While it has been claimed that VHS won over Betamax due to the greater availability of pornographic movies on the format, the evidence on hand suggests that pornographic availability did not have a major influence.
Also [according to Wikipedia] VHS machines were cheaper and the tapes could record more time. I just remember the Beta picture was better, and the machines worked for longer.
I remember it being a story I was told before the internet.
I thought Verizon bought Yahoo and had a morality stick up its butt so it banned adult material on Tumblr. Less a crusade and more of a dumb corporate policy.
I guess that's an anti-porn crusade maybe. Sony had a similar anti-porn stance which killed Betamax and did damage to the markets of the PlayStation offerings. I never thought of it as a crusade so much as a policy based on the specific tastes of upper management.
Our popular social media services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could use some competing services that adhere to a total transparency policy, so that when any use requires a moderation action, the user and public are informed exactly why the moderation action was taken, down to the statement-in-violation expressed or inferred, or the category of restricted media.
The TechDirt system (which seems to use a combination of community flags and a logical set of rules that delay a post for human moderation) seems to be a good start.
Would such a service be feasible? Is it too much work for explicit transparency? Are there disclosure problems that forbid explicit transparency? Would it be too easy to bypass all the rules?
No one in the US gets a fair trial. We have a 100.00% indictment rate, a 90% conviction rate, and the more people incarcerated than any other nation (by count or per capita). The US has 4% of the global population yet 22% of the global penal population. And that's before we get those who are in the justice system but just not in prisons.
The reverse is true for law enforcement and government officials who routinely commit perjury in court (or when on the House / Senate floor) and are never indicted.
So your warning is laughable.
More notably, it's conspicuous that our justice system is corrupt to the core and has been for decades and you seem to only express concern about it at this late hour.
Um no. When I make a contrary opinion at, say, an anti-abortion site, and my comment (lacking in vulgarity or ad-hominem attacks) doesn't pass moderation, it demonstrates the site is not interested in dialogue but concurrence.
Twitter (among many sites) tries to adhere to community standards, and it often fails due to the moderation paradox. As a result, because there are too many tweets to moderate with humans, and automation of tweet moderation sucks, you're going to get either too many or too few false takedowns.
Part of the problem is a lack of transparent metrics. (A friend of mine was recently permabanned as a staunch advocate of first nation rights. While she's careful, she engages many more radical than she is. We don't know why she was banned and can't get a straight answer.) So the public cannot see who was taken down for what statements, and if they were violations of TOS (e.g. hate speech or incitement)
And as Parler got bigger it found it had the same problem. Since it responded inadequately, well, recent events happened.
We're not the ones who attempted a Beer Hall Putsch, Herr Bürger.
I totally expect to be packed on the cattle trains, not by the Democrats but by the white-nationalist cabals in our benevolent police unions. Once Biden doesn't do enough to pull Americans out of the hole Trump and Bush left us in, or if he were to actually try to defund / reform / abolish law enforcement and their murder-privileges, Trump's red-hats will be at it again.
(To be fair, the US has been digging the American people into precarity since Reagan -- the most glorious glorified of all post-Southern-Strategy Republicans -- and not helped much by Democrats thanks to an increasingly Right-wing-locked legislature and enthusiasm tempered by industrial campaign financing. But that's all history and too complicated for the likes of you.)
I suspect after Biden you guys will be itching to elect some new mini-Mussolini, maybe even a Trump Jr. And they'll start again with the private prisons and the family separations and the detention-center plague pits.
And a genocide program will be justified because the prisons and detention centers are too expensive to sustain, and no other country will take America's deported.
And, the Red-hat einsatzgruppen will find that just gunning down dissidents into mass graves is too grizzly and hard, that it's squeamish, pukey work after all. And that is why you have to build murder factories that processes hundreds of people at a time into vitrified ash activated by a technician who only looks at graphs and numbers.
But I guess, Anonymous Coward, this is to say you don't expect to be losing any sleep over shoving me up the loading ramp because I would have done it to you.
To that, I will respond with a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
For me, it's something of a creed. So let me assure you now that I for one will die first before packing the trains or before saying an engine that massacres is a good, righteous thing.
But it's a bad idea even pragmatically, to let such a scheme get started. If you don't personally know a billionaire or are related to one, your spot on the boxcars is also reserved. No Allies will coming this time to stop them from cleaning house, and sooner or later you will be deemed insufficiently patriotic to not get your turn in the machine.
My (step-)daughter has been raised on iPhones and is unlikely to want to switch, even when she has to sustain her tech habits via her own income. It's nice to know there are multiple paths by which she can navigate that forest.
The vector this plan would go is illustrated by the whole Net-nanny controversy, in which several porn-blocking offerings used the same database to block alleged child-unsafe sites.
Biology sites were delisted for talking about birds and or bees. (e.g. plant sex.)
Sites for kids meant to counsel young people regarding questions of human sexuality (questions, feelings, LGBT+ issues, etc.) were proscribed.
Bunches of incidental Scunthorp-type intersections were blocked, including many Disney and Nintendo sites.
Religions and countercultures out of favor (Muslim sites and goth sites) were routinely blacklisted. Also, encyclopedic information about fascism, satanism, communism (though not the Confederate States of America). Those were gone too.
Curiously, religious anti-LGBT kill the gays sites were not blocked as they were whitelisted by the company making the database. It turns out many net-nanny software offerings all pulled their lists from the same free database which was assembled by a subsidiary organization of one of the big Protestant Evangelical churches, and as such all Christian hate sites got whitelisted.
Eventually, netnanny software became a known farce.
The Channel sites proceed on the presumption that law enforcement (particularly FBI Cybercrime) is lurking, which is why the systems are set up to preserve anonymity.
This doesn't stop individuals from outing themselves or betraying personal details that might narrow down where and who they are. It's a source of comedy on those sites.
Also the old adage: _The internet! Where men are men; and women are men; and children are FBI agents!
Oh, and among us serfs, we're happy to try diminished capacity cases as if they were rational adults. If they get any treatment, it's typically at a penal facility.
It'll be interesting to see if Trump's lawyers ever plead diminished capacity, and to watch how that's treated by the court, given we like to go easy on aristocrats. Even traitorous ones.
We don't have non-penal mental health hospitals that specialize in criminally insane. Though they might have an extra secure ward for either particularly violent cases or escape artists (definitely two separate groups with only partial intersection.)
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
A common story.
While it has been claimed that VHS won over Betamax due to the greater availability of pornographic movies on the format, the evidence on hand suggests that pornographic availability did not have a major influence.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Tape length and machine cost
Also [according to Wikipedia] VHS machines were cheaper and the tapes could record more time. I just remember the Beta picture was better, and the machines worked for longer.
I remember it being a story I was told before the internet.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Tumblr was crippled
According to Wikipedia:
On November 10, 2015, Sony announced that it would no longer be producing Betamax video cassettes
Do not regard me as a valid source. I don't know what to think anymore.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Tumblr was crippled
I thought Verizon bought Yahoo and had a morality stick up its butt so it banned adult material on Tumblr. Less a crusade and more of a dumb corporate policy.
I guess that's an anti-porn crusade maybe. Sony had a similar anti-porn stance which killed Betamax and did damage to the markets of the PlayStation offerings. I never thought of it as a crusade so much as a policy based on the specific tastes of upper management.
Kinda like Too many notes for the royal ear.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
"protections for moderation must be politically neutral."
I assume you mean by this the protections should be neutral.
But then I think political speech that invokes incitement or hatred should be...delicately put no matter which side it comes from.
(And yes, I say that as someone who has sometimes not kept my inciting speech delicate.)
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Aside from the figurines on top...
Is there any difference between a gay-wedding cake and a non-gay-wedding cake?
I'd assume that LGBT+ folk like the same range of cake flavors that non-LGBT+ folk like.
On the post: Irony: German Chancellor Merkel Upset At Twitter For Banning Trump; Meanwhile Germany Demands Social Media Blocks Dangerous Content
What's good for the aristocracy is not good for the serfs
Yeah, we get that a lot.
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
This conversation does indacte a marketable need.
Our popular social media services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) could use some competing services that adhere to a total transparency policy, so that when any use requires a moderation action, the user and public are informed exactly why the moderation action was taken, down to the statement-in-violation expressed or inferred, or the category of restricted media.
The TechDirt system (which seems to use a combination of community flags and a logical set of rules that delay a post for human moderation) seems to be a good start.
Would such a service be feasible? Is it too much work for explicit transparency? Are there disclosure problems that forbid explicit transparency? Would it be too easy to bypass all the rules?
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
"I am warning you."
No one in America will get a fair trial.
No one in the US gets a fair trial. We have a 100.00% indictment rate, a 90% conviction rate, and the more people incarcerated than any other nation (by count or per capita). The US has 4% of the global population yet 22% of the global penal population. And that's before we get those who are in the justice system but just not in prisons.
The reverse is true for law enforcement and government officials who routinely commit perjury in court (or when on the House / Senate floor) and are never indicted.
So your warning is laughable.
More notably, it's conspicuous that our justice system is corrupt to the core and has been for decades and you seem to only express concern about it at this late hour.
I detect a lack of fucks given.
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
"It's the lying about it that's wrong."
Um no. When I make a contrary opinion at, say, an anti-abortion site, and my comment (lacking in vulgarity or ad-hominem attacks) doesn't pass moderation, it demonstrates the site is not interested in dialogue but concurrence.
Twitter (among many sites) tries to adhere to community standards, and it often fails due to the moderation paradox. As a result, because there are too many tweets to moderate with humans, and automation of tweet moderation sucks, you're going to get either too many or too few false takedowns.
Part of the problem is a lack of transparent metrics. (A friend of mine was recently permabanned as a staunch advocate of first nation rights. While she's careful, she engages many more radical than she is. We don't know why she was banned and can't get a straight answer.) So the public cannot see who was taken down for what statements, and if they were violations of TOS (e.g. hate speech or incitement)
And as Parler got bigger it found it had the same problem. Since it responded inadequately, well, recent events happened.
On the post: As Predicted: Parler Is Banning Users It Doesn't Like
Anonymous Cowards
They have the choice of inserting a name, even one that isn't theirs.
If the default name is dumbass and you don't bother to change it, well, it suits.
Would Gay Tech Daily be about computers used in Broadway theaters?
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
"Brown Shirt Democrats"
We're not the ones who attempted a Beer Hall Putsch, Herr Bürger.
I totally expect to be packed on the cattle trains, not by the Democrats but by the white-nationalist cabals in our benevolent police unions. Once Biden doesn't do enough to pull Americans out of the hole Trump and Bush left us in, or if he were to actually try to defund / reform / abolish law enforcement and their murder-privileges, Trump's red-hats will be at it again.
(To be fair, the US has been digging the American people into precarity since Reagan -- the most glorious glorified of all post-Southern-Strategy Republicans -- and not helped much by Democrats thanks to an increasingly Right-wing-locked legislature and enthusiasm tempered by industrial campaign financing. But that's all history and too complicated for the likes of you.)
I suspect after Biden you guys will be itching to elect some new mini-Mussolini, maybe even a Trump Jr. And they'll start again with the private prisons and the family separations and the detention-center plague pits.
And a genocide program will be justified because the prisons and detention centers are too expensive to sustain, and no other country will take America's deported.
And, the Red-hat einsatzgruppen will find that just gunning down dissidents into mass graves is too grizzly and hard, that it's squeamish, pukey work after all. And that is why you have to build murder factories that processes hundreds of people at a time into vitrified ash activated by a technician who only looks at graphs and numbers.
But I guess, Anonymous Coward, this is to say you don't expect to be losing any sleep over shoving me up the loading ramp because I would have done it to you.
To that, I will respond with a passage from Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five: I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.
For me, it's something of a creed. So let me assure you now that I for one will die first before packing the trains or before saying an engine that massacres is a good, righteous thing.
But it's a bad idea even pragmatically, to let such a scheme get started. If you don't personally know a billionaire or are related to one, your spot on the boxcars is also reserved. No Allies will coming this time to stop them from cleaning house, and sooner or later you will be deemed insufficiently patriotic to not get your turn in the machine.
On the post: Everything Pundits Are Getting Wrong About This Current Moment In Content Moderation
iPhone immitation launcher suites
Excellent, so there are options after all.
My (step-)daughter has been raised on iPhones and is unlikely to want to switch, even when she has to sustain her tech habits via her own income. It's nice to know there are multiple paths by which she can navigate that forest.
On the post: Everything Pundits Are Getting Wrong About This Current Moment In Content Moderation
"your head so far up your butt"
Anonymous Coward you brought a knife to a pitched tank battle. Go home. I hope you're drunk, as it's a sad state of affairs if you're this way sober.
On the post: The Slope Gets More Slippery As You Expect Content Moderation To Happen At The Infrastructure Layer
Re: Sending Letter to DOJ and DOD
Except we've had that prediction come up for years (decades?).
Also, as per the Channel sites, a few people claiming / admitting they were at the Capitol raid does not incriminate the rest of us.
TechDirt's long tail is very long.
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
"They ban anyone who disagrees"
[citation very much needed]
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
Netnannying
The vector this plan would go is illustrated by the whole Net-nanny controversy, in which several porn-blocking offerings used the same database to block alleged child-unsafe sites.
Biology sites were delisted for talking about birds and or bees. (e.g. plant sex.)
Sites for kids meant to counsel young people regarding questions of human sexuality (questions, feelings, LGBT+ issues, etc.) were proscribed.
Bunches of incidental Scunthorp-type intersections were blocked, including many Disney and Nintendo sites.
Religions and countercultures out of favor (Muslim sites and goth sites) were routinely blacklisted. Also, encyclopedic information about fascism, satanism, communism (though not the Confederate States of America). Those were gone too.
Curiously, religious anti-LGBT kill the gays sites were not blocked as they were whitelisted by the company making the database. It turns out many net-nanny software offerings all pulled their lists from the same free database which was assembled by a subsidiary organization of one of the big Protestant Evangelical churches, and as such all Christian hate sites got whitelisted.
Eventually, netnanny software became a known farce.
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
FBI lurking
The Channel sites proceed on the presumption that law enforcement (particularly FBI Cybercrime) is lurking, which is why the systems are set up to preserve anonymity.
This doesn't stop individuals from outing themselves or betraying personal details that might narrow down where and who they are. It's a source of comedy on those sites.
Also the old adage: _The internet! Where men are men; and women are men; and children are FBI agents!
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
"mentally unfit to stand trial"
Oh, and among us serfs, we're happy to try diminished capacity cases as if they were rational adults. If they get any treatment, it's typically at a penal facility.
It'll be interesting to see if Trump's lawyers ever plead diminished capacity, and to watch how that's treated by the court, given we like to go easy on aristocrats. Even traitorous ones.
On the post: Small Idaho ISP 'Punishes' Twitter And Facebook's 'Censorship' ... By Blocking Access To Them Entirely
Re: Re: Mental health facilities
We don't have non-penal mental health hospitals that specialize in criminally insane. Though they might have an extra secure ward for either particularly violent cases or escape artists (definitely two separate groups with only partial intersection.)
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