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Apparently I am seething with malaise and disdain for Silicon Valley, and that's distasteful or something. 
Well, SV has been causing malaise (ask the parents whom Zuck was *just* apologizing to) for and showed disdain (ask the Rohingya) towards pretty much everyone else. And made a killing doing so.
OpenAI said outright it's impossible for them to compensate authors of works they use as "training data". Implying their business model is more important than somebody's livelihood. 
@rysiek@mstdn.socialI won't be novel in saying huge tech companies are roughly what Big Tobacco was a few decades ago.
By now the harm they cause is increasingly clear, but everyone's hooked. It's hard or impossible to quit cold-turkey, and they know it.
So they milk it as long as they can, and engage in irrelevant performative actions (Zuck apologized, but did not offer any compensation) to make it rain as long as possible.
Yeah, excuse me for not having the stomach for the hype they peddle as a distraction. 
Birdsite
@rysiek we (human society) are generally good at dealing with people who cause huge harm to another or a few, e.g. murder. We generally share the same disdain for them and are horrified at their acts. The same is not true for those who cause smaller harm to many. Sometimes *very many*, like billions. Sometimes we even worship - rather than vilify - them. Historically, individuals didn't have that much reach. We need to develop a new and better approach - a healthy social immune response.
@lightweight you're right of course. And it also holds for people who cause massive harm (to few or many people) very indirectly.
We keep falling for that one.
@lightweight @rysiek interesting comparison! So can we turn use of problem social media services into the social pariah that smoking has become? Or will that just lead to the social media equivalent of vaping? Maybe that already happened? FB is only for boomers these days? X is toxic? So Meta buys up WhatsApp and Insta where the kids have moved to? Can this fediverse be made safe enough for kids? Is social media going to have to be regulated as an adult only thing? Hmm.
@Slash909uk
> can we turn use of problem social media services into the social pariah that smoking has become
As a non-smoker who lived through the depopularisation of smoking, I'd say the single biggest turning point was when smoking was banned from bars and restaurants. Suddenly people had to stay out of social spaces to smoke, instead to avoid it.
Is there some analogous way we can exclude recommendation algorithms from our social spaces?
@Slash909uk
> will that just lead to the social media equivalent of vaping? Maybe that already happened? FB is only for boomers these days? X is toxic? So Meta buys up WhatsApp and Insta where the kids have moved to?
See my posts about the #Juul documentary. What allows attempts at ethical replacements to be bought by companies they seek to replace is their ownership structures. If Juul had been a worker-owned co-op, the Big Tobacco buyout would have been voted down.
@strypey @lightweight @rysiek perhaps this is where federation can win out? Buying one business is easy to engineer; buying a federated network not so. So it seems imperative that we keep the size of instances to only some fraction of the entire network? Masto.social/etc is already a problem maybe?
@Slash909uk it absolutely is a problem, and I wrote about it a while ago:
https://rys.io/en/168.html
@rysiek @Slash909uk @strypey @lightweight I've been ranting about this along with a minority. You explore it further by citing examples that are REALLY good and add 'historical' facts. You could also further add that mostr.pub - the bridge between the Fediverse and Nostr - is blocked by mastodon.social.
/Please don't come at me with Nostr is full of spammer or is full of bitcoin(ers) - that's utterly wrong or 'propaganda' (if you'd like to call it that).
@Slash909uk
> So it seems imperative that we keep the size of instances to only some fraction of the entire network?
I'm not sure that's possible. But there are things we could do to normalise smallness, like make invite-only registrations the default in AP server software. Or make free hosting of single-account servers the default entry point for newbies, instead of giant open-invite servers. If they used BYO domains, they would give newbies control of their identity.
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@Slash909uk
> Masto.social/etc is already a problem maybe?
Indeed, as @rysiek and others have long pointed out. FarceBook's Chains (I refuse to call them "Meta" or "Threads") even more so.
An organised refusal to federate with servers that use recommendation algorithms could mitigate the risk. But that's the equivalent of trying to ban smoking one bar or restaurant at a time. The ban worked for smoking because is applied to all of them.
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@Slash909uk
One social media equivalent of govt bans on smoking in bars is a govt ban on surveillance ads, forcing a return to context-based ads;
"NPO switched to serving context-based ads – which didn't involve processing any personal information, and thus didn't require a consent process – and its revenues soared. It was showing ads to a lot more people, and those ads were about as effective as the surveillance ads it had deprecated."
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/26/ico-ico/
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@Slash909uk
This would massively re-decentralise the online ad market, removing the main funding source that drives social platforms to grow huge, and push for sticky recommendation algorithms.
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@strypey @lightweight @rysiek that's a nice piece by Cory on the impact of GDPR and the move by NPO to dump surveillance tech. I'd not read that before, thanks!
I can see ad-tech moving to hide their surveillance even more as a response to this; let's hope consent is policed better in future!
@Slash909uk
> that's a nice piece by Cory on the impact of GDPR and the move by NPO to dump surveillance tech. I'd not read that before, thanks!
Welcome : ) I highly recommended subscribing to his podcast feed. That's where I first came across that piece and most of the others I've quoted from and linked to over the past few months.
@Slash909uk
> I can see ad-tech moving to hide their surveillance even more as a response to this
I guarantee they'll engage as much malicious compliance as they can, for as long as they can get away with it. Just like Apple in response to the EU ruling their app store monopoly illegal under the DMA. Here's Cory again on that;
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma
Just like the cigarette industry rearguard action against govts' slow crackdown on the harm they cause, it can't last.
@rysiek Well said, this is the first post I've ever made to my newsletter: