The fact that it is private equity that is going to evaporate when the bubble bursts is the only silver lining I can see. However, my natual cynicism makes me bet they'll spend whatever they've got left over on their pet politicians to use government (ie, public funding) to bail themselves back out.
You've got three tools, mutes, blocks, and lists. Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you, it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look. Which is pretty much like how it was to use Twitter a few years ago before everything got algorithmed.
> Yeah, there's no centralized algorithm that does it for you,
Bluesky doesn't really present it that way. The default "Discover" feed at least pretends to be exactly that.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy to prune your main feed into looking how you want it to look
I think this has changed recently. Months ago I tried to actually use Bluesky, and my Discover feed was awful. 90% of my time on the site was muting/blocking or thinking "show more/less like this" did something and it was an miserable experience which nothing seemed to improve except quitting it.
Checking it now, it's dramatically better. Still includes a lot of content I don't want, but less aggressively so, although that seems to largely be that I was gone so far it could be mostly content from accounts I follow.
A Bluesky dev has admitted that the "show less/more" items did nothing. It was in the context of supposedly hooking them up to real code at long last, though I've yet to see any practical difference. Anyone who claims they worked all along is not arguing in good faith.
> it'll take a couple days of actual effort, but it's extremely easy
If it takes a couple of days of actual effort, then it’s not extremely easy, especially for the average user who can just go to Threads with their existing Instagram account and not be bombarded with furry and diaper porn.
By default bluesky blocks adult content, once you enable it you can dial in what kind of adult content you wish to see. I know this is all anecdotal, like the links you posted... But I started a new account to see what it's like. I can scroll the default algorithm for 5 minutes and not see anything questionable, and my actual account exists with adult content turned on and I never see it. After signing up the new account, I can search for furry or diaper content, but it appears that none of it is like "nsfw" (mostly just people in furry costumes or diapers but no sexual content or nudity).
Just to solidify, I just went and created a new account to ensure I was right, and I was. You need to go to your settings, go to moderation, and enable adult content. I scrolled continuously for 5 minutes straight and saw no adult content on a default account. And on top of this, as far as I can google, Bluesky has never had adult content enabled by default, so if you are seeing it, you enabled it.
Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
"Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity.
Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!)
So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles?
Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them.
I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.
"Democrat" is a long-used general US political slang to refer to an individual member of the Democratic Party (or to refer to a collective of individual members if used as the plural "Democrats"). In the past few decades right-wing commentators have made frequent improper use of the slang to refer to the official party, partly due to its easy association with negative words such as "autocrat" and "plutocrat", resulting in the common misuse of the slang. However, there is no such thing as the "Democrat Party" or "Democrat nominee".
And it'll be pretty easy to keep track of how many crimes they _do_ discover, because the first one will be trumpeted loudly everywhere, and then after that they'll use the entire list of people as though it's a partial example: "How do we know that this individual is not associated with <crimes>, as we've already seen with _countless_ examples, like <the unspoken entirety of the list of examples>?"
Yes, but each time diluting the power of the justices individually. Right now if you have one wacko justice who decides on the basis of political ideology instead of some of the established legal theories they have 11% of a say in things. Add another few justices who are relatively normal and the ability of the wacko to swing things into dangerous territory goes down. Even if the tit-for-tat tries to cram more wackos in you have to try to convince the Senate to let more and more obviously terribly choices through.
"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.
Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.
ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social media networks are interoperable over a common standard similar to mail. And from recent history the period we are in is one in where governments are looking for open standards as a hedge against big tech.
The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard, shut down competition and invite anti-competition investigations is far-fetched.
And then we revert to the state where we don't federate with threads, which doesn't seem so different from not federating with them today. This is weird jealous break up logic. No, you didn't stop talking to me, I stopped talking to you!
I know, right? It's like, I don't even want to HEAR about your ideas on how to fix a broken system unless you've taken the personal responsibility to try and reorient your personal life to adhere to your proposed ideas while continuing to try living in the still-broken system even if that personal transition, without any systemic changes to the surrounding culture and community, make your new life impossible to live.
That's the way we _always_ implement change in America!
*Also, do you not like that the socialist merely _has_ two homes, or do you not agree with the reasoning behind _why_ they have two homes?
> "Even if you have whistleblowers come forward, they're ignored."
Do you have any sources for this? I'm rather disbelieving of it, but would love to be proven wrong. I can't imagine that _some_ major news outlet wouldn't love to stick it to the status quo with a whistleblower, unless the "whisteblower" made false claims about their proximity in the company to the dangerous/illegal actions they are trying to bring attention to.
That which was asserted without evidence could correctly be dismissed without evidence. AT THE TIME the anti-vax crowd was basing their positions entirely upon anecdote, rumor, and often badly misread prepublication research and stats. Their methodology was inherently flawed. Even if the conclusions they came to have been "validated" their position was still built upon this same flimsy scaffolding. It's not like the "do your own research" blogs and videos somehow gathered the same evidence used by this paper. This also does not indicate that other positions held by the same crowd, which are similarly based upon "anecdata" and rumor, are somehow made more evident by this paper in Nature.
>That which was asserted without evidence could correctly be dismissed without evidence. AT THE TIME the anti-vax crowd was basing their positions entirely upon anecdote, rumor, and often badly misread prepublication research and stats.
The was an abundance of evidence that the covid vaccines had a reasonable likelihood of being unsafe. Every single previous attempt at a coronavirus vaccine had failed, sometimes catastrophically (killing all the test animals), that's why there wasn't an existing coronavirus vaccine on the market. Every single previous attempt to bring a mRNA treatment to the mass-market had failed due to safety issues. Even in the Pfizer vaccine trial there were overall more deaths in the vaccinated group than the placebo group, due to cardiac deaths (although it wasn't a statistically significant enough amount to draw a conclusion, it does demonstrate that the trial had no power to identify if the vaccine was net-harmful, as it didn't have enough participants to make a meaningful conclusion about the effect of the vaccine on excess deaths).
>Every single previous attempt to bring a mRNA treatment to the mass-market had failed due to safety issues.
Not a single prototype mRNA-based drug passed phase3 trials at any point - right up until the multiple ones within a month of each other were deployed globally.
The massive and remarkable coincidence of that, is truly a special moment in history.
I agree, the assertion that 'vaccines' are safe can be dismissed without evidence. There's no evidence concluding they're actually safe. In fact, we have given the manufacturers immunity because they're 'unavoidably unsafe.'
Just look at how the COVID trials were conducted. They didn't even test each patient. Only some patients that presented symptoms, and then not even all of those patients.
How long did they follow the health outcomes for approved vaccines in the test groups? 3 months at most, and many trials, not even that long. So if someone suffers a neurological condition, well, we just won't know about it.
