• 28 Posts
  • 3.11K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle



  • Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.

    Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).


  • The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.

    Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.









  • it would enable the current ruling party to stick crimes on the opposition to eliminate the competition.

    Don Siegelman was the last Dem governor of Alabama. Pursued on spurious charges in 2004, which were immediately thrown out by the judge of the case, then again in 2006 by a Bush appointed Judge who was more friendly with Republican prosecutors.

    I expect a lot more of this in 2025 once Trump takes office and starts settling scores.


  • if you disqualified politicians who engaged in some kind of sexual assault there would not be many left to govern.

    I’ve heard arguments to the effect that politicians who are too clean simply don’t succeed, because people don’t want to give you big campaign checks unless they have Compromat on you.

    So you get invited to the Eyes Wide Shut party, your rich friends catalog your debauchery, and this is what keeps you loyal.


  • The DOJ had four years to prosecute him under Biden and they dragged their heels.

    The Southern District of New York had ample reason and opportunity to prosecute him as a mobbed to businessman in the '00s and '10s, but he was friends with the mayor so they didn’t.

    The Clintons certainly knew about Epstein in the 90s and could have busted that whole thing up 30 years ago. But the donations were too sweet, so they didn’t.

    Trump is a creature of consequences.





  • Are you saying you disagree with the Biden’s Green Power expansion

    I disagree with his fossil fuel expansion. The green power plan is being promoted, first and foremost, by market dynamics as wind/solar drop below coal/oil and the demand for AI continuous power reignites nuclear.

    But our actual carbon emissions aren’t falling. We’re producing more carbon today than when Biden took office. And the demand for electricity means even more fossil fuel consumption into the future.