To be fair he does have a lot of experience in the toxicity of social media. He’s an expert in the field.

It’s like if e-coli had some serious concerns about your choice of antibacterial spray. Worth noting the objection, possibly with a little smile, and buying a few more bottles.

I totally agree that each query/ picture isn’t literally burning huge amounts of energy - I wonder if we’re kind of making the same argument but I misread your first comment - but it’s also true that each cigarette doesn’t actually do that much damage to your lungs and buying a single puppy from a puppy mill isn’t funding the entire industry, just like buying a tiny ivory figurine isn’t killing any animals and buying a single share in EvilCorp isn’t funding the CEO’s baby-killing missions.

But, in a way, it kind of is. If you need that cigarette, I won’t stop you. If the ivory is antique or really special to you or whatever, we’ve all got vices, maybe also donate to an animal charity. If you really think EvilCorp isn’t that bad and the CEO only killed a few babies that one time, or if you don’t really mix your ethics with your finances or whatever, cool, everyone makes their own moral boundaries.

(I can’t think of a decent reason to buy from puppy mills, but I’m sure they exist).

But I think we all have a responsibility to make these ethical decisions. If you are adding to the AI user base, feeding it your data and training it and pumping its figures, there are a variety of legit reasons to do so, from curiosity to convenience to FOMO. And if you don’t care about the environment or wider impact of your actions, alright, rock on. We can’t all care about everything all the time.

But in my (unsolicited) opinion, when you use it with no decent reason or benefit, you are prioritising your fleeting whims over the deadliest threat to the world. It’s like owning an oversized gas guzzling car (personal choice) and leaving it to idle for hours at a time because it saves 15 seconds in the morning. Weird example, but to my mind it’s the same.

I’m not going to shit on people’s hobbies, but I used to throw my cigarette ends down drains because I thought it was tidier, until I found out that nope, really not good for the drains or water system. So I bought a little portable ashtray. I have no particular passion for drains and don’t smoke that much when I’m not near a bin or ashtray, but it wasn’t a huge sacrifice to buy an ashtray. The cumulative damage to the ecosystem seemed to outweigh the personal convenience of dropping my cigarette end there, so I couldn’t really justify contributing to a bad thing that wouldn’t affect me if I didn’t need to.

But - I still see lots of cigarette ends on the floor. Maybe they haven’t heard about the damage it causes, maybe they have different moral priorities, maybe they were in a real hurry; everybody makes their own decision. I just wish more people would make that decision, rather than using it because it’s there and everyone else is.

Even worse. A lot of it just seems to be done by trolls.

Every now and again they have a big push to get more editors from more sections of society and normal humans, because a majority of the edits are done by a small amount of people, and these people spend so much time doing that that they don’t have much time for things like jobs, hobbies, socialisation, etc.

They are doing a great service, and most of them are great editors, but they are very very online and aren’t always interested in Wikipedia being a collaboration of people from all walks of life.

So they manage to get more random people to make an account and make their own first little edits, and then half those random people get yelled at for not following some hidden rules or for disagreeing with Big Mike who doesn’t like to be corrected or whatever and, surprise surprise, most people whose first experience editing Wikipedia never try again. The ones who stay are the dogged, determined ones, or the ones who don’t really care about criticism, and thus the cycle continues.

Seriously though, small time editors are absolutely essential to keep Wikipedia (reasonably) honest and unbiased. Literally anyone can contribute to the world’s biggest shared knowledge hub, and if you’re not a troll, a dick, a shill or an extremist then your contribution is really, really valuable.

If you see any page that has incorrect info, or anything that’s missing information that you know, or even some clunky grammar or out of date references, please do consider making an edit. There are a bunch of best practice guidelines on editing (that aren’t always very accessible) but the main ethos is to do what you can in good faith and don’t sweat the red tape. Someone else can come along afterwards and tidy formatting up or send you a message saying ‘hey, I’ve reverted your edit because you need a source / this type of source / you accidentally replaced the entire page on astrophysics with an emoji’, and they’ll link to the guidelines you need to follow if so.

I’d love to say it’ll be fun and chill and once you’ve realised how easy it is you’ll be evangelical about it. If you edit a totally innocuous page, it probably will be.

But it’s the internet, so there are all sorts of people including the knobs, so I’ll just say - by widening the pool of editors you will be benefitting Wikipedia whatever your actual edit is, and by ignoring any argumentative bastards you’ll be adding to the majority of Wikipedia editors who are normal human beings and not, well, argumentative bastards.

(Obviously if you are actually an argumentative bastard troll, no offence meant, I hope you have a great life but the applications to be a Wikipedia editor are sadly closed and honestly it’s not worth it 😀)

Yeah, that generally sounds good. In this case though, it had been up for 6 months and a lot of people had edited the page since, so I wasn’t sure how that would work.

And, to be honest, cowardice 🤣 I don’t know if it’s just the sort of pages I’ve edited, but I’ve found the number 1 indicator for when a reversion will get pushback is when it was put there by someone with an unholy amount of edits that have a troll / far right / aggressive theme. Some people only seem to edit controversial topics, and some push really weird theories and will argue every bizarre claim as nauseum, some are very free with personal insults, and most are totally normal people.

But the ones who’ve made a slightly odd, vaguely political edit to a reasonably banal page, and when you leave a polite discussion on the talk page and carefully edit it to remove the most inflammatory bits they just revert your edit within a couple of minutes - I’ve had a terrible time with them.

Always, they revert your edit and then either make another minor edit right afterwards, or some other account / anonymous comes in and makes a minor edit, within 2 minutes of theirs. And when you check their history and see a vast majority of their edits are on X rated pages, in my experience that means you’re never going to win. Every edit you make will be reverted within minutes. If they put anything on the talk page it will be exactly as personally offensive as you can get without being outright ban-able. And their shadow account will be along right after every comment or action to agree.

It’s exhausting, and it totally made me lose faith in Wikipedia. I know there are channels to report that, but I’ve found that they take months and the discussion is like ‘yeah that was out of line but they’ve made so many non offensive edits, maybe they were having a bad day?’ with the odd essay-length barrage of insults from new accounts that are always deleted, but just remind me that it’s so easy to just create a new account for bad faith purposes that what’s the point wading through all this aggro just to make sure one user gets a stern talking to on one of his many accounts, for the sake of a line or two on a page about a topic you’re not that interested in.

Sorry for the tragic novella lol, it just really annoys me. Wikipedia could have been so great, but for the fact that trolls and bad actors don’t worry about following the rules, certainly don’t mind conflict, and can write 50 pages worth of bullshit in the time it takes an honest person to fact check the first paragraph, let alone the time and effort it takes to edit stuff by the correct channels.

And when you argue with them, that’s what they enjoy. They can wear people down just by being odious, and even if enough people wade in to help you out and waste their time arguing with someone who’s being deliberately inflammatory, and everyone agrees that yes the page on trees shouldn’t be mostly about lynching black people or whatever - that page is going to be edited again by a new account within days. All the decent people stand to win is a temporary, hard fought knowledge that a tiny piece of the internet isn’t quite as toxic as it was before, and will be again, and they lose so much energy and good will if they don’t like arguing. And for the dickheads, the entire thing is win-win.

I don’t know how to prevent that, other than a much stricter attitude to anonymous/ new account edits and offensive arguments, and detecting patterns like ‘this account always makes innocuous edits within minutes of this other person making controversial ones’, but that’s a bit more tightly controlled than Wikipedia could / should be.

(I mean the other solution is some sort of mandatory therapy and socialising courses for people who actively enjoy trolling / shit stirring / making people angry, but that would be a little beyond my or Wikipedia’s remit, so)

Man, I really disagree with your stance but you’re arguing in an annoyingly reasonable, balanced manner and doing legwork to produce evidence for your claim that invites people to re-evaluate their long held stance.

It’s annoying because I like my long held stances. They’re comfortable.

I’m a big fan of dark humour (as long as it isn’t punching down and is kept in pretty well defined areas where it’s unlikely to upset reasonable people who happen to be on the wrong side) and have read all your posts thinking ‘sorry but if people can’t joke, or express their frustration and fear by pretending they aren’t powerless, that sounds like a recipe for frustration and repression’, which is reasonable because all the examples are on my socio-political side.

And you’ve made it kinda obvious, without being aggressive, that if I only think it’s ok because I happen to agree with them… It’s maybe time to re-evaluate my threshold for when joking and letting off steam online crosses the threshold that I don’t want to be part of that community any more.

So, full marks on ‘how to convince people to change beliefs that they have an emotional connection to’, because I’ve seen the argument a few times and it’s never been remotely effective.

And I guess, the world needs less violent jokes and personal vendettas in general, even though it’s clearly one side causing the actual problems. I can’t keep criticising them without being critical of the people in my own spaces doing the same.

(Really sorry, just a few marks deducted because I do not feel overjoyed or enlightened. I’m mildly annoyed that I’ve been in the wrong and have to change, for no personal gain, and it’ll take the fun out of a lot of the internet. I suspect at some point I’ll realise I’m much happier without reading violent stuff etc, and be much more grateful. But for now it feels a little like finding out that one of my new hobbies is problematic)

I can bring villainy and snacks, maybe some sandwiches or something?

Literally everybody can see exactly what was written, when, and from which IP address. Not only is that history maintained indefinitely on Wikipedia, it’s also downloaded by thousands of people around the world.

Everybody who has ever added a missing punctuation mark to a page is recorded in history, the specific date and time and page and action, accessible even if the world wide web goes down and Wikipedia ceases to exist.

I’m not sure if your ‘anonymous graffiti’ analogy is quite right, though I’m also struggling to imagine many places in my country where someone could graffiti on a wall and not be tracked down very quickly if necessary.

Oh god, I didn’t even look to see what changes they’d made to other articles.

Actually that should make things easier, there are processes for reporting repeated vandalism, and they’re much more efficient than ‘this person wrote one article badly’. I’ll have a look.

I get your point, but the 'real crux of the matter ’ is very much - what is the fediverse. That’s what an encyclopedia is for. It defines things.

Wikipedia is not the place to highlight or discuss the moral or legal standards that every entity must meet. That would be ridiculous.

Chicken soup is subject to at least 10,000 individual regulatory restrictions (no poisons, name must reflect content, pay this tax to enter this country, staff must be paid and free and blah blah, no more than x foreign substances, must not go rancid within this time frame, can’t be packaged in a paper envelope). Some, like the workers’ rights and fair pricing and amount of weird chemicals, are actually pretty important human rights issues that have very real, immediate effects of the health and wellbeing of various population groups.

Should they all be on the Wikipedia article for chicken soup? All of them? If so, I have news about the laws, restrictions, relations, challenges, emerging research, etc, into vegetable soup. And also tomato soup. And, in fact, every processed food. And if that looks a bit ridiculous, consider the ethical considerations of the tea industry. It’s horrific (source: I’m English). It’s been horrific for hundreds of years now and has literally ended nations, killed millions of people, and doesn’t look like it’s in the final stretch of being solved.

It is, therefore, probably too much to include on a page about a new cruelty-free brand of iced tea that’s just taking off. People would go to that page to read about that brand of iced tea, not tea in general, and certainly not the troubled history and socio-political scandals of the tea trade in general, unless they had a beef with the iced tea brand.

Which, I suspect, is what happened on the fediverse page. And I didn’t put the flags on the page, or remove the content, but I’m glad someone did.

Back in the day, we used to marvel at the mental fortitude of paramedics and war medics, who constantly see and deal with the most extreme accidents and horrors of humanity so that we, the public, don’t ever have to.

That burden does seem to have expanded rather. I legit think it might be less traumatic to triage and transport a selection of burns victims, traffic fatalities etc for a living than to moderate busy social media platforms.

At least in an ambulance you generally get fair warning what sort of unspeakable horror you need to attend next, and you can help them.

I suppose in the medical emergency industry you also don’t have to inform the disfiguring disease / patch of black ice on the road / tainted drinking water that ‘yep, sorry, you can’t operate here. Yes I know you’re just trying to get by but we do have a No Festering Gonorrhoea sign that you ignored before infecting this lady’.

TLDR: at some point community moderators (not the over zealous type) might need to be recognised as an emergency service

Someone put that on in the last 12 hours, and since then, some anonymous person just deleted the entire section lol.

I legit feel really grateful, I’d been going down a bit of a ‘either every source of information is corrupt and there’s no hope, or I’m losing my mind’ rabbit hole. I haven’t quite pulled the plug on Reddit yet, which may be contributing to that.

I prefer the whole ‘major additions and changes should be introduced in the talk section of a page so it can be discussed by the committee of reasonable good faith adults with lots of spare time and patience’ approach to Wikipedia editing, but in retrospect that may be a wee bit idealistic in current times. So the ‘one person complains and documents, another person flags, and another just deletes the entire thing’ is a process that may be a good compromise between The Way Things Should Be and how to edit Wikipedia with consensus and without being harassed by neo Nazis.

They did! The change log shows the main section of ‘I found a single paper criticising the fediverse so here’s 600 words on how terrible the concept is’, and also reassured me that I wasn’t just being lazy in not wanting to trawl through the text to edit it to be less awful.

I’m bizarrely excited about it too. You can’t thank anonymous Wikipedia editors, so I’ll throw a vague ‘thank you!’ out into the world and try to pay it forward.

My next battle: figuring out why I can’t edit this post, lol (maybe a mobile problem) and long term, why I didn’t think of ‘just edit it anonymously’.

I feel like the corporate American need for exponential growth and for endless feeds of mindless scrollable content is, maybe, not what people are crying out for on the fediverse.

There are so, so many other platforms offering both. They got shit, because exponential growth and endless scrolling feeds only ever lead that way.

I’m happy with one little corner of the internet that doesn’t always need to pump up its numbers month on month, year on year, and where I can scroll for a bit then get bored and go back to the real world.

In fact, I seem to recall an awful lot of people saying that’s the only way to engage with the www and stay sane. Or at least, have a fighting chance.

Maybe today’s major social media platforms will find new ways to hold the gaze of the masses, or maybe they will continue to decline in relevance, lingering like derelict shopping centers or a dying online game, haunted by bots and the echo of once‑human chatter.

Occasionally we may wander back, out of habit or nostalgia, or to converse once more as a crowd, among the ruins. But as social media collapses on itself, the future points to a quieter, more fractured, more human web, something that no longer promises to be everything, everywhere, for everyone. This is a good thing.

Man, something about this article really hit me. The internet used to be a playground, and we’ve all noticed it becoming noisier and nastier of late. But this article points out that it’s a legit warzone now, a flesh market, a prison.

We keep coming back like caged monkeys hugging their wire mothers harder and harder the lonelier they feel. Fuck this noise. It’s barely habitable for adults, it’s absolutely no place for the younger generations to grow up. Idk how we let it get so bad, or what to do, but the entire thing needs cleaning up.

I’m thinking more ‘anti competition law’ and ‘holding social media companies responsible for harms,’ as suggested in the article, but in my head I’m imagining some glorious expulsion of Elon Musk, advertisers, and data collectors from the world wide web, like driving the devils from the garden of Eden (which, btw, seems like a trick the Christian God missed).

The combined worldwide energy usage of ChatGPT is equivalent to about 20k American households.

Or about 10 small countries. Not even being that hyperbolic: American households are fabulously, insanely wasteful of energy.

The rest of the world (barring places like Saudi Arabia, which are rarely used as moral or socio-cultural examples the world should learn from) has done the whole ‘What’s the point in trying to better the world when America and China do more damage than the rest of the world combined?’ debate decades ago, and we ended up deciding that we can’t control the worst offenders, and can only do what we can.

Literally any moral value or standard is subject to ‘but but but what’s the point if you can’t eradicate the problem entirely?’, that’s why it’s such a weak fallacy. Minimising absolutely pointless destruction of non-renewable resources won’t successfully save the environment tomorrow, but we can do it anyway, and if will help. We can’t eradicate theft, but we can do our best to pay for things before taking them. We know that being polite in public isn’t the 1 thing holding our society back from utopian perfection, but we do it anyway, because it helps.

We can all pinky promise not to murder or violently assault anyone, and pay no attention to the weirdo protesting that ‘What’s the point in not assaulting people when actually, cars and illness and unhealthy lifestyles do more harm’, because that person is presumably just looking for an excuse to hit someone.

And yeah, long story short: using ‘American households’ as an example of how insignificant AI’s energy usage is is kinda like saying smoking is safe because it’s actually less harmful than spending 6 hours a day on a busy road in Delhi. If you don’t spend 6 hours a day near busy roads in Delhi, you won’t exactly think ‘oh that’s ok then’. And if you do, your lungs need all the help they can get and you’ve got all the more reason to be wary of smoking (I say this as a smoker btw).

Huge areas of Africa and the middle east are becoming uninhabited because of climate change. Those people all need food and water, and the western world does not have the resources or inclination to house and feed them all. It is almost unanimously described as the worst crisis humanity has ever faced, and the practical solution - stop wasting fossil fuels and non-renewable resources when there’s a viable alternative - is so insanely easy.

Billions of lives could be saved, if everyone on the planet agreed to be mindful of energy waste. Not ‘stop using energy’ or ‘everybody become vegan and live in houses made of recycled banana peel’, just quit wasting.

But there are entire countries who don’t seem to get the whole ‘acting together for the betterment of humanity’ thing, so that incredibly simple solution won’t work. And all we can do in the meantime is to lead by example, make ‘responsible consumption’ a lifestyle rather than an option, and hope against hope that enough Americans and Chinese people decide to reduce their dependence on 1000 daily images of shrimp Jesus or an endless output of bullshit papers written by AI to pretend that’s what science means, in time to maybe save some of the planet before wildfire season lasts 12 months a year.

Also: it’s not even like you’re gaining anything from constantly using AI or LLMs. Just fleeting dopamine hits while your brain cells wither. Of all the habits one could try to reduce, or be mindful of, to literally save lives and countries, anybody who honestly thinks generative AI is more important is very addicted.

Also also: it’s just so shit.