Not much drama here. Someone wrote a service that lets you follow a fediverse feed anonymously. Mastodon't, being a system designed by eternally online people, sports few different types of statuses. Public (followers see it, people on you instance see it, it gets fanned out to other instances), unlisted (it won't get fanned out) and followers, it only lands in timelines of people that follow you.

Said service "hijacks" the last category because the bot follows you, thus having access to it.

Seems like a non-problem? Because it is. But it won't stop people from malding and seething.

After checking Fediverse for some time, I might say with full authority of dramaposter: what an absolute human train wreck it is. It's not even funny for the drama, just shitlibs with 24/7 diarrhea about TERFs, Musk, Muskterfs and warring over "who makes the rules". What a terrible place.

People trying explain themselves: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/109585159213960986

now mr cia man, are you happy?

i am not good enough to work cia.

now have fun opening each sissy hypno gif psd to look for hidden duplicate frame smart objects

i frick you in the butt cia man.

have fun dreaming big black peepees snooping in my files.

the jackal wins again

https://archived.moe/g/thread/90271199

pic.twitter.com/41xGH7i4vh

— Xaniken (@Xaniken) December 6, 2022

Explain this rdrama Apple Fanboys.

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/z613sa/apple_is_becoming_an_ad_company_despite_privacy/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/z67lzp/apple_is_becoming_an_ad_company_despite_privacy/?sort=controversial

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33736259

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1595859225846112256#m

https://twitter.com/ProtonPrivacy/status/1595855292788523010#m

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33726816

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/z37m9h/stable_diffusion_20_release_stabilityai/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/sdforall/comments/z3788q/looks_like_stable_diffusion_20_was_released_with/?sort=controversial

https://twitter.com/StabilityAI/status/1595590319566819328

https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1595590056517206016

https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fstability.ai%2Fblog%2Fstable-diffusion-v2-release&src=typed_query

TL;DR on the Sokal Hoax is some chads submitted bogus nonsense papers to social science journals and they got published (there's zero academic rigor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

I'm curious how hard / possible it would be to generate these with a ML tool and automating the submission process. the challenging part being any human follow up but I'm curious what could be done here.

@nekobit @lain discuss

Is Twitter to Mastodon the new Digg to Reddit?

Discuss

Tiktokcide when?

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33447285

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ykts5h/tiktok_is_unacceptable_security_risk_and_should/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/yfjbt7/facebook_used_to_be_a_big_tech_giant_now_meta/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/technews/comments/yeydnr/meta_which_hit_a_1t_market_cap_in_june_2021_is_no/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/AntiFacebook/comments/yf17ds/facebook_used_to_be_a_big_tech_giant_now_meta/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/transgender/comments/yf0301/facebook_used_to_be_a_big_tech_giant_now_meta/?sort=controversial

https://twitter.com/EvanKirstel/status/1585975917758713856#m

https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1585669851477151745#m

Investors wiped more than $65 billion from Meta’s market capitalization on Wednesday after the Facebook owner reported another quarter of declining revenues and failed to convince investors that big bets on the metaverse and artificial intelligence were paying off.

Shares in Meta dropped 19 percent in after-hours trading as the world’s largest social media platform joined other Big Tech groups in warning that an economic slowdown was hammering its advertising businesses as brands spend less on marketing.

On top of the wider macroeconomic woes, Meta faces a confluence of challenges, including rising competition for its Instagram platform from rivals such as short-form video app TikTok and difficulties in targeting and measuring advertising because of Apple’s privacy policy changes.

The company said it expected revenue in the current quarter to be in the range of $30 billion to $32.5 billion, compared with analysts’ expectations of $32.2 billion.

Net income in the third quarter fell 52 percent to $4.4 billion, below consensus estimates for $5 billion, according to S&P Capital IQ. Meanwhile, revenues fell 4 percent to $27.71 billion, the slowest pace of growth since going public in 2012, after a 1 percent decline last quarter. That was slightly better than analysts’ estimates for a 5 percent drop.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and chief executive, warned the company faced “near-term challenges on revenue” but said “the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth.”

On a call with analysts, he doubled down on his biggest bets including developing a short-form video format to rival TikTok, business messaging, and the metaverse. He tried to reassure investors that investments in these areas would pay off in the long term.

“I appreciate the patience and I think that those who are patient and invest with us will end up being rewarded,” he said, arguing that the company was doing “leading work” on the metaverse that would be “of historical importance.”

Meta’s disappointing earnings came amid a broader sell-off of Big Tech stocks. Shares of Google parent Alphabet fell more than 9 percent on Wednesday after it reported an unexpectedly severe slowdown in its core search ads business, while Snap’s stock plunged last week after it posted its slowest pace of growth since going public in 2017.

Meta, which expanded headcount rapidly during the pandemic, has faced investor scrutiny for spending heavily on Zuckerberg’s vision of building a digital avatar-filled world known as the metaverse. Like other virtual and augmented reality projects Meta is working on, this is not expected to generate returns for many years.

Revenues from Reality Labs, its metaverse unit, nearly halved in the third quarter to $285 million, while losses were $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year ago. The company said it expected operating losses in the unit to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023.

“Meta is on shaky legs when it comes to the current state of its business,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. “Zuckerberg’s decision to focus his company on the future promise of the metaverse took his attention away from the unfortunate realities of today.”

The company estimated 2022 total expenses would be in the range of $85 billion to $87 billion, narrowing from its prior outlook of $85 billion to $88 billion. However, it anticipated 2023 expenses in the range of $96 billion to $101 billion despite recently seeking to cut costs and freeze most hiring.

The company said it was “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently” and had “increased scrutiny on all areas of operating expenses.”

But it warned “these moves…  will take time to play out” and that some attempts to find savings, like shrinking its office space as more employees work from home, would result in “incremental costs in the near term.”

Zuckerberg told analysts that investment in its artificial intelligence capabilities contributed to a surge in capital expenditure but that the technology would help boost views of its short-form video format.

Analysts also raised concerns about mounting expenses. “Summing up how investors are feeling right now is that there are just too many experimental bets versus proven bets on the core,” said Brent Thill, an analyst at Jefferies.

Orange Site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33321475

#BanTikTokNow

No relevant posts on social media yet.

An Unholy Alliance Between Ye, Musk, and Trump

What do you get the contrarian billionaire who has everything? Try a social network to call their own.

It certainly seems like the hot new thing. Almost one year ago, Donald Trump, freshly banned from mainstream platforms, ginned up a Twitter clone called Truth Social, which he claimed would constitute the first “non-cancellable” global community. Elon Musk appears to be going through with his acquisition of Twitter. And earlier this week, many awoke to the news that Ye, formerly Kanye West, plans to acquire Parler after getting the boot from Instagram and Twitter over anti-Semitic rants. If the deal does happen, he’ll inherit the social-media equivalent of a gutted city mall filled with the echoing cries of January 6 defendants and racists.

Soon, we may enter an era where mercurial celebrity landlords dictate the terms of service on their own social networks—ones that are explicitly positioned against content moderation and in favor of a facile understanding of free-speech maximalism. Although the rhetoric they’ve chosen to use to gain support for their stewardship is cribbed from a larger, years-long political battle against Big Tech’s influence, their actions are personal and, in two of the three cases, born from the desperation of running out of major platforms to publish on. None of these men has signaled any desire to create something new as much as they wish to roll the clock back to some shallowly conceived digital Wild West, where the powerful and hateful alike can inflict damage and experience no consequences.

Celebrities have always had vanity projects in the tech space that have allowed them to tap into and monetize their adoring fans (let us not forget the Jeremy Renner app—RIP). These projects almost always wither away in part because they’re weird, but also because they’re walled garden environments, or private spaces. Musk, Trump, and Ye are after something different: They are all obsessed with setting the rules of public spaces.

One way to look at the existence of these would-be social-media barons is as a logical, if depressing, conclusion of the “techlash” that started shortly after Donald Trump’s election. His campaign managed to activate and mobilize communities of trolls to make endless memes and organize harassment campaigns for their “god emperor.” Less than a week after winning, the Trump campaign touted Facebook as “the single most important platform to help grow our fundraising base” and later on extolled the company’s ad targeting as a helpful tool in attracting voters. Employees at both Twitter and Facebook very publicly fretted over the way their tools might have played a role in the 2016 election.

By 2017, Facebook was in front of Congress testifying about ads linked to Russian election manipulation. An understandable consensus began to form on the political left that large social networks, but especially Facebook, helped Trump rise to power. The reasons were multifaceted: algorithms that gave a natural advantage to the most shameless users, helpful marketing tools that the campaign made good use of, a confusing tangle of foreign interference (the efficacy of which has always been tough to suss out), and a basic attentional architecture that helps polarize and pit Americans against one another (no foreign help required). The misinformation industrial complex—a loosely knit network of researchers, academics, journ*lists, and even government entities—coalesced around this moment. Different phases of the backlash homed in on bots, content moderation, and, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy. People can and will argue over the utility and lessons learned from all these debates and scandals, but the broad theme was clear: Social-media platforms are the main communication tools of the 21st century, and they matter.

With Trump at the center, the techlash morphed into a culture war with a clear partisan split. One could frame the position from the left as: We do not want these platforms to give a natural advantage to the most shameless and awful people who stoke resentment and fear to gain power. On the right, it might sound more like: We must preserve the power of the platforms to let outsiders have a natural advantage (by stoking fear and resentment to gain power). Put another way, the political world realized that platforms and content-recommendation engines decide which cultural objects get amplified. The left found this troubling, whereas the right found it to be an exciting prospect and something to leverage, exploit, and manipulate via the courts (as evidenced by the Texas social-media law that aims to tell big platforms they can’t moderate the content on their sites). Crucially, both camps resent the power of the technology platforms and believe the companies have a negative influence on our discourse and politics by either censoring too much or not doing enough to protect users and our political discourse.

Because of this stark divide, there’s been more grandstanding than actual policy changes. And because these platforms are massive networks, connecting billions of human beings—and because speech issues and First Amendment law are complex and sometimes counterintuitive—one outcome of the techlash has been an incredibly facile public understanding of content moderation and a whole lot of culture warring.

Musk and Ye aren’t so much buying into the right’s overly simplistic Big Tech culture war as they are hijacking it for their own purposes; Trump, meanwhile, is mostly just mad because his tweets violated Twitter’s terms of service. Each one casts himself as an antidote to a heavy-handed, censorious social-media apparatus that is either captured by progressive ideology or merely pressured into submission by it. But none of them has any understanding of thorny First Amendment or content-moderation issues. They embrace a shallow posture of free-speech maximalism—the very kind that some social-media-platform founders first espoused, before watching their sites become overrun with harassment, spam, and other hateful garbage that drives away both users and advertisers. It’s not clear they even believe in unfettered speech as much as they believe in their own right to take up as much oxygen as possible and face zero penalties.

Another component of this new ownership era is the long-tortured relationship between celebrity and social media. Platforms are a minefield for famous people who post from the hip without PR teams. But for those who can hit the mark without getting banned, social media is a force multiplier for cultural and political relevance and a way around gatekeeping media.

Musk, Ye, and Trump rely on their ability to pick up their phones, go direct, and say whatever they want to their legions of fans, who sound a lot like the yes-men whom billionaires surround themselves with IRL. But the moment they butt up against rules or consequences, they begin to howl about persecution and unfair treatment. The idea of being treated similarly to the rest of a platform’s user base—that is, the people who are not exempt from following a platform’s rules—is so galling to these men that they declare the entire system to be broken.

Though the three all embody the various ways platforms can amplify ideas and confer power, they also demonstrate how being the Main Character of popular and political culture can totally warp perspective. They’re so blinded by their own outlying experiences across social media that, in most cases, they hardly know what it is they’re buying (or in the case of Trump, cloning)—and perhaps they don’t even care. None of these platform acquisitions is a particularly sound business decision. Musk, Ye, and Trump could be doing plenty of more useful or effective things with their money. Instead, they are using a culture war to justify carving out their own safe spaces.

These are projects motivated entirely by grievance and conflict. And so they are destined to amplify grievance and conflict. They couldn’t possibly solve the problems around free speech and power that these three men are nominally compelled by—but we can rest assured that they’ll find a way to create more of them.

Charlie Warzel is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Galaxy Brain, a newsletter about the internet and big ideas.

Imagine if there was a company that did what Facebook, Paypal, Uber, and Spotify do and had overwhelming dominance of all those markets. That's what Kakao is. Whenever I despair about how r-slurred Americans are, at least I'm reminded that foreigners do stupid things like routing all this stuff for an entire country through one room. I guess Koreans just can't help centralizing everything.