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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don’t think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.

    The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.


  • I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we’re happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.

    The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that’s cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.


  • Your take on the debt ceiling is at odds with history. When Democrats and Republicans pass bills that require spending, they are forcing the increase of the debt ceiling. This happened under Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, everyone. If Washington politicians were serious about limiting the debt, they would have not passed all of these bills.

    If you think that politicians should care about national debt, then you need to be calling on them to reduce spending in ordinary legislation, not on debt ceiling legislation.

    That being said, I don’t know where you’re going to find the savings. What does the federal government spend a lot of its money on? Social security medicare, medicaid, and the military. Which of those do you want to cut?




  • Twitter’s rate limiting has been reported as perhaps being a failure to pay bills or otherwise properly manage their servers, and not some specific policy change. So that particular example might not be what you were focusing on or what you meant to focus on. Obviously Twitter made many other decisions, and the recent big one is cutting off access to tweets for people who are not logged in.

    As for Reddit, the price of the API is not the point. Rather, the price is so high that nobody’s going to use the API, and that’s the point. But they want to pretend that it’s still possible to be used. And we know this is true because if the API really has such high value, then presumably some of the popular clients out there would have been worth it for Reddit to purchase, and the purchase price would presumably have some correlation to API usage.

    On a more general level, though, I think what you’re talking about is the process known as “enshittification”. It’s possible for social media companies to avoid this end result, but it requires great care especially in the early stages.




  • I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that because only 10% of drivers are reckless, we don’t get to regulate the other 90% along with them. Of course if we had some magical wand that would tell us who the reckless drivers are, then we could only target the dangerous folks, but often that’s impossible.

    Often the best we can do is take a look at the data and see what kind of policies would not be horribly burdensome for the general public and yet would save a lot of lives, and then we institute those.

    The other part of the problem with the 10% bad drivers argument is that bad drivers change from hour to hour, and from day to day. After all, the majority of people believe that they’re good drivers, right?