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https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
[...] Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads.
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
(Score: 5, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Thursday January 26 2023, @05:37PM (1 child)
Seditious Conspiracy is a plot to overthrow the government. They did their plotting via tweet. And they were convicted of this crime by a jury of their peers.
Four Oath Keepers convicted of Jan. 6 seditious conspiracy [apnews.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 26 2023, @07:24PM
And? The story has better:
That's real evidence but notice that key phrases "the weapons were never used" and "lack of evidence that the Oath Keepers had an explicit plan" (presumably the prosecution disagrees). Basically, if law enforcement on the scene had acted brutally, then we might see some real though disorganized sedition. But neither happened.
And that's a story of seditious conspiracy I'm willing to buy should we find more evidence for it (which might be in the court documents though no one has mentioned it yet): that there was intent by this group to use these protests to push the defenses of the Capitol hard enough that the escalation of large scale shooting started. That would provide ideological cover for the guns to come out of storage (they did have those "rapid deployment teams") and mass sedition/civil war to start. But so far, I still have yet to hear more here than a bunch of ITG (Internet tough guys) ranting about how awesome they'll be when the civil war starts and organizing their part of the January 6 protest (definitely not spontaneously!). The firearms could just as well be part of a paranoid, ill-thought self-defense plan (though that would be during the commission of at least felony trespass and unlikely to hold up in court as self-defense).
I still have yet to see the damning evidence of seditious conspiracy, but they do show remarkable bad behavior and numerous other crimes committed. They did plan their actions ahead of time which would be necessary for any sort of conspiracy charge. And if the police acted in the way that they expected or worried about, there probably would be a lot more deaths.
Again, this doesn't show a need for censorship of social media. Instead, I'd say social media helped defuse the situation by more rapidly bringing down public condemnation of the protest. There was remarkable professionalism and restraint on the part of the police involved versus the thuggish behavior of the protesters - much which was available unfiltered through that social media. And as a result, the protesters failed hard and more thoroughly than if they could have offered the excuse of censorship as to why they looked bad.