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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • rwhitisissle@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.orgThreads is live
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    1 year ago

    Man, I hate the Twitter model of following people instead of ideas or communities. Like, I don’t give a shit what Lebron James or Stephen King thinks. I just want to complain about the most recent episode of some t.v. show I’ve watched or bicker with people about the definition of the word “authoritarianism.” I know you can do that with Twitter, but the jumping off point of it is you have to give a shit what some specific person thinks at any given time. Which…I don’t.



  • I know there are already people working on creating AI filters, to filter out spam articles and other AI-created content.

    These will probably (ironically) be largely labeled by AI. As in, you get an AI to detect AI text and content generation and flag those websites as likely AI generated, with some kind of scaling probability index. That said, I think you could use AI to enhance human writing and that’s fine. Maybe write something on your own and then have an AI restructure it or reword things for clarity, fixing grammar mistakes and other things. But full on “write me an article on [insert random thing here]” is where shit gets tedious.



  • I think it’s one of those things where on a micro level, it’s conceptually fine, and a lot of people say that’s how they want to use it. But I’ve seen reddit basically get destroyed from pivoting away from the desktop experience to focus on catering to predominately mobile users. The consequence of this is that you have shorter comments overall in threads, less incentive to reply to people who are actually trying to have real discussions, shorter lifetimes on how long people engage with a particular post, and, at the risk of being ageist, a younger userbase with a natural interest in shortform engagement and more superficially appealing content. Right now on lemmy communities like Beehaw, a solid post can have days worth of discussion in the comment section. On reddit, if you’re commenting after 8 hours, that train’s left the station. Obviously, I’m biased and have a strong interest in quality of posts and the discussions attached to them over the sheer quantity of new material hitting your feed. And, of course, part of that is a consequence of user volume, but the fact that mobile is the de facto standard tool for accessing the site magnifies all the problems I mentioned to pathological extremes.




  • Posts like this remind me of the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough At Last, in which a man who loves to read gets knocked out and wakes up after the world has been devastated by hydrogen bombs. The entire episode leading up to this had most of the characters chastising the protagonist for being a “reader,” who spends all of his time reading “doggerel” such as, wait for it, David Copperfield. Perhaps this was a genuine attitude held, if perhaps not as extremely, by people in the early or middle parts of the 20th century before television was truly ubiquitous, who looked at reading as frivolous or immature entertainment. But my point is that you’re facing a cultural attitude that will probably shift more and more in favor of inclusiveness as time goes on. Almost all women in their 30s that I know either play video games themselves or just uncritically accept that other people play video games for fun. I can see why women in their 40s might be less amenable to it. I don’t have anything to add other than that you’re both ahead of the curve and a victim of the times.