Rather, it's a recognition that it's not worth it to engage when the odds of the question being honest are slim. If you are curious about bias on Wikipedia, the information is readily available. There's even a Wikipedia article.
It's a nice Wikipedia article, and highlights that the people most critical of Wikipedia are cranks (e.g. Larry Sanger, Elon Musk), and that most studies trying to objectively discover bias find very mild and isolated examples of bias.
>This may be one of those "not everyone gets to win everywhere" situations. And if I have to choose protecting 4chan vs. protecting children...
Which to be clear, is nothing but a fiction you built yourself in order to insist on your failed arguments, 4chan is a 18+ site and it enforces the rule. It's literally the second rule of the site just below not posting illegal content.
Have they built a framework that allows them to enforce it successfully, or is the enforcement a fig-leaf?
Here, 4chan's design works against answering the question satisfactorily; their commitment to anonymity makes it difficult to say whether they really keep minors off the site (purely anecdotally, the answer seems to be "Not really; everyone knows click-through confirmation is a joke," but that's anecdote). OFCOM allegation, indeed, is more-or-less that 4chan pays lip-service to keeping minors out but fails in practice, and they demand better of service providers then "Well, we told them they're not allowed and if they make it too obvious to ignore we give 'em the boot; what more could we possibly do?" Because OFCOM has a list of what more they could possibly do.
There is a nonzero possibility that the Internet as a whole - including fora like 4chan - has become deeply enough integrated into daily human experience that 4chan having an "Are you over 18" clickthrough is no more acceptable than a 21-and-up club leaving the back door unlocked and never carding once you're inside.
I'm not sure if I'm confused or terrorized by the article.
Concerns on Wikipedia dying because of a lack of editors, and that being due to AI? Wikipedia's community often makes it very clear they don't want editors, and there's a whole lot of people who have actually tried to contribute who will tell you of the unjustifiable miserable time they had when wanting to do a good deed, that has been a considerable problem for I don't even know how many years now, why would I care about AI redirecting traffic possibly reducing the influx of editors when there's a far larger, more evident, long-standing problem?
Promoting quoting Wikipedia as a source is madness. It begs circular logic. Citogenesis is already a considerable problem, can we not kick it into overdrive? Please? Wikipedia being at risk is one thing, but asking for a cancer to be spread upon academia, I'm sorry but we are not at a point in which reputation can be squandered like that.
>Doing so may also help to address the public’s eroding trust in higher education itself, as a greater commitment to serving the public would reassert the role of universities as stewards of knowledge that exist to serve humanity – a role shared by Wikipedia.
And there's even acknowledgement! But that somehow makes it worse because one of the main reasons academia has lost reputation is the same one that often gets called out on Wikipedia: political bias and agenda pushing.
It's like there's a fire in a building and a huge stack of papers on another, in which a guy is playing with matches, and the argument is that we should move the fire from the former to the latter. I honestly think that if this sort of advice was listened to, the consequences would be terrible.
It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.
Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.
Its not just matter of regulation if it was that easy to build China would be building 100s. And by saying China I am referencing their manufacturing capacity and them being a command economy that does not have the same financial profitability concerns. It is not like they have not tried they have but nuclear technology the world has currently have does not translate to mass manufacturing.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.
Perhaps the person you’re replying to was simply trying to stoop to your level, since you made the extremely weird “spreads his DNA everywhere” comment first. Perhaps this was, to borrow your misused phrase from elsewhere in this thread, the intellectually appropriate response.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
I was following along with your sentiment until the last, childish paragraph which really took the wind out of the sails.
I guess your point is you support things, not on a legal /impartial basis but on your perception of underdog/righteousness. Also, people who don't understand your initial post are psychopaths.
Fair enough, but that's a pretty shaky foundation upon which to build the law.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
reply