shrugal

Even just the fact that Google could force something like WEI on to everyone should be a wake-up call though.

This sounds complicated, but it's pretty standard practice and probably a matter of minutes to set up if you have self-hosted other services before. What takes more time is the stuff that's not standard, like ominous configuration options.

I'm not strictly against personalized recommendations (hence why I said it "can" become manipulative), and you're making some good points. But I do think it's a very dangerous game to be playing.

It almost certainly requires collecting and storing very personal usage data, and it can influence people's mood and behaviour depending on what the algorithm is optimizing for (e.g. showing you stuff that makes you angry or ashamed). For that reason I think it's not just a matter of letting it loose on people. It needs to be very well communicated and explained (e.g. things like "we are showing you this because ..."), so people stay in control of their own actions.

Imo it's a bit like slot machines. Just fine for most people most of the time, but it can drag you down a dark path if you're vulnerable for whatever reason.

The key difference is whether it does what I told it to do (e.g. gather popular posts with tags I follow) or if it uses my usage data to figure out what would keep me engaged. The former is perfectly fine imo, the latter can become manipulative very quickly.

I think "algorithm" refers to personalized sorting and recommendations in this case, so using your data to prioritize posts that keep you on the site. That's not what any of the Fediverse apps are doing.

For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word "tweet" was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.

But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren't strictly against the law. But he also doesn't apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn't like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn't all that great before he took over imo.

The start was wanting to reduce my exposure to recommendation algorithms. That got me thinking about what absurd amounts of very intimate data companies have about us, and how they can use that to influence people.

Also broken in Chrome for me.

We have blown the concept of ownership way out of proportion. No one should be able to own things they have absolutely no connection to, like investment firms owning companies they don't work for, houses they don't live in or land they've never been to.

I would call that browsing, posting and commenting, even if it doesn't sync to other instances until the source instance is back up.

If there was an alternative you couldn't drown in then yes, we should get rid of swimming pools.

It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.