abbenm

Every corporation invested in unhealthy ventures will say it is necessary, and they can do it ethically, regardless of how misleading or untrue it is. They will launder their bad behavior through an organization to make it appear more ethical and healthy.

My guy.... you linked to a youtube documentary about the questionable economics of gold and a blog post about an unreliable certification group associated with Rainforest Alliance. Not because of anything specific to gold or certifications, but... to illustrate the general idea that corporations can be bad?

The level of generality you have to zoom out to, to associate those to Mozilla, is the same level of zooming out typically used for Qanon conspiracy theorizing.

This is exactly the kind of thing that people make fun of with Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. If you're willing to zoom out to six degrees, you can connect Kevin Bacon to anyone in the history of cinema. It doesn't prove that Kevin Bacon is personally connected to everyone in the history of cinema, but what it does prove is the frivolousness of reasoning from such stretched out connections. That goes for historical connections, but also funding connections, and, perhaps most importantly here, for conceptual connections. And I would venture that trains of thought hinging on such remote connections are a hallmark of fuzzy thinking, which is why it's terrible to go from "Rainforest Alliance bad" to "... and therefore Mozilla ad privacy is bad."

That's not to say one shouldn't be concerned about Mozilla's venture into advertising, but that this is a terribly incoherent way of showing it, that's as liable to produce overextended false positives connecting anything to anything as it is to produce any insight.

A fundamental flaw in this, is it still involves user data, even if “anonymized”. You can advertise without any user data.

Right. The reassurance is supposed to be: "don't worry, no personalized data is retained." So, ideally, no individual record of you, with your likes, your behaviors, your browser fingerprint, aggregated together with whatever third party provider data might be purchased, and machine learning inferences can be derived from that. Instead, there's a layer of abstraction, or several layers. Like "people who watch Breaking Bad also like Parks and Rec and are 12% more likely to be first generation home buyers". Several abstracted identity types can be developed and refined.

Okay, but who ordered that? Why is that something that we think satisfies us that privacy is retained? You're still going to try and associate me with an abstract machine learned identity that, to your best efforts, closely approximates what you think I like and what is most persuasive to me. I don't think people who are interested in privacy feel reassured at anonymized repurposing of data.

It's the model itself, it's the incentives inherent in advertising as an economic model, at the end of the day. I don't know that there's a piecemeal negotiation that is supposed to stand in for our interests to reassure us, or whose idea was that this third way was going to be fine.

Isn’t that exactly what brave did?

I'm actually quite intrigued with Braves attempts at innovating here, but I don't know how effective they have been and, alas, Brave relies on Chromium.

Web standards have grown dramatically more complex since then. (To me, this raises a question in and of itself, I think it would be good to try and develop standards intentionally easy to maintain to avoid embrace-extend style dominance from individual companies).

You now have HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, WebGL, WebAssembly, WebRTC. You have newer and newer layers of security, and you have multiple platforms (Apple, Windows, desktop, phone) to develop for. It's a mountain that has grown out of what was once just a unique type of slightly marked up text file.

It turns out that Meta's Threads.net platform is building a groups feature that they curiously named Loops, and we feel the need to polish the app and Loops platform further so we can maintain the communities expectations.

Ugh. Already being bad neighbors in the fediverse.

That was actually why I was initially so active on Lemmy as well. I have been a bit dispirited by pro-Russian trolls arguing in bad faith and ingratiating themselves with frequent article posting, getting a pass from Lemmy admins. So I've been a bit disappointed lately. And I expect they will push into federated short form video. I'm not sure what the solution is other than to hope for better admins.

But that said, it's all in the backdrop, and in the foreground is the fact that the fediverse can be built out over the internet to handle social media and rebalance it away from all-or-nothing death star level control of individual companies. That, to me, is a win. And the only way it wouldn't be a win is if, I think, companies show they are up to the task of containing trolls, and that a fediverse wild west is exposed to coordinated inauthetic activity in a way that can't be controlled.

I think this one is especially tricky because it seems to be all about The Algorithm (I hate that "the algorithm" has become a thing people say, but you probably know what I mean when I say it). The secret sauce that makes it work is the algo, which is very data driven, and how that works on a federated platform I'm not sure.

I desperately want something like this to succeed though, it's exciting seeing major projects taking off. I've been on Lemmy since the beginning, and it is quite big now. Mastodon had a surge, probably the surge that federation needed. But I think Loops could potentially prove to be the most significant one yet. I can't say this model of content consuming is ideal, necessarily, but I think the important thing is showing that it can be federated.

I don't know who remembers the dog days of friendica and diaspora being our only hopes. Those were dark times, and now things are really taking off.

What's an AP messenger? (This better not be the setup for a punchline).

I'm absolutely okay with vilifying people asking for sources on the historical existence of snow.

I bet they saw the source and said "oh, yes, thank you for the source, I have updated my opinion based on this new information."

Remindme works on lemmy?

It's comments like this that concern me. It's extrapolating on a worst case hypothetical, and setting it equal to a present day reality of Google's hundred billion dollar advertising empire.

It doesn't mean there's nothing to be concerned about, but I think you need to understand the difference between possible bad thing, and fanning the flames of mob mentality.

Remember how Google wasn’t always evil?

You know who also also wasn't always evil? VLC. And guess what, they're still not evil! Even though they have turned town tens of millions of dollars that would have compromised their software. So, what does that prove? Maybe that measured concern should be combined with an ability to be nuanced on a case by case basis.