I want to be a 'polyharness' maker, so I occasionally switch between Cursor, Claude, Codex, OpenCode etc.
I've tried Gemini (without Antigravity) only about 20 times and it seems of significantly lower quality than the other flagship models (e.g. it missed obvious deductions for my tax return, and often refuses to do things like very harmless/legal web scraping).
> Tinder doesn’t know if they were successful or not. They just know you stopped opening the app.
Great point, Tinder has to train on data where they don't know the target variable (whether a match was ultimately successful or not).
Here's a bet I make with zero knowledge on the topic: I bet tinder could get that info (i.e. whether a user is married or not) from data brokers for 99% of users, and probably trivially.
Marriage records are often public. But usually two people don’t stop using a dating app and get married the next day. They will date for months or years after. And that info is not so easy to get.
As far as data brokers I would imagine it’s possible to get info on an individual if you want to. You can even determine someone’s location based on data brokers info. But dating apps will want info on millions of people, which will be messy and hard to do.
It really can't be that hard to derive that data. If there's a match, keywords matching location names, addresses, etc as the last message followed by a large usage drop, you can probably identify 80%+ of longterm monogamous relationships forming
I pretty much deleted all apps as soon as I met someone I thought had real longterm potential - getting to know new people is fun and all (and so is the sex) but if you're on there long enough, you're just going to want to get on with it
> (the) departure (is) celebrated as a victory by Iran and its allies who now have deep influence in the country
Although the Iraq war was based on a lie and caused tremendous suffering, it did demonstrate the US's willingness and capability to handle a brash dictatorship. In this sense, at least at a macro level, it has tempered (as opposed to emboldened) other dictatorships like Iran and North Korea.
I take a harsher stance: that we should expect division to be sewn among us by our adversaries, and harden ourselves accordingly through open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate (rather than flame wars, especially in popular contexts like tv and social media).
I find it strange that the antidotes to a lot of the bad stuff going on today is basic enlightement stuff: cultivating a citizenry who value evidence-based worldview, education and rule of law. Yet it feels like that is increasingly slipping from our fingers.
The "bad stuff going on today" that you call is the opposite of enlightenment - citizenry based on emotions, tribal and racial affiliations, and rule of strength. There are countries and media that actively promote such a world, since it's easy to get rich and powerful in circumstances like these.
> open mindedness, debate, clear info, leaders who discuss deeply and write essays, integrity, best-faith debate
Except that people doing that lost. Very very clearly, it is not sufficient at all. And people who won loved to frame themselves as rational, open to ideas, even wrote essays and pretended good faith.
The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned.
To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
My biggest problem with Reddit is that trolls, memes, unintelligent posts have taken over the platform. Go to any semi-popular subreddit and most upvoted posts are just low effort memes. Posts that are long and well thought out don't win over memes and trolls. One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first while it takes much longer to write something thoughtful.
Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
I don't think so. I've been a Reddit user for 12+ years or so. Obviously when you make the platform easy to use for anyone, you also invite more casual users who just want to meme.
Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality since user engagement numbers matter more than quality.
Reminds me of Quora which over optimized the site for engagement growth but eventually became completely useless for this reason.
> even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts
Completely agree.
There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.
It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.
Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.
It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.
It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.
Yes, and the person you responded to posited that this is because they used to be niche. You claimed this was not the case, they provided some URLs that demonstrate semi popular subreddits have always been shit.
This post sounds like you are still disagreeing but nothing you've said points to another conclusion
As long as mods are human volunteers, can they ever keep up with scale of reddit? I regularly see submissions (on old.reddit's /r/all) that got to 10k+ upvotes and 200+ comments in hour or two before it was taken down for breaking given subredit rules.
Not really, if you want to ask a question. 9/10 times it gets locked for breaking some obscure rule. If anyone answers, that answer is just deleted immediately as well.
This type of subreddit specifically is almost entirely useless since the advent of AI.
I've been on Reddit since late 2005. Before there were comments or subreddits.
My memory is fuzzy, but I remember it getting pretty shallow and memetic since before the Digg diaspora in 2010. And I think it was the popularity of image posts that did it; it was better before image links became popular.
However, Slashdot was already highly memetic since the late nineties, and it was not image-based, so I may be wrong about the effect of pictures.
> Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality
But mods can say they censored you because of low quality contribution to reddit. :)
I do agree that the karma system does not work. I was able to farm 77k karma in two years, after I created a new account there (the old account I had before for +14 years was forced to change the password, so I created a new account - and used EXACTLY the same password, to prove a point to reddit that they are incredibly stupid. Sadly, reddit never understood the problem, even though it should be obvious that, if your passwords are lost yet users retain the same password after being forced by reddit to change it, something in reddit's insinuation simply does not add up here.)
I once cracked a pretty good joke on a high-traffic thread and got about 30k upvotes for that one post. None of my serious posts in serious subreddits ever got close. I don't think Reddit karma is a useful indicator of anything.
you weren't around back in the days that it was just a Ron Paul fanboy forum and a lot of r/atheism echo chambers (I say this as an atheist who got keenly annoyed by the amount of self-fellating going on there) - this was pre-sub-reddits, when kn0thing was still active on the site and a force for some pro-social moderation, and Digg was still their biggest competitor (until it was flooded with the HD-DVD key leak and a lot of people left it out of annoyance)
People would find exploits in the automod. For example if a trivial keyword filter flags comments mentioning Palestine but not ones that mention Paluhstein, or "the country of Isn'treal"
This is called Algospeak and has infected a lot of people's everyday language. People say "unalive" instead of "kill" or "murder", because the internet has drilled into them that you have to use that word.
If trained enough, but the commenters will just start calling it watermelon instead. So you train your LLM to block comments about watermelons, so they say thing. So you train your LLM to block comments about things. Congrats you blocked all comments.
One of my biggest criticisms of social media in general is that the algorithm that determines how things are scored and ranked is intentionally obfuscated under the auspices of preventing 3rd parties from gaming it in such way that results in an outcome where it is impossible for users to determine if the platform owners are gaming it themselves.
I'm not aware of a social media site that does it but I think that I'd very strongly prefer a site where I could view a transparent log of who voted for what and when and what moderator took what action and when and why and how that all factors into how a comment / post / thread is ranked on the feed at any particular moment than one that hides all that stuff.
Reproducible builds but for social media.
Less 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' and more 'Exactly what it says on the tin"
The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over as they are dealing with organic bad actors or automated content generators and that a great deal of those questions stem from the opaque nature of the algorithm.
All too often I find that moderators on social media are exasperated and burnt out not just from the endless janitorial work but also from users reaching out to them for understanding about the opaque nature of their actions and the outcomes that they have in the system.
So a lot of moderators gravitate towards a 'don't rock the boat' sort of mentality and over time adopt this sort of mentality: https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56
IMHO we're well past the point where any sort of security by obscurity with regards to the algorithm prevents any sort of automated influence on social media and the negative impacts of this kind of moderating technique only causes more damage than it prevents / mitigates.
X is bad it always reverts to low effort content and then bombards you with constant racisms and sexism. There are Jems but you are constantly swimming in a river of garbage
When I made a new X account a while back it immediately started showing me awful videos of people getting killed etc. This was without me engaging in anyway, just what came with a fresh account. So yes, maybe it gets worse if I engage, but the site seemed primed to be awful.
i would like this too but I dont see any way to maintain anonymity or pseudonymity and clamp down on spamming.
you can have neither or both but I dont see any way to have one without the other.
>The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over
I'm mystified why this isnt a problem AI isnt applied to.
100%, r/science 15 years ago was very strict on keeping the conversation serious and no low effort posts or jokes. That subreddit is now littered with stupid comments, jokes, and you have to dig to find serious commentary. Reddit is dying and I love it.
A non-trivial number of the newer accounts that do that are bots, ban-dodgers building karma, people aging accounts for general resale and so on. Even a lot of "human" activity on Reddit isn't in good faith before you even get to the general triviality 99.9999% of it represents.
Plus at this point if you really want to ask what Reddit thinks ask an LLM, it'll tell you in painful detail without exposing you to that place. Just remember to check claims and sources (a good practice for human claims as well as LLM ones).
People who build their identity around high scoring karma of memes take it seriously, and certainly don't want to hear "every subreddit devolves into memes if you let it"
> One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first
It's not being first to the race, it's that some people are lazy and don't want to read "long" posts but will optimize for snappy quips that are more likely to be upvoted. This incentives some "karma whores" to make these posts instead of engaging with the topic more.
That's for the reason already mentioned above: Users who post substance and care about the issues will sooner or later write about something or express an opinion the moderators don't like and get banned. Over time the site is filled with lame jokes, single word comments and cliches.
I have never heard that term used before, prior to reading this thread...
All I know is that "low-effort comments" -- is going into my 2026 lexicon!
(Admittedly this comment, my comment, the words I have written, above -- is admittedly somewhat of a "low-effort comment" in and of itself(!) A low-effort comment about other low-effort comments (a "meta" low-effort comment, if you will!), but I digress... I guess at times "we all fall short of the glory of the highest of high effort comments"... :-) )
Anyway, "low-effort comment" is a great piece of terminology, isn't it? :-)
there are still very insightful posts/comments but they are a minority buried by mostly inane comments and reddit is moving more towards like instagram reels model these days.
This is a good place to remind everyone that Ghislaine Maxwell is a moderator of /r/worldnews. She stopped using her main account when she was arrested but we suspect she's still moderating from prison using other accounts. If you comment or post about this on Reddit you will get an account level shadowban.
Let us see if the pedophiles control this site too. Bookmark this and then check back later to see if it was flagged and removed.
The business model is fundamentally broken. Reddit, unlike other sites driven by user-generated content, forgoes the cost of huge (but ideally impartial) content moderation teams in favor of unpaid user moderators, leading to what you've described. Nothing will change unless the business model changes.
Shareholders want to get paid.
CEO wants to get paid.
The primary KPI's are revenue and profit, customer satisfaction will only matter if people actively quit.
I started to get banned from subreddits after giving perfectly polite comments which happened to be contrary to popular opinion, so stopped posting on Reddit and only read it with an ad-blocking browser.
Don't give them content, don't give them your data and revenue. Reddit know full well that there should be an appeal process to user-mod nazi's. But these people obsessively post new content on their forums and so are protected.
Yes but not to the same extent. Professional, paid moderators following a centrally-defined set of rules are going to act differently to terminally-online volunteer mods.
I heard an influential person say thing about YouTube. That the "real" leaders of popular movements get banned, and then people get a completely distorted idea of what people actually believe, because the only exposure they get is to the ones YouTube approves of.
This is absolutely true and a main reason why you will see a lot of Pikachu faces in r/de after a German election. This is true for most subreddits which are touching on topics that in some form or another promote tribalism.
Such topics tend to naturally create opinionated flame wars, politics just being the most obvious example, but the subreddit mods often take a side even though the subreddit may advertise itself as the general hub for the topic.
My friend told me the same phenomenon happens in Brazil's canonical subreddit /r/brasil
I'm told that their mods tolerate left leaning hate speech much more than right leaning counterpart so unaware visitors think current left leaning government is beloved by a great majority and that it has been for years.
But they told me that last election ended very tight, something like 49/51% and I'm told current imminent election is at similar 50/50 split.
This is true! I know this because thats what I did. You can get away with almost anything as a reddit mod, and can systematically control whatever userbase you want.
In some case this is benign, like with advertisers and marketing, and in other cases it is much worse in which case there could be actual foreign enemy governments doing psyop campaigns on reddit.
Reddit isn't controlled by the company. Instead it is controlled by an army of anonymous nobodies who could have all sorts of bad motivations.
While I do think quality of subs can be quite high (much higher than discourse here for certain topics and certain subs), this is a pretty well known problem. Discussion on this [1] from a post I made earlier.
r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie has an approval rate of 74% in SF [2] while Mamdani has a 69% favorability [3] in NYC largely because of the political skew of the sub.
I visit two subs every day and get banned from both of them maybe three times a year. I am an expert in one area and experienced in the other. I typically respond only to outrageous responses to someone who asked a seemingly innocent question. Because I disagreed with the majority I typically get my karma down so low that my comments aren't showing or, last week, I was banned altogether.
No. I'm not nasty or disrespectful. I just disagree and give the reasons why.
I try to be helpful but I no longer care. I only glance at the titles in case something new shows up. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but, as I said, I'm an expert in one area and experienced in the other and reddit users lose that. I know others feel the same way and never go there. I wish I wouldn't.
Your experience is similar to mine. I feel like my most stupid and forgettable comments generally get more attention and upvotes, but when someone makes a comment that's clearly false and I respectfully disagree citing authoritative sources, people get defensive and in some cases reply with ad hominem.
Tried to clear a confusion between DDR5 / LPDDR5 / DIMM standards and cited the relevant JEDEC standards with specific quotes? Get downvoted, all of arguments ignored and replied with more false information.
Tried to argue that, even if given a charitable interpretation, some units of measurement could be confused if not written correctly (on a conversation where such confusion was clearly happening already)? Downvoted.
Explain the difference between latency and throughput? Explain that O(1) ⊂ O(n)?
Reddit is full of idiots who are too confident about things they don't understand and aren't humble enough to admit they're wrong, so they just insist and I just don't care anymore.
And let's not even get started about having nuance and a balance point of view in politics.
> Because I disagreed with the majority I typically get my karma down so low that my comments aren't showing or, last week, I was banned altogether.
This is just the nefarious nature of karma-based systems. It also applies here. I find reddit's shadow banning/shadow hiding especially offensive. (Just think for a moment how utterly disgusting it is that such a feature was intentionally designed, implemented, and is now maintained.)
Not downvoting legitimate (but unpopular) comments is protected by the various rule systems (reddiquette, HN guidelines), but of course rule adherence is (very) low (especially on reddit).
> The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions
I recently got banned from subreddit A1 because I commented in subreddit A2 without knowing the ongoing bloodfeud where A1 moderators didn't find the A2 moderators strict enough. I'm a tourist to the topic "A" all together and barely understood the lore of the topic. Let alone the cultural eggshells of following a search result into the wrong subreddit.
Mods are doing what the platform is designed for - create "echo chambers". If a sub-reddit causes cognitive dissonance then that means (from the perspective of the platform), you aren't in the "right" sub-reddit (i.e. echo chamber). If you are posting something that isn't within the accepted "norms" of the echo chamber the mods are supposed to "prune" your views, so that you are driven to find the sub-reddit where your views are acceptable. Or you create your own echo chamber on Reddit where the views that you think are "valid" are upheld by your coteries.
It's a really effective but screwed up way of creating fundamentalists ...
Why doesn't this happen with racism? In European subreddits, speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban. Yet, it's still there, and quite clear that that's the norm in Europe. Compared with topics of homeless people, about who Eastern Europeans talk the exact same way as about gypsies, and with the same logic - it's just not "protected", so it's not banned - I encounter both regularly.
> speaking about gypsies in a racist way is followed by a ban
I'm suspecting that is only because of behaviors learned from US on the internet. If not for that they wouldn't have thought of banning for it. It's not a topic that comes up often, but IRL negative views on gypsies are the norm in Europe.
I think it's important to understand that it's viewed as culture issue, not color-of-skin issue (that is something that can be changed, people of gypsy heritage that go to school and work are not considered gypsies for this) and so not getting filled in the category of "racism".
Maybe I don't understand exactly what you are saying, but if I do: there is a fundamental difference between Gypsies and homeless people, you are born a gypsy by no fault of your own, but most people are not born homeless. As such racism towards Gypsies is far more heinous because you could have any education, profession, income, housing situation you'll always stay a Gypsy and face the same prejudice, whereas you can (somewhat) more easily stop being homeless.
Now we could have a discussion on whether being poor is a choice or a consequence of societal inequality, but I think more people agree on racism here...
Looking at Eastern Europe, how some behavior which is net negative to everybody in the current environment still alive 200 years after the zero sum game is dead, I would say, that's not that simple.
Gypsies aren't a race, what they do is a lifestyle. Kinda like classical pirates and brigand bands. But while the latter examples have disappeared for the most part in Europe, gypsies are still a plague upon law and order.
> Gypsies aren't a race, what they do is a lifestyle
I said the exact same thing for like 20 years. Until I realized that this thought is utterly racist. Luckily, I was disgusted about myself and my environment where this is a normal thought, and improved, instead of doubling down.
You've just called a behavior based on a name of an ethnic group. You cannot be more racist than that.
I think some people simply aren't aware that "G**y" references the Roma (and is also considered a slur by most), because they associate it with the negative stereotypes which have been ascribed to them.
Gypsy seems to reference at least a dozen or so different groups of people in different languages (some languages use Tsinganoi-related version). Some groups use the word themself, others don't.
Most often it is the mainstream society living in stationary houses describing people living in temporary encampments with a different culture.
Not that long ago to find both sides of an argument in the comments you could search by "controversial" and the negative comments would be at the top and often you'd agree with them, or at least appreciate the debate. Now they are mostly gone. It was probably a combination of banning wrong-think and dissidents learning to not waste their time.
The worst thing for a forum is to let users punish comments they disagree with, you know, one way by fading out their comments until you cant read them.
It's not so much the time wasted in discussions, but the time wasted in having to create new accounts, since your old one got banned from the platform. Though, since the last presidency change in the USA it feels like reddit has gotten less ban-happy.
Before I added a bunch of subreddits to my blacklist that will never show up again in a search engine I had to make a new reddit account every four to six months.
It's really a shame when I stumble across an old (8y+) reddit post from search results, and I see that the useful replies are either from [deleted] or [Removed by moderator]. :(
I feel like most of their problems come from downvoting, not mods though. It's just not possible to have a real discussion on reddit anymore, because anything that is not the mainstream opinion just gets insta downvoted. People will literally downvote anything they don't agree with, and seem to be more likely to do that if they see the comment has a negative score already. If they allowed subreddits to turn off downvoting, and have HN-like system where every new comment lands on top for a while to give everyone a chance, that whole place would be much more healthy.
The most nefarious behavior I've seen is when the mods shadowban every argument they disagree with that has positive upvotes but leave arguments they disagree with that has negative upvotes to give the impression that everyone on the opposing side is stupid.
I think the mods are a larger contributor to the "acceptable discourse" in most subreddits than drive-by downvoters. Most people with unacceptable opinions (as per the mods) find other subs to congregate in when they've been banned or know their input will result in them being banned.
There are exceptions though: I participate in some capacity in most of the feminist subreddits, and the divisions between different branches are pretty charged. One example "feminismuncensored" subreddit which I believe was created in reaction to the "feminism" subreddit's slant towards white liberal feminism (which has been getting better over the years), but seems to have attracted trans-exclusionary feminists due to the name, and the fact that trans-exclusionary feminist views are also not tolerated in most of the other larger feminist subreddits (for those who don't really pay attention to this, my use of "trans-exclusionary" rather than "gender-critical" is a signal of my own bias towards trans-inclusive feminism).
The /r/feminismuncensored moderators recently stickied a post clarifying that transphobic comments are not tolerated there, and as you can imagine it was heavily downvoted by people who (I think somewhat reasonably) assumed the name of the subreddit meant trans-exclusionary feminism would be tolerated. Comments supporting the moderators' decision there were heavily downvoted as well. So this is one of the (relatively rare IMO) cases where the subreddit appears to be frequented by people whose views are out of line with the moderators' ideas of acceptable discourse. In most other subreddits the moderator bias and community bias tend to be more closely aligned
Most of the so-called "feminist" subreddits are run by men who pretend to be women, so that's not surprising at all. These men have a habit of worming their way into every online women's space and, if they can, taking control of the discussion. Reddit is especially terrible for this, and the only way for women to protest this misogyny without risk of having their accounts banned is to downvote.
What do you mean when you say "men who pretend to be women"?
I understand this is a fraught question, and I'm not trying to be snide or score points. Given the specifics of the post you're replying to, I think that's a germane thing to clarify here.
Ah, that makes sense. I'm basically the opposite, in around a decade I've posted articles directly maybe a dozen times, so it took me a while before I received the privilege to downvote.
To give another simple example, Israel has managed to pollute the mods of r/worldnews enough to make it a singularly active cheerleader of the genocide until the last year or two.
As an example, I am well aware of how strict r/worldnews is moderated on IvP topics, so I am extra careful to be factual rather than simply making comments based on more general thoughts, like I do for other areas.
I have responded to some comments in the past by responding by quoting legal cases, news links I sourced my comment from, or from subject experts.
It doesn't matter how accurate or factually proven the comment is. If it's even slightly critical, it'll end up with votes of anywhere from -10 to -50 from all the down votes.
For other people's comments, anything negative that hasn't been down voted into oblivion will always have the "cross" icon next to them, meaning it's listed as "controversial", which is when it has a large number of down votes, plus up votes to balance it out.
I was banned from there this summer after posting something relatively innocuous asking whether Palestine had a right to defend itself. At least, I assume that's why I was banned, they never actually gave a reason.
The opposite is also true. There are many subs that posting anything positive about Israel will get you banned on that sub and all subs that moderator moderates which is insane.
Where's the problem? r/worldnews is pretty Zionist in nature, and anime_titties, workreform plus way too many other "leftist" subreddits are anywhere from somewhat neutral over "Israel bad" to outright glorifying Hamas.
Don't want to engage with Zionists, go to anime_titties, don't want to engage with Qatari propaganda, go to worldnews.
I'd rather ask myself how Qatar managed to wiggle its way into pretty much every university and many left-wing and "progressive" parties that now openly support Hamas.
Israel has been allied with our nations ever since it was founded, the Qataris and other oil sheiks were a bunch of warlords and nomads a century ago.
There is a single moderator for most of the big italian subreddits and he bans anyone that says "genocide bad". He also bans anyone who points this out.
Without more details, it's not really clear that your example leads to the conclusion you give. Plenty of subreddits for games are run by the community rather than the company who owns the IP, and any company serious about getting feedback isn't going to blindly trust a subreddit even if they do moderate it themselves.
Perfect explanaition! I see this not only in politics, but also in simple tech or niche fields I'm very familiar with, sometimes even medical things I have to deal with for 20 years: If it doesnt fit the (uneducated) mods' view, it will get downvoted or (shadow)banned. Resulting in bizarre threads with 40k upvotes, but no actual answers on the open question, because the answers have been removed. Totally nuts.
I fully agree with your point of view. I think that I saw it the clearest when, in a Magic the Gathering subreddit I usually follow one person started a thread on a set of rare cards and immediately was downvoted to oblivion, and later on closed by the mods. Turns out that those cards were indeed legit, and just because everyone else thought they were not nobody got to see them once the booster opened.
Can you specify more on the one video game franchise example you're talking about? If you mean Battlefield then they did not ban "any negative discussion", just incels bitching about allowing female characters to exist in a video game about WW2. Battlefield 6 sold 7 million copies in first three days and the franchise has not tanked in any conventional sense so I guess you're talking about some other incident.
That description could cover almost any game released in the past decade. I suppose the more popular ones have multiple warring subreddits with different mod rules.
(pet hate: it's perfectly OK to call your subreddit xyz_offficial, even when you are in no way officially affiliated with the game developer or publisher)
Battlefield is the opposite. I struggle to find a positive discussion about the game, which has a lot of flaws but which I still quite enjoy, as a very casual and occasional player.
not op, but can give my personal example. I was banned from one of the twitch streamers subreddits because I questioned hype about GTA 6 and called it ghetto simulator. Reason was for stirring controversial and provoking topics.
Yeah. I don't want to be conspiratorial, but there is some heavy censorship happening in certain (or maybe most) subreddits.
A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.
Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.
In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.
I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.
worldnews is a really egregious example of what you're talking about. If you say one negative thing about Israel it gets deleted, you get banned from the sub and sometimes even banned from Reddit. Of course other subs do this on other topics too.
I get a feeling it's too cold inside. Maybe it's how thin the walls/windows look (evidenced by how loud the rain can be heard), or how tall the ceiling is, which makes it seem colder, with no light flicker indicating presence of an indoor fireplace.
I feel this is the case for a lot of industries (and even a lot of productivity-enhancers, beyond AI).
I remember a much slower change where software slowly ate away the work of property managers. Especially convenient was the ability for the tenant to perform the 6-monthly inspection remotely by uploading a half-dozen photos per room, taking just 15 minutes or so rather than waiting around for several hours for a physical meet up with the property manager. Software also allowed rent payments to be easily automated, collated and monitored.
But I don't think the number of property managers decreased, nor the price that landlords paid for their services.
When I was looking for an apartment recently, the big "luxury" buildings use AI agents to schedule tours and answer questions. Tours are also self-serve, you don't actually get to meet and talk to anyone. It's a crappy experience. I had to call an AI agent to figure out how to get in the front door of a building and it completely failed to answer this very basic question (fortunately someone eventually saw me knocking). When I toured one large complex there were several groups wandering through the building at once. It did not give me a particularly safe feeling to see that random people going everywhere in the buildings unescorted had been completely normalized.
Had the 'evidence' been a random dashcam rather than Flock cam, this wouldn't even be a story beyond severe police incompetence.
Flock didn't fail to inspect the car for damage and not find any, flock didn't take 13 days to conduct a cursory review of evidence, flock didn't fail to request cell tower triangulation data and rule out her being in the location of the accident...
I get that people feel their privacy's invaded by being filmed, but this story doesn't appear to have any more to do with Flock than what the officers had for breakfast or the brand of air freshener she had in her car at the time.
A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter. It had to be a stupid "smart" object for such an inexcusable offense to be committed.
With dumb camera footage, the cops looks at the plates, visual indicators, etc. That does not make them more competent or less prone to abuse. But here, Flock's software literally told them this woman was the one they were looking for, despite no evidence supporting this.
This is 100% both on the police and on Flock. Some technologies don't deserve to exist. Facial recognition and ALPR is one of those, because the error rates are too high and the stakes are too high.
> A random dashcam does not serve the police someone's identity on a platter.
Nor does Flock - Flock merely provides a photo and timestamp, which should have been scrutised like any other evidence.
The Flock data showed:
- Car of same make/model nearby at similar time to the accident
- Possible colour match (eyewitnesses gave varying reports on the colour of the perpetrating vehicle). But a match could have been ruled out in minutes had police inspected paint transfer onto the struck vehicle
- A number plate non-match (first three characters were reported to 911 and did not match)
- That's all!
So police didn't do their job (scutinise the evidence), and possibly worse, they may have fabricated evidence (since police claimed Isaacs' vehicle was damaged, but it was in factory-new condition) - which may explain why they're shifting blame to Flock!
That's exactly the same. Suggesting an output is the same as serving a suspect on a platter. I'm sure there's many studies about how humans (except statisticians) are not comfortable with confidence intervals.
A computer software is supposed to deliver reliable, predictable, reproducible results. When it does not every now and then, it's a bug. When your entire system is built in "recognition" and "confidence" and leads to wrongful arrests, it's not a bug. You are just not making computer science. You are making a power abuse machine.
Except of course the entire reason the police picked her in specific is because of information flock gave them.
Could they have, you know, double checked it? Yes, obviously. But they didn't.
I agree that this story is more about the incredible incompetence of the police involved than flock attempting to record everyone and everything, but flock giving the police an excuse to stop looking and arrest an innocent is by no means irrelevant.
I would say part of it could be on flock depending on how flock displays information and details in responce to a query.
Simply flagging a photo for review, no. But if it was like "this single person matches your search parameters exactly and here is their name, address, and current location", which could heavily imply guilt through overconfident displays of information.
At no point does a cop have to look at the photo(s), the timestamps, confirm the plate, see if the person who owns the car is driving it, or see the dozens of other cars in that area at the time that should also be of potential interest. They enter the query and get a single answer so obviously accept it as likely perpetrator.
The police should have thought “okay a car was seen within several miles of an accident - so what?”
Their conclusion (after 5 minutes) would have been (obviously) that there’s not so much as a strand of chewing gum connecting the car to the accident, or making it stand out from dozens of others, and they’d promptly get back to searching for the car that actually was involved.
As is common in political shenanigans, the draft bill has a euphemistic label ('algorithmic opt-out') - what it actually does is allow unspecified bureaucrats such as the Minister for Communications to designate any individual piece of content as 'harmful' and have it banished from the internet.
As an Australian who just wants relatively free access to information (and the ability to freely/easily discuss it), it's frustrating.
And it's not the first time the Australian government has done this; last year they banned U16 from social media, several weeks later everyone was alerted to Bondi by... social media.. so they could get the heck out of there, but U16... they were left clueless and unable to get updates (news sites ran 30+ minutes behind real-time events and official sites like NSW Police took 70+ minutes to even announce there was a shooter).
Thanks. Reading it at first seemed like “the people” here is you know, end users, people toggle some settings on their devices, not a government employee deciding. It turns out a government employee doing it. Yeah, just because US government is goofy doesn’t somehow make others sane or good.
Suppose government had instead banned spare car tires. 99.99% of the time, we wouldn't notice. But during an emergency the effects of such a ban become apparent. Similar with the social media ban.
Consider the situation for a 15 year-old on or nearby Bondi at the time of the attack. You hear.. fireworks?.. a car backfiring..? and meh, you continue sipping your iced matcha latte.
Sometimes having the choice to learn/see/hear information matters. Very often (like with a spare tire ban) nobody even notices the ban - but at certain times, it really matters.
Is this not a bias towards the status quo, conflating two entirely distinct problems?
We have problem A: receiving timely updates for life threatening events has not been implemented, or poorly.
Then we have problem B: social media companies have monetised engagement, without any guardrails to avoid detrimental effects, and continue to push to maximise this.
Just because the status quo involves a high speed, low latency, flood of unverified information via social media, which tangentially solves problem A in cherry-picked examples, does not mean it has to always be the case. This same proposed solution is also rife for abuse, in the same way a legitimate early warning can be sent out it can just as easily be used to spread hoax events.
Would it not make more sense to actually solve problem A, e.g. get the police to pull their finger out and use the emergency broadcast service available in just about every phone on the planet, and treat problem B as its own distinct issue? By conflating the two I don't see how we will ever solve either problem in any effective manner. By doing so we're essentially agreeing to a world where our best case scenario is the narrow intersection of A & B, while the rest of the time we're left with the full outer join of the two problems - bad access to verified emergency updates and a flood of engagement-bait crap on social media.
To be clear, I do not agree with how this legislation is being put forward nor with how it is proposed to be controlled. This is layman's legislation at its worst for a highly technical subject, and even in a more charitable light I struggle to see it as anything but a distraction and power grab rolled into one, with little likelihood of solving the problem at hand.
By your logic then, shouldn't algorithms be banned? If a U16 is going to turn to social media, and the feed is not in chronological order then how do we even guarantee that they will see what is happening in the moment when an algorithm is making the choice for them...
Seems more like, if they see something suspicious or are worried about it - dont go to your phone, just leave the situation as fast as possible. As usual, education and critical thinking is the answer.
You can literally justify absolutely anything using that logic.
That one time the toddler reached for his daddy's unsecured rifle and killed the intruder who had a history of perpetrating violent home invasions. Therefore, don't secure your firearms.
That is the seed of a reasonable argument against securing guns - if you're expecting to have to use a gun to defend yourself, you want to have a gun and have it on hand and ready to use. If it is illegal to have the gun out of storage then that is a problem in the event of being attacked by someone.
It seems unlikely that the toddler to be using a gun effectively though.
"The draft laws provide eSafety with the power to issue removal notices for nudify apps or websites, and streamline the child cyber-bulling and adult cyber abuse schemes to enable eSafety to deal more quickly with this harmful material."
> The objects of this Act are to improve and promote online safety for Australians by ... imposing a duty on persons responsible for online services to ensure a safe online environment
On special powers granted to the Minister:
> the Minister may, by legislative instrument, determine material or conduct, or a combination of material and conduct, that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm
> As is common in political shenanigans, the draft bill has a euphemistic label ('algorithmic opt-out') - what it actually does is allow unspecified bureaucrats such as the Minister for Communications to designate any individual piece of content as 'harmful' and have it banished from the internet.
Not a fan of the paternalistic/nanny state attitude of the current government or that ministers track record, but isn't this two separate things which they intend to do?
> isn't this two separate things which they intend to do?
Precisely. This bill is being sold to the public under a benign label, but smuggled along with it are some dubious affordances. The same was accomplished with 'age verification for U16s', which, if named correctly, would have been called 'everyone (not just U16s) must present a licence or use a VPN to use the internet'.
Can you elaborate how this might be different than laws in Germany that disallow certain speech around white supremacy? Or laws that disallow violent rhetoric?
I think censorship is bad because it restricts expression, and I believe restricting expression is bad because I believe free expression is both a human right and incredibly important to free society. But obviously, there are times when we collectively are going to agree to restrict rights to some other benefit. The question is of balance. To what degree are we restricting expression, and to what end? Is it truly justified?
I have no idea if this proposal is shit or not, I'm not steeped enough in it, but it's not enough to point to hate speech laws and say "censorship is okay here, why not there?" - well, the important details are literally everything else other than the part where it is censorship, so that's the part we need to address...
> it's not enough to point to hate speech laws and say "censorship is okay here, why not there?"
That’s not what your parent comment is saying. Asking “how do these things differ” does not imply support for either thing, it’s a request for clarification. Not every question is an argument in disguise.
Yes, merely asking how two things differ is not necessarily intended to be an argument in favor or against something. I used deduction based on context to figure out that part.
Text being low bandwidth, I could be wrong, but what you're saying implies it's unreasonable to assume that making a comparison to something that people are highly sympathetic to isn't likely to be an appeal to sympathy for the other thing being compared. I just disagree, my interpretation was completely reasonable here. If it's wrong, well, it's not like I told them to go fuck themselves. It would then merely be a misunderstanding. Though, I doubt it.
(To be honest, though, I also should say that I actually have no idea whether they would lean more for or against on the comparison. Not everyone is a fan of hate speech laws, after all.)
> I could be wrong, but what you're saying implies (…)
You are wrong. My point is closer to “don’t make assumptions; it muddies and derails the conversation and leads to unnecessary unproductive disagreements”.
Compare your original answer to a sibling response, which was made before yours.
America constantly restricts expression it doesn't like. It's just that you believe being topless in the park is bad speech but calling for genocide is good speech. Billionaires using computers to slurp up and regurgitate others work is good, but people copying others work is bad. Saying "lets kill the president" is bad, but saying "lets kill the senator" is good.
America does not have a monopoly on what good and bad speech is, and it certainly restricts speech, via legal means, via cultural means, and via application of force.
I'm not personally a big fan of all U.S. restrictions on speech, but I don't really see your point, to be honest. The U.S. can right sometimes and wrong others. In principle, I don't really see why the U.S. government and its officials generally shouldn't be able to raise concerns about legislation and litigation that may impact U.S. businesses, especially if they believe they might impact inadvertently the rights of U.S. citizens. There are plenty of examples where I believe the U.S. official or agency was spot-on.
If you are not a fan of U.S. soft power though, then it seems like the future will be brighter for you; we're certainly burning all of those bridges as fast as possible. But, that is really neither here nor there.
All countries restrict speech their government (which is the will of the people in a democracy) finds does more harm than good.
America protects the speech of the rich and powerful but allows stoking division and outright propaganda. It hides a lot behind "it's not technically illegal but you'll lose your job if you say the wrong thing", or "you'll get arrested but if you're rich enough to afford a lawyer you might get charges dismissed"
Perhaps solve those problems before criticising other countries for fighting back in the war.
Not everyone wants to live in a society where the American form of limited free speech is the accepted societal norm. Australia can choose its own views, so can France, and Britain, and Turkey, and China. It's not a colony of the us.
It should be no problem to call things by their name (censorship) then.
Censorship is the government suppressing information. If people actually believe that this is how things should be, let the government introduce official “censorship bills” and call publicly for “additional censorship measures”.
The fact that they aren’t doing that demonstrates that they feel the need to hide what they are really doing, which speaks of an inherent wrongness that has nothing to do with a US/non-US culture divide.
The post did not use the name "censorship", it just tried to trivialise the democratic will of a country which does not want to give more power to US billionaires, claiming it's just the whim of an "unspecified bureaucrat"
US views on the limited freedom of speech the US government allows are different to those of the limited freedom of speech that Australia, Germany, etc allow
All those countries limit freedom of speech, it doesn't make anything that doesn't exactly copy American "freedoms" (and indeed lack of freedom) wrong.
Of course argue this and HN will flag you
The more speech you have, the more powerful you are. That means those who can have more speech and more targetted speech (i.e. people who are wealthier) are more powerful. Not everyone likes that. You might, that doesn't make you right.
"Disingenuous" implies someone is doing something on purpose. Anyone calling a Minister an unelected bureaucrat is just mistaken - obviously a minister isn't an unelected bureaucrat. They're an elected bureaucrat.
That said, whoever this Anika Wells woman is the law looks like a bad idea and it is nice that the US has found it in their interests to say something helpful.
Social media could have just as easily spread misinformation about the Bondi incident. It was a failure of the NSW Police to not use the SMS emergency warning systems, which is not a good reason to keep everyone on social media.
Yeah, nah, the Australian right has been casting pro-Palestinian speech as anti-semitic.
In the States, the right has been supportive of government suppression of speech, including the communications agency (FCC) threatening broadcasters into cancelling an interview with a politician in the opposition party. The right's free speech record is far worse in the US and Australia.
Admittedly, neither side of the aisle have good free speech practices in most of the rest of the world.
It is a super popular viewpoint in certain populations. It might not be _your_ view point, but there are may people who want exactly this. They usually won't say it out loud because they want all the support they can get.
Should I remind that Palestine is against the two state solution? What would happen with the Israelis if Palestine will be free from the river to the sea?
Both sides are damnable in this conflict, but I don't buy this idea of the gazans "just wanting peace".
It’s precisely my point. Those people will have to learn to live side, and it’s not going to happen when people are taking sides, buying into propaganda etc.
Like I said, it’s not a football game where you run around Sydney with your face painted screaming “from the river to the sea” it will solve nothing.
We have nothing to do with this war, and just because "one side invaded the other" does not make either of them right - both sides have been murdering each other over religious garbage for 100s of years
This isn't our business and we shouldn't be involved
Thinking that we, as Australians, need to get involved looks to me like "aw these poor little brown people don't know what they're doing they need a big strong white man to sort it out!"
Picking a side here isn't advocating for peace it's posturing
I did specify over religious garbage and not over this specific piece of land
Regardless, the point is we aren't "fighting for peace and freedom," we're just murdering a bunch of people in a different country over something we have nothing to do with
There's some merit to your viewpoint because Hamas was at one time democratically elected. I don't think there's a strong case for claims that the majority of Palestinian people supported the October 7th attack on either military or noncombatant targets. One being that the majority of Palestinians were not of voting age at the time.
October 7th being an illegal attack justified a military response from the Israeli Defense Forces to secure their border, and most of the world agreed. Opposition solidified when IDF conducted mass destruction of civilian structures and independent observer-corroborated systematic murder of noncombatants, many of whom were children.
While two wrongs don't make a right, it's justified to support a people who are the victims of a genocide according to credible observers.
I agree, I just don't think you can really be only "pro-palestine" because it's sort of like the same thing in reverse.
If Hamas was in-charge of the situation , what do you think would happen to Israelis, you think they'd be well looked after by Hamas?
What should be happening if we had good world leadership is Israel would be bought under control through sanctions, we'd investigate and prosecute war criminals on both sides and the world would help eliminate Hamas and Iran (because they help Russia kill people in Ukraine) and support Hamas, but yeah, not in that world.
Realistically October 7 was a huge, huge disaster for the Arabs in the region.
Your dogged equating of support for the Palestinian people with support for Hamas is elevating a minority view.
This would be like my claiming that all Liberal Party of Australia members hate aboriginals. Many do, but that is not how the majority of Liberals see it. Or a claim that all US Republicans are racist. Not sure what nationality you are, but you should get the picture.
Anyway, it's ironic because if you look at all the hate directed at Israel, you could only draw the same conclusion. People hate Israelis, even though it's largely their government doing the fighting ?
If you read that doctrine, you will see propaganda is a major part of Hamas' modus operandi, and many westerners fall for it too. It's actually amazing how many point form the 1998 charter people seem to be repeating now, in 2026.
Back to my point really, if you gave control of the area back to Hamas (because who else would run things), what do you think would happen to innocent people in Israel? If all the people who attended those protests were successful, what do you think the outcome would be ?
I think you have a genuine dogmatic blind spot here.
1. Popular "pro-Palestinian" movements in the West largely do not support Hamas. Sometimes its iconography appears! Just as Nazi iconography sometimes appears at Republican events. This does not imploy majority support!
2. Belief the genocide of the Palestinian people should be halted does not imply support for Hamas.
3. Palestinian self-rule does not necessitate an armed Hamas leadership of the Palestinian territory.
4. Support for Palestinian people and condemnation of the Netanyahu government does not imply an anti-Jewish belief. The majority of American Jews condemn Netanyahu!
There is something in your belief system that erroneously tightly couples Hamas with Palestine. Hamas control of the Gaza strip is only a decade old.
The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech. They love getting their hate out.
The Left have always been a bit more 'censory', generally because of their bleeding hearts on behalf of the minorities that are the targets of the Right's exercising of their free speech.
Such is my understanding. I don't really mind either stance, with the caveat that anything 'censory' has a chance of having it's definitions expanded (and admittedly, this is succumbing to the slippery slope fallacy).
> The Right/Republicans have always touted free speech.
> The Left have always been a bit more 'censory'
Not "always", and not even now. It's always contingent and situational. Same goes for nearly every clause in the Bill of Rights.
At various points the left has been associated with the fights against obscenity laws, against Cold War loyalty oaths, against blacklisting, against bans of books.
At various points the right has been associated with the fights against desecration of the American flag, against the teaching of human evolution in schools, against depictions of sex in media, against anti-war demonstrations.
The right is just as "censory" as the left with things they don't like.
But I think both "the right" and "the left" are kind of reductive and caricatures. I guess forcing you to go in a camp is one of the great woes of American politics.
> But I think both "the right" and "the left" are kind of reductive and caricatures. I guess forcing you to go in a camp is one of the great woes of American politics.
100%, it only seems to fuel the already-present tendency for tribalism.
... right wing freedom of speech is defined with a simple rule.
you're allowed to say anything you want as long as bari weiss determines that you are sufficiently zionist and wont say anything that isnt zionist enough
They're in bed with the resource and gambling sectors, and other big business.
Their record on making actual changes to benefit the people of the country vs keeping their donors sweet is pretty terrible lately. They've half-arsed so much in the last few years it's becoming a meme.
Fabians, AFAICT, pride themselves on evidence-based policy direction. That would have (for example) implied a full ban on gambling advertising as the government's own enquiry recommended, rather than whatever watered-down industry sop Albo actually pushed through.
Labor is in bed with big business, the gambling lobby and the resources sector. Ain't nothing 'left' about any of that.
The only people who think Labor are far left are those who have swallowed the ON/Wannabe-MAGA propaganda, as they try desperately to portray the mainstream as radical. The problem is that Albo's a boring, grey, middle-of-the-road, managerial type of PM so it's laughable to anyone with half a brain.
Don't get me wrong, there are a ton of problems with how Labor are going about governing, this is not an endorsement of them. But the idea they're far anything is such utter brainrot.
You got exactly what you voted for. The left is pro censorship now. From political correctness to deplatforming, to right speech to labeling things misinformation to forgetting my body my choice when Covid came along. This is the natural end of wokism.
You're getting downvoted for the factual inaccuracy of your statement. The party in control of government in the United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to chill free speech. From overt viewpoint discrimination for broadcast television to banning press outlets critical of the administration, to deporting people in legal statuses for political speech, there is no modern parallel by any other political party. The right wing's support for free speech has enormously fallen.
The left wing owns the institutions, big tech and the media and have been controlling speech for the last number of years. Perhaps you've haven't gone to a workplace reeducation class where white people mostly males are berated for the privilege they have because they are white. Or maybe your covid post haven't had your meta account banned or the post labelled misinformation because you wanted to share science.
Trump has been not letting people in the country, kicking them out of schools and searching phones at borders to find out if they have made any posts against Jews.
That's nothing to do with the right wing and everything to do with the Jewish lobby. He has been attacking the right wing for the same reasons. Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, Majorie Green etc all have been attacked, investigated, fired for speaking against Israel.
Trump silences those against Israel while the left silences those against Men in Women's sports, bathrooms, gender surgery for toddlers. Also anyone who questions covid, diy and white men in general.
The right wing is the only place allowing to have free speech. And Fox News isn't considered right wing.
How does "the left" silence those against "Men in Women's sports etc etc"? People keep yapping about it all the time. It's the entire Republican party platform. And COVID. Jesus F. People keep yapping about Fauci the whole time. Never shut up about him. Grilled from day one. Entire congressional hearings devoted to grilling him. My social media feeds are filled with people wishing summary execution on him. Yap yap yap. Zero consequences. It's the politically correct thing to do. Everything you whine about is the official platform of the ruling party of the US, not of some purple haired Starbucks barista in Brooklyn.
H. Christ almighty, you people sure do have an enormous victim complex.
2016 Trump is different from 2026 Trump. His popularity is 29%; many jumped ship over Epstein and many more over Iran. His core supporters in 2016 are not his core supporters now.
I want to be a 'polyharness' maker, so I occasionally switch between Cursor, Claude, Codex, OpenCode etc.
I've tried Gemini (without Antigravity) only about 20 times and it seems of significantly lower quality than the other flagship models (e.g. it missed obvious deductions for my tax return, and often refuses to do things like very harmless/legal web scraping).
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