The models he - and others like him - make are probabilistic. 70% probability Hillary would win was actually accurate. 30% probability events happen all them time.
The ones with “skin in the game” in 2016 said there was a 99% chance that Hillary would win. And that they’d eat their shoe, etc, if Trump won. They were in so much disbelief that Trump could win they built models just for confirmation bias.
Based on what?
Stopped reading after this, so tired of this argument.
Bernie showing up on manosphere podcasts does far more to persuade people than a bunch of lefties stewing in each others rage on bluesky, whipping themselves into a frenzy.
It's a social subculture where being patronizing and finding a way to delegitimize anyone who finds it offputting is sorta their thing.
None?
Congratulations, it's de-facto a bubble. It's just math, half the electorate isn't on the table.
Does that mean I need to avoid Bluesky? Or Twitter? Is bluesky bad somehow because of that?
Furthermore, I already had a lot of mute words and blocks set up on X to keep it palatable. I don't see any politics over there and it's entirely focused on creative work. If I did this on Bluesky I imagine I'd significantly cull my feed down to it seeming dead.
Fast forward 10 years later and now r/seattleWA has become the right-wing subreddit. r/Seattle is more lighthearted and full of pictures of the space needle. This wasn’t the original intent, but once a community splits in two both sides are going to further differentiate to fill more user niches.
This feels like a natural process, for better or worse. Also thats the founding principle of America. If you have had enough, move and set up a new country/state/religion/homeschool group.
The idea that anybody gets to say whatever they want is how you have a free society. Treat those people like threats and you have authoritarianism. Whether the end result is left tyranny or right tyranny, I don't want it.
The future is private enclaves like Discord, Slack, private networks, private forums, and chat apps. The open Internet is a dark forest.
Could you expand on this a bit? That sounds like potentially interesting idea. Especially since I read “The Dark Forest”.
But I think it is true, private or moderated groups might be the only safe place.
If social media is really a representative view on our society, i feel quite disappointed
However, even the private enclaves become corrupted over time, especially if they ever grow in popularity. I mean, look at HN as an example. What was once a niche place for tech people and STEM related topics, now any given day the front page is 30% pure sociopolitical content, 50-75% mainstream media content; comment threads full of partisan rage baiting and emotion-driven debate.
Also, once a niche place becomes in any way important/popular, the propagandists will swoop in and work their tricks to start controlling the messaging on it.
At this point I'm feeling that niche places can only exist long-term as long as they have some sort of dictatorial control by a truly moral admin, who forcefully keeps the community in check by viciously moderating content. Of course, such a person is eventually corruptible, and finding a successor later for such a person is its own issue.
It's not clear right now what tools we'll build to analyze users & subnetworks, to try to get a pulse for what is authentic versus propoganda. But I am 100% here in large part because it's the only network where the data will be available! Where there is a strong commitment & the protocol is designed to making the firehose/backfill readily available. And with that I think humanity stands some kind of chance of engineering defense against the Dark Forest, can reach up towards some exaltant connection.
The Fediverse is much more focused on small communities (which personally I think it mostly fails to do usefully) and has an ethos that strongly rejects search / findability / data-gathering / network monitoring. There's little hope for me if that's the outlook: limited networking. For it means no defense, no higher views. Big Social is of course now totally inaccessible, as dark as it comes, with academic research having been buried by massively expensive API access costs, brutally short retention limits, and utterly opaque ranking/moderation systems.
I don't think any of us can predict how this will play out, but it certainly is interesting to watch the user growth/receding and watch the waves.
Meanwhile actual platform change is considered "unrealistic" but is actually a ton of fun and perfectly fine if you like connecting with other people more than stroking your ego with numbers obtained by sucking up to the system/algorithm and/or consumerism
Honestly X has the biggest mix of partisan viewpoints. Many subreddits, bluesky, have become mentally unhealthy places to spend your time if you’re left leaning.
There are plenty of people that seem to celebrate what happened yesterday on these places. It’s the worse I’ve seen and it disgusts me.
Sure, link-curation sites can also be low-quality, toxic echo chambers. Reddit is roughly a link-curation analogue of BlueSky, and even HN has some low-effort content, toxicity and groupthink (though it's not nearly as bad). And there are high-quality posters on Twitter, and high-quality invite-only Mastodon instances (at least in theory, I'd love to find some).
But high-quality posts are hindered by Twitter's format. High-quality posts don't fit in 150 words, hence the "thread 1/N", "thread 2/N" workaround. High-quality discussion is hard with a handful of random reply-chains as opposed to a comment tree. Specifically on Twitter, high-quality posts get limited reach because it's non-public with a (mostly) non-customizable algorithm, to the extent I mainly find said posts via links on link-curation sites.
Meanwhile, link-curation sites encourage high-quality content by encouraging (if not requiring) posts to be links. Instead of posting a "hot take", you link to an article, paper, or at least self-hosted blog*. Or when possible, you link to the primary source, and maybe post your opinion in the comments, where it's presented almost exactly like opposite opinions (just with the "OP" indicator). Comments are also better, because every reply to every reply is shown and you can collapse reply trees to view others; and because there's no word limit, so even comments can be substantive (although there's no encouraging mechanism to comment with a link to your blog post or related/contrasting primary source, which in theory could lead to especially high-quality discussions and insight, but I suspect in practice would almost never be used).
* Self-hosted blogs tend to be higher-quality due to an expected minimum length and the effort required to set it up and get attention. Although unfortunately, I've seen some links to no-name blog articles that were especially short and low quality. As mentioned, link-curation doesn't guarantee high quality like Twitter-style doesn't guarantee low quality, they facilitate high/low quality respectively.
mirawelner•1h ago
gjsman-1000•1h ago
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
giraffe_lady•1h ago
gjsman-1000•1h ago
Unless you're interpreting fled as being one-way, while embracing is somehow two-way.
__loam•1h ago
gjsman-1000•1h ago
elictronic•1h ago
pessimizer•1h ago
It's basically what Truth Social would be if it didn't even have Trump.
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edit: it's not the fault of the technology, it's the fault of the awful company. They represent people strongly aligned with the Democratic Party, but with no power in the Democratic Party, and their philosophy has been stated over and over again: if you don't agree with whatever we believe today, we don't even want your support, or want you here, or want you to be employed. A lot of conservatives would add "they also don't want us to be alive."
The worst part is that they're all upper-middle class, and when as the Gini coefficient goes up with the right-wingers they're locking into power by being so repulsive, they'll just get wealthier and wealthier and more self-righteous.
I've been suspecting for years that there's a lot of botted support for the dumbest most out of touch liberals that is paid for by conservatives. I don't meet people like this in real life, and I am very left-wing. The liberals I meet are generally humble and thoughtful (if in love with their television sets.)
ARandomerDude•1h ago
isk517•1h ago
add-sub-mul-div•1h ago
mingus88•1h ago
I have a list of chronologically sorted articles from sources I trust. That’s it and that’s all.
I read them until they are read. Then I close the app and do other stuff until tomorrow.
Is it any wonder Google killed off Reader around the same time it tried to launch Google+? Managing our own feeds was never going to peak capitalism.
HankStallone•1h ago
dfxm12•1h ago
Believe your eyes.
Silver is funded by Peter Thiel via Polymarket. Thiel is trying to manufacture disdain for Bluesky and Democrats out of thin air, and move the Overton window to the right.
MangoToupe•1h ago
I'm sure Thiel is more than happy to take advantage of this.
gjsman-1000•1h ago
Which is ultimately just silencing the messenger; the very behavior that backfires... sometimes figuratively, yesterday literally. You'd think free speech advocates would be smarter than to ever use the downvote button on a legitimate opinion, seems like a contradiction.
Edit, for the reply: > "Post a far left soundbite opinion like 'all consumption is unethical under capitalism' and you will get downvoted just as handily as 'I wasn't hired because I'm white'"
This is actually a bad example, because we just got Ames vs Ohio, eliminating the higher burden of proof that white individuals needed to present when claiming discrimination 9-0. As such, there is a possibility that complaint was factual and is going to be proven soon, where the other is purely ideological.
Edit 2: Nice undocumented edit to make it a "trans employee" instead. You've just openly admitted you would've downvoted a legitimate opinion by claiming it was illegitimate, then edited your comment afterwards to fix the weakness, proving my original point.
miltonlost•1h ago
dghlsakjg•1h ago
Populist ideas, un-backed propaganda and blind followership of both the right and the left are not popular here.
Post a far left soundbite opinion like "all consumption is unethical under capitalism" and you will get downvoted just as handily as "I wasn't hired because they needed a trans employee".
For disclosure: I did change white to trans employee approximately ~90 seconds after the original post, and not in response to his edit (I did not see the edit until now, 1 hour after the original post). It is meant as an illustrative example of an inflammatory viewpoint. It appears from the inflammation that my point was well made. Thank you.
For those wondering, I changed "I wasn't hired because I'm white" to what it reads above. My reason for the change was to make the statement absurdly inflammatory, and not subject to the exact sort of irrelevant (irrelevant to the point being made, that is) debate that OP is trying to force. If you look at my comment history you will see that I edit almost all of my comments. I have the bad habit of proofreading after posting, and editing for clarity. Not trying to do a "gotcha" because the point I am making is still logically identical.
If you want, substitute it for the completely unbacked "litterboxes in schools" right wing meme, and the point still stands. The point being: HN tolerates many viewpoints across the spectrum. HN does not tolerate stupid, and especially when it is stupid wrapped in culture war bottom scrapings. That is what will get you downvoted.
_DeadFred_•20m ago
dfxm12•1h ago
MangoToupe•59m ago
SilverElfin•1h ago
bediger4000•1h ago
About the worst I saw were, in essence, saying this is bad, but those who live by the sword, die by the sword, which is a biblical thing.
Why is Bluesky an echo chamber but X, Rumble, Gab, Gettr are not? I bet there's huge vile "damn leftists" commentary there, even though we don't know who shot Kirk or why. Why isn't that an echo chamber?
SilverElfin•19m ago
I have not even heard of some of those. So I am not saying that they aren’t echo chambers either. But given the reputation for civil discourse that blue sky has, I was surprised to see a lot of comments that were saying disgusting things in thinly coded ways.
deeg•1h ago
tracker1•37m ago