non-cotton

Do you want a happy life, or a worthwhile life? I think they're probably correlated, but I don't think you can guarantee one without risking the other. In that light, optimizing for happiness seems like the wrong move.

This conversation plays out every time the topic of taking notes comes up, especially if roam research and friends are involved. It's "the Dropbox thing", but instead of being too cool and smart and skeptical to buy into a new storage service, it's the written word, one of the cornerstones of human civilization.

Having things written down is a good idea. The big pile of notes you no longer care about doesn't matter. The value is in the small fraction of things you do end up wanting to come back to. Good luck figuring out which is which ahead-of-time. Writing down things that you think might be useful is so easy, and the cost is negligible.

The notion that writing is mostly useful as a memory aid seems like a totally misguided "both-sides" synthesis. Having things written down is actually just a good idea.

Discord isn't on your side. They're an unprofitable (so far) VC-backed company whose only customer-facing product is a well-designed chat client. They're clearly trying to build a platform for PR- and ad-friendly discourse. Nobody should be surprised when weirdos get the ban.

I guess I should have said: what's the advantage of democracy over some more authoritarian scheme, if not a higher degree of "power to the people" as you put it?

If diffusion of power isn't fundamentally worthwhile (and there's certainly a defensible position that it isn't) it seems the important question is whether Western liberal democracy is worth the trouble in the first place.

Isn't diffusion of power more-or-less the point of democracy?

Sure, but that wouldn't have prevented the "cancer" from moving to decentralized networks. If anything it'd probably accelerate the process.

I think the important point is that most operators of nodes on a federated network are not in a position to benefit from this kind of garbage content, and have every reason (and the tools they need) to keep it away from their portion of the network.

I thought the article made a reasonably convincing case that decentralized networks provide better tools for good actors to control the spread of disinformation.

What does it mean to "remove the cancer before it decentralizes" in this context?

Could site owners freely decide who's allowed to post to their site without 230? Seems to me the ability to ban unwanted users would enable a decent degree of moderation without direct control over what's posted. It wouldn't have to be all-or-nothing, you could always give an offending poster the opportunity edit or remove a post to avoid a ban. Would that be a viable way to moderate a community?

Is there a set of earphones that's repairable? Not full-size cans, but earphones?

Most of the ones I've had have that have failed did so at the cable connection. Without the cable I'd imagine these will last longer than your average pair of earphones, and I don't see them creating much more waste; less if anything.

I think this has a lot to do with the platforms vs. publishers issue, and the Section 230 dustup we're about to see.

IMO any platform whose owners have enough editorial control for these engagment-hacking techniques to be useful (the ability to decide what gets seen, what doesn't, and who sees what) should be treated as a publisher, not a platform.

This doesn't have to kill online communities generally. As long as we can distinguish between editorial control and freedom of association (i.e. the ability to ban rule-breakers and people we don't like) I don't see why effective moderation wouldn't be possible.