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Pointing out that these criticisms seem completely unprincipled is not inventing a conspiracy.

Moderation as in "You can't call the other posted 'fuckface'" and moderation as in "I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push" are not, at all, the same thing.

In fact, I wouldn't call the latter "moderation" at all, rather it's mods abusing their power to push political propaganda, but they do it through moderation in terms of action.


What if the news story is just calling someone fuckface? A lot of them are like that in this age of slop news.

> I will delete every mention of this news story because it's negative to the agenda I want to push

Thankfully this is extremely rare on the major platforms. "This news story is fake as fuck and is causing trouble such as people going to throw Molotov cocktails at random mosques" is the common scenario.


Damn it's almost as if this was a conversation we should have had around 2018 at the latest. Like evident bias in social networks was a real concern all along.

What was the response every single time? Ah yes. "Get your own Twitter".

I despise most social networks, this one included, but I can't overstate the degree to which the audience deserves this.

Absolute no lessons learned though. Maybe Musk has to buy Reddit too for people to get a clue.


What was twitter's bias in 2018?

Yeah, most of the people are upset because they're Democrats politically on Twitter, and the old one catered to them.

As far as I can tell, the only way Twitter has substantively changed over the past few years is that a small (but non-trivial) number of politically obsessed left-wingers have voluntarily self-exited. Everything else is narrative.


That's what some motivated cable news researchers decided to abuse statistics to say. To be generous, I would say the article makes a significantly stronger causal claim than the experiment supports. The best description is a good exploratory algorithm audit with weak statistical and causal inference.

The analysis rests on just nine synthetic accounts, treats thousands of highly correlated feed impressions as if they provide robust independent evidence, lacks a proper baseline for the political content available on X, and reports no meaningful uncertainty, significance testing or adequately powered replication.


Bring your own statistics, don't just say "nuh uh"

Do these contradict? There might be fewer / less active left-wing users than before.

It's also become a whole lot more hostile to anonymous visitors, hence the topic under discussion. That's not just narrative but a fact.

Every social media site is like this now. They fear the scrapers. Most of the people complaining about having to log in on X, they intentionally have no account in the first place because they don't like the site's owner or something.

I say this as part of the exception. The only reason I don't use X is because they banned me for no reason. Probably not the common case.


We put up with it mostly because it enables a lot of communication to happen at all.

You want to hold the corporations legally liable for the content their host, you can say goodbye to basically reddit as a whole, any twitter clone, youtube comment sections and a whole more stuff.


This is ultimately silly but, I thought this dialogue was with the Flash? Isn't it this one? https://i.redd.it/vmmv2d3h2q181.jpg


Ah yeah, same scene but the movie apparently adapted it a little differently: https://youtube.com/shorts/wqmMHjz1c9Y.


> The decent people won't hear them on Twitter/X, and the decent people will wonder what's wrong with them if they persist in supporting that thing.

Escaping this warped version of morality is precisely what many seek when browsing the site and the reason why many celebrated Musk's purchase.

Also why many say that bluesky is a shithole.


Fairly certain Occam's Razor would point to "they don't have the capabilities" rather than that.


If you don’t think that China’s models have the capability to make POST requests to an HTTP endpoint, that is a very silly statement to make.

Unless what you meant by capability is the story presented that these models “escaped containment to communicate with eachother out of band” - in which case your supposition relies on already wholeheartedly believing the case that I’m arguing against. That would be like saying “Clearly heaven exists because my grandma is there.”


That is not simpler explanation. None of what happened here requires some kind of super techno magic not available to, well, anyone.


>that techno-optimism has aged very badly, after all

There is no way that the kind of progress that happened in the last 60 years doesn't make it into the history books for centuries, very probably millenia.

I'm just utterly lost as to how someone can actually say this, I could bring up numbers on hunger, or child mortality, or the enormous, mind-boggling in degree, improvements in the quality of life of the average person, or how absolutely crazy the concept of taking progress for granted is.

It'd be easier to convince me that grass is blue.


>Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose.

But it's not? Technology has progressed, sure, and with that material reality changes. It enables stuff, doesn't dictate the use it gets.

I can absolutely understand a defense of the humanities based on human appreciation, life, subjective beauty, whatever you want to call it. Life is more than an optimization game.

...But then it should adhere itself to that. This simply is not the case, under this pretense, the social sciences are an exhaustive argument in favor of Snow's position.

It is no coincidence that in academia there's problems in one side that are much less prevalent in the other. Nor that it was the humanities who started taking the name of science for credibility.


English is my second language, with that in mind, I felt it may be interesting or amusing to some the parts which were "hard" for me to understand.

>Michaelmas term lately over

I had no idea that "Michaelmas" was even a thing. Nor do I think I have ever encountered the formulation of "term lately over"

>As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth

This puzzled me, as I'd imagine, if there's no water, there surely would be no mud. Apparently a reference to the great flood which makes it make sense.

>and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus

This one was funny since I properly understood (I think?) that it's meant to give a feeling of the savage, untamed, natural feel of the elements taking over London. But then I thought a reference to a Megalosaurus couldn't possibly be that. And it seems it is?

The rest was way easier, although I had to make sure what "Dogs, undistinguishable in mire" meant.


It's not presently on scihub (also, $25 for access? fuck off...), but the whole study stinks of "dickens scholar checks modern reading comp, vastly overestimates familiarity with victorian england and dickens' prose.".... .... here's the bio of the first author of the paper > SUSAN CARLSON is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature,


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