We need a new paradigm for social media. And no, I’m not satisfied with Lemmy either (privacy issues).
Yup. I’m working on something, but it also has some privacy issues as well.
The problem is that the more privacy you have, the more people will post illegal and spammy stuff and the less monetizable the platform is. The more free speech you have, the more moderation costs. So social media companies will generally lean toward less privacy (so more ad revenue) and less free speech.
My focus is on p2p and user-generated moderation, which tries to solve two problems:
- instance hosting costs - near zero since data is stored on user devices; you can host a mirror to help
- bad mods - automatic moderation - if user A mods like user B, user A will trust user B more and posts they filter will filter for A
But the automatic moderation thing requires public information, like mod reports, categorization, and votes, so it’s not going to improve on lemmy in privacy. Anything privacy-respecting would require too much work from users (they’ll need to both consent to trust each other). Maybe I’ll be able to add it as an option.
But even if my system is perfect (it won’t be), it’s unlikely to beat something like Twitter or Facebook due to the network effect and sheer amount of engineering and marketing resources available.
Imo, lemmy is good enough for now. People like me will be working on stuff behind the scenes, so if lemmy falls over, hopefully we’ll have a ready replacement.
No, stop, please, don’t kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
Stock was at 420 and that was all that matters
Well, one more reason to ignore that platform on it’s way to obsolescence.
I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg
Hmm, jeg tror desværre jeg består af et 100% syntetisk keramisk bomuldsprodukt…
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
Protect the bots!!!
yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You’re welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That’s what I was coming in here to suggest, so I’m glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it’s unlikely many bots that aren’t made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
I’d bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
“Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots,” Musk wrote on X.
…that makes no sense. By “bots” usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there’s any cause worth paying money for, it’s making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.
Well, you can invest money to get rid of bots, or you can try to make money to get rid of bots. He tries the latter, and will kill the platform doing that.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I’ll utilize Twitter, it’s pretty simple.
It has a “chicken or egg” problem. There are better alternatives, except many don’t use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don’t want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it’s working even better than hoped (but we’ll need to see how it scales)
Don’t discount the FOMO factor as well. It’s what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don’t report on trends. Maybe you’ll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That’s the thinking anyway.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
So you’ll be returning there tomorrow?
lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I’m only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
I think they were going for a “it’s always been trash” angle
Indeed (Although there are still plenty of internet witch hunts…)
Hopefully more people change to mastodon now
And make it a shitty place. Lemmy world already is in my block list
What? Why?
Bunch of Hamas apologists/supporters.
Bots and politics
That’s every instance, not just Lemmy world
I hate to tell you this, but you’re in a lemmy.world community right now, so your block list isn’t working very well.
😂😂
*keys and *omas are more fun though. mastodon’s way too businesslike to encourage a fair share of people to pick it over shitter (it works other way around as well tho)
Free speech is free speech only if your dictator tells you so.
You might want to do some research on what free speech means because this is cringe.
Social media was never about free speech.
Meh, you still ise Twitter, you get what you deserve.
What does vaggumon digivolve to? MetalVaggumon. ヴァグモン
Indeed I deserve porn, so I get porn.
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
Gotta get them 44 billion back somehow.
Well, this ain’t it chief
People with “hot link in bio” and all that jazz
I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter’s just stupid IMO. I hope that shit’ll die sooner than later.
I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.
Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.
It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.
I get the appeal of twitter. I’ve said this before. You want to know your dates? When that next book in the series is coming out. When a new game trailer is available? Movie trailer? You want to know about when a vlog creator posts their newest content? Twitter was good for those things. I used to use it for that. Now it’s just useless for most things. And I’m back to using RSS feeds, more than half of which don’t work properly.
It’s still the perfect one-to-many communication method. Best way to get news from people you kinda give a shit about, the rest was just noise.
I miss so much news in racing and gaming due to not being on Twitter anymore
I’ve never stopped using web sites for those use cases.
There’s something to be said for having full control over your online “home”.
That’s fair but not everyone does it this way. I actually switched to twitter from RSS when google and the like basically pushed for it to go away and now I’m back on RSS with mixed results because twitter has become a dumpster fire. Having full control isn’t working out great for me and probably a fair few others.
That is an amazing idea!
We should make a site where people can set up their own internet homepage. Each person can have their own space on the internet! To give the users a sense of ownership let’s call it MySpace.
I think my friend Tom will help design the site.
I followed a bunch of artists and content creators and I got annoyed when the entire feed became just interspersed with Musk’s ramblings and bullshit. I never followed him and I didn’t want promoted content.
Twitter has always been pointless to me except for outage notices etc, and that’s just because that’s where the companies chose to post. The second there is a “town board” style app with all company announcements etc then it’s completely pointless.
twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they’ll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service
Twitter was great for watching Jan 6 unfold, there’s no replacement for the kind of unfiltered crowd sourced information gathering it enabled
okay, so for tracking food trucks and lifted, heavily-financed trucks
lmfao fuck off musk sure it is
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
It’s sterile and I like the taste.
Bear?
Threads is also a barely moderated mess, because they don’t want to scare away “moderate” (sic!) conservatives (code word for “fascist not openly identifying as such”).
And they’re anti politics, except they don’t count that as politics
Free speech? More like free* speech
*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely “free”
Fee speech
