FaceDeer

FaceDeer , 3 months ago

This site never worked without a hitch.

That is not a ringing endorsement.

I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.

FaceDeer , 3 months ago

It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.

If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".

FaceDeer , 3 months ago

First thing I'd do when boarding a Federation ship is tell the computer it's authorized to keep an eye on my vitals.

FaceDeer , 4 months ago

Or do cloning. If their own DNA is too messed up by the Phage then pick a non-Vidiian species that's particularly compatible and start running off copies to harvest. Apparently killing clones is fine by the Federation, paragons of moral virtue that they are, so this should be an acceptable solution.

FaceDeer , 4 months ago

If I had to make it make sense, Riker killing those clones might have been different because the clones weren't "awakened" yet.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

By this argument nothing should ever interoperate with anything else because clearly that's the first step toward destruction.

I'm writing this on Firefox, which interoperates with Chrome and Edge. Oh no! We need to get these browsers operating on incompatible protocols stat, before they all extend and extinguish each other.

In reality, "embrace extend extinguish" is not a law of nature. XMPP is not ActivityPub. They are separate things with separate circumstances. Did you know that XMPP is actually still functional and open and you can download clients and servers that use it to this day? The stories about how Google "destroyed" it have become wildly distorted folklore at this point.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can choose that even if Threads federates. You pick what you engage with, which communities and instances you subscribe to and which you block.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

Why can't you do that? Use one of the many non-Threads servers to do it. Like Kbin, the one you're already using. Nothing about it changes if Threads federates.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

I don't mean to alarm you, but Meta can see this post even if Threads doesn't federate.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

Why not? It's no different as far as Meta is concerned, it only inconveniences us.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

The reason I think Lower Decks does a fine job with its "fan service" is that none of those "get this reference? See?" moments matter. They're just stuff that's going on in the background, where an ordinary non-Lower-Decks Star Trek show would simply put a bunch of random meaningless gizmos or whatever to fill out the scene. The story that's being told in the foreground works perfectly well if you don't "get" any of the references. Often the story is enhanced by those references, but if you watch Lower Decks without any knowledge of the previous shows (aside presumably from a general gist of how shows like Star Trek work) you can still enjoy it.

FaceDeer , 5 months ago

I think it might be self-inflicted. Patrick Stewart is big enough that he can make it so with regard to the scripts. He's the one that insisted there be a dune buggy chase scene in Nemesis, for example. And he's pushed for more action and romance in the movies. I suspect that this is another case of a good actor or writer who works best when tempered by outside control.

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.

I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.

Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

Uh... huh. Okay, I'm going to count that as a Godwin and leave it at that.

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

The problem with a lot of sci-fi is that if you considered what effects the technology would truly have on society you very quickly get a situation that is so different from the common experience of the audience that most can't easily get on board any more.

If the Federation allowed the full range of genetic engineering that we know they have the tech for, nobody would get old or die of natural causes. Gender and even species would be fluid. People could have arbitrary numbers of parents, or family relationships that the word "parent" doesn't meaningfully apply to. I would love to watch a show in a setting like this but I suspect that my taste wouldn't be so common. And the special effects and makeup budgets would skyrocket.

So alas, I suspect the prohibition will remain.

FaceDeer , 6 months ago

Except the Federation is very much not equal. There's plenty of genetic variation within species and a much larger variation between species. Vulcans live hundreds of years and have telepathy, humans die after just one hundred and are brain-blind. Bashir was born with severe genetic defects. Geordi was blind, and then he could see better than baseline. There are differences in fundamental capabilities everywhere.

Genetic engineering would allow those advantages to be shared by everyone. It annoys me how hypocritical the Federation is about this issue.

FaceDeer , 8 months ago

Indeed, I don't see why people clickbait on the Fediverse where there isn't even any advertising to be had. There's no benefit.

For those who want to know what's beyond the headline, this is about how in previous Star Trek shows we keep seeing humans defeat AIs by talking them down with their "human emotions" or "human element" always winning the day. But in the most recent episode of Lower Decks there's a bunch of "evil AIs" who are immune to that and instead sort their own shit out for themselves.

FaceDeer , 8 months ago

It was a good article, it's just the presentation. Unlike on Reddit you can include text with a link so perhaps a snippet of explanation like what I wrote would have helped.

FaceDeer , 9 months ago

And no Moriarty either. Still, I was amused.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

Calling it "official" is kind of weird. Anyone can start a futurology community here in the Fediverse, and it's entirely up to the users which one they want to use.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

I just had a look at his profile, and wow, I wouldn't call him "super right-wing." I'd call him a loonie. Fortunately most of the magazines he's squatting on have similarly loonie names and I doubt there'll be much call to use them for anything productive. Maybe Graphene and Fluoride might be useful for serious posts someday, but they're pretty special-interest for the size of the Fediverse right now.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

Just wait until 3001 AD and the ban will expire. Since he's clearly not a fan of transhumanism or other such fields of study he probably won't still be around then to extend it.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

The basis of this article seems to be interpreting stage 1 of enshittification (“platform is good to users”) as being a “free rider”.

Indeed, while this can be true it doesn't have to be true. It's entirely possible to profit off of your users without being awful to them. Economics is not a zero-sum game, everyone can "win" from a transaction. Typically this happens because each party gets something from the other party that they value more than the other party does.

For example, I spent years on Reddit happily arguing with wrong people, deriving my "value" from just having fun interacting with folks about stuff. The server resources that Reddit expended supporting that were fairly trivial in dollar terms. Meanwhile Reddit earned a bunch of money by pretending to serve ads to my ad blocker and by selling information about me to AI trainers (or they would have if they'd thought of that before it was too late). None of that bothered me any, so they got something valuable to them from something nearly costless to me.

If Reddit had just stuck with that then everything would have been fine. Instead Reddit hired 2000 staff for some reason, requiring them to squeeze even more money out somehow, and the rest is history.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

They also spent those 2000 staff implementing image hosting, video hosting (poorly), a live chat feature nobody wanted, maintaining a mobile app that was inferior to several apps being developed by lone independent coders, and a bunch of other nonsense unrelated to the core experience of Reddit. Rather than being the best Reddit the could be they tried to poorly mimic Facebook and Instagram and other such social media sites.

The thing that killed Reddit was the unfortunately extremely common drive that corporations feel to grow, grow, grow grow all the time every quarter. Always must have more subscribers, more features, more income streams, more products, new markets.

FaceDeer , 10 months ago

Back in my Reddit days I got banned twice - once from a subreddit and once a site-wide shadowban (which got rescinded when I appealed, amazingly) and both were random bolts from the blue where I didn't actually break the rule I was banned for. In the shadowban case I happened to belong to a subreddit that was apparently in the midst of brigading another subreddit I was reading, and when I upvoted a few comments I guess I triggered some kind of anti-brigade filter. In the case of the subreddit ban, there was a guy being downvoted who was complaining about it and I explained to him why I thought it was likely that he was getting downvotes. That subreddit had a "no downvotes allowed" rule and the mods must have figured that since I was explaining why the guy was getting downvotes I must also be downvoting him. On Reddit there's no way to actually tell who's downvoting who.

Here on the Fediverse it's both a bit more scary since every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants, but it's also less scary because every instance can have whatever standards of care it wants. I can just create a new account at a different instance if the one I'm on turns out to be run by yo-yos. Hopefully the account migration features get implemented soon to make that even easier.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Bearing in mind, of course, that there's a lot of biases in your sample. You're sampling the demographics of /m/kbin, not kbin as a whole, and you're primarily targeting English-speakers since that's the language you wrote in.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Perhaps a better option would have been "deflowered."

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

"Deflowered" isn't an option. :(

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Hasn't it been a long-running complaint that admins can just edit karma and so forth however they want? By putting this on a blockchain it creates a public record that can't be tampered with without public awareness, and depending on how they do it it can't be easily tampered with at all.

Again depending on the technical details of how they implement this, the network fees may be trivial - small enough for Reddit to subsidize without the users having to worry about it at all.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

By putting them on the blockchain it would at least make them a public database, where you'd be able to see if Reddit admins tried to do any tampering.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

No, you can't just "edit the chain." You'd need to fork it with new rules to have it accept whatever arbitrary transaction you wanted to insert. Furthermore, even if the blockchain was set up in such a way as to make that easy, it would be obvious to everyone what had happened. The blockchain is a public database. Reddit's back end is currently a private database. If Reddit changes a karma score or whatever over on their current private database, how can you tell? How can you prove it? If they try to do something like that with a blockchain everyone will see it.

Assuming it even works - you speak of "controlling the majority of computers" as if it's something that's easy to do. Reddit's "Community Points" tokens are on the Ethereum blockchain. Under its current consensus algorithm you'd need to control 66% of the stake. The current amount staked is 21921671 Ether, which at current prices is 41.4 billion US dollars. You would have to buy on the order of 50 million Ether to overcome the existing stake, and there simply isn't that much available for sale so the price is literally incalculable. They've made it a very hard blockchain to break.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

No, I went into a bit more detail in the next sentence. If we were to assume a billionaire with nigh-infinite wealth he would probably still have quite a challenge ahead of him if he wanted to manipulate the Ethereum blockchain.

For starters you can't simply go up to the existing stakers, hand them a big stack of cash, and tell them "your Ether is mine now." The Ether that is staked is not for sale. It can be put up for sale, if the staker desires, but given that it's currently staked and not on an exchange somewhere that means that the stakers don't currently want to sell it.

So Mr. Moneybags is going to have to buy Ether from external exchanges and put that up as a stake such that they will have 2/3 of the stake while accounting for the fact that he doesn't own the 20 million Ether that's already staked. So he's going to need about 40 million Ether (40/(40+20) = 2/3). At current market prices, 40 million Ether will cost $75.5 billion.

But there's yet another hurdle. There isn't actually 40 million Ether for sale on the exchanges right now, either. There's only 120 million Ether in existence, and much of that is bound up in various contracts (staking, stabletokens, layer-2 rollups, etc). So if he goes to the exchanges and just starts buying whatever is available the market is going to see that there's an insatiable demand for Ether. The price of Ether will rise. If it rises enough people will start prying their Ether out of wherever they've stashed it, because now they can cash in and make bank off of Mr. Moneybags who's making it rain over on the exchanges. It's going to cost way more than a mere $75 billion dollars. Elon Musk is currently worth $238 billion, I wouldn't be surprised if his entire net worth wouldn't be enough to accomplish this.

Let's say that Elon and Bezos and a bunch of others pool their money to do this. This is economic activity without historical precedent, a vast transfer of wealth from the pockets of the rich and powerful to... a whole bunch of random cryptocurrency holders around the planet. This will be very notable, I'm sure, and I suspect that there'll be major governments very curious about where all this money is going and why. They'll want their cut, or they'll reflexively go "don't understand this so better ban it", or assume it's a big money laundering thing, or something. Yet more obstacles to overcome. It's possible to overcome them but not easy on this scale.

<continued next comment, for the first time I've exceeded the comment size limit>

FaceDeer , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

So we'll assume that's all magically resolved. A vast fortune has been spent and the Meddlers' Conglomerate now has 40 million Ether. Just need to stake it and the blockchain's theirs now! Except there's another problem; Ethereum's staking contract has a rate limit on how fast Ether can enter or exit it. This was built into the system to smooth out any sudden shifts like this. The rate is 57600 Ether per day, so it'll take 694 days to finish moving those 40 million Ether into the staking contract. Almost 2 years.

Alright, it's been 2 years and now the Meddler's Conglomerate has moved their vast fortune into the staking contract. The whole world has been watching with bated breath, because there's no way that you could do anything like this secretly - the blockchain is an open book. Maybe somehow they've managed to keep their real-world identity secret (though people are perhaps wondering about the coincidence that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and a couple of others are now drawing welfare cheques) but the pattern of activity on the staking contract is in the clear so everyone knows which staking accounts belong to this giant whale of a staker. Let's see what they do!

So they're rejecting certain transactions relating to the Reddit community point rollup. Note that there are ways you can write a rollup contract that would prevent the base layer from having any say in what goes on inside it, but let's assume that Reddit wrote it stupid and they're able to have some sort of impact. The rest of Ethereum's userbase nods, saying "aha, I figured they were probably up to no good." At which point they roll out a User-Activated Soft Fork for Ethereum that locks those 40 million Ether. There is nothing that stakers can do to prevent a user-activated soft fork from going into effect provided basically all the users want it to go into effect. It's a nuclear option, but the Meddler's Conglomerate started the nuclear war first and this will finish it. The Meddler's Conglomerate now owns zero Ether. They are broke. They probably didn't even manage to disrupt the blockchain much in the process, aside from making a bunch of cryptocurrency speculators insanely wealthy.

This scenario, "what if someone with infinite money wants to do something nefarious?", has been war-gamed and planned for in excruciating detail for nigh on a decade now. Ethereum's built a lot of very robust mechanisms to prevent it. And whenever a token or rollup spins up that's "on the Ethereum blockchain" they inherit all of that security.

So yeah, for all Reddit's faults and all that people might pooh-pooh "cryptobros", this actually is one of the better ideas they've had in a long time. It's more secure and more open than running it on their own in-house private database.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

If you don't want the blockchain you use to have those features then don't use a blockchain with those features in it. Ethereum doesn't. Token contracts or rollups don't have to have those features, and when they do have them they can be locked behind conditions that prevent unilateral changes. IIRC community points are on an Arbitrum rollup, which is currently in beta but which will be removing its own update functionality once it is mature.

I doubt anyone is seriously proposing to store the actual contents of posts or comments on the blockchain directly, blockchain space is far too expensive and inefficient for that. This is just about storing karma or community points, a simple numeric value for each user.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Ah yes, Usenet was the original Fediverse. Kind of. It was more of a distributed peer-to-peer system than the current day ActivityPub. I loved it back when it was mainly discussion and the .binaries groups were an awkward sideshow. Reddit filled that niche in terms of its actual function, but I always knew the underlying centralized structure of Reddit would someday be its downfall.

The sad thing is that back when it first began Reddit was actually planning on being federated too. They released their server as open source and had plans to make it able to interact with other Reddit servers. Never came to fruition.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Ironically you'd need something like a cryptocurrency if you wanted to implement something like that for the Fediverse.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Heh, that guy again. I wonder if he's conducting some kind of experiment to see what happens when he gets his reputation score as low as possible?

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Well, things always end eventually. The important thing is that Reddit was good while it lasted.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Congrats, you're the first kbin user I've recognized by name, because when I saw this comment it reminded me of a similarly ludicrous anti-protestor comment in another thread and I thought "surely there can't be two people with this offensively terrible of a take on kbin." Yup, same guy.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

For some reason /r/SubredditDrama is awash in admin bootlickers these days. Makes the threads on these subjects rather unfun to read.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Replace the mods with who? Reddit doesn't have an endless supply of compliant free labor they can just assign willy-nilly to whatever subs they desire. Especially now that the masks are off about what Reddit admins really think about moderators.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?

And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Actually, that sounds like exactly what I would be advising them to do in a situation like this. Reddit has been bloating itself with new features that nobody has been asking for because it keeps trying to turn itself into Facebook or Discord or whatever. If Reddit needs to become profitable I'd suggest cutting those and focusing entirely on what Reddit already does better than its competitors. Link aggregation and threaded discussion. Do just that, but do it better. That would allow them to shed some massive expenses both in technology and in staffing without impacting the income from its core business.

They didn't do that and it's probably too late now. I don't know how Reddit would be able to shed its Imgur-like image and video hosting at this point, for example.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

There's also the Ernest Hemmingway quote from The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?"

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

FaceDeer , 11 months ago

Yeah, it wasn't a bad place. I'm sure a lot of people would expect it to be full of threads about how century club members were better than the low-karma plebs or discussing tips on how to farm more karma or something, and it was nothing like that. I mainly recall it being a place where people would share tragedies in their lives and commiserate on them, knowing that they had a relatively "private" place to be discussing that sort of thing with people they considered "peers." I just didn't find it to be compelling discussion most of the time.