Lvxferre
The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
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Bots are parasites: they only thrive if the host population is large enough to maintain them. Once the hosts are gone, the parasites are gone too.
In other words: botters only bot a platform when they expect human beings to see and interact with the output of their bots. As such they can never become the majority: once they do, botting there becomes pointless.
That applies even to repost bots - you could have other bots upvoting the repost, but you won’t do it unless you can sell the account to an advertiser, and the advertiser will only buy it if they can “reach” an “audience” (i.e. spam humans).
I’m not expecting a big exodus, but rather a slow decline in both the number of users and their engagement. With a few peaks here and there that seem to revert the downwards trend, but each peak being smaller than the one before.
They won’t be leaving for the same reason as most people here did, pissed at the IPO-related changes (such as killing 3rd party apps). It’ll be more like “…meh, why would I check Reddit? There’s better stuff elsewhere.” We can already see the decline of the content quality in Reddit now; it’ll get only worse over time.
I think that most will end in Discord. Some in Bluesky, and some will simply touch grass. Conservatives might end in Minitrue “truth social” or crap like that.
Facebook might perhaps absorb some of the former Reddit users. It feels disgusting for the privacy conscious, but for them it’ll be a simple matter of not finding interesting stuff in Reddit.
The same applies to Reddit’s liquid profit - for now, that value extraction still creates a small peak on raw profit, to the point that the bottom line became positive; later on the peak will barely reach the surface; later on, value extraction will be necessary to avoid making the bottom line too negative.
Yup, it is 100% relevant! Selling user data is extremely profitable, specially with a large userbase. However, it lowers the value of the platform - it makes users less eager to genuinely contribute with it (due to privacy concerns, seeing it as a “they’re exploiting me!” matter, etc.). As such the data being generated there becomes less useful, less relevant, and less profitable over time, paradoxically enough.
I fucked it up and switched the terms, sorry. Look for “value extraction” instead; you’ll find multiple references to the concept such as this or Mazzucato’s “The Value of Everything”.
To keep it short: you create value when you produce desirable goods/services for the customers; however, when you extract it, you’re picking the value that was already created (by society, your customers, or even your own business) and turning it into profit. The later is faster but unsustainable, as that value doesn’t pop up from nowhere, so when a business shifts from value creation to value extraction it’ll get some quick cash and then go kaboom.
In Reddit’s case, this value is mostly users willing to generate, curate, and share content with the platform, and other users knowing this:
- someone recommends you a product/brand. The person might be wrong, but you were reasonably sure that they aren’t a corporation astroturfing their own product. Someone else might criticise it instead.
- you hop into your favourite subreddit and, while the content there isn’t the best, it’s still good enough - because the mods gave some fucks about growing their subreddits;
- you discuss some controversial topic. You might get dogpiled, but at least you know that the dogs piling you are human beings, that sometimes might listen to reason; a bot will never;
- et cetera.
All that value was being slowly extracted through the last years, but the changes in 2023/2024 did it the hardest.
As I often mention in other communities, this smells like value exploitation extraction* from a distance. Value exploitation extraction typically generates a peak of profit in the short term, but it makes losses even harsher in the long run.
As such I don’t think that Reddit is getting “bigger”. That profit is like someone who lives in a wooden house, dismantling their own home to sell it as lumber; of course they’ll get some quick cash, but it’s still a bad idea.
In a letter to shareholders, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman attributed the recent increase in users to the platform’s AI-powered translation feature.
Let’s pretend for a moment that we can totally trust Huffman’s claim here. Even human translations often get some issues, as nuances and whatnots are not translated, and this generates petty fights, specially in a younger userbase like Reddit’s; with AI tendency to hallucinate, that gets way worse. And even if that was not an issue, a lot of content is simply irrelevant for people outside a certain regional demographic.
*EDIT REASON: I switched the terms, sorry. (C’mon, I’m L3.)
Kind of. @storksforlegs@beehaw.org is right that journalistic standards prevent too much meddling. Plus commercial news defending interests have a better resource for manipulation - instead of lying, they pick which true pieces of info to release as relevant, and paint them one or another way.
For example. Let’s say that Alice insults Bob, and Bob slaps Alice in return. Someone defending Alice would say that she was the victim of aggression, while someone defending Bob would say that he reacted to Alice’s verbal abuse. Neither is false, but they don’t get the full picture. While LLM/A"I" style bullshit be saying instead “Alice picked a puppy and beat it to death with Bob’s face”.
The site that you’ve linked blocked me for some reason, and cost/benefit in Malta is bound to be different from the one here in LatAm, but I’ve recently built a midrange-ish computer, so might as well list what I bought for reference.
- CPU - Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Good cost/benefit ratio, and rather good performance. I had to buy a third party cooler as the CPU doesn’t come with one, so keep that in mind. I considered the Ryzen 5 5600 for budget reasons, too; it might be an option if you want to make the build cheaper.
- Mobo - Gigabyte B550M Aorus Elite. If coupled with the above you need to Q-Flash update the BIOS, but that was relatively painless. So far it’s working great, can’t complain about it.
- RAM - I went for 2*16GB instead, mostly to future-proof my build. The brand is Apacer Nox, I didn’t find people complaining about it and it had a reasonable price.
- SSD - Adata 480GB.
- PSU - Gamdias Cyclops M1-750B, 750W. Frankly my method to look for a PSU was to look for 700~800W ones in a local forum, with the word “porcaria” (rubbish, shit) alongside it so I could see complains, then I found people actually praising this one.
If I convert my overall costs from reals to euros it was around €500, but keep in mind that I didn’t buy a new HDD or a new GPU. GPUs in special are relatively expensive here, I’m hoping that the prices go down next year.
That’s a great analogy. And a fair point - it got burrowed, but it’s still there.
At least when we deal with individuals using the platform. The platform is still listening to you, and sharing it with advertisers; that’s the whole model behind Meta (WhatsApp) and Snapchat. They’re still hearing you, and want to talk with you (shhh, I’ve heard you bought [product]? Here are some offers for even more [product]!), regardless of what you want.
The whole “one individual talking to another” aspect of the internet of the 00s is gone. It feels more and more like an “everyone is talking to you and hearing you, like it or not”. Facebook is only an example of that - and even if it didn’t enshittify, I find unlikely that it would’ve kept that aspect.
I also wonder if my experiences with Orkut wouldn’t be similar to the ones of the author with FB, if only Google didn’t kill Orkut. (It was a big thing here.)
what can we do?
The link itself offers a good first step: Stallman himself should be encouraged to step down, and if he doesn’t the FSF should remove him from its board.
Furthermore we should be backing up both things and, in their failure, backing up a competing entity.
This should be done in a subtle way, though - without causing unnecessary drama. I know, easier said than done.
A silver lining on everything here is that his saner views are likely to be backed up by other people in the libre software movement.
There are a few things that Stallman really does not get.
- Power over an individual reduces their ability to consent, and adults have considerable power over teens.
- The discussion about having those teens accessing pornography should be handled separately. It’s simply not the same matter.
- Pornography and nudity are not the same thing.
- No matter how bad witch hunters are, this should not be used as a defence for the alleged target of their witch hunts.
- “Normal” or “natural” are not the same as “should be taken as morally, ethically, or legally acceptable”.
Once you take those things into account, you notice that most of the things that Stallman talks about the topic aren’t just immoral, they’re outright idiotic.
Exactly! (Plus bitcoin mining. Same deal, really - a flawed tech with some potential and some use, but that does not justify the associated environmental harm.)
Of course, tech bros like Schmidt won’t like the solution.
And if the underlying tech improves in such a way that it stops being fined, it stopped being part of the problem.
Or alternatively fine (yes, fine; not just “tax”) heavy energy sinks, to the point that they’re unable to run, and use the money to address climatic issues now.
But it’s easier to wallow in a mix of nirvana fallacy (either solving the climate issue altogether, or doing jack shit) + wishful belief (“AGI is cooooming! Praise AGI!”), right?
This wouldn’t even stop the development of model-based generation, mind you. Only force it towards smarter approaches, that don’t boil down to “needz moar [parameters | training data | cranks]!” brute-force.
But nah. I’m supposed to treat it as a devil or as an angel, right? And this specific muppet is treating it like an angel talking about the First Coming of AGI.
Then as you ask “provide sources.”, it says simply “Source: Tech Review Websites”. If this came from an actual person I would genuinely ask it “do you take me for gullible trash?”.
It’s still somewhat useful, due to Google Search crumbling away into nothingness, if you ask “link me five sites with info about [topic]”.
I started with a Knoppix-based distro, called Kurumin. KDE 3 was the rage back then!
On your main point: the shell might be hard in the beginning, but for most things that you need to use the shell with, people on the internet already had the same issue and shared how to do it. Unless you’re actively trying to make something different, like I did with my audio switching script.
And even the sort of situation that you need to use the shell for decreased by a lot from back then to now.
I gave it a check. If Pocketpair plays it smart they can make Nintendo look like a herd of muppets in the court, and even potentially acting on bad faith. Pocketpair might also simply change a few elements of its own game through an update, much like PvZ replacing Michael Jackson zombie with a disco zombie.
I’m not even sure how much patents apply to games.
Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.
I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.
But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.
True that.
Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.
The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)
And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.
At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)
Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.
I didn’t know that I needed to know about Jevons’ paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.
You’ll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don’t show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.
Really my point is there are enough things to criticize about LLMs and people’s use of them, this seems like a really silly one to try and push.
The comment that you’re replying to is fairly specifically criticising the usage of the word “hallucination” to misrepresent the nature of the undesirable LLM output, in the context of people selling you stuff by what it is not.
It is not “pushing” another “thing to criticise about LLMs”. OK? I have my fair share of criticism against LLMs themselves, but that is not what I’m doing right now.
Continuing (and torturing) that analogy, […] max_int or small buffers.
When we extend analogies they often break in the process. That’s the case here.
Originally the analogy works because it shows a phony selling a product by what it is not. By making the phony to precompute 4*10¹² equations (a completely unrealistic situation), he stops being a phony to become a muppet doing things the hard way.
If it were the case that there had only been one case of a hallucination with LLMs, I think we could pretty safely call that a malfunction
If it happens 0.000001% of the time, I think we could still call it a malfunction and that it performs better than a lot of software.
Emphases mine. Those “ifs” represent a completely unrealistic situation, that does not show anything useful about the real situation.
We know that LLMs output “hallucinations” way more than just once, or 0.000001% of the time. They’re common enough to show you how LLMs work.
I did read the paper fully, but I’m going to comment mostly based on the challenged that the OP refers to.
My belief is that the article is accurate on highlighting that the Fediverse on its own is not enough to reclaim the internet. However, it’s still a step in the right direction and should be nurtured as such.
Discoverability as there is no central or unified index
Yes, discovery is harder within a federated platform than a centralised one. However the indices that we use don’t need to be “central” or “unified” - it’s completely fine if they’re decentralised and brought up by third parties, as long as people know about them.
Like Lemmy Explorer for example; it’s neither “central” nor “unified”, it’s simply a tool made by a third party, and yet it solves the issue nicely.
Complicated moderation efforts due to its decentralized nature
This implicit idea, that moderation efforts should be co-ordinated across a whole platform, quickly leads to unsatisfied people - either because they don’t feel safe or because they don’t feel like they can say what they think. Or both.
Let us not fool ourselves by falsely believing that moderation always boils down to “remove CSAM and Nazi” (i.e. “remove things that decent people universally consider as bad”). Different communities want to be moderated in different, sometimes mutually exclusive, ways. And that leads to decentralised moderation efforts.
In other words: “this is not a bug, this is a feature.”
[Note: the above is not an endorsement of Lemmy’s blatant lack of mod tools.]
Interoperability between instances of different types (e.g., Lemmy and Funkwhale)
Because yeah, the interoperability between Twitter, YouTube and Reddit is certainly better. /s
I’m being cheeky to highlight that, as problematic that the interoperability between instances of different types might be in the Fediverse, it’s still something that you don’t typically see in traditional media.
Concentration on a small number of large instances
Yes, user concentration into a few instances is a problem, as it gives the instance admins too much power. However, there’s considerably less room for those admins to act in a user-hostile way, before users pack their stuff up and migrate - because the cost of switching federated instances is smaller than the cost of switching non-federated platforms.
The risk of commercial capture by Big Tech
Besides what I said above, on the concentration of users, consider the fact that plenty Fediverse instances defederated Threads. What is this, if not the usage of the Fediverse features to resist commercial capture?
Yup, I got that you don’t mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don’t think that there aren’t so many of them as you’re saying; it’s certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).
They’re still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they’ll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.