The story behind the numbers they present clearly demonstrates that X is censoring/shadowbanning them. Going from 600MM to 13MM impressions/yr -- losing 98% of their impressions! -- is no accident but clearly Musk's thumb on the scale.
Imagine what this means if you are trying to gauge impact of a post. Remember, X is giving them zero information about who they're preventing from seeing it. Impressions is the main datapoint so if you can't figure out why you've lost 98% of your impact, how on earth are you going to evaluate it vs other platforms?
And yes, each platform has a cost. There's a LOT more to social strategy than just "copy and paste this announce to every platform".
The only thing Elmo managed to do was block legitimate and fun bots posting silly stuff.
The actual pretending-to-be-humans bots / professional trolls that argue for any viewpoint they get paid to endorse are still there in full force. They even pay the fee for the checkmark.
They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Also, cross positing the same content on multiple platforms isn’t time consuming.
This is clearly EFF violating their stated commitment to political neutrality, and providing only a superficial and easily discredited rationale for cover.
The problem is they can't really say it, because if their stance is that Musk's management deserves such rejection, then they are cutting their nose to spite their face, and if the abhorrent ones are X users in general, they show themselves to be only on one side of the aisle, removing any legitimacy to their principles.
>They still get more engagement on X than on Bluesky.
Is this the right metric? Or would having 98% of their impressions lopped off by the platform factor in? What if they were 100% suppressed? Would it still be "political" for them to leave? If not, then what's the threshhold?
And, if the platform is suppressing them, then isn't it the platform that's playing politics? How are they absolved, and why should EFF stick around to give them its imprimatur of legitimacy / neutrality?
It's not necessarily shadowbanning (although it could well be), given that it's been turned into a cesspit where huge numbers of users left and the ones still there are probably not the demographic that would engage with the EFF, it could just be a natural consequence of Musk's wrecking it.
That may be the case, but the EFF’s Twitter alone is enough to explain their poor performance.
Their last post did quite well, and it is characteristically different from their other posts.
I don’t think Elon Musk personally needs to put his thumb on the scale in this case. I don’t even understand why he’d be involved here and not say anything. Like wouldn’t he say “EFF sucks” or something? I dunno, I don’t really keep up with that kind of thing.
It’s fine if the EFF wants to leave because they aren’t reaching people.
On a decent social platform, it shouldn't even matter if their posting sucks or is lazy. If I followed them, I want to see their stuff. If I'm not seeing the posts of the accounts I follow, the site is not worth me using - same if ppl who explicitly followed me aren't seeing my posts.
Maybe, I haven’t been keeping up since the cracker machine stuff. I thought EFF was a GNU-adjacent thing any generic tech person supported. I guess I was wrong.
The GNU-adjacent thing would be FSF, and I'd say many EFF supporters are antagonistic towards the FSF (and/or RMS) because of their "extremist" stances. I'd characterize EFF as "corporate Open Source" vs. FSF/GNU "Free Software."
The thing is, unless their posts have only gotten bad recently, it's reasonable to assume that the drop in traffic is unrelated to post quality. Algorithms, changing audiences, etc. become better explanations.
Leaving out key parts of a quote is a disingenuous way to attempt to make a counter-argument, especially when the full quote clearly contradicts your second sentence.
They said nothing of this in TFA, all they talked about was decimated view count. The obvious conclusion is X is censoring them, like they pretty much do to anybody that Elon feels like censoring.
> how would reproducing some random number be legally "stealing" under any legal system in the world?
The usual way, via the criminal code. My old business treasury was scammed into transferring funds on-chain to an impersonator. We were able to recover losses through an insurance claim which required us to report the theft to the police.
What is the alternative? It seems like a lot (a majority?) of professional formats are professionally developed by for-profit consortia, with open-source trailing behind as patents expire. Isn't this what patents are for? If a private entity drops $$$/time/expertise into tech shouldn't they be rewarded for some period?
The alternative would be lavishly funded public research, which sounds great to me! But is that going to happen?
The OP's complaint is literally about a one-sentence paragraph, the second in the article. Plenty of warning to avoid the rest and move on, but LLM shaming is it's own reward perhaps?
This only happens if the extension puts their `moz-extension://` links into the DOM. It's different to chrome case where extensions can be detected regardless of being activated on that site or not.
As I understand it, an extension could also leak its links via its own backend, e.g. to advertisers, who could then detect it even though no user-observable DOM modification is happening.
Much better than static global IDs, but still not ideal.
Yeah, anything happening in backend depends totally on the extensions. Unless I need something, I rarely use extensions that are closed-source or open-source but has some sending data in their features.
I'm hoping the meme goes away. Internet is a dark forest, crypto DEXes are a dark forest, AI is a dark forest. Add the obligatory gloss of Cixin Liu (DF is only one of many amazing concepts in TBP but apparently the only bloggable one). Hard sci-fi references sound smart but in the end don't describe society very well.
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