iteratethis

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It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.

I think when an ad is fact-checked and fails that test, it should become hidden. Even better would be to block the advertiser from the network or even seize their ad spent.

Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability.

But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle?

For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting.

Imagine how hard it is to launch a new product like that? If you'd have a billion users (which is absurdly hard for a new product), you'd then need to monetize them for $20 per year per user. In a saturated competitive environment where users don't want to pay.

Hence, the more common strategy is to turn some dials on the existing money printer. Just increase ads.

That's why FB's Metaverse bet wasn't crazy at all. You make $100B+, social media is stagnating, and you need a huge new revenue stream. They don't really exist. You have to go crazy on big bets.

What are you implying? That the Netherlands, a vastly more progressive nation than the US, is somehow similar to North Korea, an authoritarian state?

I didn't suggest it's a country-wide problem.

The size of a country isn't an excuse for any of this. You won't find this phenomenon in other large developed countries either, not with these specifics.

This is about laying down the law in a very basic way.

These alternative networks are mostly lefty Twitter refugees whom indeed carry on their joyless identity politics and everything that comes with it. Everything is political, there's lots of dunking, excessive safety-ism and universal ideological agreement on everything.

Toxic positivity, it's incredibly tiring and alienating. I think the whole world is done with it.

I think the discussion should be reframed into household hours worked. It fundamentally changes the discussion.

A couple working 4 day work weeks amounts to 1.6 FTE, which is considerably more compared to the traditional breadwinner model. Now if you add that life got a whole lot more demanding/complex outside of work, the sum work load of a family is rather high instead of low.

Another interesting aspect we see in the Netherlands, where we work part-time a lot. Perhaps a little too much. There's a kind of defeatism regarding working more hours. People feel it doesn't really change their life for the better.

When you're already settled, can pay the bills and have reasonable disposable income, working more doesn't really improve your quality of life in a very tangible way.

Young people are even more apathetic. They figure they can't ever afford a home anyway, and with a pension age heading towards 70, they conclude they can't ever retire. In light of this, might as well maximize free time here and now.

Society wants you to work more to combat the population ageing or to compete with China, but on the ground people don't care about this call to arms. The societal contract is broken.

I find it astonishing that nobody has the common sense to consider that the nature of this epidemic is uniquely American, and thus learn from the plenty of developed nations that don't have this problem.

You will barely find any find meth or fentanyl in Western Europe. You won't have zombie blocks nor would they ever be tolerated at this scale. The absurd amount of deaths would trigger urgent and decisive actions.

Nor would frequent petty crimes be tolerated. In the Dutch city that I live, there were imminent threats of looting during the lockdown curfew days. Vast crowds of local men, including the local football hooligans, formed a spontaneous army awaiting the looters.

They would not allow their town to be trashed. Everybody stood for the integrity of their community: citizens, police, businesses. Public disorder is not tolerated, not at a large scale anyway.

The attitude to just let it spiral out of control is anything but "progressive". You have a right to public order, clean cities, consistency in applying justice, it's the basis of a functioning society.

I didn't mean to suggest that you're somehow unreasonable in how you run your server, I was mostly commenting on the larger concept of mainstream Mastodon.

Indeed, right to far-right doesn't stand a chance there so they get blocked. They effectively move to a darkweb situation where you never see their content unless you're really trying hard to look for it.

What remains, mainstream Mastodon, is moderated to the left, if not far-left. Or perhaps it's a very vocal far-left minority silencing the rest. It's of course not universal across the entire network, but roughly the vibe of the network.

Not much has changed since their realization 3 years ago that they need to diversify their revenue. It was then presented as an urgent life/death matter and justification for multiple rounds of layoffs, but very little progress was made as far as I can tell.

In the "mission" statement they're doubling down on a total lack of self-reflection. They actually think they're in the position to "shape" markets and the internet in general.

How so? Just look at AI. How is a 10M Mozilla proof of concept going to move the needle against Google and OpenAI/Microsoft throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it? Where exactly is Mozilla's relevance in influencing anything at all?

And yes, the political brand is annoying and distracting. The "do-good" internet traditionally aligns to liberal, moderate progressive politics. Mozilla's current "woke" brand is not the same thing. It reeks of DEI, identity politics, intersectional feminism, anti-whiteness.

I don't care if you subscribe to these politics, I'm saying it's not moderate nor neutral. It's sub brand of highly polarized US politics that is widely unpopular outside of it. If you claim to stand for the worldwide internet, this is not "inclusive".

Luckily though, it turns out to be a case of woke capitalism. The budget for software development is 221M, the budget for "leadership" 109M.

They do a lot of leading at Mozilla. Nobody knows what exactly is led as zero promises or roadmaps are tangible or deliver anything. When you check board members, fellows and grants...it just leaves you puzzled at what these people do, how it helps, and how it moves the needle.

They can't help themselves. They are used to getting free money by literally doing nothing: keeping the search box aimed at Google. Next they piss it all away on useless initiatives where failure has no consequences.

There are incredibly important differences in user experience when picking one instance over the other.

A very small one has a large likelihood to disappear. Each instance has different moderation rules. On a small instance, you don't even see entire threads and lots of other stuff does not sync properly.

I don't think that paints a complete picture.

There's a shared covenant and there's shared block lists, both of which heavily influence what the norm is on the larger Mastodon network. Perhaps an even larger dynamic are activist-type admins that have an extremely low tolerance for content countering their political beliefs and will blackmail other admins into enforcing a block of a user or entire instance.

None of this is a shocking revelation as a large portion of older Mastodon users are known for their excessive safety-ism. It's a perpetual conflict on the network versus those that want to be more forgiving and pragmatic.

Anyway, the bottom line is that mainstream Mastodon is a left to far-left network, and content is moderated as such. The idea "just pick another server" doesn't really apply.

Mainstream Mastodon is basically hard-left Gen Z. Misfits and doomers, including the many joyless Twitter refugees.

To each their own, but I learned that I rather have a little "too much" speech instead of this.

Firefox was already statistically irrelevant 5 years ago. On our dashboard, a global e-commerce site with billions of views per year, it's not even in the top 10. Even regional browsers sometimes surpass it.

Firefox is also no longer a developer-default browser. This too has been true for years now.

There's very little Mozilla can do about it. Chrome and Safari are big because they're shipped as a default to platforms with billions of users. And the web works well on both of those browsers. It's not an engineering problem. You can't improve Firefox and expect market share to rise.

It's pretty much a done deal, and Microsoft (as well as Brave) using Chromium cemented that deal.

I don't have kids, but I can totally understand how that would increase one's tolerance for chaos.

I think I "don't care" because I'm very analytical. Already at a very young age did I realize that this world doesn't make much sense in that it's not very logical, consistent or fair. It's more like a game to play.

So you develop a kind of "humans going to human" attitude where you detach from drama. Or at least pick your battles.

Endless summer nights are a nice flipside though.

Honestly, human work conditions continue to be primitive, even for "privileged" office jobs.

You sit all day. You have poor lighting. You breath crappy air. The screen stare is damaging to your eyes. You're exposed to lots of stress and few real cognitive breaks.

You're just supposed to ignore every basic human need and best practice and grind through it. And even be thankful for the opportunity too.

Whatever you can do to improve things, is all on you. The expectations remain the same. It's more like a personal hobby, your bodies' basic needs.

Same with "mental health" that employers supposedly care about. They would never take away any root causes, instead...here's a link to an e-course.

Some theorize that the absolute misery of Northwestern Europe during winter is what led to the scientific revolution, industrialization, etc.

Not because the people were brilliant. Simply because they were forced inside and had lots of time to think.

If you'd have read the article, you'd know that lab-based meat is not plant-based.

Given time you will come across almost all of them. And you're expected to rapidly pick up any gaps you may have in that list.

For the simple reason that on most teams, there's no other person.

My tip would be: just don't care.

I once was hired as a type of consultant for an internal matter. The company had a lot of in-house developed software from various internal departments situated in different countries.

A whole bunch of representatives traveled to a single location focusing on one such important application. We had 10 local versions of it. Plan is to get rid of all of them and align on what should go into a single new one that was to be built.

The sessions were a total disaster. A tragedy of the commons situation where each representative did not cooperate or align, instead they all tried to "win" each and every little detail. Frustration grew, there was shouting, petty revenge behavior, toddler-like silence (I refuse to further speak), people simply leaving, and even people crying from stress.

In the debrief with the session leader, she was still traumatized. She watched me dutifully make notes and then asked: how do you do this?

During the sessions, which lasted 2 days, I was at perfect peace amidst a bunch of screaming pseudo-adults. Completely unbothered. I'm not talking about controlling my frustration, I had none at all.

Because I don't care. It's a super power. Which obviously needs to be applied responsibly.

You're wrong.

App/mobile and web developers are stretched beyond belief as it comes to skills expected of them. This handbook gives a reasonable overview of the scope of a front-end developer:

https://thoughtworksinc.github.io/front-end-handbook/en/

Yet it's still incomplete, most of the cloud stuff isn't even included.

We're over-asking people. Take Spotify. Has an army of quite decent engineers. They had to actually build a homegrown platform to shield developers from the ops tooling madness. The average developer struggles to understand just git. Even senior ones do.

Front-end developers were a joke 20 years ago. Not taken very serious, not "real" developers. Now it's one of the most complicated programming jobs there are. You have to know...everything.

As for performance, there I do agree that a programmer has a responsibility.

True. I'm lucky to have a perfectly symmetrical square living room with great acoustics. Well, I think that's beneficial. I have no idea really, but it does sound good.

And I'm quite sensitive to acoustics. In a lot of modern "minimalist" homes I'm upset by the sound bouncing around endlessly, sometimes it's so bad I can barely hear conversations.

There's a few "valid" reasons why homes get more expensive over time that you cannot attribute to malice or greed.

Population growth whilst land does not grow, homes being more advanced, and the 1950s not being a very reasonable comparison. The single breadwinner rich middle class was a blip in history, a temporary post-WW2 effect.

But still if you account for all of that, something is surely off. And as so many countries face this problem, I'm quite sure that you can't solve it with the simple stroke of a pen.

I don't think it's useful to say "a house is for living". Most home owners do use their house to live in, the value appreciation is a side effect of a market that fails to address supply.

Heavy government intervention into private rent markets and project construction so far tend to have the opposite effect. Landlords and development companies simply pull out.

One often suggested approach is to build lots of very high rise apartment towers. Even then I'd expect a price decrease of say 30% only, for a type of living most will not be very fond of. It's a big cultural change. You'll still pay quite a lot, for something that sucks.

My less practical idea is about geographic distribution. Western Europe as an example, some parts incredibly dense. Where we think the "solution" is to endlessly make them even more dense. Whilst Eastern Europe is 80% empty.

I know, there's reasons for it, but when you think about it this way, you'll understand why there's no solution to our current problem. Because we're not solving a problem, we're increasing the size of the problem. I would advocate for fresh thinking in redistributing population pressure.

An unintended summary of the article? Adding people drives up costs?

The only enforceable claim is regarding usage of minors below the age of 13. All other claims are "soft" violations. Legal but unethical.

How do you regulate legal but unethical? You can't. So let's make it illegal. But how?

Maximum notifications per day? Deep introspection of the actual content? Good and bad influencers? Curfue? It's impossible to codify this into law, unless you're China.

It's counter-productive for sure.

Reminds me of the crypto controversy of 2 years back. Mozilla had been allowing crypto donations for as long as they existed.

But then some important ex-employee "rediscovered" this, virtue signaled on Twitter how wildly inappropriate this is and formed a mob powerful enough to make Mozilla take the bow and close crypto donations.

And now? Well, now there won't be crypto donations. The same amount of crypto is mined, just none of it donated to Mozilla. You've achieved less than nothing, but you did the virtuous thing. Whilst simultaneously being funded by Google, with a laundry list of ethical violations, but those "don't count".

The think is criticism is not on the attempt, rather that they are bad at it.

In fairness though, it's actually very hard. Try inventing a new tech product that generates 200-400m in revenue, that others could not easily replicate.

Say you'd have 0.5B at your disposal and a few hundred people. You likely can't do it.

We don't forget this, we don't care. We buy a printer and it should print.

Nobody cares what people need, they care what sells.

Don't have the link, but I once read a study analyzing the Asian market regarding electronics. The focus was on washing machines, fridges, etc. They discovered that more features, even if useless, improves sales.

So you'll have a washing machine with 50 buttons, 20 lights, 2 LED screens. People will buy that over any simpler one.

As long as we consumers behave like this, the other companies go out of business.