yanderekko

KF never topped the app store charts, nor had the widespread defense that Tea did.

Citizens United did not overturn the general body of antitrust law...

Why would they fear people who adblock leaving the platform?

Deepfakes?

Yep. Maybe there will be a net reduction in jobs but I can't help but feel like catastrophic 90% reductions involve "lump of labor"-type fallacies where we just imagine taking the given set of work being done and imagine how much of that will be handled via AI vs. humans in 5 or 10 years or whatever.

When the reality is that good AI tools will cause lots of projects to add video content where it wasn't before, or to spend more time creating high-quality video content. And this will undoubtedly involve some new labor.

How many Reddit users knew they were agreeing in the future for Reddit to sell the content they wrote to make money for Reddit, not them?

Despite my low opinion of Redditors, I believe that on some level they are aware of the principle that if the product is free, then you are the product.

If you presented the regular users with the choice between "pay a subscription fee and opt out or let us use your data in these ways", the vast majority will end up choosing the latter and we all know it.

Are you seriously attributing public sector bureaucratic dysfunction to some sort of subversive public sector conservative operatives, or vague regulatory poison pills that you cannot actually point to here?

It seems a lot more intuitive to believe that you cannot just legislate that all government employees act selflessly towards the Greater Good, and the Homeless Industrial complex is a real thing that is not necessarily working in the interests of the public. Observing waste, fraud, and abuse and reflexively saying "this must be the fault of conservatives somehow" is just sorta sad.

If "AI ethics" means being run by so-called rationalists and Effective Altruists then it has nothing to do with ethics or doing anything for the benefit of all humanity.

Many would disagree.

If you want a for-profit AI enterprise whose conception of ethics is dumping resources into an endless game of whack-a-mole to ensure that your product cannot be used in any embarrassing way by racists on 4chan, then the market is already going to provide you with several options.

The reddit moderators who cashed out were not the ones who were shutting down the service. They simply had insider information that allowed them to move first with this information. This was not a rugpull scenario.

Demand for an asset fell so its price dropped. Nothing scammy about this.

Do you seriously think that Andreesen would advocate for technological progress regardless of an arbitrarily high cost to human welfare?

Andreessen’s newly espoused ideology did not spring up in a vacuum. Instead, it’s part of a broader movement that seeks to take all the guardrails off of technological development and push forward with “progress,” whatever the cost may be.

Pretty clear strawman starting at the third paragraph. I'm sure we could dig up many more.

This article is just a snarky rant. Embarassing.

A growing number of Americans consider sclerosis to be a virtue, as long as it can be seen as a natural result of extreme safetyism.

If I earned profits from a VC fund in San Francisco what are the chances of me paying only UK tax on that? You can also tax the fund directly and the corporations they invested in. You can tax the transfers of wealth between those entities. Of course you can tax these people if you want. Sure some of them will run to Belize, but the US control the domicile rules, tax them as you wish. Are they going to stay there forever? Tax income earned on US PE funds at source.

Obviously you can tax income and put the mandate of enforcement on companies that are paying individuals. You cannot delegate the taxation of pre-existing wealth to companies though and deputize every firm as an IRS agent.

It will bring them back to have their wealth arbitrarily expropriated? Yeah I doubt it. Never mind that it's unclear what it means to "deny them access to the US market" when these people are acting via working for / owning corporations. You're going to deny big corporations access to US markets based on the financial profiles of their owners? You're going to expect foreigners in general to surrender all their wealth in order to access US markets? Good luck enforcing that.

As a response they move their wealth overseas and renounce their citizenship if necessary. What strategy from the banana republic playbook would you like to see the State employ next?

The notion that "talking to a poor person" would somehow illuminate any of the issues that the author is talking about is laughable. Folk economic beliefs are notoriously terrible. Shedding crocodile tears about how poverty will still exist in the techno-utopian future is a way of attacking a strawman. Focusing on the plight of San Francisco in particular is backwards thinking, since Andreessen is undoubtedly more concerned about global metrics than parochial, highly-localized ones. No one should care that much if tech is driving up the Gini coefficient in SF if it's driving down global Gini.

I mean, if that were truly the case we'd see companies hovering around RTO numbers that just barely guaranteed these benefits - so far I haven't seen any stories to this effect, so it seems sorta hand-wavey to me?

I mean, yes it's bullshit to try to apply RTO policies on remote workers that were hired as remote workers. It's not even a "return" in that scenario, properly understood. And IANAL but I wonder if that could be considered a constructive dismissal that mandates severance rather than a "soft" one.

That said, this article flirts with the often-made argument that RTO is some sort of way of boosting commercial property prices or tax incentives. I've never bought this and would be curious to see the argument steelmanned, since I don't think large corporations are going to easily fall into this sunk cost fallacy style thinking. If remote work boosts productivity and allows them to lower the costs of having offices, companies should embrace this even if they made prior investments in having offices.

Yeah, when the primary complaint about Twitter is "other people are using it to say things I dislike", then that seems like a pretty.. motivated critique of the platform.

At what point can we finally admit there is a coordinated war on against freedom of expression online?

Just call it a war of hate speech or "disinformation" instead and plenty of people will admit it.

I don't think most powermods really revolted

Well, at least a substantial minority did.

I am very worried about the "hobbyist mods". And yea, they weren't talked about for the same reason you don't talk about stuff you expect is "the ideal". If a mod is kind, has clear rules, and is even a domain expert in some cases, what is there to talk about?

Actually, this raises a good point. The hobbyist mods who were yeeted were probably disproportionately likely to be the sort of intemperate, authoritarian mods that given Reddit mods a bad name. Additionally, these mods are probably the most likely to see the easing of their authoritarian policies as tantamount to opening the doors to hatred, spam, misinformation, etc. Can their judgment really be trusted?

Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.

bikespokememe.jpg

I totally buy the argument that the protest probably lead to their being some sort of marginal shift from hobbyist moderators to admin-friendly powermods. But to this point:

- This happened to the extent that hobbyist mods rendered their own forums unusable on an indeterminate basis. They chose the hill they died on, and cannot claim they were acting in the interests of their community in doing so.

- Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised (there were concerns about powermods, but not powermods vs. hobbyist mods.) So the entire article likely represents an act of concern trolling. The underlying point may still be valid, but its bad-faith motivations deserve to be called out.

Honestly I find this claim laughable and in my view represents a weak grasp at confirmation bias from the API doomsayers. Still remember seeing discussions here a few months ago where people predicted that the API changes would lead to Reddit being flooded by obvious spam and even child pornography. Well, obviously that didn't happen and the front page of the internet is just filled with low-quality trash like it's always been.

If someone wants to prove this point, support it with data. Otherwise it feels like simple mood affiliation. The UX of the median Redditor has not changed at all.

exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes

Edgy, not criminal.

In the posts you link, you can see Null obviously wants to allow basically anything but is still responsive to legal considerations. Maybe he's right and maybe he's wrong about the law. He responds to legal notices that he considers valid, and this has kept him out of real trouble so far.

I think "borderline criminal" is a fair characterization, but I'd point out that lots of sites are "borderline criminal" in the sense that there are often public statements of "we would like to allow this but legally we cannot." It's not that scandalous.

Yes, well, that's the beautiful thing about common law - we still have a pretty clear understanding of what constitutes free speech, and it's largely invariant to whether the means of communication is through the internet or a medium that was more-familiar to the founders.

I'd say KiwiFarms is about as "dedicated to torture" as say the tabloid industry (producers and consumers) is. Seems like a real stretch of language, really.

You host death threats and leaked PII

These death threats are not true threats and hosting PII is not illegal. Nor is encouraging "harassment" because what's encouraged is not actual criminal harassment. Every victim of a social media mob claims harassment, including Joshua Moon. When the good guys do it, of course, they just call it "consequences culture".

Even the EFF acknowledges the activity on your forum is illegal and called on the cops to prosecute.

Which is a cowardly attempt at playing both sides. By juxtaposing "KiwiFarms users do bad things" with "criminals should be punished", the implication is that those bad things are criminal but the EFF maintains plausible deniability, which is wise since to do otherwise would constitute defamation. The important thing is that criminal activity should be determined through judicial proceedings, not armchair lawyering from midwits who likely think that there are laws against hate speech.

Well, right now there's a odd vogue to think that a healthy democracy does things like ban political parties (currently an active debate regarding the AfD in Germany), or embrace indigenous apartheid movements (NZ, Australia), or to cede sovereignty to unaccountable transnational elites that promise to protect you from the ravages of political misinformation (the EU as a whole.) I don't think these notions will stand the test of time, but we'll see.

The "good tribe" will always characterize the dissenters of the "bad tribe" in this way.