1. Bought bitcoin when it was worthless
2. Followed DFV's footsteps when I watched him go in GME options around a year ago.
None of his DD was actually related to GME being shorted. In fact he mentioned a few months ago that he wasn't betting on the squeeze would happen.
The problem is that there is a segment of the American voters who believe that if the current billionaires and large corporations would quit screwing them, they would become the billionaires and owners of the large corporations. As such they are all for screwing over the current crop of billionaires, but don’t want long lasting reduction in the structural power of billionaires.
John Steinbeck
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-ho...
Hopefully this sentiment results in structural change instead.
It already happened 4 years ago.
As for 2024 - it is obvious now that the only way the GOP can win another election is by dismantling democracy.
There is no chance whatsoever that the GOP can win again without wilfully disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. In spite of the bot mob on Twitter trying to create the impression there's some kind of enraged far right majority agitating for representation, the reality is the numbers just aren't there for a clean win.
So that is what is happening now. 2020 is the last chance for the far right, and they know that - which is why they intend to take the shot well before 2024.
I don't think that's true. There are plenty of moderates in the the swing sates that voted for Biden but would be more than willing to jump on the bandwagon for someone who is seen as a moderate conservative and making the right promises. The trick is getting that candidate through the primaries if the scene looks like 2016, where the hard hard right will gather around the one nut job, and the other 5 establishment republicans will be indistinguishable.
After Trumpists, tea partiers and evangelicals it will be interesting to see what happens next. The latter two groups seemed happy to align with trump despite not sharing their core values, maybe the trumpists will stick with whatever the next group is.
I believe the context here is that Sovereign Citizens and some Q people believe that this is the date that Trump assumes a new term.
March 4 was (haven’t verified this myself) the original inauguration date. So says a podcast I listened to about conspiracy theories.
But here it's a pretty huge app, and the bombing is motivated by a real issue the users are having, so I think I agree with you that it was not necessarily the right decision.
As always the real problem is that tech giants are opaque in their behaviour. If we had clear guidelines for what constitutes "review bombing" there wouldn't really be an issue I think.
I think the app sucks if they can just prevent you from trading a stock and make you the bagholder in favor of large investors. Seems like a legitimate concern that hundred thousands of other people share - not some organized random prank. People are losing money as we speak.
Or a more sophisticated version of this would be to somehow cluster reviews based on the particular issue they are reporting.
In an ideal situation the app should show the 4. lifetime stars and the 1. recent stars. A user will them immediately know something happened, and investigate on their own (whether the review bombing was for something they care about or not).
I'm not entirely sure I agree with this; let me offer another perspective and maybe you can talk through this with me and help me understand a little better. A review is an opportunity for a user to give their honest feedback to any prospective user and (incidentally) to the app developer(s), so a bunch of reviews bombing an app into oblivion has the potential to be wasteful and harmful (unauthentic negative ratings from competitors, like you mentioned). But on the other hand if Firefox mobile has average reviews and I don't leave any kind of review since I've been fairly satisfied with my experience with the app for the eight or so years I've been using android, then they release Firefox Daylight and completely ruin the experience for me, preventing me from doing things I've been able to do for years and fundamentally tanking the experience, should a five star review from 2017-18 be considered more relevant than my 2 star review from 2020? And the other thousands of 1 star reviews flooding in after the update? What if a company has a bad app, changes their process from waterfall to agile (sorry, had to inject a little humor here), overhauls their app, and gets a huge influx of positive reviews the same day as the release. Do the negative reviews left over time have more relevance than the positive reviews left after the update?
I'm not trying to take a position on what the right approach is, I'm hoping to understand a perspective that's different from mine :).
If people think the app is a good or bad experience they will say so.
>[reviews i dont like] probably shouldn't have the same weight as [reviews i do like].
At the same time as it auto-liquidated the positions, it blocked attempts to purchase the liquidated stock.
One of their major investors directly benefited from the resulting market distortion.
Federated/distributed systems where the network is itself the filter seem more promising to me, even though they tend to come at the expense of usability.
As for breaking apart reviews into categories that also has its problem. Zagat used to rate restaurants in 5 categories and it ended up requiring people to lie if they wanted to convey the message "do not go here".
Sophisticated scoring might also bring common critiques, like ratings being biased or opaque (or just confusing). I recall Netflix had a issue when they made their star rating a prediction of what you would rate it (based on your previous viewing habits). It confused a lot of people who thought it was simply the average star rating. They since switched to percent-match as a result, and dropped star-reviews in favor of thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
Come to think of it, your suggestion may lead to something like percent-match for apps...though I suspect rating apps along dimensions the way Netflix does TV/movies may be tricky. Maybe different dimensions for different categories in the app store?
I'm still intrigued by a distributed approach that filters opinion through the sieve of the social network...I think it has more promise than centralized rating systems that attract abuse.
Sad times in cyberspace.
> What if we had a standard way to let users themselves build up and share their own views of whether other users, messages, rooms, servers etc. are obnoxious or not? What if you could visualise and choose which filters to apply to your view of Matrix?
The closest to actual deplatforming is:
> Admins running servers in particular jurisdictions then have the option to enforce whatever rules they need on their servers
But honestly, in a federated system I always assumed the server owners could do that. As long as it's not mandated from on high by the Matrix team, anyone can host whatever they want by setting up their own server.
I'm expecting that Google will do the same here.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.avuscapita...
Wrt Parler specifically, I think a lot of the "solutions" (or sketches toward) on this site would quickly reveal that the optimal societal configuration is closer to what we have now than one would expect - with or without S230.
Also, the wording of "using AWS" is almost libelously in need of a citation - who is doing it, and how do they have any sway over a company that is both absolutely enormous and not particularly woke?
President (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), White House, Parler (Google Play, Apple, AWS), MyPillow guy, anyone who utters the phrase "stop the steal" on Facebook, Kyle Rittenhouse (Facebook, GoFundMe, Discover)
So things may change suddenly, but in one of two directions:
1. big tech being split up
2. big tech exercising the control they have over politics, by controlling speech, to prevent being split up
The second option would of course be the final end of democracy in America.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."
The claw's in deep.
Without more information, it's hard to say whether this was a good faith move by Google, reflexive algorithmic moderation, or another example of American extractionalism.
There is so much wrath, envy, and greed out there, and so much willingness to believe whatever fits one’s preconceived notions of how the world works.
Get real, most economic theory is all nonsense to cover for corruption and insider trading. Everyone can see how bad the economic inequality is getting, greed is mainly from the rich side, not from the so-called "conspiracy theorists"
An “idea”? It’s like saying there is an entrenched idea that the Earth goes around the Sun.
The political class tried everything in the book to divide this nation. And in just one day, at least among the “retarded”, there is unity. No wonder they are all coming out of the woodwork to claim support for the retards. They are worried.
That's how things were from the 70s up until the internet boom.
It's going to take another paradim shift before the cynicism errodes.
I think the end point is one of:
- America comes to its senses, reforms, and becomes democratic
- America becomes a China-like oligarchy and police state, with ubiquitous surveillance, and a big-tech-run social credit system to keep everyone in line
- America bumbles along is the same fashion it has been doing, with things slowly deteriorating
I'm sure that there are many tweaks to the way apps are ranked, but I would expect that the rating itself would, indeed, mostly be a star average.
I can confirm that the displayed rating on both stores is exactly the weighted average of valid reviews and ratings posted by users. No trickery there.
The only caveat here is that both platform regularly invalidate posted reviews and ratings for various reasons (the user asked for it to be removed, apple/google has reasons to believe it was fraudulent/automated, ...). If a review/rating is removed, it won't be shown and won't be taken into account in the calculation.
So the calculation is really along the lines of :
> SELECT app, AVG(stars) AS display_stars FROM customer_reviews WHERE deleted=false GROUP BY app;
They will probably reenable ratings for the Robinhood app when things calm down, so if you want to give it a 1 star rating just wait a few weeks and try not to forget about it.
Or, even better, high ratings for apps from large corporations encourage them to support the continuation of your store's monopoly power.
There's a massive selection bias at play which tends to naturally inflate review scores without any explicit fudging.
This, so much - imagine you believe "they" stole the election, "they" got your favorite social media shut down (parler/gab/whatever), "they" blocked the buying of options, "they" then liquidated your position as the price predictably fail and you got margin called, you complained but "they" got your feedback deleted. Ouch.
I can't see this ending well at all. The executive will have to be extremely careful with what they will enact. The climate was already tense, but this is making it explosive.
I'd be extremely careful for all my 2021 forecast.
It's breaking trust at the society level.
It can become extremely dangerous when a large percentage of the population don't believe there's a social contract anymore.