I'm interested to see how Bluesky ends up handling bad actors in the long-term. Will they have the resources to keep up? Or will it become polluted like the other large platforms.
Also, if a part of their business model will be based off selling algorithmic feeds, won't that mean more spam is actually good for their bottom line because they'll sell more algorithmic feeds that counter the spam?
The AT Protocol already accounts for this. There will eventually be community-built content labelers and classifers that you can subscribe to to rank and moderate your own feed however you want.
I have a feeling that this is going to create a weird thing of some magnitude where accounts end up on popular blacklists for poor reasons and have no recourse.
I’m concerned that in time it might develop into zealous communities of samethink where you have to mind any slightly dissenting opinion or you’ll get blacklisted.
I think what I’m thinking about is essentially that judges cannot be replaced by community opinion. (Not that Twitter moderation was less bad).
There's ultimately no getting around that kind of segmentation. You can't make everybody read what you want them to read.
If you don't let people control what they encounter, whether by signing up for aggressively moderated communities or subscribing to automated curators or just manually black/white-listing as they see fit, they'll find themselves dissatisfied with all the noise and move on.
Unmoderated social media is not a solution to "zealous communities" and "samethink" -- through self-selection, it just becomes a haven for whatever zealotry or samethink happens to organically dominate it.
Lack of moderation is a kind of moderation itself. It allows the loudest and most unpleasant voices to drown out everything else. "Shout louder and have a thicker skin" isn't really conducive to thoughtful discussion.
It seems to me that "say whatever you want and others have the ability to decide not to listen" is about as good a compromise as you can hope for.
> I have a feeling that this is going to create a weird thing of some magnitude where accounts end up on popular blacklists for poor reasons and have no recourse.
This actually has already kind of occurred with moderation lists and the solution has generally been to strike down list managers who abuse their authority and block them (as you can't normally add someone who has blocked you to their lists).
It's standard practice for impersonators on tiktok to block the person they're impersonating for this exact reason. You can unblock to interact with a third party and then immediately reblock, etc. The victim can't even report the impersonator without a third party DM'ing them a link to the profile.
In Bsky there is built in support for publishing and subscribing to different algorithms or feeds, and these will apply different block lists and moderation. People will subscribe to multiple feeds. It's like how there are different news channels or news sites. You follow multiple of them.
> that in time it might develop into zealous communities of samethink
yeah, this is reddit in a nutshell. Anyone that pointed out that Harris is going to lose the election because of x reasons was ridiculed. Among other things.
He carried all 7 swing states, 5 of them with what looks like it will be a 2% margin or more (and those five would be enough for a victory even without the other two). We lost both houses of Congress. It was a closer election than, say, 2008, but this was a resounding defeat. Saying otherwise is just sticking your head in the sand.
We live in a weird world where a 2% margin in a handful of states counts as a "resounding defeat".
Losing the Senate was expected. The House was perhaps less of a toss up than the presidential election itself, but this outcome isn't really a surprise.
She also lost the popular vote by nearly 3M - more than the entire population of 19 different European countries - and he carried more states than his opponent 4 years ago, and more than Bush did in both 2000 & 2004.
It is by all conventional and accepted definitions a resounding defeat.
It doesn't matter who wins the popular vote. Since you don't get anything for it, the campaigns don't try to increase it. I'm not getting rallies or ads in California.
The DNC barely exists and doesn't do anything. (Same for the RNC.)
In a presidential year it's basically all geography and coattails from the presidential campaign. This one followed the post-inflation trend from every other country, if you need a single explanation for it.
I disagree - IMO the idea of having superdelegates is terrible. Any way of picking your party's candidate that deviates from how the candidate is selected in the general is setting yourself up for failure. IMO this is part of why the party has lost steam and alignment with their base. That does fall on the DNC, I think
we can talk about super delegates if we want, but this is a worlwide phenomenon and goes past advertising and faux represenation. People are frustrated and want change. Any change. They are afraid and fearful people don't make rational choices.
The reason people want change is not because they are “irrational” or “fearful”, it is because the people in power have demonstrated their inability to lead in every capacity. In Germany the government has literally collapsed due to the former coalition’s ineptitude. Prices in America have skyrocketed in the past 4 years, and pay hasn’t even started to catch up. In England innocents are being murdered and the government instead focuses on the people upset about the murders, calling them “terrorists”.
If I fail at my job I am fired, that is a logical outcome. Why do you feel that politicians should be treated differently?
In fact, every single economic indicator is currently better than 2019.
One thing you can say that may be true is that voters are upset because they remember inflation from 2021-22 and are still reacting to it. Or that they don't like high interest rates. And housing prices are bad in blue states and that is the local governments' fault.
But one thing we see from US voters is that R voters claim the economy is bad under a D president and immediately switch to claiming it's good under an R president. So I think you should consider those people are lying.
> R voters claim the economy is bad under a D president and immediately switch to claiming it's good under an R president.
adding on to this, typically it takes 1-3 years for the effects of an administration to really bear fruit in the economy, either good or ill. So a common tactic from the R side the last several presidential cycles is to claim ownership of the economy handed to them by the outgoing D president, then when their policies cause some kind of problem, blame the incoming D president 4 years later.
See also: who the R's blame the deficit on vs. which party's presidents actually increased the deficit the most over the last 20-25 years.
If it takes 2-3 years, then that means that the economic growth we experienced in ~2021 is Trump’s 2017/19 policies, and the economic downturn we’re receiving in 2024 is due to Biden’s 2021/23 policies.
I highly doubt any but the most crude policy changes would demonstrate within 5 years how they were to play out in the longer term. The idea of that seems almost as insane as US politics.
I dont think this graph demonstrates what you think it does. Household income is up, but individual income is down, by the same source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
This would imply that income is down (especially factoring ever present inflation), but households have grown.
> Inflation is over and done with. We even fixed income inequality; it's sharply reduced since 2019:
The Unexpected Compression study is about a specific subset of wages (low), not income. These are different things, even in broad definitions. Inflation is not solved. It continues to be leveraged and has a lasting effect.
> So I think you should consider those people are lying.
Indeed it's down a bit. The reason I didn't link it is that I think household income matters more than personal income, because it's more relevant to paying for the big expenses like the household itself, but it depends how people share expenses.
I think the flat "median personal income" has to do with the baby boomers hitting retirement age and leaving their jobs, but not really sure. It doesn't help that both median income charts end in 2023.
> These are different things, even in broad definitions.
In a high unemployment period they'd be different, but since we have historically low unemployment they're close.
It's okay. Very unstable around 2021, flat but better than 2019 since then. Could certainly be better.
I think it could be improved if we'd kept some of the welfare improvements from 2020 (namely child tax credit expansion), but highly engaged people got distracted advocating for student loan relief since then, and voters are never really into welfare programs even when they're the ones getting it.
> I believe that they are ignorant first.
Thus "consider" ;)
I do think people mainly answer that kind of survey based on what they hear in the news; they're not that selfish and want to seem a little savvy, so if you're asked "is the economy bad" you're going to answer with what you're hearing from everyone else even if you just went on a nice vacation.
Households introduce a lot of variables, especially marriage. In some studies it has been shown you seek higher income opportunities than you might individually.[0] This would be my assumption, at least.
Thank you for for the source, this helps my point perfectly. If household income is only just reaching 2019 levels, but food has gone between 100-200% up in price[0], then that means the effective buying power has been cut in half if not more (depending on the good).
> Inflation is over and done with.
No, it’s not. It returned to a more normal level, but the effects don’t just magically disappear.
> We even fixed income inequality; it's sharply reduced since 2019
Fixed is pulling a lot of weight there. The lowest 10% of earners had wages that returned to pre-pandemic levels faster than those who make more, a lot of which were solely HS grads, and have increased proportionally higher. This does not in any way mean income equality is “fixed”, it’s still obviously there. Additionally, this coincides with your first link that wages for 90% of the population aren’t what they used to be, and those within the 10th percentile are hit the hardest by food prices anyway. Also “economic indicators” don’t matter until either food prices go down or wages meet inflation. As they say, everyone anxiously hopes for bread and circuses.
> One thing you can say that may be true is that voters are upset because they remember inflation from 2021-22 and are still reacting to it. Or that they don't like high interest rates. And housing prices are bad in blue states and that is the local governments' fault.
They’re going to react to it as long as it’s still affecting them, obviously. No one likes high interest rates. And that’s part of a handful of reasons there’s been more movement out of blue states.
> But one thing we see from US voters is that R voters claim the economy is bad under a D president and immediately switch to claiming it's good under an R president. So I think you should consider those people are lying.
This is just hypocritical. So the people you disagree with are liars because they disagree with you? While you’re claiming the economy is great under a Dem, and downplaying one of the most significant bouts of inflation in living memory?
> If household income is only just reaching 2019 levels, but food has gone between 100-200% up in price[0], then that means the effective buying power has been cut in half if not more (depending on the good).
No, the chart I linked is income after accounting for price increases. That's what "real income" means.
The other thing we can see in surveys is that people think their personal economic situation is good, but then think the economy is bad anyway. So they don't generally believe their income is down at this time, though they do remember it being down recently.
> No, it’s not. It returned to a more normal level, but the effects don’t just magically disappear.
Inflation is a rate. When the rate goes down, then it's over. ("disinflation")
When it goes negative ("deflation") it means a severe economic crisis like the one in 2008.
> They’re going to react to it as long as it’s still affecting them, obviously. No one likes high interest rates.
Luckily they've been going down all this year. I think savers like them though.
> And that’s part of a handful of reasons there’s been more movement out of blue states.
Wellllll… the US has a gigantic welfare program for homeownership called 30-year fixed mortgages. Many people bought homes in 2021 when rates were low, so it literally doesn't matter to them if it goes up after that. It does make it harder to move though, or to borrow money for other things.
The housing costs issue more affects young people who want to move out of their parents' places.
> This is just hypocritical. So the people you disagree with are liars because they disagree with you?
It's because they immediately switch. I also thought the economy was good in 2019, but it was definitely bad in 2020. (And worst of all in 2008.)
Also no, I didn't say they were liars, just that it's a possibility.
I did indeed misread, however my graph still proves that buying power, a far more important metric than the useless real income, is down across the board. And these mysteries “studies” don’t particularly help anything. Objectively speaking money went further in 2019 than it has in 2024, and anyone with real world experience can tell you that.
Inflation ending means stable prices. A general reduction in the price level (aka deflation) comes with horrific unemployment for some people and income loss for everyone else. If you think you want that, you don't.
I'm sure they do but you can't lower the general price level without the economy imploding because everyone's in too much debt. Imagine if you just bought a house and then housing prices halved - your loan balance is now twice the value of your house.
You could just declare all nominal prices 100x lower and make everyone rewrite their loan contracts, it'd make the penny useful again too, but the best approach is to just wait until expectations reset or voters find a new thing to get mad about.
(Prices can go down in some sectors, like food/oil/technology; nobody really has a good explanation for when this is safe and when it isn't.)
Also, in this case the guy who got elected was running on explicitly inflationary policy - low interest rates, tax cuts and tariffs. Though I don't think voters knew that.
Towards the end of the Plague Years, when food prices were going up 4%-5% quarter to quarter, people were most definitely complaining that the prices were rising way too fast.
Some of the prices have started to come down a bit in the past few months[ß] but for vast majority of food items, from staples to high-end ingredients, prices remain painfully high.
ß: in the UK, beef and pork are becoming marginally less expensive, possibly thanks to meat producers figuring out that a number of people are willing to try things like venison, spreading the demand across a wider range of products; this year's olive harvest has been so good the prices for olive oil are expected to come down in about another year; and butter has come down (slightly) from its peak.
I don't think its so black and white. There was definitely incorrect information being spread around about the perpetrators migration status.
However, he was a second generation migrant and I suspect some anti-immigration arguments try to make the claim that subsequent generations are also an issue. To these people making the argument that he was second generation so the claims that he was first generation is misinformation would be considered splitting hairs. However, this should not be an excuse for spreading incorrect information and we should always endeavour to accurately communicate the state of the world with other people.
This leads us to some of the other misinformation claims. I've seen it claimed it was misinformation that he was a Muslim. Whether he was a Muslim or not now seems less clear because the police have subsequently revealed he was in possession of a military study of an Al-Qaeda training manual and was also in possession of ricin. Of course it is possible to have such a manual for purely academic purposes or because he wanted to carry out a terrorist style attack but he had no allegiance to Islamic terrorism. But it does lend a small amount of evidence towards him being associated with Islamic terrorism. Also, it's important to note that the people making the claim about him being a Muslim could not have known about this at the time. The strong claims that they made about his religion were certainly not supported by the evidence that they possessed. Of course they may claim they have an oracle they use which involves the behaviour of the police when describing the alleged perpetrator and that allows them to make strong inferences about the background of alleged perpetrator. But I suspect such an oracle will always be weak probabilistically and even you believe it was strong you still have a responsibility to explain that you are using such an oracle when making such claims so other people can properly weigh the evidence themselves.
This information about the training manual and the ricin was also suppressed by the police until October when it was likely to be known in early August. I also consider this a form of misinformation or lying because the police must have known how this information may slightly change how people would evaluate the situation if they were in possession of it but chose not to release it. However, the police may have strong operational reasons for not releasing such information which may have surpassed the value of acting in a truthful manner. Hopefully, there is an investigation into why such information was suppressed because it may have effected the criminal trials of some of the people involved in the riots.
>In Germany the government has literally collapsed due to the former coalition’s ineptitude.
The government collapsed because the party pushed by the country's most influential media company (Axel-Springer) with the expressed goal of collapsing the coalition did just that.
I’m sorry, what? Which party do you mean? The only parties involved with the collapse of the coalition was the coalition itself, SDP, FDP, and Greens. It was all internal disputes that led to the collapse.
Yeah, the introspection is "get people to vote". Apathy has always been the biggest detractor from progress. The distractions of "listen to what (white) men are saying" and "fix the economy" are just distractions from the real reasons D turnout lowered.
“Narrowest possible lost”, sure, minus the fact that despite raising over $1B the Harris campaign still ended up $20M in debt, Republicans are majority in every section of elected government with plans to reinforce that, millions of Americans are becoming disillusioned with Democratic ideology, and you even have the president and his wife casting aside his own VP in favor of Trump by refusing to attend her election night party, but instead meeting with the very same man who did not give him the same courtesy in 2020.
Yeah, aside from all that it was the “narrowest possible loss”.
> minus the fact that despite raising over $1B the Harris campaign still ended up $20M in debt
Why do you think this is worth bringing up? Because it has numbers in it? I don't know what happens to the debt of a campaign after it's over, but I do know it's neither of our problems. It sounds like they've already covered it through late donations though.
Her campaign was swing state-focused and it does seem like it worked in those states (based on relative swings), but it had an unusually short length of time to run. It likely would've just worked if it was a normal length campaign, or if she'd gone on Rogan.
> Republicans are majority in every section of elected government with plans to reinforce that
More like plans to lose it. Enough cabinet members have been pulled from R House members that they're going to have a 2-3 person majority for months.
Starting a presidential year with a trifecta isn't rare, but even more common is that they lose it in the midterms. US voters have no consistent opinions, but their most consistent opinion is "thermostatic swing" - in a midterm year they always vote against whoever is president. Basically they're just haters.
> millions of Americans are becoming disillusioned with Democratic ideology
Eh. I think any theory which assumes voters are actually paying attention or have coherent ideologies is wrong. They have better things to do than that.
In particular, Trump and Obama are very similar here - they're both popular with all kinds of people, because everyone just kind of imagines he agrees with them. (Also, neither of them have successors, which the rest of their party should be worried about.)
Losing over $1.5B of donor (or more accurately, investor) capital does not reflect well when the Trump campaign didn’t even use all of $1B, ran for longer, and won the presidency. Major DNC donors know this and will be less likely to fund future campaigns that include the people who worked on this, especially Harris and Walz.
> I think any theory which assumes voters are actually paying attention or have coherent ideologies is wrong.
Then you’d be wrong. Many voters don’t have coherent ideas on say international policy, however many have specific ideologies regarding more local, important issues, such as food accessibility, welfare, immigration status, body autonomy, etc. Perhaps not across the board, but this belief that people are gormless masses to be controlled is probably a major reason your party has been losing steam.
Obama doesn’t have a successor. Trump has Jr and JD who can and probably will run next cycle (most likely Trump funding, Jr organizing, with JD running) while Barron may in the further future. Whether these are strong enough though, time will tell.
It’s already happened, for instance there are multiple blocklists that try to remove as many furries as possible (which personally is a benefit, although you may think differently). We also have more political ones, mostly anti-“right wing” as bsky trends more “left”. The more extreme elements of Twitter were the first to evacuate, so it’s no surprise that they’re already attempting to rebuild their algorithmically defined echo chambers. Dissenting opinions cause 3d6 psychic damage, after all.
I understand the moderators working for the big social networks have a terrible job and often see the worst the internet has to offer.
Who is going to do that job as a volunteer? Or is that expected to be solved by technology? Hard to imagine them achieving what Google, Facebook etc could not reliably.
Some people seem to get immense satisfaction and pleasure out of censoring other people online.
It's something I've seen time and time again, in a wide variety of discussions forums, for decades now.
Such people will happily do it for free, and they're willing to dedicate many hours per day to it, too.
I don't understand their motivation(s), but perhaps it simply gives them a sense of power, control, or influence that they otherwise don't have in their lives outside of the Internet.
Praying he doesn't take this the wrong way, but perhaps /u/dang would be so kind as to weigh in? I don't equate what he does on a daily basis to censoring, but I'm certain it constitutes a part of the job (after all, this is the Internet, and I'm sure there's all manner of trash making an appearance on occasion). Furthermore, I would posit that there's a bit of overlap between censorship and moderation -- even excellent moderation -- although I welcome any nuance I'm missing on this topic.
Moreover, while I hope he is compensated well enough, I imagine this was initially, if not any longer, a job that demanded effort disproportionate to the monetary reward. What would keep someone interested in such a job and naturally driven to perform it well?
Coming from a place of curiosity, meaning no offense, and happy to let this comment slip quietly away to a back room to sit alone if that's what it merits.
> Furthermore, I would posit that there's a bit of overlap between censorship and moderation -- even excellent moderation -- although I welcome any nuance I'm missing on this topic.
You aren't missing anything. Many people have oppositional defiance disorder and have never used an unmoderated forum; they are completely unusable because they're full of spam.
if there are no reprocussions businesses won’t do jacksh*t but if there were, FB/Google/… would solve any issue like this by the time teapot started whistling…
it is one thing to say they “can’t” vs. “the won’t cause they no reason to”
I mean they cannot do it _automatically_ with high certainty, which is why they hire companies to do it for them, who then make employees look at suspected problematic content / reported content.
I'm sure Google and Facebook wouldn't pay these companies if they could achieve similar results without them.
If AT was distributed using a signed hash message protocol combined with a simple replication strategy (perhaps only replicating a friend and the friends friends) to spread those posts out between their PDSes this burden of moderation would fall less upon the shoulders of their main PDS.
As always I refer the conversion to the ssb API documentation[1] for an example of how AT could have been made.
There was an influx of less than savory characters after reddit censorship of some unfortunate subs, but I don't think voat was created for "bad actors", which is why OP's question is relevant.
While a agree with a few niche points, that some pages don't look good in-between common breakpoints, and that sometimes typography can miss the mark in terms of legibility, I completely disagree with the idea that "canvas" style designs are bad. Look at the graphic design of any modern magazine, very often it looks more like the "canvas" design than the "document". Also, landing pages have nearly infinite real estate, and they are there to communicate as much information as possible, because it might be the only page the user ever sees.
I've been using Hyprland for about a year, and it's pretty great. I only wish there were more official layouts, kinda like XMonad. But it's very possible to add a plugin or use IPC to add just about any functionality you want. I think it's just a matter of time before window managers start being built on top of Hyprland
TLDR: Don't do data fetching in your components if your care about performance. Hoist it up to the route, so you don't have to wait for deeply nested components to render serially.
I rewrote one of my apps in vanilla JS to get the most performance possible, the wheel I had to reinvent is under 150 line of code [1], definitely worst the small cost [2]
Property taxes are assessed on land value + "improvements" (i.e., structures) value. A land value tax doesn't tax the imps. This generally encourages doing more productive things with the same parcel of land.
Also, the idea is to make it heavy enough to neutralize the incentive to just hold the land, which is clearly not productive yet still lucratively "compensated." It's a highly regressive tax. The original highly regressive tax, as can be seen in some of the terminology (landlord) even if the details have drifted since.
I think there's far too much wiggle room in the analysis of land-value vs improvement and would strongly prefer a solution that moves away from perpetual ownership and towards revolving leases instead. The way to do this non-coercively would be to gate the enormous tax benefits we bestow to real estate windfalls (1031 exchanges, the $500k exclusion, the 15% and 20% capital gains rates) behind conversion to a 99 year lease. We won't see the shade beneath those trees but our grandkids will.
Isn't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a vacancy? It's the same problem, just with different clothes: a blighted building in the middle of an expensive city rather than a vacant field in the middle of an expensive suburb.
I can't speak to Austin, but I would expect to see the same thing in the form of low-value land use. It happens whenever appreciation competes with or outstrips productive activity. Which is extremely common.
Investors should pay the collective for exclusive use of a scarce resource, they should not get paid for holding exclusive access to a scarce resource. That's bad and backwards. Unless you're an investor, of course ;)
> Isn't NY notorious for having a "paradoxically" huge vacancy rate due to the strong incentive to never show a decrease in rent, even if it comes at the expense of a vacancy?
Yes, but that's due to financing restrictions. Unless one is planning on putting a tax burden on every piece of real estate analogous to full leverage, the cost of financing an empty unit providing unsufficient motivation to fill it seems to imply a similarly-scaled LVT wouldn't either.
These loans are typically fixed rate and long term. The cost of leverage is nothing next to what appreciation has been, and it's the latter that LVT seeks to neutralize. So it would increase the incentive to actually use the land rather than simply hold a deed to the land.
Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic. If you ask me to defend it, I simply won't. Rolling leases are the way.
>Again, I think that calculating LVT is highly problematic.
It isn't possible to calculate the tax with 100% accuracy, but that doesn't mean it is problematic to calculate with a close enough approximation. The process of multivariate analysis is relatively simple, relies upon public data, can be open sourced and is self correcting over time (with the addition of new data via sales).
It's also absolutely impossible to avoid. $0 needs to be spent on enforcement. You can't cart land off to a tax haven. If you don't pay you forfeit the land and property - simple. You don't need legions of forensic tax accountants to uncover a trail of transactions like you would for income taxes. You don't need arbitrary rules about where somebody's main residence is. You don't need elaborate machine learning models to detect VAT carousel fraud.
You need a bunch of publicly available data and a very simple model.
Anytime you see a plot that is just a parking lot with an attendant in a dense city, that is just a land speculation play. That parcel is still extremely underused, but putting a parking lot on it lets the owner extract some rent in the mean time. A land value tax would ideally be high enough that the owner of that plot would be losing significant amounts of money even with that parking lot there, and would be incentivized to sell it to someone who wants to actually develop it immediately.
The suburban version of this phenomenon is the self-storage place. Build cheap steel structure(s) that can generate a little income now while holding land that will presumably be more valuable in the future.
I think it's a bit different: property tax taxes the actual property that is located on the piece of land, i.e. single family home, for its current value. Land value tax works differently: tax authorities ask themselves a question: "what is the most profitable thing one could possibly build on that land?", and they tax you based on that. Which means that if you build a single family home in the neighborhood of 7-stories apartment buildings you will be taxed as if you owned an apartment building. And the only way for you to be able to afford those taxes is to actually build 7-stories apartment building there.
EDIT: I know I'm simplifying a bit. The actual tax laws might not be worded the way I described it, but the net effect is exactly this: you are taxed on the potential resale value of your land, which is highly dependent on "what's the most valuable thing that can be built here?" question.
The problem is that it could work that way, or it might not. It depends on what tax rate the government sets, which could change depending on the time, the economy, and the current administration. If the government guesses the magic rate that discourages speculation without discouraging other relatively low-value businesses that society still needs to function, then yes, that's a great system. However, I'd the government overshoots or undershoots, then the land value tax doesn actually fix anything.
Property tax = you do not own the land, the government does and leases it to you. Setting the rate to the highest rate is stupid because it means the government confiscates all the land and leases it only to e.g. casinos and you get nothing but casinos.
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