volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@freemo Yeah, asking people to put their evidence on their table sounds like a pretty good idea.

But it does get frustrating when you ask if there has been evidence, and people were reply that there absolutely has, and what they present isn't evidence at all, and you point that out, and they say it is, and at that point there's nowhere else to go with it.

It's raining outside!
What's your evidence?
Well here's a bucket full of water from the rain!
...That bucket is empty.
No it's full of rain! Look at all this water in it!

Siiiigh

I refer to it as the book club theory. We all showed up to the book club, and we all read books with the same title, but the plot lines were different in different people's copies, so it's pretty darn hard to discuss the book.

@David I'm of the opinion that we should let people do their art the way they want to do their art, so okay fine we can point out that alt text is important for the vision impaired, but if the artist feels that it's not right for their expression, I absolutely don't think we should hold that against them.

Or one way to put it is that if we all have to choose between you posting without alt text or you feeling kind of suffocated by that ask, I'd rather you post without alt text.

The way I look at it this is supposed to be about expression and any requirements that interfere with that expression, however the author/artist feels right, is something we ought to not impose.

@wjmaggos I don't think so.

When I put an idea out there, that someone would like to talk about, how do I know to go searching for it? How many conversations am I going to miss because I didn't know to go search for replies to some content I put out a while back?

No, if someone has something to add to something I've said, I want to be notified so I don't miss it.

OR, how about this, let the end user decide what notifications they want. Keep the functionality in the system, but let the end user decide how they'd like to set their notification preferences.

I always want to talk about empowering people to make their own experiences here, not take away options.

I *believe* the system probably already exposes enough info that it can tell if something is a reply to a boost, and it can mute that if the user doesn't want to know about it.

@siderea @va3db @Gargron @taylorlorenz

@DemDifference it'd be a waste.

Anyone not already in the choir it'd speak to knows why those statistics are misleading at beast, so they'd just ignore them.

@olmitch Not necessarily.

If the student went with the goal of getting that degree, and the college successfully gave them what they expected, what they paid for, well the college didn't fail.

If the degree doesn't get the person where they want to go, though, well they failed to make the right decisions in their personal life.

@david_megginson keep in mind that not everyone bought into, or cared about, that sense of authority.

@timbray

@freemo the thing is, we live in a time where two people can see the exact same thing, read the exact same words, and come away with exactly opposite ideas about what they just saw or read.

So in that sort of environment... the answer to your question depends on who you ask.

It's just the state of society, that we can look at the same weather report and disagree about whether it's raining or not.

@wjmaggos don't overlook the role of critical mass, though.

A LOT of platforms have come and gone despite being better than the services offered by the big guys, but they were missing users, so it didn't matter.

No, this isn't fair, yes, it's really a shame, but it's reality.

Good tech doesn't solve that problem, unfortunately.

@siderea in that case I simply disagree with your proposal altogether :)

I think replies to boosted content SHOULD go back to the author. When I put out content, and someone else boosts, I DO want to be engaged with by default.

I'd say it breaks the conversation, almost hijacking threads away from the author, to break it on the hinge like that.

QTs at least make this action clear, reframing into a new thread with a pointer back to the old one.

So @wjmaggos I'd say this without QTs is the worst of both worlds.

The author's thread is broken, but without a new contextualization to justify that break.

@siderea says the reply function as it is is almost as if the person doing the boosting is saying "Why don't you go on and tell them what you think?"

And that's EXACTLY how I, as an author of content here, expect it to work, it's exactly the value I derive out of the platform.

I'd hate to miss out on the conversation that my content prompted happening elsewhere.

@va3db @Gargron @taylorlorenz

@iquaanyin@mastodon.social *selling* implies it.

It doesn't matter what you're selling, the implication is that you find yourself better off having made that choice, or else you wouldn't have done it.

But I was thinking, you can look at it the other way around: if it does imply abject desperation, then outlawing this transaction doesn't outlaw the abject desperation. That person is in just as bad a place as before.

It's just that you've removed one option from that poor person for responding to their situation.

@eeyam

@iquaanyin@mastodon.social selling implies associating with someone else for mutual benefit, implies being better off having found that way to help someone else.

We sell things all the time even in the absence of desperation.

Selling only implies that the seller has taken an opportunity to be better off in the world.

We should at least consider the problems in blocking people from such opportunities to come out ahead.

@eeyam

@RunRichRun

The Founding Fathers absolutely did consider low ethical standards and they wrote about that problem.

And that's why we have separations of powers, independent judiciary, checks and balances, etc.

The famous quote is:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary."

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0199

@AlaskaWx

@RunRichRun but this piece follows the same misunderstandings that the Court was trying to raise awareness of.

Most importantly it misses that unlike lower courts, the SCOTUS was specifically set up to be independent of the other branches, to maintain the crucial independent judiciary of the federal government.

It's not that the code contains no enforcement mechanisms, but rather that it CANNOT contain enforcement mechanisms without piercing the independent judiciary and creating conflicts of interest.

That's what people seem to misunderstand, though it's basic civics.

@olmitch well at least there's the "with intent to destroy" qualifier

@jargoggles

Cause: a person signs up for the platform that gives them the better experience for them

Effect: They receive the experience that's better for them

That's why people do it.

They don't care about the billionaires like you do. They have other interests.

So it's not that they just enjoy being controlled by billionaires--it's that they don't care about billionaires, but they DO care about the better experience they get on those platforms.

@forteller

@forteller no, it's more that people prefer systems that give them better user experiences and better match what they want out of social media, and not all of us share that consuming concern with billionaires.

Great, that's your crusade, your ax to grind on about.

But it's just not relevant to so many of us, so it doesn't enter into our decisionmaking.

It's just another form of celebrity gossip, and that's just not interesting to so many of us.

@aeva this reminds me of disputes from decades ago where the term software engineer ran into issues with longstanding legal rules built up around the term "engineer"..

I think the profession ran faster than governments noticed, and by the time they started to say something the term was already too far in use, so not being able to put that horse back in the barn, they had to change the law instead.

(Or just ignore the laws and leave them unenforced. It probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction)

Off the top of my head "technologist" might have been the existing term that best fit it, since that term is used similarly in the broader engineering world.

It doesn't have a good zing to it, though.

@eeyam the one where we recognize the importance of lifesaving surgery and see a way of making it more accessible to those in need?

And decide that we should at least consider it?