Oh, I thought you meant no email address required to make an account.

Just having to register in order to read the feed is probably just for server load reasons, if I had to guess.

That’s not how it works though.

I actually agree that registration is silly. It’s trivial to create fake email addresses; all it does is present obstacles and slight privacy implications for legitimate users, while forming an incredibly mild speedbump for malicious users. But, it’s probably not going away, every little tool in the toolbox that can be deployed by overworked volunteer admins against the unending tide of malicious users trying to make their lives more difficult is probably going to get deployed if it is easy to do.

Hey did anyone say loops yet?

Fixed ty

I hope she crumpled it up, then reconsidered, uncrumpled, took the photo, and then presumably recrumpled it before throwing it away.

Edit: Regendered

1. Because they want to know who you are
2. Because what are you going to do about it? They’re going to make money regardless

One or the other

There’s usually one of the buttons you can hold down to mute the ads, near the bottom right in the little phalanx of buttons all around the screen.

If you find it, label it “MUTE” in marker or something, spread the word.

Hm. TIL Inferno; I read but I still don’t feel like I understand it. What I was talking about was a little bit more of a browser-native “OS” shell if you want to call it that… I feel like the kind of ease of interaction that people have on the command line on a Unix system still doesn’t really exist for any type of web resource that I’m interacting with. It’s all separate systems without much unifying access or principle.

Maybe Inferno would have been the answer (like I say I read a little bit still don’t really grasp it), but the WP page seems to say that Lucent didn’t really have a coherent way to deploy or market it and so even it being a good idea wouldn’t really have saved it from obscurity. :-( Like I say it is sad overall, these things were better than the stuff we have around now.

Yeah, makes sense. I think they sort of just missed the boat :-(. I mean, the research that went into it birthed UTF-8, /proc and /sys, a lot of really good things that managed to make it in super-watered-down form into modern operating systems. But I think that if you want to make a modern OS that gets any kind of traction today, it needs to live on the web as opposed to on someone’s personal computer, sad to say.

I think if you wanted to get serious about bringing those ideas into the modern day you would need to just rewrite it from scratch within a different context with a different scope.

9front? I thought that was still pretty active with new releases steadily coming out.

Even if you accept the scriptures as credible

I do not. They include some direct contradictions between different sections about factual events, never mind even the spiritual inconsistencies, which are massive. If you study the history and where things got translated into other things, you can actually see where some of the mistakes got introduced and why, and how particular people introduced particular self-serving parts into “canon” at different points for particular reasons. So no, definitely not credible.

I’m just saying that, when I read the story of Jesus’s life specifically, the way he’s described sounds exactly like how a real holy man would behave and how I think society as a whole (very much including the church) would react to him: With mistrust, hostility, and eventually with assassination. It’s very different from both the Mike Johnson supply side Jesus version and the Sunday school version that is common in American religious upbringing. In fact they are so different that those three are all simply mutually unrelated to each other. American Christians are just telling the story they’re trying to tell, making the point they’re trying to make, just like you apparently are here.

I’m not taking a position about whether any of it is true and I don’t plan to. I have no idea what argument you’re trying to start, but I want no part of it.

What?

Jesus didn’t tell the guy to give Jesus anything. He said, go give it all away, then come back when you have nothing to give me, then we can get to work.

If you read the bible, Jesus was very much like what I would have expected a for-real holy man to be. He was also constantly at war with the Mike Johnsons of his day, with periodic physical violence from both sides.

Hey everybody, this guy’s having fun

Get him out of here

No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…

Fair enough. I do think this happens. At the same time I don’t see that there’s a lot to be gained by being super sensitive about it, or deciding to freak out and abandon the topic because of some people arguing.

I would say that every so often, I wander into one of the lemmy.world political communities and I have exactly the reaction you are expressing here. It’s just random aggressive people, some of whom I think are deliberately trying to inflame conflict and prejudice, and they drown out anything useful. It’s a waste of time, so I don’t fuck with it. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that not everything is that way. I would say the vast majority of things I observe on Lemmy are not that way.

Or, they’re not what I would describe that way. You seem like you’re maybe talking about something different, and accusing the conversations I like of being something deliberately designed to waste my time that I should be able to “rise above” or etc. But you also don’t want to give examples, so IDK, not much I can do with that.

So check out this example. I’ll give my take on it:

https://ponder.cat/post/2904223

I think there are some people there who are just there to stir shit. But, I would say the great majority at least of what I was paying attention to is productive. I learned about some propaganda, learned the shape of the media landscape, from some previous interactions, and then in that thread we got to talk about some other issues related to that, and work some things out.

Yeah, if you focus on the idiots exclusively, then your interaction will be unproductive. I do definitely think that yes.

By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.

If you feel strongly enough about this topic to be concerned that people are going to be taken in by it, give some examples. By being vague and evasive about what it is you’re talking about, you make it impossible for anyone to learn about what you’re saying if you have something of value to try to make a point about, and also impossible for them to make counterpoints if they disagree with you. It just all stays in waste-of-time-land. Which is, ironically, exactly the issue you are trying to raise.

If you’re concerned that people will disagree with your categorizations, and that’ll just be so upsetting that you can’t bear the thought of doing it as a result, I feel like this whole issue may be more of a you problem than a Lemmy problem.

As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.

Not even close. I was talking about Usenet, early BBS culture and anonymous FTP days, then the more modern era of Napster / Slashdot / Rotten.com / the little proliferation of forums and personal sites came after those “old days,” and 4chan was created a little bit after that.

Everyone is going to have different definitions of when “early” is, but “the internet” goes back quite a long way before 4chan. 4chan and Myspace were kind of the first iteration of the massive everyone-goes-to-the-same-place omni-site model that presaged the horrors to come.

1. It’s not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
2. IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don’t find it “stressful” or the way some people receive it. If they don’t want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what’s going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
3. The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.

But then where will I deploy my AI moderator?

I wanted to make sure I sat down and really replied to you before because I generally like your takes and respect you as a person, and a quick reply from my phone would be impossible as a medium for replying to your thoughtful and well stated argument.

Yeah, all good. I mean maybe I am wrong, we can talk about it.

My issue with Substack isn’t that there’s Nazis on there, it’s that Substack’s owners made sure they were there, and made sure they got a cut of the revenue sharing scheme.

Okay so this is actually one of the issues that made me start to say that this is deliberate disinformation, not just people saying some stuff I don’t agree with. The thing is: I don’t think this is actually true. I saw a big article that made this claim, I dug into the details, and it turned out to be one of those “Ship of Theseus” things where, the people they invited were not the Nazis, just some random people with MAGA-type ideas, and they hadn’t expressed those MAGA-type ideas until long after Substack’s dealings with them had been and gone (pre-2017 Matt Taibbi I think was one). Basically, Substack in this aspect did nothing wrong at all. But people wrapped it up like they had sought out Richard Spenser and invited him to the platform and made sure to give him some money to get things started, which is false, and it was weird that people were trying so hard to say that that had happened. What they did was took millions of dollars from VCs and then gave it to good journalists.

Who are you talking about when you say the Substack owners made sure there were Nazis? I want to dig into this a little bit more and where you heard that from.

There’s a whole separate issue of them allowing for real neo-Nazis. I’m probably in the vast minority, but I actually think that was fine. It’s the same like I think Hasan Piker can say whatever the fuck he wants, it’s the same like I think nutomic can have transphobic views if he wants. I think it is fine.

Like I say, I’m probably the minority there.

considered it important to Substack’s future that those Nazis be present and paid.

The question I find myself asking is what views do they hold, what do they tolerate, and how long until they find a new way to promote those views or allow someone to co-opt their waveforms to broadcast their message to us.

Just to be clear: Are you saying that they’re in any way promoting or in favor of Nazis? Or just that they allow them on the platform and that’s the huge problem?

I’ve seen the first thing, and I think that’s what you’re saying, but if you are saying the second thing it’s a different conversation.

I guess ultimately, what I’m driving at, is that it is my view that Substack, like Medium, is a captured outlet. It can only ever show you a distorted version of the truth that serves its holders of power, who are ultimately aligned with the techbroligarchs that are strangling all of us.

I don’t think any of this is true. I haven’t seen any indication at all that they’re distorting anything about the blogs that are hosted there, and the very nature of them (as far as I’m aware) makes it pretty difficult for them to start rigging the algorithm to promote one instead of another, or anything like that.

I do think it’s a problem that Substack is a centralized platform. That I will 100% agree with you on. The point being that regardless of whether the current owners are up to anything, there’s the strong likelihood in the future that it will succumb to the inevitable like so many before it.

I think Ghost is probably a much better model, to be honest. On the other hand, because Substack is centralized, they were able to subsidize good journalism to get the ball rolling, and I think that was a really good thing. And, of course, it’s absolutely impossible to keep Nazis off of Ghost either. Actually, even the purge of Nazis that Substack eventually did, would be impossible on Ghost, because its decentralized nature means they would be there to stay if they chose Ghost. It’s more or less impossible to stop, generally speaking. (Which is part of why I agree with Substack’s original stance on it.)

Does this make sense?

The equation “Substack = Nazis” is textbook political misinformation: A thing with a technical grain of truth, entirely missing the point and then dishonestly presented, for the purpose of splintering and confusing the left and getting them to attack each other. I suspect it is deliberately promoted by enemies, because while it has a technical little fig-leaf of truthfulness, it bears so little resemblance to anything real or relevant and is a convenient way to shit on one of the chief leftist platforms for thought and journalism, and leftists love nothing more than a contest of “I am so pure that I hate this thing that everyone else likes because it’s actually evil and I’m super clever and informed so I can see that and you can’t and I’m the first one.”

I guess it is possible that people came up with this all on their own as a purity-test (actually I do think that the original campaign which persuaded Substack to get rid of most of the Nazis, was that), and it’s just a general leftist self-own because of that tendency. I do feel like it’s pretty likely that it has started coming in in some way from outside though. When this argument is presented in print form, it often has so many hallmarks of propaganda or slanty dishonest framings associated with it that it’s hard for me to think that it is entirely self-created organic purity testing gone awry.

Here was my conversation about the details of the underlying Substack Nazi issue the last time it came up. I don’t have a lot to add to it: https://ponder.cat/post/1721638/1949850

Hey, look, I found some.

But to address your request for more information on that admittedly poorly chosen example: that was at the start at the Russian invasion, so I don’t have the source readily available. It might have been Jacobin or a YT geopolitical analyst based in Europe.

Not what I asked. I asked you for general reliable sources about the world, since your international friends are in touch with them and all read them and they’re 100% up to speed on things that idiot Americans are not aware of. I want to know these sources, not this specific claim, but just in general. Surely you want to help me not be a blithering idiot in my news consumption anymore?

IDK, maybe your answer is “YouTube and Jacobin.” I do watch YouTube and I’m familiar with Jacobin.

I come to Lemmy for conversations that are fun, funny, thought-provoking, and helpful. So, on that note, I’m out. Enjoy your day.

Seems to me like you come to Lemmy to snidely insinuate weird pro-Russian points of view, and then become super-friendly and say it was all a big misunderstanding, brother, when someone calls you on it, and then say it wasn’t important and flee into the darkness when asked for details. I stand behind my rudeness to you, it seems like it was well-earned. You’re welcome to defend “US manipulating geopolitics with UA and RU so as to bring the EU to heel,” if you want to, but since you don’t want to, have a wonderful evening.