“If you’ve ever hosted a potluck and none of the guests were spouting antisemitic and/or authoritarian talking points, congratulations! You’ve achieved what some of the most valuable companies in the world claim is impossible.”
Just want to take a moment to say…
Thank you, moderators. Sincerely.
There is one complaint that I have about the mods across Lemmy, they seem to be hesitant to crack down on trolling. This has, in turn, made trolling easy thanks to the audience Lemmy attracted. Love the mods here, but when someone calls out a troll, maybe don’t remove the comment calling out the troll and leave the troll alone to continue trolling. Your contribution is actively negative if you do this.
Damn, I thought I was the only person who noticed this. It’s just like being in elementary school all over again. The bullies run rampant, but any time anyone stands up to the bullies, they get in trouble while the adults (mods) ignore the various abuses the bully gets away with regularly.
Life never really changes, does it?
It’s the same groupthink that happened on reddit. Someone says something incidiary, another responds, and depending on the slant of the community, people dog pile. Same shit happens, as you said, in life.
Rebecca Watson had a nice breakdown of how Wikipedia avoided this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9lGAf91HNA
Basically they nipped that shit in the bud and didn’t allow it to take root and the Nazis gave up. The ol’ anecdote of kicking the polite Nazi out of the bar so it does not become a Nazi bar holds up.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=U9lGAf91HNA
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Anyone know if it is possible to get the Piped link in the NewPipe app? I only get the YouTube link when I hit Share.
Disable/delete YouTube in your settings and go to settings - apps - default apps - opening links, press on the newpipe app and enable opening links, you may have to add supported links manually
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They claim it’s impossible because they don’t want to lose market share.
They didn’t start treating women, black people, LGBT people, the disabled, and countless other minorities as human beings because they thought all human life has intrinsic value, they started treating them like humans because they realized they were leaving money on the table. They realized their profits could be even bigger if they hired people from these groups and aimed advertising at them, they could have everyone’s money, not just white people’s money.
Now that the real “silent majority” aren’t a bunch of backwards fucking racists, companies try to act like they give a shit about various minority groups while really only caring to get the profits they can extract from those communities.
They understand that when they lose customers, those customers turn to other services to spend their money, with right wingers and white supremacists and authoritarians, that’s running off to places like TruthSocial and Xitter.
This is the same thing, they don’t value the lives of white supremacists, they value the money in their pockets, and as long as those people have money to spend, they will find excuses to keep taking their money.
The Fediverse easily sidesteps this problem by being volunteer and donation-based, meaning nobody is currently using it to sell to the biggest markets available.
The CEO of the company I used to work, used to say every time they talked about the inclusivity initiatives that they were not doing them because it was the moral thing to do, but because it was the thing that brings more returns to the company. Always found rare that he was so honest with that.
Partially agree
It really is about the will to take a hard stance. Just look at twitch. You have hundred-ish concurrent channels with two or three volunteer mods who can’t handle “the memes”. And then you have stuff like (in their prime) Geek and Sundry where you had very attractive hosts outright making sex and bondage jokes and chat was pleasant. Because the automod settings would nuke any comment that included key words and mods would add the cheeky mispellings as they show up.
It really does boil down to wanting the audience. Numbers mean money. Money is good. If you get rid of the chuds, your numbers go down. So you try to “manage” them and only remove the “problematic” users. Until the overton window shifts and you try to ignore all the dog whistles.
Where I disagree is that the fediverse is any better. Lemmy.world is already an example of one instance getting big enough that it has a LOT of influence. And they (as well as other instances) have already had their bursts of mods (and admins…) going batshit insane like it is a vbulletin board in the 00s.
But also? We are seeing the same bullshit we see everywhere. A “good” example is Naomi Wu. She has been in the news cycles periodically because of all the “best” reasons (she is clearly being silenced by the CCP, a lot of “maker youtube” is shouting her out as an OG a result, she had the audacity to speak out about a prominent youtuber who recently imploded making her uncomfortable for the exact reasons said youtuber imploded, she has boobs and doesn’t wear a burkha, etc). And I can attest to three of the prominent boards having moderators who think they are doing a good job by removing any mention of that because it “makes people angry” or “doesn’t lead to good discussion”. Can’t acknowledge someone who actually influenced a lot of the design philosophies in the 3d printers we all use on a 3d printing board because the chuds will get mad. And so forth
And THAT is the problem. Mods and Admins will decide they want to be influential and want those giant audiences.
You make a fair point, but the difference here is that we can always just go to a new instance that is more desirable. Mods and admins can power trip, but only within their own domain.
And defederation is always an option
Easy my ass. It takes an insane amount of man hours to moderate large platforms.
The key word here is “large”. From the article:
“[Fediverse] instances don’t generally have any unwanted guests because there’s zero incentive to grow beyond an ability to self-moderate. If an instance were to become known for hosting Nazis —either via malice or an incompetent owner— other more responsible instances would simply de-federate (cut themselves off) from the Nazi instance until they got their shit together. Problem solved, no ‘trust and safety’ required”
we have more mods per capita that the corpo hellsites and we don’t even have venture capital money funding us
Corporations don’t aggressively moderate and ban Nazis on their platforms because it would measurably negative affect their MAU stats, which is one of the primary metrics social media corps report on how “good” (read: profitable) their social network platform is.
Meta et al. will NEVER intentionally remove users that push engagement numbers up (regardless of how or what topics are being engaged) unless:
- they determine it’s more profitable/less harmful to their business to do so
- they are forced to by a court order
There’s plenty of Nazis in the Fediverse, just not on any instances your instances are federated with.
Isn’t that kind of the point?
On the one hand yes, on the other hand that means the Fediverse is involuntarily providing those freaks their own Fedi-Truth-Social.
You’ll never be able to keep these people from talking to each other, but you can quarantine them in their own little circles where they cause as little damage as possible to the outside world.
Hopefully… Recent developments look more like they are using unmoderated social media to radicalize themselves and plan real shit.
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Yes, even in small groups they can do absolutely horrible things, as they have done in the past. But that doesn’t really change if we allow them to have a bigger audience. And in the end, it’s also a numbers game. In a group of 100 fascists, the chance of encountering someone who is both motivated and capable of causing major harm to society is smaller than in a group of 10,000.
How is this news?
It’s literally a blog post.
It appears the community isn’t exclusively for news.
The sidebar agrees with you:
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
@JustinHanagan A Nazi under every rock.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a heil.
