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Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. Tha
by fartcannon 4y ago
Nowadays, maybe let's assume malice. Maybe its a false positive and a bunch of people stop using twitter, Facebook, google, apple, or Microsoft as a result. That is less harmful (some might say it's good) than the opposite, where big corps use our collective desire to forgive as a tool to exploit us.
You can apply that saying to your wife and kids. Or your neighbour. Big corps that make money off exploiting peoples negative emotions like twitter? No. I assume malice.
- tehlike 4y agoThat must be a hard life assuming things are working against you
- fartcannon 4y agoNah, its good. Lots of dopamine from being right all the time.
- tehlike 4y agoSounds good. You must also not be learning anything new. Let this be first.
- roenxi 4y agoIf you go over to the Wikipedia article for "genocides by death toll" we currently have 2 ongoing - one in Sudan, one Myanmar. And possibly Xianjing although that doesn't meet Wikipedia's standards. There are really few limits to how nasty a group of humans can get after they identify an in- and out- group. That is genocides, in 2022. The idea that a social media company is out to crush competitors and make money is really not that far out there, and certainly not an idea that can be reasonably mocked. These companies are going the way of the more corporate news organizations - they've got influence, they want to be political actors. They are not trustworthy.
- tehlike 4y agoYou are mixing a bunch of things. I do think twitter has too much moderation problem, i don't think this particular issue is.
- mavu 4y agoNot if they actually are. Then it helps to make informed decisions.
- throw_m239339 4y ago> That must be a hard life assuming things are working against you Yes, better be gullible all the time instead and trust all these corporations...
- tehlike 4y agoOr do the correct thing and be somewhat skeptical but also logical, and think of things in context, weight potential causes for an issue and pick the likely one. Speaking from experience: 1. size of mastodon is such a small thing that i doubt twitter even worries about it, among other things they have to worry about - like monetization. 2. My guess is integrity system incorrectly marked a url or link crawler/preview/whatever service is failing to crawl the page, or something along those lines. It can be something else, but my overarching claim is that it was not someone going into admin UI and typing mastodon to block them explicitly to cut the competition out. It may still be a lowly paid employee incorrectly doing something, but it's not for cutting the competition out and very very likely an honest mistake.
- mattbrewsbytes 4y agoSounds like maybe fartcannon saw the anti-competitive things large companies have done in the past.
- tehlike 4y agoWe all have. But assuming everything is of that nature is what I am against.
- fartcannon 4y agoIt just doesn't hurt to assume greed exists and big corporations are behaving greedily. Otherwise you're either in denial, or walking around perpetually shocked.
- BeetleB 4y agoA masterful example of the strawman and false dichotomy.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- colordrops 4y agoOf course, but we aren't talking about everything, just sociopathic mega corps.
- AndrewUnmuted 4y agoAmazon used to take down its EC2 servers where Netflix streamed their content during the early days of the streaming wars. What of it? Are you actually so naive to think things aren't working against us?
- nosefrog 4y agoSource?
- AndrewUnmuted 4y agoUh, me. I worked at Amazon when this happened.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoPleasantly surprised that you got 8 replies saying that things are often working against us. It’s true at least some of the time. And depending on your social status, that “some of the time” can become all of the time. Competitors have no obligation to play nicely. Is it really a surprise they don’t?
- fartcannon 4y agoI don't care if they don't play nice. I assume they don't. I also don't turn a blind eye to things working against our collective interest.
- timcavel 4y ago
- brnt 4y agoBig tech has earned the assumption.
- dokem 4y agoNot as hard as getting taken for a ride at every turn.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoThere are a lot of people that have no interest in cultivating an objective and accurate world view. "sounds plausible" goes in the "objective evidence" pile and nobody follows up to see if they were correct. What is a hypothesis here? That twitter thought they could block Mastodon and no one in the world would notice? That no one would care?
- fartcannon 4y agoDamage control is cheap and easy.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoSo do you really think a team at twitter sat down and thought, lets block mastodon for a day to avoid some customer bleed, then we can do damage control, but it will be worth it in the end?
- fartcannon 4y agoYes.
- tehlike 4y agoIn the command center, while drinking a glass of wine... Let's kill it, board said.
- abnry 4y agoI would qualify this by saying the priors matter. Twitter has torched their credibility in a flaming dumpster fire. That changes how one might make assumptions.
- colpabar 4y agoIt also just looks suspect. Mastadon is a competitor to twitter, right? It's obviously good for twitter that no one can post links to the mastadon sign up page, right? Do I still have to assume it's just a bug? I sure wish the bugs in my code ended up benefiting my company :)
- tehlike 4y agoMastodon is a very very small surface for twitter...
- somenameforme 4y agoAnd not long ago Facebook was a very small surface for MySpace. And Reddit was a very small surface for Digg, and so on. Network effects can cause competition to rapidly snowball.
- tehlike 4y agoI root for mastodon, but i don't think it becoming big enough to challenge any current social media platform. Twitter may die, but i don't think mastodon would grow as much as you make it sound.
- clumpthump 4y agoHanlon's Razor is, I believe, a good rule of thumb, but people keep using it in situations such as this one where it's not just potentially malice (wanting to harm someone for little other reason than wanting to see them hurt or wanting to hurt) but also greed/self-interest. Hanlon's Razor as stated makes sense to me. I see a lot more stupidity in the world than I see people wanting to hurt for no other reason. But greed? I see a lot of that.
- daenz 4y agoYeah, I think Hanlon's Razor was intended to apply to individuals, not organizations. Often the "stupidity" of an organization is a shield for malice or greed.
- tehlike 4y agoOrganizations are made up of people. When you have 5000 people making small decisions with 0.1% possibility of being wrong, if have 40% of chance having at least one mistake over 5000 decisions.
- daenz 4y agoPeople are not independent coin tosses. They coordinate, manage, overrule, scheme, discuss, and process information in strategic ways that render these kinds of extremely simplified models impossible.
- tehlike 4y agoThey don't work on every single decision collectively.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tehlike 4y agoThis issue is such a small thing that it is much more likely to be an unintended issue than otherwise.
- derbOac 4y agoFor me personally when large quasimonopolies are involved I give it a 50-50 prior over the incompetence-malice distribution.
- loceng 4y agoWith a dash of expected plausible deniability that it was a bug - unless someone outright whistleblows otherwise.
- Osmose 4y agoNot everything needs to be an absolute rule, this totally looks like a small bug on Twitter's part, and if it takes like weeks to fix then you can decide "okay that's a little more suspicious". What's the point of making this particular moment an immediate, gigantic moral issue?
- fartcannon 4y agoI prefer the other way around. Twitter is probably acting bad. If they update it immediately, apologize, then we can assume its not an issue. What value do you get by giving them the benefit of doubt? You just give them a way to gently manipulate you if you assume every little thing that's bad is an accident.
- Osmose 4y agoThe alternative to "Twitter is acting bad" doesn't have to be "Twitter is completely innocent", it can be "Huh that sucks, wonder what caused that". You don't have to make an immediate judgement call on the morality of every tiny bug. The value I get from that is not spending energy judging everything immediately as soon as I see it, which, in a world with social media, is a significant savings.
- fartcannon 4y agoI would prefer to draw attention to their bad behaviour. I'll expend my energy. You can enjoy the benefits.
- spicybright 4y agoIt seems like people many people today aren't satisfied with saying "I don't know" when it's the most reasonable answer. Every little action apparently has to be blamed on something (usually based on very little or no evidence). It doesn't even matter why as long as twitter is aware of it, and it gets fixed soon.
- skybrian 4y agoSo you're saying that you don't care about the truth and would prefer people to act on misinformation.
- jdauriemma 4y agoMaybe this is a bit too forgiving of Twitter, but do they even see Mastodon as a threat worthy of stifling in this manner?