I am several hundred opossums in a trench coat

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • As a moderator of a couple communities, some basic/copypasta misbehaviour is caught by automated bots that I largely had to bootstrap or heavily modify myself. Near everything else has to be manually reviewed, which obviously isn’t particularly sustainable in the long term.

    Improving the situation is a complex issue, since these kinds of tools often require a level of secrecy incompatible with FOSS principles to work effectively. If you publicly publish your model/algorithm for detecting spam, spammers will simply craft their content to avoid it by testing against it. This problem extends to accessing third party tools, such as specialised tools Microsoft and Google provide for identifying and reporting CSAM content to authorities. They are generally unwilling to provision their service to small actors, IMO in an attempt to stop producers themselves testing and manipulating their content to subvert the tool.




  • Likewise, an open source project can totally die if they refuse to engage with the needs of the users. The lack of moderation and content management tools have been a longstanding criticism of Lemmy, and instances will migrate to alternatives that address these concerns. It is a genuine legal liability for instance operators if they are unable to sufficiently delete CSAM/illegal content or comply with EU regulations.











  • Companies are always going to make shitty changes, but that doesn’t change the reality that industry leaders are usually in that position for a reason. You simply cannot replace After Effects without kneecapping yourself. GIMP is nowhere near as capable as Photoshop. It is impossible to develop iOS apps without Xcode, and difficult/unsupported to develop Android without Android Studio.

    You can piss off your high horse as much as you want, but it is fantastical to claim that professions should hamstring their work and sacrifice reality and practicality for the sake of some ideology belief. Companies aren’t choosing these standards because they love giving away money, they’re doing it because they recognise that rejecting a $300 annual expense for $10,000 worth of greater productivity is financially irresponsible.