EnglishMobster

You do realize that just makes you look, like, actually insane, right?

Like, that in combination with everything else you wrote just makes it seem like mad ramblings and sort of discounts anything you have to say since you’re leading an angry rant with “put someone else’s poop in your butt”.

And then when you say you’ve been banned from multiple sites and it’s all a grand conspiracy from Reddit to be out to get you, people are just going to think “this guy opened the article by suggesting you shove someone else’s poop in your butt.”

I know there are studies blah blah blah. But you understand how this looks, right?

Here’s a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

The following is a transcript if you’d rather avoid Reddit:

(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it’s come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won’t be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what’s right. We’re only a team as long as we’re all working together and working for each other. That’s the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don’t solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they’re having a conflict with, we have a chain that they’re supposed to follow.

So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we’re here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won’t tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I’m not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

Um, some of you know us very well, I’ve been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you’ve been here for nine years or nine days, you’re here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

Um, We can’t solve problems we don’t know about though, so on that note, I’d like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

It’s the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you’re not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There’s an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you’re not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that’s okay, that’s fine, we understand, that’s why we have these options - Yvonne’s gonna post it in the general chat.

It’s a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you’re consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

(speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

(speaker 1, Linus) That’s it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

(speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

(speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

There’s a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it’s a pyramid. Fascism is when these “some people are better” is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn’t touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where “some people are better” because they know the party leaders or they’re technocrats. It’s a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)

Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn’t have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn’t be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things (“always a bigger fish”).

Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can’t have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as “apolitical”, even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.

Well… maybe.

Artists are able to work off of commissions, assuming that there is a demand for their art. (Getting that demand is the tricky part.) If people don’t want their work on its own, then they have to work at a corporation - maybe making concept art, or drawing animation cels, or whatever. None of that art is owned by them; it’s typically in the contract the artist signs when they become employed. Anything they make belongs to the corporation.

I used to work for Disney - in their theme parks, not as an artist - and even my employment contract said that any idea I had while Disney was my employer was property of Disney. Literally, if I had an idea on the job, I could not monetize it. If I thought of an idea for a video game or novel or movie, Disney owned that idea just because they were my employer.

Now. Could they enforce that? No way. But they could try, and as Tom points out then it doesn’t matter if I’m in the write or not - Disney has expensive lawyers, I do not.

Scientists need grant money to do science. You have to convince a panel of experts that you have a good idea, and that your idea is worth throwing grant money at. Then you use that grant money to pay yourself and your assistants while you perform an experiment. This grant money can be from a university… or it could be from a corporation doing research and development for new concepts or ideas. If you make a discovery, the corporation might be able to patent that, since you were on their payroll at the time.

Making things Creative Commons doesn’t magically make money appear. When you get paid by someone wanting to publish your work, they are specifically buying out your copyright on that work - they can do whatever they wish with it after. (Famously, this is why the first Harry Potter book is called “Sorcerer’s Stone” in the US, because the publisher owned the copyright and changed the name.)

Creative Commons, therefore, is completely at odds with traditional publishing, since you can’t sell your copyright to them. You can still self-publish, of course… but that’s a whole can of worms. Not to mention that it’s incredibly easy these days to have AI churn out 80k words of BS and sell it on Amazon for $1.99. You don’t need many sales to break even.

100%.

It gets tricky, though. For example, I’m using a website called “Sudowrite” to help me write a novel. I’ve been kicking this idea around since 2007. I have a general idea for what it should look like, but I always struggle with Act 2.

Literally over a decade’s worth of notes. And not a good Act 2.

But I was able to use ChatGPT and Sudowrite (especially its “Story Engine” tool) to finally understand what Act 2 was missing. And now I’m able to rewrite what I’ve already done, making it better. AI is a tool just like a word processor is a tool.

Lest anyone think I’m writing an ad here - I’m not. Per their FAQ, Sudowrite says that I own the copyright on anything that I generate with their stuff.

Who owns the copyright to what I write?

You do. Anything you write in Sudowrite and anything Sudowrite suggests for you belongs to you.

But if I don’t modify it, that’s clearly not true (as you mention). Furthermore, I can actually have it suggest things that might run counter to that idea.

I’ve had it suggest lines from Kafka - good lines, too. I’ve read Kafka, so I recognized them… but what if I didn’t? I don’t own the copyright on those lines, as Tom Scott points out in OP’s video. Kafka’s original German is public domain… most translations are not.

You can highlight some text in the tool and say “Write this in the style of Douglas Adams.” It knows who Douglas Adams is. It knows what his work sounds like. And the only way it knows is because its model was trained on his work. When I did this, one of the suggestions included Zaphod Beeblebrox, which was certainly not mentioned in my text. It also suggests spaceships and aliens and futuristic gadgets, all written in the kind of prose that you’d expect from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

How would it know that, if it hadn’t read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?

It’s why Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI. While the model may be a bunch of statistics, it also must know what her text is like - to some degree. We can argue over how, but going back to the AI suggesting Zaphod Beeblebrox… if I didn’t know HGTTG maybe I’d think that’s a cool name for a character? How can Sudowrite say I own the copyright when it’s clear that they don’t own it, either?

Which sort of brings me back to the beginning. AI has the potential to be a wonderful tool - again, like going from a typewriter to a computer. I have had this idea for literally 16 years now, and Sudowrite was literally a game changer. I knew all of act 1, act 2 was… ehhhh, and then act 3 was never satisfying without a good act 2. I knew where I wanted to go, but not how to get there. AI really helped, because it understands story structures - and how to make good stories (with some prodding - it’s not perfect). And now, whenever I’m stumped, I can type some stuff into the prompt and it’ll generate ideas for me.

But that only works if we really figure out where the line is for copyright. I’m trusting what Sudowrite is telling me… but I’m taking a risk, because what if they’re wrong?

https://web.archive.org/web/20091210094533/http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html

@Sproux for you as well.

Yep! The Reddit version, at least. Dunno if the Lemmy/Kbin sorts are the same or not.

Before that, it was sorted by top. I think subreddits were top/day, and comments were top/all time. Frontpage was top/day for all the subreddits you were subscribed to (or top/day for a selection of “default” subreddits if you didn’t have an account).

Things change over time.

For example - I want to see the broadest possible choice of content in my feed. I want to be able to interact with anywhere that’s not outright hateful and/or malicious. So when I was choosing an instance, finding a permissive (but not too permissive!) admin was important to me.

But when Threads started making waves and the fedipact started becoming a thing that people were discussing, things changed out of left field.

I still wanted to federate with Threads. I think fears of EEE are overblown; Facebook has to comply with the Digital Markets Act and guarantee third-party interoperability. EEE on the fediverse runs counter to EU law. Additionally, most of my friends are folks who don’t “get” the fediverse; I tried coaxing my fiance onto Mastodon and she lasted 1 day before going back to birdsite. She uses Threads actively now, and I’d love to be able to see her posts and interact with her without needing to sign up for Threads myself.

I had hoped that the semi-permissive admins I’ve found would tolerate it, but a lot of them decided to draw the line and join the fedipact (including my Mastodon admin).

Which now sucks - it feels like a bunch of bullies are trying to use intimidation to tell me where I can and can’t post. By threatening to defederate everywhere that’s not in the fedipact, there’s this feeling where now I can’t join a server that curates the way I want because if I do, I’ll be cut off from the rest of the fediverse. If I run my own server, there’s a good chance these other instances will use bots to catch that my server federates with Threads and pre-emptively defederate me.

Defederation is used as a weapon and a way to bully other instances, which I really don’t like. I understand the need for defederation as a tool but it sucks seeing how easily it’s abused, and how you really can’t trust that admins of a server you join won’t be intimidated into compliance by these fedipact bullies.

So now, if I want to like my fiance’s posts… I basically have to join Threads and help Zuck directly, or have an account elsewhere that basically can only federate with Threads. Thanks, fedipact.

Based started on 4chan. People stole memes from 4chan, where it spread and became Zoomer slang.

Cringe I think has a similar but slightly different etymology; I don’t know if it necessarily came from 4chan or if it came from Reddit.

/vp/ used to be really good at good Pokemon info back in the Black/White days.

That said - I haven’t been back in quite a while, but even back then you did occasionally see folks who obviously were from /b/ or /pol/ posting. I’m sure it’s probably gotten worse over the years, as people start growing out of 4chan…

To be fair…

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I don’t like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don’t like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn’t suit their political views.

I don’t think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind “avoid using Lemmy” than “avoid using Calckey/Firefish”.

That is a known bug at the moment. I believe there is a fix in review right now but Codeberg seems to be down.

Search for a community just like you would elsewhere.

This place would be @fediverse@kbin.social, so you’d search that to find this place on the fediverse. Lemmy communities use the same format.

Lemmy doesn’t have the functionality like Kbin does. It’s one reason why Kbin exists.

From your Mastodon account, just search @technology@lemmy.ml. You’ll see the whole community as if it was one user. You can also interact with comments, reply, or upvote.

Note that Lemmy kind of does a bad job of integrating with Mastodon. Each community is an account that “boosts” (retweets) every post and comment in it, making it very noisy. I talked to the devs about it a while back and better integration is just not something they’re interested in.

Kbin (which is a Reddit clone like Lemmy) works much much better. If you search @Disneyland@kbin.social from Mastodon, you’ll see the Disneyland magazine appears to be an actual user and the threads/comment sections work like you’d expect them to on Mastodon. Any posts appear to come from that Mastodon account (instead of being “boosts”).

Kbin allows you to follow Mastodon users as well, which Lemmy doesn’t support and has no plans to support. You can flip between “Reddit mode” (“Threads”) and “Twitter mode” (“Microblog”) at the top of the page on Kbin, effectively merging 2 services into 1.

Kbin’s roadmap also has it integrating more ActivityPub stuff natively over time. It’s the reason why I use it over Lemmy.

(Continued from parent due to post length constraints.)

You say we should move off-site. There’s already a large general-purpose forum for Disney: MiceChat. It’s a classic non-federated forum, from a bygone age of the internet. People who aren’t attached to a Reddit-like interface typically are on MiceChat, or one of the thousands of Disney Facebook groups. They’re the largest Disney community on the internet.

We discussed running our own Disney-themed Kbin instance (like /r/StarTrek and /r/Android both did), that would be a federated competitor to MiceChat. The idea still appeals to me. But the fact of the matter is that we didn’t have the time nor money to be admins. I have a full-time job where I can’t be spending time working as an admin all day (and - fun fact - I actually did work for Disney, formerly), and I don’t have the legal know-how to host a website.

Making a community on someone else’s instance doesn’t have those same issues. kbin.social has a sane admin team and is permissive with federation, giving the magazine a large reach (but keeping out hate speech and trolls). There are people on here who want to participate in their hobbies - like going to Disneyland, which for many is a hobby - or who want to use the community as a resource (and the Disneyland subreddit was a resource, too).

Because at the end of the day - it is a lot of work, but seeing a thriving community is rewarding. You grow attached to it. It’s why people play simulation games; you help shepard people along, make people happy, and watch the line go up. It’s not “ego” any more than playing a city builder game is “ego”. I certainly never threw my weight around on Reddit; our subreddit was positively tiny compared to others. The only time I used my green badge on Reddit was to give people warnings or make community-wide announcements. The only time I mentioned I was a mod elsewhere was when I needed a “fun fact” to introduce myself with at work/school or when it’s directly relevant (like letting people on the fediverse know that the magazine here is run by the same team that ran it on Reddit).

The Disneyland subreddit was a good community, IMO. The whole mod team did a lot of work to keep it good, and I was proud to help out. Connecting people with the resources they need and letting them show off the things that made them excited, while keeping the spambots and trolls at bay and redirecting lost folks to the right spot. It’s something you need to experience to understand.

One thing that was missing was Disney’s direct involvement. Disney never contacted us. Even when I worked for them - corporate knew I was a mod there but left us alone since it was considered my personal business (my only restriction was that I couldn’t say I was speaking officially on behalf of the company). As long as the sidebar said that we were fan-run, Disney never said a peep. Because Disney didn’t have any official presence on Reddit, folks would frequently repost news shared by Disney to the subreddit directly.

Threads gives us a unique opportunity to be able to connect folks to official Disney social media right here on Kbin. They’d be able to interact 2-way without needing to make a Threads account themselves (and without Disney needing to come here officially). It’s really the best thing that could happen for that type of community, and it would be a shame to lose out on it.

I am using “my magazine” as a colloquial term for “the magazine I moderate”, obviously not as the term for “the magazine I own”. I trust you know that and are arguing in bad faith.

You can go start your own magazine on another instance if you wish. The presence of one does not preclude competition. Heck, you can even start another one here; we had similar subreddits on Reddit. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld folks were an example of a bad mod team on a power trip, which caused splinter subreddits to pop up like /r/DisneyWorld. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld mod team came here to Kbin and sure enough Kbin has already splintered too - there’s @WaltDisneyWorld (original WaltDisneyWorld mods), @DisneyWorld, and @wdw.

If you think you can do a good job running a Disneyland magazine, I’m not going to stop you from making DisneylandResort or DisneyParks or going to Lemmy and making something there. Competition is good and healthy.

But… I don’t think you truly appreciate how much work moderating a community can be. I literally was a mod for 1 sizeable subreddit (I was a mod on 2-3 other subs, technically, but they had subscriber counts in the dozens and rarely saw activity).

I’d love to show you what moderating a subreddit with 500k subscribers really looks like. It gets bad. Gore, scat, porn, hate, bigotry, and trolling - you deal with it all. Death threats in modmail to boot. And we were just 500k subs! The former default subs have millions and they are far worse, I’ve been told.

We ran a community for folks to discuss a single topic: the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Not Hong Kong Disneyland, not Disneyland Paris, not Walt Disney World. Those have their own subreddits, with their own communities and their own mod team (plus /r/disneyparks). I wasn’t associated with any of them outside of small formalities; I only got to know them during the blackout when we did look into coordinating our own site. (More on that later.)

If each mod team didn’t do their job, each sub would be overrun with posts that don’t fit the sub. We’re constantly removing posts about WDW or Disneyland Paris or Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. We’re constantly removing posts from people talking about general Disney stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the park. It’s a lot of work to curate a feed, and when the effort is made in good faith we redirect people to more appropriate places to talk about the things they’re passionate about.

People joined that subreddit to talk about the Disneyland in Anaheim; many didn’t care about Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. If we missed something and a person posts about the “wrong” park (which happens sometimes, even with AutoMod), the community generally comes in and downvotes the post (and sometimes insults the user). From their perspective, they’re seeing some content they don’t care about/want in their feed. And technically, per Reddiquette, that’s what the downvote button is “supposed” to be for - sorting out things that don’t belong.

It’s like posting a TikTok link to /r/YoutubeHaiku or a picture to /r/videos - each community has a set of rules and a social contract to enforce them. That’s what makes a good community with relevant content that makes you come back. Without a good mod team, a subreddit gets overrun with posts that don’t fit the sub - you can see some of that here on Lemmy/Kbin already. This is both because mod tools are lacking (no AutoMod) and because people are changing instances as they see fit. For example, @Starwars is abandoned, I think - the only(!!!) mod hasn’t been active in weeks. I’ve seen things here like videos in the politics communities and other things that wouldn’t fly with larger mod teams.

(Hit max character length, continued as a reply)

My worry that many articles are going to have a biased take on the situation, or be coming from Mastodon etc. where things don’t map up 1:1.

My perspective:

I moderate a medium-sized magazine here on Kbin (@Disneyland, about 264 subscribers here and a couple dozen elsewhere on the fediverse). You can’t moderate a magazine from another instance, nor can you redirect a magazine somewhere else. This means I effectively must use Kbin.social, especially since I also mod the /r/Disneyland subreddit and have been redirecting people to our magazine for a month now.

I personally would like to see Threads here, if only because @disneyparks would be a nice fit to have automatically included in our microblog tab. I can’t go to another instance that supports Threads because again - moderators on Kbin can’t be from different instances. And besides - me being on another instance doesn’t stop the fact that I couldn’t have content from Threads automatically added here. So my options are basically “deal with it” or “abandon the community here”.

It really sucks that there is a way that could make my magazine better by including actual official Disney sources in our Disney-themed magazine, but some people are afraid of EEE they are trying to keep that from everyone. I’d rather federate with Threads and allow users to individually block the domain if they desire.

• If EEE is the worry, fight them at the “extend” step, not the “embrace” one.

• If mountains of spam is the worry - people have to manually follow people from other instances for those posts to federate to Kbin, so not every single account will magically pop up here on Kbin. It’ll be accounts that people on Kbin have followed; a small chunk.

• Vice-versa, Threads is full of casual users who don’t know much about the fediverse. Any Threads users interacting on Kbin are those who understand the fediverse and go out of their way to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Threads. We know from past history that these are going to be a minority; even within the fediverse, Mastodon is huge (and tech-savvy) but we see very few Mastodon folks posting to Kbin threads.

• If “Facebook is sucking up all my data” is the worry, they could do that anyway. The fediverse is open and public; they can easily set up a “shadow instance” that federates everywhere and slurps everything. They don’t need Threads for that.

If people just don’t want to see Threads users at all, making the block button defederate on the account level would be wonderful. If people choose to block Threads, then Threads users couldn’t see them and vice versa. People who see Threads as a potential useful resource (myself, for the magazine I mod) would still be able to have that content in the community here on Kbin. Everyone’s happy.

https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en

Threads can’t be in the EU unless it’s federated, basically. It’s likely Facebook/Instagram will adopt federated protocols as well. Facebook has to allow interoperability on their platform.

Lemmy doesn’t have this feature, but Kbin does. Kbin fixes a lot of the issues with Lemmy.