It does seem like the headline + mechanics are entirely uninteresting and unsurprising. I guess the ‘newsworthy’ thing here is that substack platforms the neo-natzis?

It also platforms a bunch of ex-guardian journalists, who will say plenty about the harm being done by corporate buyouts and influence in traditional media. So I have a hard time taking this article, from this venue, very seriously.

For example: fox news, every podcast service, the opinion pages (and some news sections) of most major newspapers, and (I assume) more have all been profiting off of amplifying fringe right-wing folks. Is substack substantially worse? Are they doing anything policy wise that we should advocate for? Regulators who aren’t doing something they should?

… Don’t they take a cut of most subs?

Claiming some old public figure was a newly discovered pedo, and including a quote of them saying terrible things.

Except the quote was 5 years old, not from the Epstein files, the figure had apologized and been publicly forgiven by the victim, and the files revealed nothing new.

The ratio is a vibe, and I kinda regret posting a precise one. The case I checked carefully is this one: everything this guy posts

which I noted in November, and blocked very shortly thereafter. I vaguely recall finding a handful more examples of ‘too good to be true’ headlines, which were in fact not true, but I did not save links.

What made me sad is that even bereft of the algorithm and bad incentives in system, if the headline is ‘directionally correct’ still seems like the most important thing. Very interested in a social media where correct is ranked over good feels.

(and then there’s the regular examples like this, which are not slop but are heavily disputed/recontextualized by the top comment. Correction highly upvoted, yet the OP itself is still doing well))

I gave Lemmy a dedicated year. A few notes:

Very few people click through.

Lots of rage bait.

Communities split over instances make it pretty hard to know where to post things, what with defederation and such.

I didn’t miss much “news”; lemmy was functional for reporting what people were talking about.

No notification of moderation actions taken against you is a choice.

Those who post small websites that do cool things: thank you! I did discover several other cool places and tools.

I found that about 1/10 of the top lemmy posts (after filtering out jokes and sports) are links to AI slop that nobody bothered to check, comments just take the headline as real if they affirm. Pointing this out in the comments did not reduce engagement or drop the posts.

Cutting it out of my routine, at last for awhile.

One thing I really hoped for from the social Internet was access to people and data that could correct me/fill in gaps. But lemmy doesn’t do this, as people see what is upvoted and upvotes are used for affirmations to the reader.

Also improves Teams/slows the enshitifcation. It’s harder to make the product bad when it’s hardly a monopoly.

The people who have made that category error aren’t reading this discussion, so literally reaching them isn’t on the table and doesn’t make sense for this discussion. Presumably we’re concerned about people who will soon make that jump? I also don’t think that making this distinction helps them very much.

If I’m already having the ‘this is a person’ reaction, I think the takes in this thread are much too shallow (and, if I squint, patterned after school-yard bullying) to help update in the other way. Almost all of them are themselves lazy metaphors. “An LLM is a person because its an agent” and “An LLM isn’t a person because it repeats things others have said” seem equally shallow and unconvincing to me. If anything, you’ll get folks being defensive about it, downvoted, and then leaving this community of mostly people for a more bot filled one.

I don’t get think this is good strategy. People falling for bots are unlikely to have interactions with people here, and if they are the ugliness is likely to increase bot use imo.

I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.

It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.

We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.

Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.

Price raising in response to demand isn’t always a bad thing, it cuts back on hoarding. Recall toilet paper shortages, for eg. Alternative is rationing, which cuts some folks out entirely and incentives a bunch of dumb behavior.

Boo to personalized pricing. But idk how eager I am to get out the tomatoes.

Taken broadly; literal management might be correctly optimizing shareholder returns for next quarter (cut costs at all costs), as the incentives encourage. The goal is no longer to keep having a business next year.

Directionally correct, but it does require self hosted agentic models that can compete with the automation running on corporate side. This is not obvious. It will be a new equilibria; maybe just a few more hours of poorly done work by a handful of consumers is enough to break some monopolies. Or maybe everyone will be attached to OpenAI compute, and we’ve just gained a new middleman for most interactions.

Then you should be able to easily give criticisms.

We haven’t invested sufficiently in them for this too be plausible. They’re incentives haven’t been to get very ahead either.

It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?

I do have a favorite for video game characters of the other gender. But I didn’t pick it until quite late in life, and I’m not sure it’s a good name for gender-bent me irl.

Parents had a name for a AFAB child iirc; though I’ve forgotten it.

You get a good number of data hoarders after a picture provider goes down/enshittifies. Yes, they’ll lose at least one large collection of photos. But I suspect many folks realize they could be banned, lose their account, etc, and take some effort to save things that matter.

If you read the article, it’s because power companies are monopolies and so we’ve regulated them rather harshly. They are often compelled to build infrastructure to meet demand, for example. We don’t make the provider of a steel mill, housing builder, etc pay (generally).

And that’s weird, right? It’s one area of the market where we do a planned economy, and all states manage it differently. Now it’s being stress tested in a new way.

It’s interesting to me that we don’t do this for all industries. Like, if a big auto manufacturer or textile company sets up shop, the local power company is compelled to build more power plants for them (sometimes the power company eats the cost, sometimes a deal with the provider, etc. See the article). Monopolies are weird.

Oh that’s interesting. I hadn’t realized the energy sector saw a C-suite pay spike too. Looking around, it seems like they were at or above pay for CEOs elsewhere. Crazy.

We’ve really seen deregulation under all the administrations, eh?