Social media as a decoupled virtual public space can't both exist and protect our individual rights and the implicit dependencies that culminate in retaining a certain level of rational thought, at least not at the same time.
Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.
By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.
You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.
Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.
We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.
I agree, but I feel this is a bit rich coming from Mastodon which is notorious for depending on a load of custom ActivityPub extensions for server to server operation, and just having an entirely separate REST API not based on any open standards (beyond JSON/HTTP) for its client to server comms.
I used to run a non-Mastodon Activity Pub server and it never really worked. There’s a reason why everyone just uses Mastodon, at which point who cares if there’s an open protocol.
trod1234|1 year ago
Any communications platform that allows a many to one interaction, with the ability to obscure the source (you), is a danger to democracy.
By raising the noise floor, or manipulating sentiment in a inconsistent way, in such platforms, you can manipulate on a grand scale individual perception by distorting reflected appraisal. Its a fundamentally harmful and destructive process.
You do also however need anonymity at the same time, and there must be cost. Competing interests guarantee that this will never be possible in a centralized system. The feedback relationship which is distorted, and distorts itself, will run off the rails.
Human moderation doesn't scale, and AI moderation can't determine unique meaning, and hallucinates, distorting reflected appraisal in the process, isolating (through punishment), and removes agency.
We need to appropriately secure our communication platforms from these subtle but corrupting outcomes that are brittle and lack resiliency measures.
ChrisArchitect|1 year ago
Mastodon announces new European non-profit, change of CEO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42681976
danpalmer|1 year ago
I used to run a non-Mastodon Activity Pub server and it never really worked. There’s a reason why everyone just uses Mastodon, at which point who cares if there’s an open protocol.
verdverm|1 year ago