GMG Union protested G/O Media's decision to test AI-generated content and demanded that the company "invest in real journalism done by real journalists."
The brands concerned: Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Deadspin, Jezebel, The Root, The A.V. Club, The Takeout, The Onion, The Inventory, Quartz
The first step is to create content without the hurdle of hiring people.
The previous strike by the staff of those publications led to this result:
What we won:
Higher salary minimums for all positions, including $62,000 at the lowest tier in 2022 (up from $55,000), with an additional $1,000 each year for the life of the contract
Guaranteed 3% annual raises for all unit members
15 weeks parental leave
12 weeks minimum severance
Maintained our current cost-sharing cap for healthcare
WPATH-compliant, trans-inclusive healthcare
Defeated management’s proposal to give up bargaining rights over changes to healthcare mid-contract
45K diversity effort budget with audit and transparency
Goal of 40% of candidates at the hiring manager interview stage from underrepresented backgrounds
Retained right to publicly speak about working conditions, including social media escalation campaigns
Strengthened editorial independence language; management must now adhere to both G/O Media's editorial policy and the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics
Obtained guarantees against forced relocation for current remote staff
It's no surprise that this holding wanted to retaliate.
The next step is the comments, where people like us usually come in to generate free value by commenting the articles. This job will also be taken over by the AI. A machine will discuss with itself in front of us to talk about the virtues of the product described in the article. A very normal looking conversation will in fact be a theatrics play of a text formatted ad. You will read ads. The float of comment will be interrupted by ads, or even started by them, who knows? The limit between real and fake will become more and more blurry.
The test is the adoption rate. The best retaliation is always the boycott.
We won't stay on kbin forever anyway. Let's face it, if we are on kbin it's because we fled reddit and we saw that lemmy was...weird. As soon as a sane other implementation of a forum/microblogging using activitypub is proven to be robust there will be another migration. And it will probably involve actors like Facebook and co.
Now that people made the initial jump of leaving reddit they will be more inclined to making another jump to a platform that suit them better.
But it won't be just about technicalities but also about language and community. I'm not a fan of the lemmy agenda, but I'm also not a fan of the american soft power leaking in every sub. And to fight this a regional instance of activitypub tools will be very welcome.
With eyes on the future of the fediverse, I would prefer not ending up with another Facebook-like situation where 'one place' is the 'default' place - where the 'default' place is run by people less trustworthy than Mark Zuckerberg.
It won't. There will be different federations with different politics, specially on the NSFW content, corporatism level and global militantism. All these instances will be incompatible and will defederate and refederate differently.
You will have a Microsoft instance, which will never federate with google or facebook or amazon or Apple. They won't share their customers. Lower brands will probably federate for techsupport for example, etc. This will be interesting to watch.
For reddit and twitter it's also induced by the threat of AI. Twitter and reddit host a lot of content, organized, sorted, coherent. It's invaluable for training an AI and these companies don't want to let it go for free. They want control over it, therefore they are making it very hard for AI companies to farm their content. The fact that it's happening now is because AI companies are probably rushing to copy as much data as possible before laws are voted to put a limit over them.
It will be the same for the fediverse, our content will be scanned by AI's. Our content is freely visible, organized, sorted and scored. We should be careful about that. If you are not a professional publisher or a public person then you should probably think about rotating your username as often as possible.
edit: But also, with the rise of tiktok, a lot of countries are now suspicious about the soft power of those apps, and are ready to legislate against them. The EU already did, they did vote fines against them and are regularly getting money out of them. The taboo is gone, you can attack those companies, it works. They were supposed to be out of reach, but they are not.
Also there is no genius in Twitter, as far as I know they have no patent over anything. If someone manages to become more popular than them on the same principle then twitter is done. Gravity will do the rest and users will move to a different platform. People are using it because people are using it. So the model is fragile and the value is questionable.
What’s so bad about giving AI models something to learn on?
From a user point of view? A lot. So far the AI has made itself the champion of the creation of fake. Fake news, fake pictures, fake videos, fake history, fake identity. Do you think that the AI will be used for your own good? Do you think that your private data are farmed for you own good? I don't.
I posted an example about fake identities and fake posters on Twitter. This is the end goal. This is where the money generated by the AI will come from.
That way you could detect and address rogue scrubbers while still working with LLM creators who are open to an honest training integration. And if your company can’t really detect the difference between users and LLM crawlers after implementing something like this, well, then those crawlers don’t really affect the company as much as the CEOs would like to pretend.
Twitter and Reddit probably want to be their own LLM creators. They don't want to leave this market to another LLM. Also it doesn't take a lot of API calls to generate the content that will astroturf your product.
Anyway the cat is out of the bag and this data will be harvested. The brands will astroturf their products using AI processes. People are not stupid and will realize the trick played on them. We are probably heading toward platforms using full authenticated access.
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...
bluesky is crap. it requires an invite and id verification. 100% will turn into a fascist navel-gazing network.
The rest of the platforms which will still be using anonymous access will be invaded by AI's astroturfing their stuff into your face. Which one do you prefer?
Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it'd be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I'd doubt they'd form a...
The instances of the fediverse are necessarily smaller than the reddit server, therefore you will have to search for remote communities on specialized servers. Or start your own.
If meditation concerns 0.1% of the population, then you will need 10000 accounts for each 10 meditation members, that would be 40 people on kbin. So you have to search on different instances, and maybe move to a different federation. Your main instance should be located where you live and then you search elsewhere for your niche interests.
Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you've heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about....
If we want the fediverse to replace Reddit then either
We don't want the fediverse to replace reddit. Specially in term of popularity. What made reddit collapse in quality is the amount of people on the platform. The 3rd party app thing was only a trigger for many people. Many others have seen the quality of the content of reddit nosedive with time. The festival of memes and one liners has been described again and again. We didn't have this during those few weeks here. We will have it if the platform becomes too popular. How could it be otherwise? How can you picture a popular platform without the popular content? The platform filtering through some hurdles is a good thing.
Even now you can already see the bad behavior of redditor being reflected in the content. And it's only starting.
People have to come out of interest. Otherwise your platform will be filled with 1-click meme posters, and that's probably not what you want.
100 per minute is faster than the speed at which I deleted my history. So I guess we can still help people deleting their history.
I used the archive which is shared around and extracted my posts to get the id of my comments and deleted those, like 30 per minute. But I guess that if we rebuild a database with the author as a key then we can pretty quickly return a list of id's based on an author. Then the user can feed this list to a python script by himself and delete himself.
What I couldn't do in time is edit the posts as I ran in some weird index errors that I couldn't bypass.
I agree that a lot of politicized content is shit. Yesterday I checked reddit and an article was titled 'ultra-rich reminded of pitchforks if they don't share' or some asinine bullshit. I would enjoy not having this relentless ragebait spam here.
@news is like 50% american political news. The newcomers are reproducing what they did on reddit. It's news material to them.
I do however think, that I can just block them right?
You cannot block the content they upvote. You can block a magazine, but why would you block @news? Why should it be the de facto american political channel? Also the content induces a type of comment. If the frontpage is made of rageclick then subscribers will be rageclick consumers.
So we have reenacted the reddit process. Except we did it way faster.
I think you are right to caution but maybe a little over the top.
It's only the beginning, the worse is yet to come as today is the last day for apollo and co.
The US crowd is a specific crowd. Only in the US could the pizzagate be a thing. Don't equate the USA as "another country but bigger". The weaponization of the american media is perfectly visible and understood and honestly I expected better from people who left a platform like reddit. I was wrong. Only a small minority was able to produce interesting conversations before Jim interrupted the finer things club.
Also just because you are american doesn't mean that you have to post about american politics. There is a whole world out there and american would be well inspired to look at what is happening beyond the ocean. I was talking about https://ground.news a few minutes ago. Great tool to find foreign stories in english from all around the globe.
Are you sure that you are answering to the right post or are you just jumping on the bandwagon of another post? You address nothing of what I mentioned about the federation system and the solution I've given.
I don't think you quite realize how much craziness is in the world at large. There are have been instances of pizzagate levels of craziness in my home country, as well as in the other countries whose news I follow.
Give some example which show the magnitude of the pizzagate. I'm not talking about a follower of qanon making noise for views, I'm talking about the pizzagate with everything that it includes.
You also don't seem to grasp how discussions on the Internet work. People will post about things that interest them. Telling people not to post things that are of interest to them because you don't like it is counterintuitive and borderline offensive.
I thought that you were serious for a moment, I was wrong. Or you answered to the wrong post.
Don't. The last thing we want is to associate the fediverse with some kind of anarchist world where everything is trash and everyone insults everyone. Leave the memers to reddit.
As we start to see more users join, it's inevitable to see trolls (especially low-effort trolls) making more of an appearance and trying to be controversial and noticed....
To the three of you who downvoted me without a word of explanation: we can see who downvotes who on kbin.
So I ask you, why did you downvote me and why do you think that this guy talking to his fellow politicians is news worthy? We are not on an american website anymore, the rest of the world doesn't care about the american constant struggle and crying about politicians saying stuff.
There is an up/down vote button for you to express that POV on the post itself.
NO.
There is a reason why we have different magazines with different names. Got to @USpolitics or @politicus. How many more political subs do you need? When we register for @news it's not to get yet another american political shenanigans. You really think that someone from Italy registered to @news to hear about what your governor or potus or whatever wizard said to his king? Use your magazines! What is wrong with you? We are not your audience.
Let's invite some people from lemmy.ml and see if you agree to follow their votes. They have news too, do you want to hear from them? Of course not! So change your tone.
Also, no one owes you an explanation of jack crap. And that applies "in general."
I don't care, I will keep callout you out on your bullshit. block me if you want. After all, you said yourself that there is an upvote/downvote button, well there is also a block button, please use it, but I will keep calling you out anyway. Post your political soap opera to your political magazine, end of the story.
I'm thinking you should probably stop speaking on behalf of everyone. I am not American but I do care that millions of Americans are losing their rights. I care that US businesses got over a trillion in PPP loan forgiveness but that the same can't be extended to 40 million individuals and their student loans for education they are almost forced to have if they want a shot at making more than minimum wage and even then, it's not a guarantee.
Stop importing US problems in your own country. Nothing meaningful happens in your country? You still have to indulge into america politics even with the @news magazine? What is so hard with posting US political news in one of the US political magazines? Tell me!
Have a look at the frontpage of @news, we are at around 50% of american news and most of it is political.
I'm not a refugee but I care that the Greek government effectively let hundreds die rather than assist them.
I'm not French but I am interested in the riots happening there.
I'm not Russian, Ukrainian, or even European but I want to know what is happening with the occupation of Ukraine, the coup attempt, and what other countries are doing to ensure the Russia doesn't violate NATO and the repercussions if they do.
We can fill the frontpage of news with french political news, should we? Of course not.
At least post it in @politics. So far absolutely no one could argue why political news weren't posted to @political instead.
I had not realized that @news was specifically for European news?
There is a whole world out there. Right now @new is around 50% US. How is it a good thing? Look at this from a non US perspective. You open your news feed and nearly half of it is about US politicians doing the political dance.
If you have political news to post, please post them at least in a political magazine, not in news.
Lately our supreme court has been behaving very much like bought-and-paid-for politicians, and that should be concerning to all Americans.
This is not news, everyone around the planet know that your politicians are sold to the richest people. Again, keep it into political magazines, or we will be flooded.
Do you really want US politics to flood each sub like what happened on reddit?
Downvoting and running away was a reddit thing, now you are accountable for your downvotes.
I have the maturity to ask for answer when people react to what I say. My question about sorting posts out of @news and moving them to @USpolitics is perfectly legitimate. I'm glad that some people took the time to answer so we can have a discussion, but so far among the handful of people who had the courage to put up a written argument I've read nothing convincing me that this post has its place in @news rather than in politics.
If all you want is a copy of reddit then please go back to reddit.You will have a barrage of US political news all day long.
You need to take some time to consider your own response and whether or not that's something WE want on the fediverse. You can just as easily be blocked too, you know.
Block me, be my guest, at least you won't be able to downvote me on sight anymore.
And the news about Ukraine, France, Sweden, Uruguay, Cambodia, Australia are in the single digits. So kbin is turning into reddit. In less than 3 weeks we are back at square one. And this is without the influx of the people who will be pushed away from reddit on July.
Why don't YOU take your content and publish it into the magazine that was designed for it in the first place?
I will tell you: popularity! You don't want to read USpolitics because it's not popular, you want the buzz
Also, if you were a little bit coherent with what you said, you would agree with me. You said:
I'm not a refugee but I care that the Greek government effectively let hundreds die rather than assist them.
I'm not French but I am interested in the riots happening there.
I'm not Russian, Ukrainian, or even European but I want to know what is happening with the occupation of Ukraine, the coup attempt, and what other countries are doing to ensure the Russia doesn't violate NATO and the repercussions if they do.
So you pretend to care about what happens outside of the USA, but look at the results on news:
Zelensky, 5 upvotes
Uruguay, 3 upvotes
Sweden, 3 upvotes
Cambodia, 2 upvotes.
Israel 7
China 8
Australia 5
Germany 8
Scotland 7
uk 9
Colombia 5
meanwhile, prostitution in Maine 80
supreme court total around 500
See? This is american redditors pushing their political content in the news feed and pushing the content you wanted to see down the frontpage. What do you think of this?
Still, my opinion is the only one justified. Read the comments, see by yourself. I gave a chance to anyone who downvoted me to voice his opinion and all I saw was miss and miss.
Hmmm. I wonder why there are more posts about US news than Cambodian news. Why is that? Do you think it could be a conspiracy by thousands of users to flood the Fediverse with US news pieces to try to drown out all of the Cambodian news everyone would prefer to hear?
I'm talking about the votes, not the number of posts. If you tuned down your ragemeter you would have figured it out by yourself.
Or maybe the content you see is whatever is on people's minds, so they post it. Maybe you can post some Cambodian news instead of complaining about the lack of it. I'm interested in Cambodian news too, so please feel free to post all that sweet, sweet Cambodian news you are so upset about not seeing.
Now who's arrogant? I'm glad that we've established this point. Thanks for answering btw.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has launched his ruling party's campaign for re-election in a poll that has been criticised as a sham after the main opposition party was prevented from running.
But of course if you all want to share what brand of cereals Donald Trump had for breakfast then please be my guest and post it as NEWS. But the best place to do it is reddit.
You asked why you were downvoted. It's because of your arrogant attitude and trolling.
You are the troll here, so change your tone: "Don't forget me too! 🤣"
You asked why anyone outside the US should care what happens in the US.
No, you read it wrong. I specifically talked about the nature of the post which was political. We already have magazines for politics, specially the US one, but the nature of the problem is politics seen as news. The US politics is and endless shitshow which doesn't qualify as news anymore. Breaking news! Trump called AOC FAT!
The answer is very simple. If the US experiences a collapse of some kind (which it might), it will have a profoundly negative effect on the value of currencies worldwide, including the EUR and GBP. So, no matter how much you hate it, the value of your currency is affected by the value of ours.
That must be the most ridiculous argument I've read so far. Look at this news that I just picked from the news magazine:
The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns (vox.com)
Girlparts
The world is shaking! Suspense! Good thing that I've been informed about this one.
That's just one reason why you should care about the rise of conservatism and how it harms the U.S.
Doing things like calling out someone's post history or making a whiney edit about the people downvoting you are also reddit things. And that's the kind of behaviour you're exhibiting right here. You're being close minded and demanding that other people cater to your needs.
I'm not whining, I'm calling people out on their bullshit votes. @news is turning into political trash and you don't seem to care.
Just like Americans shouldn't only concern themselves with their news, you too shouldn't only close yourself off and only care about your news. And if you don't like it, unsubscribe yourself.
I'm not closed, I already posted about foreign countries. And if you are not happy with people calling you out on your bullshit then go back to reddit where you can downvote incognito.
You can turn this place to shit if you want to but I won't remain quiet about it, dude...
Okay, I've been staying out of this but now I just have to:
What an entry!
what kind of extraordinary qualifications do you have to unilaterally decide which votes are valid and which are not? Is it as simple as any vote that disagrees with you is automatically "bullshit"?
I'm talking about very factual points: the usage of the tool that we are building now. Many of us have migrated because of the flaws of other media platforms.
Your position about "downvote" is like expression a feeling. For other people like me it's very factual. That's part of what I wanted to establish. It emotions vs facts all over again. The reaction I had were mostly based on feeling. Just like the content I'm seeing spammed here. Ragebait.
Have you considered that people are just downvoting you and moving on because they feel that the flaws in your arguments are apparent enough that they can just click the down arrow without having to type a whole essay about it?
And I gave them an opportunity to answer with arguments. That was the point. If they have such a big reason to downvote then let's go and say why. And the result is poof.... there was not much except feelings. This magazine is turning into a collection of ragebait. And now one of the default magazine of the alternative to reddit has fallen into the same trap that reddit laid to us: ragebait content. I wouldn't care if is was posted into USPolitics or politicus, but news, what, the whole planet???
I expected much better from the first wave of people who left reddit. In the end they just want more of the same ragebait.
And I know exactly what you are all going to say. "then go away if you don't like it". Yes, I don't like it, that's why I left reddit. I couldn't care less about your political shitshow non-stop circus which leaked thorough all the subs. You think people care about your senators killing a dog with their car? The people posting other news are now thrown down the frontpage so we can make more space for the latest Trumpstunt. And now you are getting out of the wood because you had too much! What a superhero you are.
Why? Because they don't respect the tool, which splits the posts by theme and interests. For example USPolitics and news. I say this is not news worthy.
And why do YOU complain about someone discussing the tool with other users? Do something else, go outside, stop complaining about it, no one is forcing you.
But you understand all of it, don't you? You know exactly what I'm talking about.
I based all my arguments on facts. All I got was people with feelings brushed in the wrong way. You going emotional is very telling of the situation. Seems like when someone is talking to you you take it as a feeling based action. Sometimes it's just conversation.
No. Look at the image again, we don't have the instance of the user.
also it's just a comment with someone's opinion. what is the issue exactly
It's a motivation speech. Add a parrot and you have an "advice animals". Have you not noticed how reddit became this repository of snapshot of Tweets and tiktioks? That's what you want?
But look at what we lose in the process of screenshooting a post:
We cannot write an answer to the OP
We have no follow-up of the conversation started by the original post
OP cannot edit his screenshot
OP cannot answer our discussion
OP doesn't even know that his post is discussed elsewhere
We have no connection with OP between our instance and his.
In short, we have lost all the advantages of the fediverse, for what? For the graphics, for the white on black background which reminds of Twitter. It's a terrible trade.
That being said, there's been instances (especially with regards to certain politicians on Twitter) where having the screenshot has been paramount, as the original post gets deleted.
Editing what you said is a right. You have the right to change your opinion. It's in fact a virtue. If you see something interesting in the comment, use the symbol and edit your post, and say that you changed your mind.
Link the original post and be done with it. Risk of the original post being deleted, making your post useless.
I like it. If you think you posted by mistake, if there was a misunderstanding or if you fucked up..... well, I think it's a good idea that the fediverse allows you to make things right.
Link a screenshot. You could add the link to the original post in the comments
Forget the screenshots. It's like using binary with git.
Just make it live, use the fediverse as it is supposed to be used and see where it leads us. We'll see how Ernest & Co can make something based on the fediverse which makes the process way more fluent and intuitive.
If you click on the "more" button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I'm not sure if this a...
Even more ironically I'm using this offline backup to dig out my comments id's so I can delete them surgically in the live database.
Turned out that I had more than 30k comments on reddit. Just to give an idea of how much of reddit content can remain if you delete using the API in a "normal" way. I managed to only delete like 900 of them in the "normal" way.
If I had more time I would have made a double entry database where a user could return a list of his comments id's based on his username. That would have purged the database way more efficiently.
I know this is a silly question, especially as I'm currently focused on local-only feeds, but there's just one part of the Fediverse I wish would get more love: PeerTube. While there aren't a lot of people actively looking for alternative video hosts outside the big guys (Twitch, YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.), it would be nice to...
What will you do when people start mirroring content from Youtube to kbin? Youtube will enforce the new politics of blocking the adblockers, so there will be an incentive for the viewers to host those videos here. What will Ernest do when the lawyers of big labels start suing kbin?
‘We Are Appalled’: G/O Media Union Protests Company’s Decision to Test AI Content. [Kotaku, TheOnion, Gizmodo, Deadspin, TheRoot, etc] (www.mediaite.com)
GMG Union protested G/O Media's decision to test AI-generated content and demanded that the company "invest in real journalism done by real journalists."
Those of you hosting a peertube instance, how much money does it cost you? (kbin.social)
And did you monetize your infrastructure? If so, how?
Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here? (kbin.social)
It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place....
deleted_by_author
Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter (www.theverge.com)
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...
Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content (futurism.com)
G/O Media, an online media company that owns Gizmodo and Kotaku has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites.
The Verge: Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, briefly showed up on Google Play (www.theverge.com)
Meta has not announced an official release date for the app, but it showing up on the Google Play store likely means a release is imminent.
'Rate limit exceeded;' Twitter down for thousands of users worldwide (www.cbsnews.com)
Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site or faced difficulty and delays Saturday.
While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities (kbin.social)
Gaming, news, tech, general literature. All of these are somewhat thriving, with a steady influx of posts and comments. At the same time, the userbase is sorely lacking for more niche communities. In my case it'd be stuff like poetry, yoga, religion, linguistics, meditation. Or many other communities I'd doubt they'd form a...
Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted (kbin.social)
Think about things from the point of view of someone who has never used Reddit or the fediverse, but you've heard about them both from recent news articles and want to see what they are about....
My Reddit GDPR Request took 20 days, this is what it looks like (kbin.social)
Account was from 2011 with almost 5000 comments....
Jim is invading the "finer things club", aka kbin.social is only our launchpad for the fediverse. We should think about finding another instance soon. (kbin.social)
For the last few weeks we enjoyed a much better content on kbin than we had on reddit for a long time....
PSA: anyone still looking to protest, promote fediverse, any form of rebellion ON REDDIT, the place to do it is r/pics. you can post anything with basically no censorship. as long as you mention John Oliver somehow, the mods aren't going to bother you! (kbin.social)
r/pics is wide open to all kinds of anti reddit posts, calls for spez to resign, whatever you want with the current rules right now....
Reminder: reddit may be dead, but trolls are not. (kbin.social)
As we start to see more users join, it's inevitable to see trolls (especially low-effort trolls) making more of an appearance and trying to be controversial and noticed....
John Roberts Begs the Liberal Justices to Stop Criticizing the Court (newrepublic.com)
The chief justice doesn’t like his conservative Supreme Court colleagues getting called out for judicial overreach.
They stole the internet from the people and we have to take it back (media.kbin.social)
PSA: every interaction you make with various posts on kbin is viewable to everyone. (kbin.social)
If you click on the "more" button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I'm not sure if this a...
Will it ever be possible for kbin to federate with PeerTube? (kbin.social)
I know this is a silly question, especially as I'm currently focused on local-only feeds, but there's just one part of the Fediverse I wish would get more love: PeerTube. While there aren't a lot of people actively looking for alternative video hosts outside the big guys (Twitch, YouTube, Dailymotion, etc.), it would be nice to...