The current US government is already a meme around the world, it’s not like this makes it look worse than it already is.

Given enough time, all things come to light. I hope this is something that will be a shameful part of History in years to come.

In fact, I think at least in Brazil Reddit is becoming more and more popular. Go back like 5 years ago and Brazilian subs in Portuguese were small and low-traffic except for one or two (ex: /r/brasil).

Now there are a bunch of different themes and I see new topics being discussed quite often.

I believe the reason is Facebook has enshittified so much that its communities are dying quickly and Brazilians are finding Reddit works better for simple discussions. Also no one posts anything personal on FB anymore, it’s all Instagram style reposts so it lost any purpose.

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The problem is how the whole thing was presented to people. You just need to pass by subreddits related to ChatGPT to see the amount of misunderstandings about how it works, just an example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ld6dot/a_close_friend_confessed_she_almost_fell_into/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1koadmg/testing_gpts_response_to_delusional_prompts_it/

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1low386/this_is_what_recursion_looks_like/

https://www.reddit.com/r/technopaganism/comments/1lwlvfc/i_may_have_opened_a_doorway_i_didnt_know_was/

This whole thing is kinda scary. About how easily some people can spiral into delusion when over-relying on LLMs.

These models don’t truly “know” anything, they improvise, fill gaps with plausible-sounding but often enough fabricated information.

It’s understandable how non technical users treat their outputs as profound revelations, mistaking AI-generated fiction for hidden truths.

This is quite funny actually.

you can just leave, there are so many alternatives available […] In fact you should have seen the writing on the wall many years ago and latest when he bought it.

Yeah I know what you’re saying, and I agree — many people left Twitter back then indeed. But many people will still get bothered with the hypocrisy of this sort of behavior persisting in their society. Anything is justified at the moment it is convenient, then when the hypocrisy is pointed out, suddenly the problem is the person who fell for it. It feels a bit like an US cultural thing, where the damage of something to society isn’t really discussed, after all, we all have “free will”, so the fault is on the person who didn’t know better. But you’re gonna be affected by these things one way or another regardless of whether you try to ignore them.

There are enough fools in the world who will keep giving billionaires more and more power, no matter what they do, because America’s current indoctrination glorifies the ultra-rich (the dominant class in the U.S.) in the same way authoritarian countries indoctrinate their citizens to worship a strong leader who promises to take care of everything for them.

it’s his platform, he can do whatever he wants on it, he paid a lot of money for it. […] I really don’t get why this would upset anyone

lol

1. Champions “free speech” to justify buying Twitter in a legitimate way.
2. Wins over idealists who think they’re fighting for openness, calling it a “public square”, “Greek Agora” etc.
3. Bans critics and content he just doesn’t align with.
4. Gets called out.
5. “Whoa whoa, I meant my free speech. The rest of you? Peasants.”
6. People leave the platform: “I don’t get why this upsets anyone, it’s his platform”.

This reminds me of the behavior most common in subreddits such as /r/Bitcoin, we can even put it side by side:

• Step 1: Preach a grand ideal — “X is the free speech Agora!” / “Bitcoin is your path to financial freedom!”
• Step 2: Rally support by moralizing it — “If you’re against this, you’re against liberty!” / “Only fools ignore Bitcoin!”
• Step 3: When the consequences hit — censorship or market crashes — suddenly the ideal becomes personal: “It’s his platform, he can do whatever he wants.” / “You fool! You shouldn’t have invested more than you can afford to lose.”

Yeah, adults should be able to tell the difference between someone disagreeing with them and someone being rude/trolling.

I don’t think I ever needed to block anyone, but I kinda stopped commenting as much nowadays cause I realized a lot of times people just don’t understand something and say things out of ignorance + pretentiousness, immediately attacking whoever correct what they’re saying. I don’t think there’s a way out of that in these kinds of open discussion threads, unfortunately, because it’s not exactly bad faith.

Still what makes you think that an alternative isn’t going to get flooded with AI too? That ship has sank already.

Having more people does help, but only to a certain extent. At some point, it just becomes difficult to moderate and having a higher number of casual users that don’t give a shit about the rules.

And I’d have thought the potential customers segment are exactly the Mastodon users.

I wouldn’t mind having some ads, but I wonder how some more extremists users would react.

But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be, it places the burden of “begging” on the instance owners, which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

All of this talk is actually ignoring the very fundamental aspect of this sort of transaction: trust.

When you buy from a place, you do it because you trust the store or the service to handle problems [1]. I remember one saying that a purchase is actually a very intimate relationship, and if you have any reason to think that person or service would screw up over, you’d never engage in any monetary transactions with them.

A marketplace where anyone can sell only works because despite your diligence to look for reputable sellers, the platform usually offers some assurance that you’ll be refunded for any type of scam, which means they take on the burden of doing some quality control on approving sellers. At least that’s how it works in Brazil, I suppose that a country with a high societal trust might have less of this problem, but the incentives are the heart of any system.

[1] Sure, sometimes it doesn’t go the way you wanted it and you can end up being screwed by the service, but the expectation was there.

If it involves money, it has the incentive to game the system. So each instance would be dealing with multiple attempts from actors adding fake reviews, sabotaging competitors, endless spam etc. If it can be easily automated, the service would be 24/7 filled with AI spam and drive away all users, defeating the purpose entirely.

The only trustworthy reviews are from people who actually bought the product in the website, because then it has a negative incentive to spend that much money for one fake review.

What would be the advantage of ChromeOS over Android anyway? Does it have better memory management when it comes to tabs open or something like that?

I checked the official app but it’s awful. So many adds that have no clear visual cues it’s an ad, so you start reading it and realize halfway it’s just an ad. It makes you so pissed you just don’t want to continue browsing.

I’m pretty sure the employees working on it don’t have a say on it. Someone at the top decided to do it and they just have to pretend they believe on it because they have to be “team players”.