weevie833 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Montana Tweaks Law, But Still Bans Communities From Building Better, Faster Broadband Networks

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 01:42pm

  OK, you've changed my mind. Legit. Allow me one last retort: I live in New Hampshire where the culture here is very much pro-libertarian and anti-community. There is constant pressure to defund public schools, deny any research into public transit solutions, and forget about any services for seniors. There is no sales tax here and there never will be - it's mostly funded by property tax which is argued in Town Meetings every year. Coming together in the common good is antithetical to the Don't Tread on Me/Trumpian credo in most of the parts here. It's every Ayn Randian free-stater for himself and I could only wish that something like what you have referenced were possible but there just isn't the oxygen for it. I suspect there are other areas of the country the same or worse.

• On the post: Montana Tweaks Law, But Still Bans Communities From Building Better, Faster Broadband Networks

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 11:38am

  I don't disagree with what you are saying. I will say, however, that I haven't paid for landline phone or cable TV service since 2007. Who uses a landline?? And f*** TV. I cut the cord and won't go back. But that's just me. I pay $82/month for broadband fibre at the lowest tier and it does what it needs to do. All of that is besides the larger issue of bringing broadband to 100% of the population. A basic municipal service would be great if it was reliable, funded, maintained, staffed, and affordable. IMHO, it seems like one of those "pick two" situations.

• On the post: Montana Tweaks Law, But Still Bans Communities From Building Better, Faster Broadband Networks

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 11:31am

  Stone: Presume goodwill here. I am not an industry expert or lobbyist - I am just a guy who has worked from home for the past 15 years relying 100% on broadband/fibre Internet in two non-rural/non-urban areas of the country with zero problems. It is a sample of one. Thus, if the problem were so pervasive as described, perhaps I might have encountered it directly or indirectly? I haven't. On the other hand, I have dealt with MANY MANY MANY state and local government employees and their surrogates dealing with Medicaid for my mother, services for the aged, veteran's nursing home services, and other areas where it is consistently evident that government employees are good-hearted but either ill-equipped to do their job, cannot do their job, can do their job but choose not to, or the employees for such services do not exist (but should) because they were not funded. If you have a strong case for community/municipal run broadband Internet that contradicts this experience, by all means offer it instead of snark. I'm all ears.

• On the post: Montana Tweaks Law, But Still Bans Communities From Building Better, Faster Broadband Networks

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 06:48am

  I'd be willing to concede that there are (at least) two credible sides to this issue, despite the horrendously asymmetric invasion of lobbyists. With a municipal/community provider, there is always a chronic problem of staffing competent, motivated people when private industry always pays better. And you could well imagine that a public utility would somehow become politicized in some way that some fringe group would try to defund or sabotage it as a conduit of liberal indoctrination blah blah blah. And let's not get into what happens at town meetings when it comes to funding these things with TAXES. At least with a private company, there is a semblance of recourse, a smidgen of competition, and a shadow of competence. Sure, there are patches of private company badness - I don't doubt that. (I have not seen any problems in 25 years). I just don't see a better municipal-based solution until providing decent broadband is so turnkey that even the slouchiest government zhlub can shove a PC board into a slot and press the ANY key to make it work.

• On the post: Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2023 @ 09:36am

  Sgt. Schultz says...

  First, I concede that I know NOTHING about what goes on behind closed doors at big tech companies. So I say this with no authority whatsoever. That said, it is possible that a tech CEO in a position to either allow or throttle their services in China makes their decisions based on more than just moral, ethical, or political fortitude. Given the strong-arm tactics used by China in all of its doings, i.e., building islands in the sea to claim sovereignty, oppression of Uyghuirs, disappearing certain unsavory folk, etc., I would not be the least surprised if some Chinese official made an offer to Midjourney folks that they could not refuse. I, for one, would rather err on the side of existing on the top side of the soil than not. Ethics be damned.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2023 @ 06:01am

  sumgai - I think we (I think) agree about the same thing but are stuck on semantics. The only reason community-destroying assholes are removed from any commercial social media platform is because it jeopardizes their potential revenue stream. There are no laws being enforced in doing so and it is already evident that Facebook (at least) has been well aware that conflict and outrage is good for business. Facebook’s ethical failures are not accidental; they are part of the business model https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8179701/ Where I agree with you is that the collateral effect of this practice is that it benefits the good of =the particular social media community= which I qualify as not being "the public." If it were benefitting the public, it would benefit everyone - not just people with a social media account.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 02 Apr, 2023 @ 07:36pm

  My reference to the "public good" was in about the institutions like the post office or the FDA operating in the public interest rather than for profit. Twitter may have ethically sound staffers, but the business model is to make money by exploiting market opportunities. They (and all other social media companies) have never demonstrated an interest in promoting public well-being. Rather, quite the opposite.

• On the post: As The Social Media Moral Panic Continues, People Keep Highlighting How Much Value It Actually Provides

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 04:12pm

  Well, as a 58 year old guy, I can attest to a childhood composed of the following: - Imminent nuclear annihilation - The last gasps of the Vietnam War - Nixon et al. - Racial conflict - Environmental pollution at a mass scale - Population explosion - AIDS - Gas crises - Recessions in 1973-'75, '80, '81-82 - The total decline of American manufacturing that killed off the middle class (and my parents' viability as workers) It was a jolly good time back then, but I get your point. My 16 and 18 year olds don't pay attention to any of the partisan BS going on right now anyway. Too busy thumb-flipping through tattoo photos and mountain bike videos. I don't think either of them have ever listened to single newscast of any kind in their lives but they do know what's going on.

• On the post: As The Social Media Moral Panic Continues, People Keep Highlighting How Much Value It Actually Provides

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 12:50pm

  AC: While it is true that there is a 2000+ year history of social media as you describe, what differs here is scale and penetration. The untethered timebase, portability, and ubiquity of current SM places it somewhere not necessarily comparable to other prior forms of it. I say this in the context of attributing the intensity of influence in the construction of reality compared to prior forms. Also, if you have some reference for your claim about "...the more active they are in creating and interacting, the less the algorithms shape what they see and how they interact" since I would want to include that in my class. (I teach a separate class on trends in social media). Is this a mathematical "governor" of sorts that arbitrates the flow of content? As I understand it, all user input (not just content, but scrolling, pausing, etc.) is captured as a basis of calculating interest, which is used as input for predicting affinity to other content, groups, and ads. It is true that users have control over what they choose to do in a SM system, though I would qualify that by saying that what a person =believes= is appropriate or optimal to do within a SM system is learned within SM culture. Social media is more like a physical shopping mall than an open neighborhood - you are always playing within the prescribed boundaries of a commercial property which comes with its own rules and expectations. If you get a minute, check out this experimental webpage that visualizes interactive metadata. This is what I was referring to before: https://clickclickclick.click/

• On the post: As The Social Media Moral Panic Continues, People Keep Highlighting How Much Value It Actually Provides

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 12:03pm

  Thank. BTW, when I said "It is difficult to be objective to the risks of SM if you don’t understand how it works" I was not referring to you, Mike Masnick. I was referring to a person who uses social media unquestioningly. Sorry if that came off the wrong way.

• On the post: As The Social Media Moral Panic Continues, People Keep Highlighting How Much Value It Actually Provides

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 11:14am

  Mediate socializing

  First, thank you for an extraordinary effort to compose your case. I offer some comments that are not intended to invalidate or refute what you are saying here - just some comments. Dinky stuff: Unless things have changed "Danah Boyd" is actually "danah boyd" cuz that's how she rolls. Second, I can't argue against "teens are gonna do what teens are gonna do," so I will set that aside and then encourage you to read "The Mediated Construction of Reality: Society, Culture, Mediatization" by Couldry and Hepp [https://www.amazon.com/Mediated-Construction-Reality-Nick-Couldry-ebook/dp/B01N1QTP2A/r] specifically, Chapter 2. (This is one of the required readings in my class "Synthetic Media and the Construction of Reality" - here is the accompanying e-book: https://granite.pressbooks.pub/comm643/. ) The point I am making here is that the so-called existential danger of SM isn't so much in the content of social media but in adapting to a =mediated form= of socializing which is (in many cases) the primary means for socializing at all, for many. (You literally cannot get the phone out of my 18-year old's hand). TL;DR: Mediated socializing introduces a method of constructing reality that is offset from actual human interaction. Mediated socializing introduces an extra cognitive layer that takes into account the "grammar" of online socializing, as evident in things like how long it should take before you expect a response from someone. (The book is better at demonstrating what this is about). Insert your preferred risk set associated with that, but in my old-time way of viewing things, people immersed in SM have a distorted understanding of how humans should interact with civility, despite the benefits you cite. Second, these mediated forms of interaction are not objective "dumb" systems like the old BBS days - these are commercial platforms designed to make money through algorithmically optimized methods to maintain user attention, =by any means necessary=. There are ZERO incentives for social media systems to operate in the public good, and their business models reflect that in the form of mass social experimentation and (unethical) the use of amplification to produce the best conditions for advertisers. I am NOT saying that social media is "bad," and that teens should not use them, nor will I make any claim that SM is a causal factor in suicide. I spent three years developing an online training program for suicide prevention, so I am quite familiar with the evidence-based practice and theories. Bottom line: No one thing causes suicide - there are ALWAYS a combination of risk factors and protective factors that contribute to individual cases. So that dimension of this argument is off the table - I agree that SM does not "cause suicide." However... we cannot overlook the collateral effects of a generation (or two) that has adapted to a mediated form of constructing reality when we KNOW for certain that the tech entities by which teens engage are not operating in earnest for its users' well-being. Maybe teens are smart enough to know that intuitively, but I would not bet on it. We spend a lot of energy telling teens to be good judges of online content, but we do not teach teens how the content got there in the first place. It is difficult to be objective to the risks of SM if you don't understand how it works.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 08:19am

  This is not a sociology study. It is data science. There is no study of human behavior and relationships. Strawman argument.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 07:34am

  I was referring to the blathering impression that "peer review is in an atrocious state" which is an indictment intended to invalidate the conclusions. It is a weak, hearsay argument for the sake of rhetoric. Nonetheless, my reaction to this paper is solely on the basis of the evidence that refutes the belief that Twitter has a deliberate bias against Conservatives in terms of suspensions because it has a larger Liberal agenda =as a matter of policy=. The evidence clearly shows that suspensions are based on the prevalence of spreading misinformation, suspensions occur to both Conservatives and Liberals, but that Conservatives tend to do this more than Liberals because they cite the worst misinformed crap in the world. You can argue all you want that the criteria for these suspensions are flawed and you'd have a decent case. But that is not the focal point of the research - it is about explaining why suspensions occur in Twitter. I argue that any "reasonable person" in the legal sense of it would realize that citing Breitbart as a basis of any kind of truth claim is mostly horseshit. For that matter, citing ANY form of news media as a basis of any truth claim is mostly horseshit, but some outlets are far more horshitty than others. Last, this is not social science research. It does not examine human behavior and relationships qualitatively. This is data science, which in this case, would be highly reproducible.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2023 @ 06:04am

  Regarding peer review: Peer review does not dispute the conclusions of a research study, nor is it ever intended to do so. To make any claim that peer review is "preaching to the choir" for a rubber stamp of approval is a misunderstanding of research methods. Peer view is SOLELY for the purpose of validating the research methods, selection of population, data gathering, and calculations against the data such as statistical strategies. Flaws of these kinds invalidate the conclusions indirectly, which is why the writer of the paper I linked to included the statistical basis of their interpretations. (If you don't understand the stats, then don't argue about their validity!). Non-academics often think that scientific research is about "what scientists believe is true." This is not correct. Good scientific research is about following the data wherever the conclusions land. And yes - there is bad scientific research, which is why there is a difference between research studies published in open journals versus those published in peer reviewed journals, (like the one I cited, pending). Fortunately, when science is wrong, it is self-corrective with better research.

• On the post: Forget Shadow Banning, Now Elon Is Shadow Boosting Accounts He Likes, While Trying To Drive Away Users Who Won’t Pay

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 28 Mar, 2023 @ 01:10pm

  Here is a research study (like, actual research) that provides nuance to the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter account deplatforming. Keep in mind that (as obvious as this is to say), Twitter is not a public square controlled by a socialist government - it is a private company in a capitalist economy for the purpose of making money through advertising. Twitter has ZERO interest in promoting the public good. https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5 "Thus, among the politically active Twitter users in our study, Republicans and conservatives shared information from much lower quality sites than Democrats and liberals - even when quality was judged by a politically-balanced group of U.S. laypeople. This observation provides clear evidence for a political asymmetry in misinformation sharing in our dataset that cannot be attributed to liberal bias in what is considered misinformation or low quality news." "...we see a strong positive relationship between being more Republican / conservative and likelihood of being suspended (b = 0.45, z = 22.6, p < 0.001) when using political orientation as the sole independent variable in the probit regression. However, once low quality news sharing is added to the model, the association between suspension and political orientation is reduced by 56.2% (b = 0.20, z = 4.6, p < 0.001; see Figure 2b), and sharing low quality news is also strongly associated with suspension (b = 0.27, z = 6.6, p < 0.001)." It may be true that Conservatives are deplatformed more than Liberals in pure number. But when controlling for misinformation / disinformation as a basis of suspension, that gap collapses. So, if Conservatives insist on feeding more crap into the system, you can expect a similar pattern of reaction from a privately held company concerned about its credibility as an advertising platform. Of course, all this is moot since Elon took over, so who cares.

• On the post: Antisemitism On Twitter Has More Than Doubled Since Elon Musk Took Over

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 22 Mar, 2023 @ 08:17am

  Matthew - There is a kernel of merit to your argument in the most general sense of it: words are just words in a microblogging app. But an earnest study of the historical record shows how hate speech has been used as a strategy for manufacturing consent for other acts - and it's not just the Nazis. It's one thing to call someone an a**hole for whatever reason. It doesn't threaten you as a class of people. However, the first milestone in justifying violence against a group of people is to make the case that they deserve it: scapegoating, stereotyping, conspiracy theories, etc. Establishing these ideas through hate speech justifies discrimination which ALWAYS leads to violence. This is not hearsay, it's not "liberal ideology." This is LITERALLY how violence against Jews is manufactured (and towards anyone else, for that matter - the "Leftists" are next!) The worst thing for humanity is to take bad ideas and put them into a global network where they can accelerate, amplify, and proliferate. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. As the great George Costanza once said, "We live in a SOCIETY!!" The issue isn't as simplistic as you make it out to be.

• On the post: Political Fiction vs. Reality: Twitter’s Alleged Help For Dems vs. Rupert Murdoch’s Real Help For Trump

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2023 @ 05:43am

  The SAT and equity

  OK, I'll bite. The SAT measures a small slice of a person's academic acumen which, in the college context, is not necessarily a good predictor of success. It is a predictor of math and English skills. The SAT doesn't measure resilience, creativity, interpersonal skills, independence/responsibility, "having your shit together," and any of the other things that separate the dropouts from the scholars. Sure, the SAT is "useful," but it is less relevant today given the breadth of human capacity needed to function in the semi-adult world. With two kids entering college as we speak and the fact that I actually work in a college, I can attest to the misalignment of college entrance requirements and the personal characteristics that actually produce success. Equity has nothing to do with it.

• On the post: Daily Deal: Scrivener 3, The Go-To App for Writers

  

  weevie833 ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2023 @ 01:08pm

  As far as I know, there is still no cloud version of Scrivener for Mac which was a major setback for my use case. I'm not a professional writer so it's not a big deal but I had high hopes. I ended up using Pressbooks instead.