• 8 Posts
  • 607 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Using compressed axes to display data was literally “How to identify misleading statistics 101” in middle school for us…

    It seems fine to you but for the majority of people it’s misleading most people look at the lines and the relative distance between them to make judgment calls. Not literally the entire point of graphs, to visually display information.

    This is a well-known effect and is taught in pretty much every major curriculum.



  • I’m not sure what argument you’re making here yes of course parents should be teaching their children these skills instead of letting them go on social media.

    How is that relevant to the argument that I’m making though?

    This is obviously not occurring today so how do you expect it to occur tomorrow when we make no changes today?

    You do realize that the children of tomorrow will be raised by the children of today right? And as we let the children of today become addicted to social media and don’t provide them with the tools skills and safety to protect themselves from social media how do you expect them to teach their children how?

    Sure I may be cognizant of this but again, as stated previously in these messages…, this is a systemic problem. You cannot solve a systemic problem by putting the burden of solution on each individual involved in the problem. Systemic problems require systematic solutions, this is largely an inarguable point.


  • Well yeah that’s a problem of course but that doesn’t negate the reasoning I stated in other areas of this thread.

    I’m not promoting trust in a central authority or government here that’s a separate problem that exists on an entirely different plane.

    Yes you who probably has some amount of critical thinking skills can do that. The majority of young generational individuals today, cannot. Which largely negates the “well they should get gud” argument. It’s a systematic problem, you can’t solve systematic problems that way…

    I’m not going to repeat myself though, my last paragraph in the previous message is a fairly succinct tldr. This is a principal that’s been applied and works across industries, and is critically important for building “safe systems”

    Safe systems being systems that are designed to be operated and interacted with safely. There is a practical infinite number of safe systems that you can find examples of to further drive my point home. We can design systems that provide safety from human behavior and failings, the largest obstacle is usually both the political aspect and the aspect of individuals who refuse to acknowledge that safe systems are important.




  • Side note.

    Social media is now a theater of war, with adults and children alike being the weapons created by way of social media propaganda.

    Children, who are the most likely to be affected and manipulated, who are also primary targets due to said vulnerabilities should be excluded from these platforms for this reason alone.

    This is a problem that’s growing at a scale to affect entire countries. Countries with populations vulnerable to social media targeting propaganda, astroturfing, and manipulation are vulnerable on the world stage.

    Making this a growing national security concern for any country.


  • It most definitely is possible in federated networks to be clear.

    Federated networks are extremely vulnerable to bots. And “organic” online narrative is easily manipulated with bots and bot driven content.

    We see this in centralized platforms like Reddit which have mature and centralized bot detection and control mechanisms which are largely ineffective in an ideal scenario for them to be the most effective.

    The only saving grace for federated services right now is that they are simply far too small to be worth the time and money to manipulate narratives on. The user bases are infinitesimal in comparison to mainstream social media.

    This changes if their popularity skyrockets. The only thing it takes to manipulate opinions and narrative is money and a vulnerable target. The fediverse is largely a vulnerable target and current mega corporations have more than enough money to do what they need done a million times over.