Zak
@Zak@lemmy.world
- Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 1 week ago:
I don’t mean replying, but selecting from a menu of possible reasons to downrank a post. Slashdot’s moderation system that I mentioned earlier has (or had - haven’t looked there in a while) “troll” as one of the categories.
- Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 1 week ago:
After 20 years of living with it, I’ve decided I don’t like the downvote. The upvote is fine.
Reddit’s founders, early on tried to encourage people to treat the downvote as moderation. It was meant to mean that a thing doesn’t belong on reddit and people shouldn’t see it. Of course that quickly became mere dislike or disagreement.
I’d prefer an approach that requires some input about what’s wrong with a post in order to reduce its prominence; a restricted list of options as in Slashdot’s moderation would be sufficient, I think. I’m not sure whether this should necessarily require also making a report to a more powerful admin/moderator, but I lean toward making that optional in most communities.
- Comment on Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed 1 week ago:
The study is based on having LLMs decide to amplify one of the top ten posts on their timeline or share a news headline. LLMs aren’t people, and the authors have not convinced me that they will behave like people in this context.
The behavioral options are restricted to posting news headlines, reposting news headlines, or being passive. There’s no option to create original content, and no interventions centered on discouraging reposting. Facebook has experimented with limits to reposting and found such limits discouraged the spread of divisive content and misinformation.
I mostly use social media to share pictures of birds. This contributes to some of the problems the source article discusses. It causes fragmentation; people who don’t like bird photos won’t follow me. It leads to disparity of influence; I think I have more followers than the average Mastodon account. I sometimes even amplify conflict.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 2 weeks ago:
This is an ass-covering response to school shootings, because some of the shooters have expressed their intent before.
A strip search obviously isn’t necessary even if it’s a credible threat; a metal detector wand and basic pat down is more than enough to ensure someone doesn’t have a gun. This wasn’t a credible threat though, and a chat with the school counselor would have been the right way to handle this.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 2 weeks ago:
Snapchat’s automated detection software picked up the comment, the company alerted the FBI, and the girl was arrested on school grounds within hours.
Someone should tell the kids about Signal.
As for monitoring on school computers, that seems OK to me if it’s disclosed to the students and parents in advance. What’s problematic is the responses, which seem much more focused on ass-covering than student welfare. I imagine most 13 year olds have made jokes about killing people once or twice and any adult with common sense would be able to tell they’re jokes.
- Comment on Best option for enabling comments on my Ghost blog? 2 weeks ago:
Not Lemmy, unless the post tags a community.
- Comment on Grok’s ‘spicy’ video setting instantly made me Taylor Swift nude deepfakes 2 weeks ago:
Yes, but Musk makes inappropriate offers to impregnate women regularly, so this isn’t surprising.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
A flashlight is literally one of the simplest electronic devices there is
You might be surprised at everything going on inside a modern flashlight. I’ll grant that it’s probably easier to find room for extra seals around the port than in a smartwatch though.
- Comment on 2 weeks ago:
If you mean a USB-C port in general, they can be made waterproof. If you mean something specific to putting one in the most compact form factor possible, that might be true.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 3 weeks ago:
They don’t have to offer backroom incentives to the sort of organizations that want to use attestation. That would be a good future target for antitrust courts, as I’m pretty sure Google’s primary motivation to add it was Amazon launching a phone in 2014 without Google services. Amazon didn’t need Google’s help to fail at that, but perhaps the next company to try was dissuaded.
As Apple recently discovered, willful noncompliance with the antitrust court is a bad plan. Google will probably be wary of backroom deals in the short term.
- Comment on The EU still wants to scan all your chats – and the rules could come into force by October 2025 3 weeks ago:
If you’re a citizen of an EU country, you should contact your politicians to tell them not to, maybe they won’t.
It only has to pass once, and they keep trying.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 3 weeks ago:
Oh, no doubt they would if they could. I’m not saying they’re more ethical than Google; I’m saying they’re less powerful than Google.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 3 weeks ago:
Still ironic though that Epic games is the main proponent, but yet they do the exact same thing on their store paying for exclusives.
The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.
Google has successfully excluded all meaningful competitors from the Android app distribution market. Even big companies like Samsung and Amazon have been unable to operate a profitable app store. Epic is not likely to exclude competitors from the game store market in the near future.
- Comment on Google loses app store antitrust appeal, must make sweeping changes to Play Store 3 weeks ago:
From the article:
developers can opt out if they don’t want their apps to be available more widely
So it won’t affect that.
- Comment on Lemmy User Feedback and Improvement Thread: Share Your Complaints, Suggestions, and Ideas 3 weeks ago:
This is typical of forum software. Some have access controls, but they’re at the admin/moderator level.
- Comment on I'm never going back to Matrix - Terence Eden 3 weeks ago:
Matrix is commonly used for public, discoverable rooms, much like IRC or Discord. Perhaps it’s not good for that use case, but the author seems to wish it was.
An effective spam prevention approach is a basic feature of any public communication service that reaches a certain size. Perhaps keyword filtering as the author suggests isn’t the right approach, but some rate limits would help:
- Private messages from a new contact could notify just once until approved instead of once per message.
- Servers could limit the number of outstanding message requests, with a low limit for new accounts.
- Comment on Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks 4 weeks ago:
Google pushed out competitors using partnerships only they could afford, then intentionally made search worse so people would see more ads.
- Comment on How come Lemmy rarely shows up in internet search results? 5 weeks ago:
Be the change you want to see
On my flashlight review website, every article links to a corresponding post on !flashlight@lemmy.world and displays comments from there.
- Comment on How come Lemmy rarely shows up in internet search results? 5 weeks ago:
Not much links to it. It’s really rare that I see a blog, social media, or non-fediverse forum post link to a Lemmy post. That sort of thing still matters quite a bit to search engines.
- Comment on Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette 5 weeks ago:
When I was about five years old, my parents were shopping for a car. When the radio said Brand X Dealer was the best place to buy a car, I was so excited to tell them what I’d just learned.
I haven’t forgiven advertising since.
- Comment on Apple appeals EU's €500M fine over App Store payment restraints 1 month ago:
It’s likely their priority is continuing to collect all the fees they can for as long as they can rather than the fine itself.
- Comment on ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it 1 month ago:
This is not one of the claims made by the ICEBlock developers; their claims are only to do with notifications.
If you want to claim that a locked Android device is substantially easier for law enforcement to break in to than a locked iPhone, please cite up-to-date (from 2025) sources.
- Comment on ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it 1 month ago:
It makes me suspect they’re not talking about the stock systems OEMs ship.
The developers of GrapheneOS, an independent, security-oriented Android distribution are probably not only talking about stock OEM Android.
That’s a separate issue from whether users are forced to get all their software from a specific source, which is also separate from whether users will actually use other sources when given the option.
On Android, developers can offer users a way to install an app that isn’t easily traced to their identity and on iOS they can’t. Furthermore, an Android app can be both on the Play store and available from other sources; there’s no exclusivity.
- Comment on ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it 1 month ago:
It’s true that FCM will result in more reliability and a better UX than other ways to implement notifications. Doing something else is still the right choice for certain use cases, such as those where privacy or keeping the entire codebase open source are top priorities.
- Comment on ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it 1 month ago:
Maybe they want that, but the statement on their website is not wrong on a technicality because it’s oversimplified; it’s wrong because it asserts a privacy difference between the two operating systems that does not exist.
- Comment on ICEBlock climbs to the top of the App Store charts after officials slam it 1 month ago:
The link in the comment you’re replying to says which part is not true, but since you seem more willing to comment than to click a link and read, I’ll summarize:
The part about the Apple Push Notification service requiring less information that can identify an individual user than Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging is not true. Both use a similar token system. Furthermore, it is possible to build android apps with notifications that do not use FCM.
- Comment on Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up 1 month ago:
I think generating and sharing sexually explicit images of a person without their consent is abuse.
That’s distinct from generating an image that looks like CSAM without the involvement of any real child. While I find that disturbing, I’m morally uncomfortable criminalizing an act that has no victim.
- Comment on Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp 2 months ago:
No. WhatsApp came first, but later adopted Signal’s key exchange and encryption. One of WhatsApp’s founders is now chairman of the Signal Foundation and a major financial backer of the project.
- Comment on Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content 2 months ago:
Mastodon’s federation is not at all consistent even when it could get much closer with a little effort.
Servers don’t remote fetch old posts from recent follows for example, nor replies to off-server posts from people on a third server. There’s work being done on both, but I’m surprised it wasn’t prioritized much earlier. Some other Fediverse software handles these situations better.
- Comment on Mastodon: New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content 2 months ago:
I think the fediverse has a built-in legal risk in that any time someone posts, data is sent to a large number of servers when then make it available via the web or sometimes push it to additional servers (e.g. by user boosts or community subscriptions). This is currently done without any explicit license for the IP contained in that post.
I’m inclined to think that irrevocable permissions are the right thing here, in large part because it’s impossible to guarantee that any subsequent signal from the original poster propagates to everyone who has a copy of that post, or that the server software responds how someone else expects it will.
