*taking back control intensifies* http://money.cnn.com/2017/11/22/news/economy/uk-france-biggest-economies-in-the-world/index.html
Thinking about what we do when the Russian bots and the Angry Brigaders come to Mastodon.
"We block them!" is the obvious response. Masto lets both #mastoadmins and users block/silence both individuals and instances. And that’s good for now. But what’s gonna happen when we’re big enough to get large scale attacks?
Should admins be automatically alerted if multiple folks on their instance start blocking a person? Or an instance? Or if, say, five different people on your instance blocked five different people from badactor.donuts? Hell, maybe you want to automatically defederate with badactor.donuts when that happens, and tell the admin so they can rescind the block when they get a chance to investigate.
This is hopefully a long way away from happening. But it feels like a thing we should start thinking about. How do we give people who are running an instance as a hobby the tool to quickly detect and deal with attacks?
(This probably also goes with my musings on "friend" instances potentially watching what each other block, and alerting their admin/autoblocking when enough friends are blocking the saame thing. It’s kind of the same idea on a lower level.)
Thesis: a web of trust based social network wouldn't have a reliable "global" follower / like / etc count -- it would only be the ones you've seen -- and this would be a feature.
Some of the most toxic behavior on Twitter comes from people trying to become "the most popular person in the room", which also leads to a lot of social messaging which isn't about being constructive, but differentiating yourself in a way that makes you look better than others.
😃 #Mastodon is getting a lot of new users right now, but, importantly, it's also getting new instances. Here are two comics focused instances for #under1000
I want to use Mastodon more, but I'm having trouble finding likeminded people. Hit me up if you like (or make!) narrative driven games/adventure games, or making YouTube vids/Twitch streams about them. Or if you just fancy a giggle. #gamedev #adventuregames #youtube #twitch #narrativedesign
Freedom House report: 30 countries use "armies of opinion shapers" online
https://www.ft.com/content/223af71a-d853-11e6-944b-e7eb37a6aa8e
<<Being an English-speaking society is like living in a glass house: it makes you transparent. Conversely, foreign countries are opaque to mostly monolingual Britons and Americans. Foreigners know us much better than we know them. This asymmetry probably helped Russia get its favoured candidate into the White House, and it will handicap Britain in the Brexit negotiations.>>
How a half educated #tech elite delivered us into chaos. Key paragraph: "Put simply, what Google and Facebook have built is a pair of amazingly sophisticated, computer-driven engines for extracting users’ personal information and data trails, refining them for sale to advertisers in high-speed data-trading auctions that are entirely unregulated and opaque to everyone except the companies themselves." [and perhaps opaque to themselves] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/19/how-tech-leaders-delivered-us-into-evil-john-naughton
Whoever these people are, they are very good at gaming Google and Youtube rankings.
It would be interesting to find out just what else they've gamed.
An interesting thing about the 'Leahz' persona is that she's been around a while, spreading the craziest conspiracy theories: a meteor was going to hit in 2015; the blizzard of 2014 was 'fake snow'.
https://www.metabunk.org/fake-snow-what-happens-to-old-theories.t3469/
In the light of 2016/2017: it's worth considering that these stories and these conspiracy actors are NOT random. And while they might make money out of it, it's very possible that some of these are state-level actors just trying to destablise the USA.
Imagine how satisfying House of Cards would have been if season three had been about Frank Underwood's fall─everything falling apart?
Instead they went for longevity with each successive season being less satisfying because the closure of a villain story is in their downfall
um, excuse me? need?? what part of Maslow's hierarchy are GeForce Experiences listed under? https://mastodon.social/media/Lef7uVp4u97ZfTSfenA
DND
First time planning a large-scale battle... I think tomorrow my party is going to be part of the defense of a medium-sized town. Orcs gonna be there, human army gonna be there. But the party isn't high-level enough to dominate this battle on their own - they'll just contribute. We'll see what happens.
Per the Evil Overlord List, a normal 5-year-old was hired to shoot down blatantly stupid plans. This is their story.
#writingprompts #writing
Data Scientist in the bay. Tennis player (4.5). D&D, Gloomhaven, and board game enthusiast. Pronouns he/him.