Lvxferre [he/him]

If by “a little toxicity” you mean a little bit of aggressiveness, sarcasm, etc., I agree with you. It depends a lot on the community though - in some, allowing it will be counter-productive.

If however you mean harassment and hate speech, as the author of the text, I strongly disagree. If the mod doesn’t curb down those things, they might not be “lording” over the discourse, but other users are - because

• users shut each other up through harassment
• hate speech silences whole groups, as they leave the community

Another detail is that you don’t need to control the discourse to curb down harassment, since it’s only behavioural and not discursive in nature.

So IMO when it comes to those two things the problem is not overzealous mods, but dumb ones not doing due diligence, who are a bit too eager to falsely accuse their own users to be voicing hate speech or harassing each other when it is not the case.

[Sorry for the wall of text.]

You’re reading too much into my “look it up”. It was basically “I’m not wasting my time with your rhetorical question”.

I’m aware of what you’re explaining (semantic drift + polysemy), however neither is relevant here.

Wtf is “hate speech”?

Look it up.

To call hate speech and harassment “toxicity” downplays both issues.

Optimists cause more harm than good.

Kids are as smart as we used to be. And we didn’t save the then-future, now-present. Same deal with boomers.

Names will change, corporations will change, investors will stay the same. For us things won’t get meaningfully better or worse than they are.

Thanks for the additional info. The article is a mess.

Bluesky is too busy RP-ing as federated to be actually federated.

[Bluesky] is in breach of EU regulations for not disclosing key details about the group […] “All platforms in the EU . . . have to have a dedicated page on their website where it says how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,”

The commission cannot regulate Bluesky directly as it does not yet reach the threshold of more than 45mn monthly users in the EU to be designated a very large online platform.

So, basically: it isn’t there yet because it isn’t necessary yet.

…as suspicious as I am of Bluesky, the title of the article is kind of misleading.

Thank you!

Perhaps.

Worst hypothesis the company gets completely bankrupt, but someone takes up the torch.

If you’re referring to symbolic AI, I don’t think that the AI scene will turn 180° and ditch NN-based approaches. Instead what I predict is that we’ll see hybrids - where a symbolic model works as the “core” of the AI, handling the logic, and a neural network handles the input/output.

I believe that the current LLM paradigm is a technological dead end. We might see a few additional applications popping up, in the near future; but they’ll be only a tiny fraction of what was promised.

My bet is that they’ll get superseded by models with hard-coded logic. Just enough to be able to correctly output “if X and Y are true/false, then Z is false”, without fine-tuning or other band-aid solutions.

However once they lose the googlebux, a meaningful part of the revenue stream will be donations. And features implemented because of donators asking for them are, typically, things that we users desire.

May I be frank? I suspect that, in the long run, Mozilla not getting this money will actually benefit Firefox. Sure, so exec will get pissed as they won’t get 5.6 million dollars a year, and Firefox won’t get some weird nobody-asked-for feature that’ll be ditched some time later; but I think that they’ll focus better on the browser this way. Specially because whoever is paying the dinner is the one picking the dish, and with a higher proportion of their effective income coming from donations, what users want will stop being so neglected.

Just my two cents.

I’ll copypaste an interesting comment here:

[Stephen Smith] This article is a great example of a trend I don’t think companies realize they’ve started yet: They have killed the golden goose of user-generated content for short-term profit. // Who would willingly contribute to a modern-day YouTube, Reddit, StackOverflow, or Twitter knowing that they are just feeding the robots that will one day replace them?

You don’t even need robots replacing humans, or people believing so. All you need is people feeling that you’re profiting at their expense.

Also obligatory “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product”.

That’s good news. Odds are that some of those people will go back to closed media platforms after ~2 months; but the ones who stay help Mastodon and the Fediverse to grow.

Federation woes?

Your comment has a different take though, and adding value to the discussion, it isn’t just the same as I said. Both are complementary.

Even more accurately: it’s bullshit.

“Lie” implies that the person knows the truth and is deliberately saying something that conflicts with it. However the sort of people who spread misinfo doesn’t really care about what’s true or false, they only care about what further reinforces their claims or not.

Predictable outcome for anyone not wallowing in wishful belief.