Now is the time for Europe to rally behind Ukraine. We really should have upped military funding and arms production in preparation for this outcome.

Bernie Sanders reflected on it stating that it was the Democrats failing the working class that won Trump the election, and people in the Democratic Party denounced him for it.

Yes to all the above, and probably a mix of bots and terminally online people getting involved. Not sure what year everyone started becoming unhinged but I think it was at least mid-2010’s.

People are now being perma banned from r/pics of all places for merely posting on the Asmongold subreddit. Yes, it’s become something of an anti-woke echo chamber in recent months, but it’s the main subreddit of Twitch’s most popular streamer.

And now we wondered why 74.7 million Americans voted for Donald Trump last week. Because maybe telling your voters that they’re Nazi scum if they don’t agree with you isn’t a winning strategy, like the world view that most Reddit moderators have.

I’ll wait and see what comes of it. Valve have been singlehandedly responsible for evolving Linux gaming by leaps and bounds, to the point where the only real hurdle right now is anti-cheat compatibility.

Their direct collaboration with Arch is massive for that reason alone

I’m thinking the API protests would have been more effective if y’all just stopped moderating entirely instead of locking down subreddits.

Let the site turn into an absolute cesspool.

I used to work for a major business outsourcer. One of their contingency plans in case an office burned down or had to be evacuated was literally to make everybody work in another office 50 miles away.

It was so bad that they weren’t even willing to reimburse travel costs. It was either get there or be fired.

I don’t remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg’s social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.

IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.

Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg’s front-page, but they didn’t have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.

It’s hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that’s ‘bigotry.’

Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.

They’d fit right at home on r/Asmongold. That place has become a KotakuInAction offshoot in recent months. So much right wing, anti-woke and anti-trans content gets posted there that I’m surprised the admins haven’t quarantined or banned it.

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It’s easy to avoid buying things from Amazon

I mean… Yes but also no.

Amazon have gone to crap in recent years and has become a more upmarket Wish or Temu. Much of their storefront is full of Chinese knock-off brands these days.

What Amazon does offer is somewhat reliable next (and sometimes same) day delivery. The only way you can get something faster is by travelling to a brick & mortar shop and buying in person.

As for AWS, aren’t we forgetting that Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, even Alibaba and Huawei have their own cloud solutions?

I’m in the first camp. Instagram is flooded with spam accounts posting links to illicit Telegram channels where actual CSAM is being distributed. The owner of Telegram was also arrested recently for failing to safeguard his platform from such highly illegal activity. Children having easy and often unrestricted access to social media is probably the reason why things have gotten so bad.

Every major social network should be asking for ID verification, but there should be strict safeguards on how that information is used and stored, with hefty fines for failures to safeguard.

Gab tried to pull the same thing with their Dissenter plugin. It was such a bad idea that Mozilla and Google banded together to remove the extensions from their stores for ToS violations.

Now imagine what a nightmare it would be to moderate the ability to comment on anything online with actual standards and decency.

This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

Facebook listening in on your microphone is one of those things that I actually believe to be true. Ever had conversations with people to then realize that you’re being served targeted ads based on these conversations? Seems very coincidental.

Off is the direction in which I would like Microsoft to fuck if they think I’m gonna have a deep learning AI spy on my computer activity.

This just makes me want to switch to Linux.

Genuine question, is Bluesky worth using in its current state? Can it hold a candle to pre-Musk Twitter?

I’m asking because I feel incredibly burned by the barebones state of Threads and I don’t really want to commit to another platform that doesn’t have its shit together. Threads still doesn’t have trending topics and functional hashtags over a year into its launch, and this is is shit that Mastodon had for years, despite Meta expecting to piggyback off of the ActivityPub protocol and be welcomed into the Fediverse with open arms.

So imagine you’re on PornHub and then out of nowhere, Clippy shows up and says “hmmm looks like you need some help pleasuring yourself”, then starts flicking through similar nude pictures and videos to what you’ve been looking at before. The idle animation of the AI assistant even changes to Clippy morphing into the shape of a penis and shagging a rolled up piece of lined paper is if it were a fleshlight. You can’t tell if Microsoft are mocking you for being a coomer, nor can you tell whether to find Clippy’s sexual deviancy funny or creepy.

Somehow that hypothetical dystopia of Clippy watching you masturbate is only slightly worse than what Microsoft plan to do with Recall. If the mere thought of a machine learning AI taking screenshots of your desktop every few seconds and learning from your computer usage habits isn’t absolutely fucking terrifying… Then imagine that these are likely being uploaded to a server for the perusal of advertisers, intelligence agencies and any hackers skilled enough to break into Microsoft’s servers.

Even if it was stored locally, all it takes is one dodgy web link for you to inadvertently send all your Recall data to a hacker and have it ransomed.

I don’t think the “decentralize and federate everything” strategy is a good idea when it comes to online marketplaces.

We’ve seen how quickly bad actors can wreak havoc on the Fediverse like that one time when Lemmy Shitpost was closed for weeks due to people creating new instances of their own and spamming the community with CSAM. Imagine how much you open the community up to scams or criminal activity when money gets involved.