Comment on John Oliver promoted alternatives to big tech in last night's episode, including Mastodon and Pixelfed

• Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I think the rise of hate speech on centralised platforms relies very heavily on theur centrlaised moderation and curation via algorithms.

  They have all known for a long time that their algorithms promote hate speech, but they know that curbing that behaviour negatively affects their revenue, so they don’t do it. They chase the fast buck, and they appease advertisers who have a naturally conservative bent, and that means rage bait and conventional values.

  That’s quite apart from when platform owners explicitly support that hate speech and actively suppress left leaning voices.

  I think what we have on decentralised systems where we curate/moderate for ourselves works well because most of that open hate speech is siloed, which I think is the best thing you can do with it.

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• lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I think that it’s just words & images on a screen that we could easily ignore like people did before, and people are indulging a grandiose conceit by thinking that moderation is that important or serves any greater cause than the interests of moderators. On social media that seems to be to serve the consumers, by which I mean the advertisers & commercial interests who pay for the attention of users. While the old internet approach of ignoring, gawking at the freakshow, or ridiculing/flaming toxic & hateful shit worked fine then resulting in many people disengaging, ragequitting, or going outside to do something better, that’s not great for advertisers protecting their brand & wanting to keep people pliant & unchallenged as they stay engaged in their uncritical filter bubbles & echo chambers.

  With old internet, safety didn’t wasn’t internet nanny, thought police shit, and stop burning my virgin eyes & ears. It was an anonymous handle, not revealing personally identifying information (a/s/l?), not falling for scams & giving out payment information (unless you’re into that kinky shit). Glad to see newer social media returning to some of that.

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  • mke@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Toxicity doesn’t “work fine,” it’s contagious and destructive. For projects, it slows progress. For communities in general, it reinforces bad behavior and pushes out newcomers, leading to more negative spaces, isolation, and stagnation, just off the top of my head. These were issues in older communities just as they are in modern ones.

    I don’t see why we should abandon moderation for your benefit, at the expense of people who care.

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    • lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      For projects, it slows progress.

      Your example of toxicity is linux maintainers resisting a newer programming language, not wanting to maintain additional bindings, and being stubborn about it? People decide whether to work & agree with each other, so what’s your definition of toxicity here? How’s moderation supposed to solve that: force people to agree & work together unwillingly? Seems rather authoritarian. People should only put words & images on a screen that someone approves? More authoritarian. And look at those imaginary problems we can solve!

      This goes back to the grandiose conceit I wrote about earlier: some people can’t get over themselves, take these words & images on a screen a bit too seriously, and feel they know better than others the right words & images to put on a screen, because of course they do. The rest of us know it’s just a bunch of self-important crap that doesn’t matter unless we make it matter, and we can ignore it or put our own words & images on a screen or go outside.

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  • Ghostbanjo1949@lemmy.mengsk.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    I wholeheartedly agree, the only censorship should be in the individuals hands and only affects them. Aka blocking other users or content from being displayed on your own account. My moral compass does not need to be everyone’s moral compass.

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