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The alternative is being overrun by spam, which is already really bad on discord.

What's your solution?


Im aware of that and dont have a solution for that. Its not my job to provide one. The thing is there doesnt need to be one if you just document your stuff in a normal way. Also other platforms like reddit face the same problem and seem to be able to solve it in another way, so its not mandatory to survive in the net. Spam has always been an issue as long as the public internet existed. There are other ways to deal with it than introducing global identifiers which can be correlated between platforms and the "real world".


Reddit solves it by having millions of unpaid human moderators manually removing spam. And also by throttling/shadowbanning accounts that use anonymous IPs, non-FAANG email accounts, or non-google/apple SSO.


That's shortsighted. GP doesn't want to share their phone number, because then that phone number is likely to be sold together with their other data which can lead to more nasty problems.


That's not the only alternative. You see these kinds of intrusive checks on platforms that have drastically under-funded moderation/safety teams. I don't know Discord's numbers, but Twitter's total revenue pre-Musk was about $1/user/month or about $0.01/tweet. Plus there's a hunger for investor-beloved growth metrics that leaves things biased toward greasing the signup funnels. So you end up with privacy-destroying compromises like this.


The solution would be easy: at least offer an alternative. I would gladly give you a few cents or a dollar so you leave me alone with the dishonest bullshit. Probably one of the easiest and most effective ways you could use to fight spammers, but it is obvious why nobody does it or offers the option, because they want numbers. Would be nice to at least stop the charade.

In short, no, the alternative is not "being overrun by spam".


Documentation


Documentation is really cool, but it doesn't support voice chat yet :)


Right, but that's "support", not "documentation". Completely different thing, and the latter is not really a substitute for the former, whether it's on Discord, IRC, XMPP, or at the bar after a conference.


HTML files. Or a PDF.


What about commodities then, like oil?

It was not too long ago that the price for a barrel of oil was negative $40.


Oil is a regular good that is priced according to supply and demand expectations.

Goods can have negative prices due sharp drops in demand (a lot of X was produced, but no one wants to buy x and you are paying to store it).


Because the alternative is Twitter.


The alternative is mastodon/pleroma/misskey/calkey, etc.


I've tried making do on Mastodon. It's just not as well-made. The federation thing gets in the way, the discoverability of content is hard, one prolific tooter can too easily flood your feed - it's a decade behind Twitter and Threads in terms of usability. Even the basic information density of the web layout is poor.

I'm willing to look past these flaws and stick with the fediverse, but if nobody I want to follow is doing that, there's no point.

I hope Gargron et al can make it happen and beat both Threads and Twitter, but so far they've just been too stubborn (like the search and quote-tweet things) and haven't iterated fast-enough to really compete.


Sure, and the alternative to mac/windows is linux. Which I guess is actually unfair to linux. mastodon/etc are terrible, they will never be used by more than an unimportant minority of people.


Mastodon don't even have a proper search.


Wouldn't the other big tech firms be able to build a Twitter clone? Why am I not hearing about a Google version, or a Microsoft version? You'd think someone inside one of the Trillion dollar firms would have had the idea.


Google bringing back Buzz (the Twitter-alike that was briefly in gmail) would perhaps be the funniest possible outcome of all of this.


Google building a social media product. That will definitely go well this time around.


5th time's a charm.


You can also just not use either.


Hacker News is a fine alternative


HN is in no way an alternative, and that's okay. For the masses that use Twitter, HN is completely uninteresting and completely fails to replace Twitter. HN is too niche, too obscure, too old, and too strict to be a Twitter, and that's what makes it great.


At least Twitter fixed the election tampering problem, and now allows the free flow of information, even if TPBT object to it. Threads will still be as bad as FB in those regards.


Twitter did no such thing, Twitter now personally silences loud dissenters and engages openly in anticompetitive behavior meanwhile doing less moderation than they ever have. Plugging your ears and ignoring it is not "fixing" the election tampering problem.



What do you think Twitter did that Facebook didn’t do?


My only surprise is that it took this long


It's true for a lot of cases.

Adding almost any restriction only hurts casual users, and attackers are rarely casual users.


Unfortunately vulnerability is among the first things to be exploited, just take a look at any advertisement.


human CVE


What's the solution though?


Laws similar to those EU laws mentioned in the article.

You can definitely go further than that - a strong consumer protection agency that actually enforced these rules would help more - but having those rules in place would at least help people like OP who are willing to stand on their rights (and in turn that creates incentives for airlines to do the right thing), and is already proven to be a viable approach.


>Laws similar to those EU laws mentioned in the article.

Doesn't seem to stop Air France.


There's ongoing work to update the regulations to remove a lot of the loopholes. For example, some airlines like to try to claim that pretty much any delay/cancellation is caused by "extraordinary circumstances", even though court decisions have limited when that excuse can be used.

The efforts to clearly define some of the vague parts of EU261 have been held up by intense lobbying from the airline industry.

One important addition that has been suggested would be to force airlines to publish the cause of disruptions, so that they can't lie about it later when passengers are trying to claim compensation.


OP managed to get a decent amount of money after a bit of hassle, which is a lot better than how it works for US domestic flights.


These EU regulations do not apply when a delay or cancellation is due to the weather.

I really don’t see a problem here, you can’t just predict weather 100%, so why blame the airlines?


They do mandate some compensation if it's a sufficiently long delay due to weather? (Such as hotel rooms overnight, meal comps., etc...)


Essentially, telling airlines and airports that they need to move their provisioning levels much further from "the minimum we can get away with when everything works OK" and significantly closer to "able to deal effectively when the shit hits the fan".


Net margins being what they are for US domestic airlines (single-digit percentage on average), the additional resilience will most likely be reflected in higher prices for the consumer. Of course, that may be worth the tradeoff.


Slack in the system and higher ticket prices to support it.


For the last half century of commercial flight, however, the airline passenger has shown nothing if not a desire for lower airfares at any cost.


Lowered costs shouldn't mean criminal abuse though. If I eat at a fast food restaurant, I expect crappy meat, sure – but I shouldn't be held hostage in my booth until they decide to get around to delivering my food.


I don't support allowing criminal behavior on the part of the airlines.

But it's extraordinary hyperbole to suggest that too few customer service reps to quickly handle the needs of many travelers during an adverse weather advent amounts to criminal abuse.


"if you are dissatisfied with the airline's reply, you may resort to judicial or extrajudicial means."

What exactly is "extrajudicial means"?


Rustle up a posse, the airline knows what it did.


Horse heads are my go-to.


It means you can bring them into arbitration. Judicial means a lawsuit, arbitration/mediation is extrajudicial. While "extrajudicial" can mean other things, they're not advocating vigilantism against the airline no matter how satisfying it may be for the CSR on the phone to hear about some executive's car getting keyed in the parking lot.


Still, throwing a tantrum on Twitter often does help a lot and it's also extrajudicial.


Hire a man with a very specific set of skills…


Arbitration.


The Facebook app is fantastic in my opinion.


Chess is a leisure activity, not work, you cannot compare the impact of automation of the two.

Also, chess engines did kill chess. Chess used to be a spectacle on the national stage, from 2000 up until Queen's Gambit and the following streamer boom, chess was largely dead.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Chess&hl...


I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that engines killed mainstream interest in chess. The trend seems to only go back to 2004, which is not long enough.

My sense growing up in the 90s was that chess was a niche thing for nerds. I think it seems somewhat more mainstream now than it was then, while remaining fundamentally a niche thing for nerds :) But it seems very clear to me that it never underwent the broad collapse that I remember being broadly predicted after Kasparov vs Deep Blue.


My anecdotal recollection is that Deep Blue is a big part of what put chess into everyone's mind and rejuvenated the mainstream interest in playing what had previously been a nerd niche.


Yep, that's how I remember it too.


Human chess is still an activity that earns people money tho


Even today, there's a handful of people who make a full living off chess. The owners of chess.com, a few streamers, a handful of super GMs, and chess teachers, and the latter will be automated away.

And prior to the explosion in popularity? Barely anyone.


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