grepe

yup. how is that not obvious to anyone is beyond me... some of those workers have contracts that would require amazon paying severance in case they would just fire them like so many other companies do. better make them leave on their own.

that is an interesting idea. still... you can create an account (or have a troll farm of such accounts) that will mainly be used to trust bots and when their reputation goes down you throw them away and create new ones. same as you would do with traditional troll accounts... you made it one step more complicated but since the cost of creating bot accounts is essentially zero it doesn't help much.

you are right - it doesn't have to be one or the other... I just assume that for social media to work as I expect I don't know most of the people on the platform. given that assumption and the lowering price of creating bots and ability to onboard them I expect that eventually most of the actors on the platform will end up being bots. people that write them are often insanely motivated (politically or financially) and creating barriers for them is not easy.

I was thinking about something like this but I think it's ultimately not enough. You have essentially just two possible ends stages for this:

1. you only trust people that you personally meet and you verified their private key directly and then you will see only posts/interactions from like 15 people. the social media looses its meaning and you can just have a chat group on signal.

2. you allow some length of chains (you trust people [that are trusted by the people]^n that you know) but if you include enough people for social media to make sense then you will eventually end up with someone poisoning your network by trusting a bot (which can trust other bots...) so that wouldn't work unless you keep doing moderation similar as now.

i would be willing to buy a wearable physical device (like a yubikey) that could be connected to my computer via a bluetooth interface and act as a fido2 second factor needed for every post but instead of having just a button (like on the yubikey) it would only work if monitoring of my heat rate or brainwaves would check out.

but there is just no right or wrong answer to every question... sometimes it's just about opinion.

sometimes these questions are trivial (which color of tie should I wear with this shirt) and sometimes they are literally life and death questions (should death penalty be legal)... and there will always be people with opposing opinions on them. "agreeing to disagree" is literally the best possible thing they can do to live in the same society.

I think I get the sentiment that you are angry at but there is nothing wrong with that statement. It just doesn't mean "whelp, there must be some higher purpose those things are serving that we don't see" and is more like "there are some awful people doing bad things" or "they just were living in a seismic area" or "they had some genes not compatible with their survival"... There are always reasons. Not satisfying or purpose fulfilling reasons, just reasons.

Actually, I do... but do you really want the source or do you just want me to be wrong?

Why do you think lower paid CEO must be shitty? There turns out to be very little link between the CEO and CEO pay and the company performance... they are only paid a lot cause they are in the position of power to directly influence their salary.

All good advice. I'd recommended protonmail for mail hosting - got very good experience with them and the onky downside is you have to use their client.

I tried both hosting my own mail server and using a paid mail hosting with my own domain and I advise against the former.

The reason not to roll out your own mail server is that your email might go to spam at many many common mail services. Servers and domains that don't usually send out big amount of email are considered suspicious by spam filters and the process of letting other mail servers know that they are there by sending out emails is called warming them up. It's hard and it takes time... Also, why would you think you can do hosting better than a professional that is paid for that? Let someone else handle that.

With your own domain you are also not bound to one provider - you can change both domain registrar and your email hosting later without changing your email address.

Also, avoid using something too unusual. I went with [email protected] cause I thought it couldn't be simpler than that. Bad idea... and I can't count how many times people send mail to a wrong address because such tld is unfamiliar. I get told by web forms regularly that my email is not a valid address and even people that got my email written on a piece of paper have replaced the .email with .gmail.com cause "that couldn't be right"...

I think many of these classifications are caused simply by doctors refusing to say "I just don't know" and patients refusing to accept that they really don't and probably never will...

Take IBS. We are supposed to believe that there is a disease with no known cause, so many possible triggers and influencers that anyone can find some that fit and wildly varying symptoms... something similar could probably be said for many other "syndromes". Of course all of those people have something else or a combination of something else but nobody wants to admit they just don't know and everyone wants a diagnosis.