No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
You're absolutely right. Often times it also didn't feel like a conversation; rather, it was just a bunch of one liners. I'm also suspicious that there are a lot of bots commenting as well. It just didn't feel organic. In any case, I have wondered about your point regarding the current size of the community and how it lends itself to a more intimate experience. I'm hoping that with growth we can keep that going. Do you think it's possible?
I used BBS systems before Usenet. They were a labor of love. It is absolutely possible to maintain civility and constructive collaboration online, in fact it's the natural order. I wish there were a better word than 'enshittification' to describe the corrosiveness and malice that corporate-controlled social media wrought, but seeing it go from what it once was to Twitter and Facebook was dismaying - shitty, even.
Lemmy is a really big deal. Not only is the threading format and aggregating similar to reddit, BBS and Usenet days, but it also captures the spirit of self-moderation, innovation and user-autonomy that allowed reddit to flourish. Reddit was built and held together by a great deal more than software and hardware. Lemmy has that and it's non-commercial and scalable. It's the best thing to happen to social media in a long time.
No doubt, it really is. It feels so much better than what I have encountered elsewhere in terms of social media.
It's really cool to hear your perspective on this topic as you have a lot more experience historically coming from the proto versions of online communities. I really believe what you say is true in respects to civility and constructive collaboration being the natural order. Something I keep pondering is how communities like this will respond to the software and hardware of antagonizing forces. For context, my 9-5 is bot analysis and mitigation. As I watch all manner of bot technology mature, I can't help but wonder if our communities, and humans as a whole, are prepared to solve these problems.
Feel free to tell me to take my tinfoil hat off. ;)
Yes, I completely agree that we are vulnerable to bots. The APIs are wide open by design. It will be interesting to see how it evolves but ActivityPub is supposedly designed with this stuff in mind. Yes it's easy to act maliciously and create accounts. There are a million ways to attack. It's a fact of life, sadly. Also probably the natural order - we've been chucking rocks at one another for millennia.
It happened on Usenet. It wasn't a paradise, it was full of spam and trolls and bots. However the fragmentation and self policing of the Usenet groups somehow kept the experience tolerable. Maybe we just expected less. Lemmy reminds me a lot of early BBS days. Not even any spam so far. It's remarkable - but probably temporary. I'm liking it though.
Mastodon is built on ActivityPub and seems to be thriving. I don't see spam or problems there so far. It seems quite civil. It's more like Twitter in format than Lemmy is, but the big instances have dealt with DOS and malicious actors and seem to be coping ok.
Your work sounds very cool. The development over the past few years in data analytics and machine learning is indeed startling when the ability for deception and manipulation is so easily scalable, but I think we will find ways to isolate or mitigate these issues gradually. It might take years and a lot of suffering, but innovation to solve problems is also our natural inclination.
Thanks so much for the insightful responses. You're right regarding the millions of ways to attack and that it's a fact of life. As long as there are other tribes there will be rocks to throw.
I didn't realize how much of Usenet was full of bots. I can imagine spam and trolls but it's interesting to think about the early days of bots. I take it for granted that the problem has been around for longer than companies centered around mitigation. It's heartening to know that you all handled it so well then and that the bigger instances built on ActivityPub are managing too.
On your point of mitigating these issues as they scale and grow, I completely agree. Previously in my career I worked on analyzing and mitigating malware. Bots are similar. It's a cat and mouse game. Regardless of how well we manage to detect and stop the tools bad actors use they will always find new ways to circumvent those methods. It's good job security.
Hi there - just a follow up and I appreciate the discussion because I've been thinking about this quite a bit. Bots weren't really a thing on usenet, That was the wrong term - what I should have said was spam - it was just flooded with spam and got worse and worse over time. The closest thing to an interactive bot that I can remember back then was ELIZA (wikipedia), which I daresay you've heard about but that was a local program that ran on your PC for amusement - I suppose it might have been possible to integrate ELIZA-like stuff on a BBS somehow and somebody probably did it but it wouldn't have been anything like the kind of bot you're talking about on social media that's deployed to comment - more just for the novelty value. Sending nonsense to usenet was not well tolerated, ISPs were not the best moderators but they did act on repeated abuse complaints, usually, and the knowledge needed to spoof and circumvent basic controls wasn't widespread then. I think people at the time were just into the fact that you could actually communicate with strangers via computer about all kinds of subjects. There was no point in making an ass of yourself there.
That's the other thing I wanted to emphasize about the difference between Lemmy and Usenet (there are many similarities) -- I am fairly certain there was no community moderation on Usenet whatsoever - it was a free-for-all. Spam, porn, everything. I think the only control was the ISPs who carried UseNet and they did presumably ban users and remove groups / behaviors that were really offensive, although there were plenty of really awful groups. You can imagine how that worked out - people went to facebook because it was "safer" and the structure was focused around individual connection versus community, which was also a big change. I think this difference is important because UseNet really was very cool and very fucked up at the same time. However I think the bad part could have been fixed if there was some degree of community moderation and control.
I think we’ve got enough time with the community like this that we can enjoy it while it lasts, and the newfound wisdom to appreciate it before it’s gone. :)
Well said!