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That is correct, but it's not to media's credit. Most journalists say basically, "Trust me, I'm the authority, I wouldn't be allowed to say this if it were simply lies. I could prove it to you but I won't, at worst I'll be forced to prove it to my peers. (And you aren't one, peasant)." They practically never link to the scientific paper they just reported on, certainly not to anything that could let us check politically controversial claims ourselves.

And how could it be otherwise? You aren't the customer. Ads, or worse, billionaire political patronage, is what pays the bills for media companies. Their authority - the blind trust people have in them - is what makes them valuable for their actual customers. They're not doing science, the last thing they want is to make it easy to check their work (although, maybe I'm too charitable to scientists too here, if they make it easier to check their work it's often the bare minimum, but I digress).

One of the original points of WikiLeaks was to make a kind of journalism where claims were easy to check from the sources. But you can see how controversial that was.


"Bigfoot" isn't inherently a conspiracy theory. If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist. To be a conspiracy theorist, you also have to posit a grand conspiracy to conceal the existence of bigfoot.

If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.


> If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong

That not a philosophically supportable statement. "There's insufficient evidence to warrant belief in your claim" is more realistic.


It wasn't meant to be philosophical, it was meant to be practical. As a practical matter, you're wrong if you say that Bigfoot exists, or that the sun won't rise tomorrow.

> If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.

No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.


Not me, I didn't. That conspiracy was certainly pretty big, but there was also a ton of smaller leaks as you'd expect on a real conspiracy of that size, so you certainly wouldn't be called nuts for assuming NSA were spying on a lot they weren't supposed to.

Security state loyalists were not nearly as influential in online discourse back then, as they are now. Probably astroturfing, AI and algorithmic amplification plays a part in that.


> If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist.

I’m not sure if “I’m just a cryptozoologist” is much of a vindication.


It's the record companies/publishers which don't use them. I don't think I know one record company which reports metadata well.

Spotify's discover weekly was genuinely good when it first came. It was on another level from other recommendation services. Maybe 90% of the music I've bought on Bandcamp, I would never have known about if it wasn't for discover weekly (Bandcamp's own recommendation/discovery features are lousy).

But somehow, probably from a combination of rights owners gaming it and Spotify gaming it, DW is a pale shadow of its former self.


It has been tried. I don't remember its name, but I remember that they have changed names at least once. It's a pretty obvious "app" for Spotify's API which they opened up a few years ago.

If you're implementing it for Computercraft anyway, there's no reason to stick to the standard. It's well known that bzip2 has a couple of extra steps which don't improve compression ratio at all.

I suggest implementing Scott's Bijective Burrows-Wheeler variant on bits rather than bytes, and do bijective run-length encoding of the resulting string. It's not exactly on the "pareto frontier", but it's fun!


Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.

wow, is there more on this?

Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore


You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.

Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.


> but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines

The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.


Inviting people who invited bots chould also hurt your "social credit" score in various ways.

Your tree could for instance be pruned - you can still invite people, but the people you invited can no longer invite people.

There are not a lot of sites which have tried this and failed. Those which have tried to be even a little bit clever about it, have succeeded pretty well (Advogato was a really early example).

What there have been, are sites which rejected such restrictions after a while, because they would rather have a big number to show to investors than real people. Many have even run the fake accounts themselves (e.g. Reddit).


If by worked you mean "worked so well they replaced all the big actors" then sure, nothing has worked.

But plenty has worked on a smaller scale. Raph Levien's Advogato worked fine.

There's also a reason most new social networks start up as invite only - it works great for cutting down on spam accounts. But once they pivot to prioritizing growth at all costs, it goes out the window.


Yes, we get the same speed from suffix arrays these days, and much, much less memory usage.

But good luck visualizing what those algorithms do :)


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