I thought I had a friendly tone and was being nice. I really did not intend to come off as aggressive. Rereading this I see how it can come off sarcastic and condescending instead of the friendly informational tone I was going for. Sorry.

kbin.cafe

If you click my profile, you can see both my username and the instance I come from!

Thank you for trying to think of us, but I wasn’t asking for help at all so I’m not sure why I was tagged with @. I also barely use plugins.

Why is this tagged as being written in Japanese?

This is answered on the Obsidian help page. TL;DR: it automatically updates. Version is in the upper left corner of Settings - About.

Remember the eleven separate times (and two HobbyDrama posts) where people leaked classified military details because they didn’t like the inaccuracy of the military vehicles in the video game War Thunder? It happened again.

Probably going to do a writeup on this, including both this new leak and the old ones that the two HobbyDrama posts didn’t cover. Right now it’s breaking drama so I need to wait.

Taking photographs and using your phone during a theatrical performance is usually considered bad theatre etiquette. These aren’t obscure rules used by a small group of theatre snobs to tell who’s a newbie and who’s a fellow member of the elite. They’re announced to everyone attending the show (sans late arrivals and people using the bathroom). Most shows, including Beetlejuice, have a pre-show announcement that happens right before the show begins. The announcement says something like “the use of any recording device is strictly prohibited” and asks the audience to turn off their cellphones.

I normally wouldn’t do this, but because the Fediverse is small and it’s semi-relevant… !musicals. There’s currently a bug that makes !communityName@instancelinks like the one I just wrote not always federate out properly from Kbin, so here are some alternative links to the same place: @musicals and https://kbin.social/m/musicals.

I don’t consciously make these calculations either, but what you just described sounds exactly like how I choose what to click on. Also came here for suggestions!

I’ll say that I’ve looked up hobbies I enjoy but don’t think about much so I can boost my engagement on the Fediverse. Normally I wouldn’t bother, but I want to help this place grow, so I’ve let in things that I have a milder interest in as well as my usual interests. This is also how I get variety in the posts I see, as I usually stick to /sub. When I wander out, it’s on purpose and to a specific known community, because /all usually has some depressing political news or ragebait that would get me to outrage-click. I’m here to have a good time, not to doomscroll or get angry. Kbin has no algorithm intended to keep us scrolling on it, but those things do generate the most engagement, so it’s only natural they end up on /all frequently enough (though not as frequently as they’d appear on the popular page on Reddit) that I feel a desire to avoid /all.

I feel like I learned this difference at some point but totally forgot about it. Thank you for your explanation, I’ll definitely remember this time!

From my instance on kbin I already had two clickable links. Did they not work on lemm.ee?

“We believe that users should have a say in how their attention is directed, and developers should be free to experiment with new ways of presenting information,” Bluesky’s chief executive, Jay Graber, told me in an email message.

Of course, there are also challenges to algorithmic choice. When the Stanford political science professor Francis Fukuyama led a working group that in 2020 proposed outside entities offer algorithmic choice, critics chimed in with many concerns.

Robert Faris and Joan Donovan, then of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, wrote that they were worried that Fukuyama’s proposal could let platforms off the hook for their failures to remove harmful content. Nathalie Maréchal, Ramesh Srinivasan and Dipayan Ghosh argued that his approach would do nothing to change the some tech platforms’ underlying business model that incentivizes the creation of toxic and manipulative content.

Mr. Fukuyama agreed that his solution might not help reduce toxic content and polarization. “I deplore the toxicity of political discourse in the United States and other democracies today, but I am not willing to try solving the problem by discarding the right to free expression,” he wrote in response to the critics.

When she ran the ethics team at Twitter, Rumman Chowdhury developed prototypes for offering users algorithmic choice. But her research revealed that many users found it difficult to envision having control of their feed. “The paradigm of social media that we have is not one in which people understand having agency,” said Ms. Chowdhury, whose Twitter team was let go when Mr. Musk took over. She went on to found the nonprofit Humane Intelligence.

But just because people don’t know they want it doesn’t mean that algorithmic choice is not important. I didn’t know I wanted an iPhone until I saw one.

And with another national election looming and disinformation circulating wildly, I believe that asking people to choose disinformation — rather than to accept it passively — would make a difference. If users had to pick an antivaccine news feed, and to see that there are other feeds to choose from, the existence of that choice would itself be educational.

Algorithms make our choices invisible. Making those choices visible is an important step in building a healthy information ecosystem.

Here’s the text!

Social media can feel like a giant newsstand, with more choices than any newsstand ever. It contains news not only from journalism outlets, but also from your grandma, your friends, celebrities and people in countries you have never visited. It is a bountiful feast.

But so often you don’t get to pick from the buffet. On most social media platforms, algorithms use your behavior to narrow in on the posts you are shown. If you send a celebrity’s post to a friend but breeze past your grandma’s, it may display more posts like the celebrity’s in your feed. Even when you choose which accounts to follow, the algorithm still decides which posts to show you and which to bury.

There are a lot of problems with this model. There is the possibility of being trapped in filter bubbles, where we see only news that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. There are rabbit holes, where algorithms can push people toward more extreme content. And there are engagement-driven algorithms that often reward content that is outrageous or horrifying.

Yet not one of those problems is as damaging as the problem of who controls the algorithms. Never has the power to control public discourse been so completely in the hands of a few profit-seeking corporations with no requirements to serve the public good.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X, has shown what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a social media company.

Since Mr. Musk bought the platform, he has repeatedly declared that he wants to defeat the “woke mind virus” — which he has struggled to define, but that largely seems to mean Democratic and progressive policies. He has reinstated accounts that were banned because of the white supremacist and antisemitic views they espoused. He has banned journalists and activists. He has promoted far-right figures such as Tucker Carlson and Andrew Tate, who were kicked off other platforms. He has changed the rules so that users can pay to have some posts boosted by the algorithm, and has purportedly changed the algorithm to boost his own posts. The result, as Charlie Warzel said in The Atlantic, is that the platform is now a “far-right social network” that “advances the interests, prejudices and conspiracy theories of the right wing of American politics.”

The Twitter takeover has been a public reckoning with algorithmic control, but any tech company could do something similar. To prevent those who would hijack algorithms for power, we need a pro-choice movement for algorithms. We, the users, should be able to decide what we read at the newsstand.

In my ideal world, I would like to be able to choose my feed from a list of providers. I would love to have a feed put together by librarians, who are already expert at curating information, or from my favorite news outlet. And I’d like to be able to compare what a feed curated by the American Civil Liberties Union looks like compared with one curated by the Heritage Foundation. Or maybe I just want to use my friend Susie’s curation, because she has great taste.

There is a growing worldwide movement to provide us with some algorithmic choice — from a Belgrade group demanding that recommender algorithms should be a “public good” to European regulators who are demanding that platforms give users at least one algorithm option that is not based on tracking user behavior.

One of the first places to start making this vision a reality is a social network called Bluesky, which recently opened up its data to allow developers to build custom algorithms. The company, which is financially supported by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, said that 20 percent of its 265,000 users are using custom feeds.

On my Bluesky feed, I often toggle between feeds called Tech News, Cute Animal Pics, PositiviFeed and my favorite, Home+, which includes “interesting content from your extended social circles.” Some of them were built by Bluesky developers, and others were created by outside developers. All I have to do is go to My Feeds and select a feed from a wide menu of choices including from MLB+, a feed about baseball, to #Disability, one that picks up keywords related to disability or UA fundraising, a feed of Ukrainian fund-raising posts.

Choosing from this wide selection of feeds frees me from having to decide whom to follow. Switching social networks is less exhausting — I don’t have to rebuild my Twitter network. Instead, I can just dip my toes into already curated feeds that introduce me to new people and topics.

m/savedyouaclick. It does exist at @savedyouaclick, but that won’t federate over to kbin for me. I tried multiple times to get the magazine over here, multiple times entering @[email protected] in the search bar and it’s still not here so might as well remake it. I’m guessing the reason for this is the same reason behind this issue about a magazine from a specific instance not federating over on kbin’s codeberg: something that is fixed in later versions of lemmy. Not sure if lemmy.nrd.li is running a version late enough that it fixes this issue or not.

I also intended to make a couple other magazines that did not have any equivalent I could find on the lemmy.world community search (since it’s one of the biggest instances I figure it’ll show me the most communities, including communities that are not on lemmy.world), but they now have an equivalent!

Are you saying that you think I have zero chance of getting a magazine off the ground so I have more posters than just myself, or zero chance of finding someone else who is willing to moderate? I’m not entirely sure I understand your reply.

I’m fine with being active in the place, doing lots of advertising, doing my best to get the place off the ground, writing up rules, etc.

I’m not fine with being the first line of defense against some troll posting gore. I also know that I tend to be pretty oversensitive and might use moderator powers to remove replies that really should have stayed up. Hence “I do not have the… thick skin needed to be a moderator”.

So yeah, this is totally self-serving. Don’t feel like putting myself through the gore or putting myself through the “oh my god fucking powertripping mod” criticism (whether warranted or unwarranted), better stay out of that position of power in the first place.

Part of my creative projects vault is ideas for a homebrew D&D campaign! What's yours like? I need to flesh out my world a little and add a few spicy situations before it's ready for players.

A Reddit replacement, except without doomscrolling. On Reddit I would follow communities for hobbies and have discussions about the hobby, and I’d like to do the same here. I would also doomscroll news and all the outraged comments on the news, and I would very much not like to do the same thing here.

On Kbin, there isn’t an easily-accessible Discovery feed, which is where I would click and fall into the doomscrolling and people yelling at the news. Once it gets implemented for those who want it, I dearly hope we can hide it. Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, I know it’s my own fault for clicking the Discovery button in the first place. I’ll stick to the magazines I /sub to, thank you very much. I can find new interests perfectly well through real-life friends, and learn about the news from actual news articles.

Not right now, considering there’s an issue open on codeberg proposing the ability to do this.