The connection is billionaires criticising each others' wacky dystopian dreams. I have no problem with the criticism, I just think it lacks self awareness and that most people would put Dorsey and Zuckerberg in the same category.
Not cryptocurrencies, just BTC. The dystopian thing to do would be not to seek the decentralized route which he is trying to, at least in a part with BTC. Not sure how that qualifies as dystopian.
Cryptocurrencies claim to empower via decentralisation, but in reality they simply change the power structures from legal-based to capital-based power structures, and removing legal challenges that could be levelled at corporations in favour of "proofs" that have no moral leeway. I believe they are a strongly dystopian concept masquerading as a utopian opportunity.
Sure, I can see that argument too. You should recognize tho, that our current "legal-based" structure (at least in the West) is built on top of a "capital-based" power structure in where money buys power (by donations, special interest, lobbying, etc...) and this structure is highly centralized and only accesible to the wealthy. I dig BTC and not necessarily NFTs or other ones as much but I rather have systems get decentralized (even if with a capital-based structure) while giving everyone an opportunity to truly participate rather than continue on the current corrupt structure that is beyond repair and only benefit a few.
A few days ago I randomly read about how Zuckerberg tried to serve Dorsey a goat he killed. Seeing their names in the headline just made me think about it again:
Yeah can you imagine actually killing your food instead of letting someone else do it and just buying it wrapped in plastic at the store. What a bizarre idea.
I mean, I dislike zuck as much as anyone else, but I don't see what's so bad about this.
Zuck invites Dorsey over for dinner, and at the time he was doing a personal challenge to only eat meat that he himself had killed, to be mindful that it did come from a once living animal.
Y'know, if more people did that, we would probably have less people eating meat in general. We're so disconnected from how our food is actually made... Meat doesn't grow on trees or just magically appear in stores.
I don't really understand this critique. Isn't Twitter a metaverse of sorts? And It's a fairly dystopian one at that. I have no doubt these online environments will continue to get more sophisticated as time goes on.
I think people always think of the metaverse as a 3D space, whereas social networks are always thought of as more of a 2D space. That's how I think of it at least
Social networks are much more than 2 (or even three) dimensional. Try mapping out connections (unweighted or weighted by any strength metric) and the figure out how many dimensions you’d need to consistently map that as distances in a space. Even for a single person and their direct connections and the connections between those direct connections you’ll usually get, I expect, a very large number of dimensions.
IMO the the algorithmic basis of twitter is much less troubling than Facebook.
Part of that is because Twitter is a far more alive means for discourse, for democratic processes to emerge & steer what gets raised. There's way less of the echo chamber. There's significantly more back & forth in the comments, way more cross-engagement, that highlights other views, that checks what's happening. On Facebook, the post & the link are primary & the comments are a mess, often a sea of amplification. Twitter- as a for the most part open discussion- is able to tap a "wisdom of the crowds" sensibility whereas Facebook is perpetually falling into dark rabbit holes.
But all of this... blaming the tools... it doesn't click with me, really. As unknowable & scary as algorithmic selection is, it seems like a distant second compared to what the real story is.
Isn't it obvious? It's us. It's humanity that is the problem. These are inherent problems with attention & broadcast, & how easy it is to feed on other people, to excite them & drive them to ends. Antagonism and zeal are a high-grade memetic weapons payload, and the easy democratic access to thought & conversation is easily subverted. We haven't much in the way of building up immunities- to this day, blocking people seems to be the one and only defense most people have online, and that is a shield which does nothing to contribute to general welfare, to helping align & raise up the infosphere.
We live in a dystopian world with dystopian fallen people. It's a much closer together world, much better stitched together. This was of course going to cause problems. But I cannot imagine the horror of going back, of trying to establish authoritarian & limited channels for communication that the info-scarce world of the past was limited to. I do have great hope for progress, but humanity must innovate openly together, must build our own overlays to ourselves better comprehend the world.
But given that we are all flawed and easily manipulated (on the macro) I think you might minimizing the roles these tools play when they are designed to exploit our flaws.
The criticism about fb here isn't about the real name policy. Its the neutral content that they refuse to censor, for monetary reasons. Twitter does, for monetary reasons too.
There’s a lot of study being done on facebooks psychological harm to people and society, but not nearly enough on Twitter. I’m quite sure that Twitter is deeply responsible for the deaths of quite a few people by allowing/encouraging cyber bullying and witch hunts.
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
The joke here is that Jack, Mark (and others) already live in an unreal metaverse. These people are so far out of touch with reality that they're thinking about creating an even deeper virtual world than the fakeness they live in, just to escape it.
I used to work on and with a lot of folks over at Roblox and still don't understand the metaverse hype, when you ask them to explain it they go off into these speeches that make me think they don't even understand it themselves.
To me, it feels like a lot of the metaverse hype is just companies (and their founders) looking for some higher purpose, rather than just saying "we're a social network" or "we're a gaming platform".
I've been wondering about who's going to use it - especially by the time it ships. People can be surprisingly unpredictable so it seems like a big bet in a very specific direction. Meanwhile, a lot of teenagers around me (I'm not living in/around SV) are flipping completely back to Real Life socializing and, too some extent, are even anti-tech. They're acutely aware of privacy issues in using any sort of connected technology and want to limit their use and exposure. There's selection bias in my sample, but it makes me wonder about the longer term future of "social media", especially large scale green-field social media like a new metaverse.
The term "metaverse" is a strange choice. Feels like there was a room of engineers advocating for this term, based on some obscure sci-fi author they all enjoyed.
Not sure what the right phrase is, but this feels like "metaverse" is a going to be an uphill battle for users to embrace.
Reminds me of the term cyberspace which was user quite a lot in the bigining or World Wide Web which has just become the web. Maybe metaverse will become something else as well? META or Verse or maybe MV?
I feel like Jack Dorsey is one of the more "human" billionaire tech bros, but he also has no clue what to do with his platform. He strikes me as someone who's good at his job and enjoys being chill.
In general I dislike FB, using it less than one hour a month. I do like Oculus VR, and worked for a few years doing VR (SAIC and a project for Disney), and maybe I have read too many William Gibson SF books (all of them, actually), but I see a future where I spend a couple of hours a day in a metaverse. I live in the mountains with a hiking trailhead 200 feet from my front door, so I don’t personally worry about losing touch with the physical world. I can imagine some people becoming addicted to a good metaverse implementation.
When I see some peoples’ sick addictions to constantly using their phone, I sometimes feel compelled to tell them about the https://freedom.to service (I am a happy customer).
The lack of self awareness is staggering. I struggle to think of a single website that has done more damage to western civilization than Twitter.
Facebook is a disgusting mess, but a bunch of out of touch old people sharing propaganda pales in comparison to journalists, celebrities, and politicians actively coordinating witch hunts.
I've said it before, but it's quite telling that the current political drumbeat is set on destroying Facebook, but never mentions Twitter.
The fact that Mark Zuckerberg is targeted by the media and the activists while Jack Dorsey is not, I don't think it is because Facebook is worse than Twitter. Rather, it is because Mark Zuckerberg tries to make Facebook political neutral while Jack Dorsey donated $10million to the "Antiracist" center and openly makes Twitter left leaning.
The only way for Mark Zuckerberg to be left loose, is do something similar to Jack Dorsey.
Your evidence for Twitter having less reach is that they aren’t included in FAANG? Twitter’s reach aside, they’re more powerful than Facebook given that they aren’t politically neutral. Facebook may not be politically neutral either, but they at least attempt to be. Twitter on the other hand has clearly picked a side and does not hide it. In fact, they often flaunt it by applying rules to only certain types of accounts. It doesn’t take any effort to see this.
The FAANG thing was just a reference to the fact that Facebook's userbase is vastly larger than Twitter's - and that's before we even get into WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook is the social network and nothing else comes close. Twitter's a sideshow. A business is wayyyy more likely to have an official Facebook page than an official Twitter account.
Regarding "politics", I think publicly displaying some principles is preferable to the faux-neutrality with secret behind-the-scenes tinkering that Facebook does. It gives me the willies.
You (and temp8964) are engaged in, in my view, conspiratorial minded thinking. You imagine some great vast system working against a view. It's just not so. Governing a platform is hard, keeping things on the rails is hard. Not every decision is easy & clean & obvious. Taking the conspiratorial minded view, saying- this is not a democratic platform, this doesn't allow open conversation, is working against me- seems patently clearly obviously heinously untrue. To try to grind an axe over this is, to me, bogus. There's no evidence, no claim I can possibly imagine that justifies such extreme & radical shade casting.
There is no great vast system working against a view. It's just not so. Governing a platform is hard, keeping things on the rails is hard. Not every decision is easy & clean & obvious. Saying- this is not a democratic platform, this doesn't allow open conversation, is working against me- seems patently clearly obviously heinously untrue. 99.999999999999% of conversations go unmediated, unhindered. To try to grind an axe over this is, to portray Twitter as some horrible biased agent twisting things to it's desired world view, is to me, is to threaten obvious social order that exists, is to call fire where there is none. It creates a sense of agency & power & competency & deliberateness which in no way reflects anything resembling reality.
I'm curious what evidence you have to substantiate this unlikely possibility? You suggest a (widely rejected) theory that political motivations, rather than ethics, cause the media to complain about Facebook's business practices as compared to Twitter. This conjecture seems to conveniently ignore the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, it's substantial funding by Zuckerberg, and it's socially progressive goals. They have, for example, advocated for incorporating Native American and black culture education in school curriculums.
There is, in fact, no amount of money Mark Zuckerberg could contribute toward progressive causes to absolve himself and Facebook of the stain of unethical practices.
I'm sure there is nothing I could do to convince you of that in light of a history of analysis through a politics-or-race only lens.
One thing I've noted is all the queer meme accounts I follow get regularly banned with shite moderation on FB apps while Twitter openly welcomes OnlyFans promo posts.
It's quite a stretch to say that Zuckerberg is politically neutral. The top 20 FB groups are mostly right-wing MAGA supporters. That this persists to this day seems to indicate to me that it's by design.
Not to mention Mark's alleged personal involvement in Cambridge Analytica scandal [1] or Mark's 1:1 dinner with Trump in the White House in 2019.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadFlame on!
Cryptocurrencies claim to empower via decentralisation, but in reality they simply change the power structures from legal-based to capital-based power structures, and removing legal challenges that could be levelled at corporations in favour of "proofs" that have no moral leeway. I believe they are a strongly dystopian concept masquerading as a utopian opportunity.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/24/mark-zuckerberg-once-killed-...
Zuck invites Dorsey over for dinner, and at the time he was doing a personal challenge to only eat meat that he himself had killed, to be mindful that it did come from a once living animal.
Y'know, if more people did that, we would probably have less people eating meat in general. We're so disconnected from how our food is actually made... Meat doesn't grow on trees or just magically appear in stores.
The worst part was apparently the zuck is a bad chef and serve a cold meal.
Part of that is because Twitter is a far more alive means for discourse, for democratic processes to emerge & steer what gets raised. There's way less of the echo chamber. There's significantly more back & forth in the comments, way more cross-engagement, that highlights other views, that checks what's happening. On Facebook, the post & the link are primary & the comments are a mess, often a sea of amplification. Twitter- as a for the most part open discussion- is able to tap a "wisdom of the crowds" sensibility whereas Facebook is perpetually falling into dark rabbit holes.
But all of this... blaming the tools... it doesn't click with me, really. As unknowable & scary as algorithmic selection is, it seems like a distant second compared to what the real story is.
Isn't it obvious? It's us. It's humanity that is the problem. These are inherent problems with attention & broadcast, & how easy it is to feed on other people, to excite them & drive them to ends. Antagonism and zeal are a high-grade memetic weapons payload, and the easy democratic access to thought & conversation is easily subverted. We haven't much in the way of building up immunities- to this day, blocking people seems to be the one and only defense most people have online, and that is a shield which does nothing to contribute to general welfare, to helping align & raise up the infosphere.
We live in a dystopian world with dystopian fallen people. It's a much closer together world, much better stitched together. This was of course going to cause problems. But I cannot imagine the horror of going back, of trying to establish authoritarian & limited channels for communication that the info-scarce world of the past was limited to. I do have great hope for progress, but humanity must innovate openly together, must build our own overlays to ourselves better comprehend the world.
But given that we are all flawed and easily manipulated (on the macro) I think you might minimizing the roles these tools play when they are designed to exploit our flaws.
Twitter doesn't have a real-name policy.
Telling people to ditch Facebook because its harmful and all that is easy if you don't use it (either at all or anymore).
The joke here is that Jack, Mark (and others) already live in an unreal metaverse. These people are so far out of touch with reality that they're thinking about creating an even deeper virtual world than the fakeness they live in, just to escape it.
To me, it feels like a lot of the metaverse hype is just companies (and their founders) looking for some higher purpose, rather than just saying "we're a social network" or "we're a gaming platform".
Not sure what the right phrase is, but this feels like "metaverse" is a going to be an uphill battle for users to embrace.
When I see some peoples’ sick addictions to constantly using their phone, I sometimes feel compelled to tell them about the https://freedom.to service (I am a happy customer).
Facebook is a disgusting mess, but a bunch of out of touch old people sharing propaganda pales in comparison to journalists, celebrities, and politicians actively coordinating witch hunts.
I've said it before, but it's quite telling that the current political drumbeat is set on destroying Facebook, but never mentions Twitter.
The only way for Mark Zuckerberg to be left loose, is do something similar to Jack Dorsey.
Regarding "politics", I think publicly displaying some principles is preferable to the faux-neutrality with secret behind-the-scenes tinkering that Facebook does. It gives me the willies.
Twitter's own research shows they have more broadly amplified the right than the left. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953427 I for one could not be less shocked.
You (and temp8964) are engaged in, in my view, conspiratorial minded thinking. You imagine some great vast system working against a view. It's just not so. Governing a platform is hard, keeping things on the rails is hard. Not every decision is easy & clean & obvious. Taking the conspiratorial minded view, saying- this is not a democratic platform, this doesn't allow open conversation, is working against me- seems patently clearly obviously heinously untrue. To try to grind an axe over this is, to me, bogus. There's no evidence, no claim I can possibly imagine that justifies such extreme & radical shade casting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Further, Twitter's own research shows they have more broadly amplified the right than the left. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953427 I for one could not be less shocked.
There is no great vast system working against a view. It's just not so. Governing a platform is hard, keeping things on the rails is hard. Not every decision is easy & clean & obvious. Saying- this is not a democratic platform, this doesn't allow open conversation, is working against me- seems patently clearly obviously heinously untrue. 99.999999999999% of conversations go unmediated, unhindered. To try to grind an axe over this is, to portray Twitter as some horrible biased agent twisting things to it's desired world view, is to me, is to threaten obvious social order that exists, is to call fire where there is none. It creates a sense of agency & power & competency & deliberateness which in no way reflects anything resembling reality.
There is, in fact, no amount of money Mark Zuckerberg could contribute toward progressive causes to absolve himself and Facebook of the stain of unethical practices.
I'm sure there is nothing I could do to convince you of that in light of a history of analysis through a politics-or-race only lens.
Not to mention Mark's alleged personal involvement in Cambridge Analytica scandal [1] or Mark's 1:1 dinner with Trump in the White House in 2019.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22736476/mark-zuckerberg...