That’s why kbin should self-upvote by default. If only Michael Scotts are upvoting their own comments, then the Michael Scotts have an inherent advantage in comment visibility.
We’re going to hear more from the Michael Scotts and less from the humble Pams.
Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?
I’d expect them to be… I don’t know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn’t finding it.
There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren’t completely insane.
That time has passed.
Slightly rewriting thousands of pages of text to avoid being buried by Google sounds like a good job for ChatGPT.
Algorithms thwarting other algorithms… smells like justice.
Probably imported, but that doesn’t make them less real. The ease of transferring accounts will be a major advantage for this platform.
I had the same visceral reaction to this law as most old-school internet dwellers, but I’ve changed my tune. My view now:
Yes, it’s ridiculous to charge someone money for linking to your content, but it’s less ridiculous than the status quo.
We’re at a point where foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content, while the people who actually produce that content at considerable expense are going broke. This situation is the result of those foreign corporations building a virtual monopoly on news by out-competing / crowding out all the old places we were exposed to headlines: from newsstands to flipping through the channels to media homepages to RSS feeds.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans.
This law will probably not be effective in the short term, and might even backfire due to Facebook’s content blackout. It’s easy for them to give the middle finger to small markets like Australia and Canada.
But major players like California are considering similar laws, and you can bet Facebook will suddenly find they can pay content producers when the alternative is losing the world’s fifth largest economy.
I’ve seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it’s accurate, Reddit should just… do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They’d be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it’s your productivity that will suffer, no one else’s. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you’re not being huge hypocrites and pretending it’s community-run.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
Reddit was not going to change its mind.
Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit’s revenue and let the apps stay in business.
But it’s become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn’t an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can’t see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.
I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren’t over and Reddit is feeling it.
If you’re looking for some logic in this mess, it’s that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.
So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we’re forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we’ve stuck to old habits.
This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we’d only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.
Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it’s just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)