OpenStars

Hands-down the best summary that I have ever heard: Jon Stewart's recent episode.

Hrm, maybe billionaires buying up all of the sources of media MIGHT have some sort of... what was that word again?

Please deposit [ one taco ] to continue driving. Thank you and have a nice day!

This is the model that Wikipedia uses and, while there are most definitely detractions, there are also significant benefits as well. Email spam filters too.

In one sense, it is a lot like irl democracy - with all the perks and pitfalls therein. For one it could lead to echo chamber reinforcement, though I don't think this one is a huge deal b/c so too can our current moderator setup, and if anything a trust system may be less susceptible, by virtue of spreading out the number of available "moderators" for each category of action?

The single greatest challenge I can think of to this working is that like democracy, it is vulnerable to outsider attack, wherein e.g. if someone could fake 100k bots to upvote a particular person's posts, they could in a fairly short time period elevate them to high status artificially. Perhaps this issue could be dealt with by performing a weighted voting scheme so that not all upvotes are equal, and e.g. an upvote from a higher-status account would count significantly more than an upvote from an account that is only a few hours old. Note that ofc this only reinforces the echo chamber issue all the more, b/c if you just join, how could you possibly hope to argue against a couple of people who have been on the platform for many years? The answer, ofc, is that you go elsewhere to start your own place, as is tradition. Which exasperates still further the issue of finding "good" places but... that is somewhat a separate matter, needing a separate solution in place for it (or maybe that is too naive of me to say?).

Btw the word "politics" essentially means "how we agree", and just as irl we are all going to have different ideas about how to achieve our enormous variety of goals, so too would that affect our preferences for social media. And at least at first, I would expect that many people may hate it, so I would hope that this would be made an opt-in feature by default.

Also, and for some reason I expect this next point to be quite unpopular, especially among some of the current moderators: we already have a system in place for distinguishing b/t good vs. bad content, or at least popular vs. unpopular - it is called "voting". I have seen some fairly innocuous replies get removed, citing "trolling" or some such, when someone dares to, get this, innocently ask a question, or perhaps state a known fact out-of-context (I know, sea-lioning exists too, I don't mean that). Irl someone might patiently explain why the other person was wrong or insensitive, or just ignore and move past it, but a mod feels a burden to clean up their safe spaces. So now I wonder, will this effect be exaggerated far further, and worse become capricious as a result? Personally I have had several posts that got perhaps 5 downvotes in the first few minutes, but then in the next few hours got >10-100x greater upvotes. So are the people looking at something RIGHT NOW more important than the 100 people that would look at it an hour from then? Even more tricky, what about the order that the votes are delivered in - would a post survive if the up- and down-voting were delivered more evenly, or like a person playing their hands at gambling, would their post get removed if it ever got too many losses in a row, thus preventing it from ever achieving whatever its true weight would have meant? If so, then people will aim to always talk in a "safe" manner, b/c nothing else would ever be allowed to be discussed, on the off-chance that someone (or 5 someones) could be offended by it (even if a hundred more studious people would have loved to have seen it, if they had been offered the chance - but being busier irl, were not offered the chance by the "winner take all" nature of social media posts, where they are either removed or they are not removed, there really is no middle ground... so far).

So to summarize that last point: mods can be fairly untrustworthy (I say this as a former one myself:-P), but so too can regular people, and since HARD removal takes away people's options to make up their own minds, why not leave most posts in and let voting do its work? Perhaps a label could be added, which users could select in their settings not to show "potentially controversial" material.

These are difficult and weighty matters to try to solve.

No! I mean yes. I mean... "jes", I guess? :-P

Very big table, complex operations, much waiting, so yeah.

In this comic, bodily decomposition occurs at a "feels like" pace:-).

Well my wife threatened to leave me, but... yeah,

once we're done.

I was going to say "in an interpreted language", but this sounds funnier.:-)

When will it hurry up to become Xhittiest and then we can all be done with it!? :-P

Someone seems to have run this on the UI of Twitter during its conversion into X.

And Reddit too.

That's what I was saying yes: a tool is just a tool, the intent lies in the hand of those who would wield it. Though in this case, the BLAME lies in both those who hollow themselves out to be willing to become such a tool, and those who would use them: case in point those who showed up on January 6 to "defend the Constitution" - how many now have the good sense to be horrified at what they were involved in? Regardless, it is up to those who are cognizant to do something about it, or else just sit back and watch it all happen.

But one thing I want to make clear: this is not just the one-dimensional Rich vs. the Poors. This is some Rich folk who don't really give a damn either way - b/c they've bought both sides - vs. some different set of Rich folk who do, and the latter making use of the Tools at their disposal to get their way. Among the former are probably people like Bill Gates who literally cannot spend enough in his entire lifetime to ever get rid of even a fraction of it, plus Warren Buffet who literally advocates for politicians to raise taxes (it's not like they ever will ofc, no matter what he says:-D). Then in the second category I would expect to find people like Jeff Bezos who tracks his workers time in the bathrooms, making them choose between washing their hands vs. getting back to work on time so as not to get fired, regardless if they are pregnant or whatever; and ofc Elon Musk.

I am saying that the TRULY, generationally wealthy, likely don't even give a damn, and some seem to even want their taxes RAISED - obviously not so much as to lower their standard of living, but if it helps avoid revolts then they would be okay with that - while the "wannabe" Rich are the ones who seem to want their taxes kept low.

And yes, there are some Poors who truly do side with the Rich, I guess b/c they either hate themselves or think they are displaced millionaires, but either way they have bought into the pyramid/hierarchical thinking concept that the Rich are the ones who deserve their wealth.

So to bring this back to my original point several comments back: if I sound defeatist it is b/c originally the goals of the Rich and the Poor just happened to align in the Revolutionary War, and too in WWI, WWII, etc., whereas now, for perhaps the first time in a truly completionist way, they no longer align. What I mean by the latter point is that, for example having a ready-made source of young soldiers to fight wars for you, it used to be to the benefit of the Rich to keep the Poor vaguely happy. Whereas now, with automation bringing robots rather than humans to the battlefield (and everywhere else as well), they seem ready to throw off the shackles of needing to keep the Poor in any state whatsoever. So let them ~~eat cake~~ die already, it makes little difference to them anymore.