Reddit Implements a Social Credit Score Which Only Administrators Can See.

Reddit Implements a Social Credit Score Which Only Administrators Can See.

Reddit has implemented a new Social Credit Score.

It is being lampooned on Lemmy, a “federated” Reddit clone that is only truly improved in the sense that it is not a Chrome App that spies on the user.

When I was banned from most of Reddit, I had a “karma” of over 20,000 which means most users found me incredibly insightful.

The people doing the banning are toxic, and in the case of /r/Linux, they are puppets of Microsoft.

I wonder how long the Social Credit Score has actually been around before they admitted to it.

There’s almost no actual discussion on Reddit anymore because they’ve terrified people into this self policing or banned or driven off all the normal people with punishment for the moderators just not liking them.

Now all they have left are subreddits filled with pornography.

Apparently this is fine.

People spreading their bare ass cheeks in an entire subreddit is fine, but making a joke about Microsoft isn’t.

If you’re still using this thing, why?

I’ve been lurking on Lemmy and it strikes me that while it has many of the same problems, it does not appear quite as utterly toxic as Reddit. Although you’d have to try hard.

They’ve turned Reddit into something that’s not even the Web anymore.

It’s a Chrome App that pops up QR codes so you can “anonymously” browse pornography, you see, only with their official app that contacts dozens of ad companies and spyware servers.

Since Infinity, a Free Software program, stopped working due to the API changes, whenever I go to look at something on Reddit it’s in a Gopher proxy.

(gopher://gopherddit.com/)

If I want to view an image, it goes directly to a jpeg file instead of popping up this Chrome app garbage on Reddit’s site.

Chrome is being built to destroy the Web and force people into surveillance Capitalism.

It’s watching you.

Every single site you load. You’d have to be nuts to use Chrome.

Of course a lot of people are not capable of thinking about it in this sense because they’ve been taught to value convenience instead of Freedom and what’s best for them in the long run.

But Reddit’s app is the same thing. Most phone apps that are not from F-Droid are doing a lot of bad things to you.

According to Privacy Tests, the two worst desktop Web browsers to use are Chrome and Edge, which is just a version of Chrome from Microsoft.

The two best are Brave and LibreWolf.

While this only counts the level of protection from Web sites, Chrome and Edge have a lot of spyware at the application level, and so does Firefox.

Using adtech browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, is not a great idea.

When you go and look at Private Mode, Chrome and Edge don’t get much better than they are in the normal mode.

When you look at Android browsers, DuckDuckGo is actually much worse than Google Chrome for Android. 😛

DuckDuckGo is a “branding condom” for Microsoft Bing.

I was reading Jamie Zawinski’s blog because I was bored out of my mind today. One of his commenters was defending that DuckDuckGo used “hundreds and hundreds of sources”.

Curiously, if you do a search on DuckDuckGo and the same search on Bing, basically they’re 100% identical.

Hundreds and hundreds of Bing. 😉

But Social Credit Scores.

Yeah, that thing you’re always hearing about those “Nasty Red Chinese” having?

Yeah, the US has them and just outsourced this to Big Tech companies.

You have Social Credit Scores, and they just won’t tell YOU what it is, or how they’re using it to discriminate against you.

You have, probably as many of them as products that track you.

Reddit is just a very small turd in this punch bowl.

Google is a bigger one, so is Microsoft.

Every time you slide your credit card. Every time you transmit a fast food order with an app or save 10 cents a gallon on gas.

Microsoft LinkedIn “experimented” on over 20 million people over five years and may have stopped some of them from getting a job.

Microsoft LinkedIn “experimented” on over 20 million people over five years and may have stopped some of them from getting a job. -New York Times (archived from NewsWaffle)

[Microsoft] LinkedIn ran experiments on more than 20 million users over five years that, while intended to improve how the platform worked for members, could have affected some people’s livelihoods, according to a new study. […]

LinkedIn’s algorithmic experiments may come as a surprise to millions of people because the company did not inform users that the tests were underway. […]

LinkedIn[…]routinely run[s] large-scale experiments in which they try out different versions of app features, web designs and algorithms on different people. The longstanding practice, called A/B testing, is intended to […] keep them engaged, which helps the [company] make money through premium membership fees or advertising. Users often have no idea that companies are running the tests on them.

But the changes made by LinkedIn are indicative of how such tweaks to widely used algorithms can become social engineering experiments with potentially life-altering consequences for many people.[…]

“The findings suggest that some users had better access to job opportunities or a meaningful difference in access to job opportunities,” said Michael Zimmer, an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Data, Ethics and Society at Marquette University.[…]

LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, did not directly answer a question about how the company had considered the potential long-term consequences of its experiments on users’ employment and economic status.

Basically, LinkedIn is there to make Microsoft money (duh) by running skeevy tests on people, who probably didn’t even read the EULA, which might have caused them to miss employment opportunities.

When Microsoft was reached for comment, they had none.

What are you going to say when you’ve been outed as ruining someone’s hopes and dreams for career advancement (or even finding a job at all in a bad economy), in the pursuit of a better algorithm to bring in ad money from people who haven’t stopped to consider why this is all “free”?

As a separate issue, LinkedIn is not doing as well as the obsequious Gates-Funded New York Times would suggest.

The New York Times runs hundreds of Gates propaganda articles and even softens what they do when their LinkedIn division screws people who have accounts there.

LinkedIn itself, like the rest of Microsoft, laid of thousands already in staggered layoffs and is on a hiring freeze. (Scroll through the results and you can see that LinkedIn itself has fired thousands and is turning into a ghost town.)

LinkedIn also gets used like “another Facebook” by people who shouldn’t be anywhere near it.

People such as my sister-in-law, who we joke about in #Techrights because she’s such a materialistic megalomaniac, make “LinkedIn” accounts as a temple to themselves, not thinking about how they’re being manipulated and experimented upon by Microsoft.

Another person I know who is on LinkedIn is an ex of mine who got blacklisted from government employment in Wisconsin after he faked a back injury to file a fraudulent worker’s comp case. He has an arrest warrant in Illinois, and his profile currently says he works as a DoorDash driver.

Like many “social” (control) media sites, many LinkedIn profiles I’ve seen accidentally reveal some things the “used” (of Microsoft) probably doesn’t want a job interviewer (or stalker) to know, such as they fact that they’ve had a string of jobs they weren’t at for very long, which signals that they’ll probably bring problems to your company if you hire them.

Most people should look for jobs some other way than resorting to LinkedIn.

Most companies still accept paper job applications or at least applications submitted directly to their hiring people. Most people don’t need to be on a “social network” to find a job.

Maybe that’s why Microsoft is firing so many LinkedIn employees?

Major “adtech” layoffs. Newspapers continue dying off. American economy continues to the scene of the crash.

In another sign of Dotcom Bubble 2.0, adtechs are laying off, according to layoffs.fyi and the New York Times.

We’re definitely seeing echos of the Dotcom Bubble collapse, even though most consumer-facing news is trying to spin things to suggest the lowest unemployment rates ever. A lie that Vice-President Kamala Harris repeated only the other day.

Most Americans are terribly concerned with inflation and losing their jobs, but the CNNs and CNBCs still project denial. What rags!

Burying your head in the sand hasn’t ever helped anyone solve a problem. These folks want you to subscribe to the religion that as long as “consumer confidence” remains high, it does not matter how much toxic sludge is swirling around in the system. There’s a lot of toxic sludge, that’s for sure. When is the last time anyone asked how confident YOU were as a consumer? Yeah, me neither.

In the New York Times article I just linked to, Marc Andreeson, one of the early Web pioneers (Netscape, Sun, etc.) and an active “Venture Capitalist” today, says that “good big tech companies” are overstaffed by 200% and “bad big tech companies” are overstaffed by 400%.

(By good and bad, he means as investments, of course. And, relatively speaking.)

So it falls somewhere in-between with Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Uber where in the 200-400% range they actually are.

I posted about the internal woes at Microsoft.

It’s a bloodbath in tech right now. A complete bloodbath.

Most people who have been through layoffs (I have.) can tell you that when the CEO or their boss calls a meeting and says that the company has to “become leaner and more focused”, it’s not a good thing. Employee morale tanks immediately, people start looking for jobs, even the ones that may not have been fired.

But layoffs work like that. Microsoft is in so much trouble, and their executives have no vision, and they’re not alone. Most companies are like that. They try to sand and paint and keep it looking okay, and then the problems just bubble up and the rust explodes publicly. That’s what’s going on in Microsoft today.

I think that Marc Andreeson is correct and we’re looking at job losses that could easily enter the millions within the next 6-12 months.

“The News” quality is being chiseled away at due to the collapse in both advertising revenues, and the lack of people willing to pay for it.

Gannett, the largest newspaper company in America, posted a $54 million dollar quarterly loss recently, and risks being “acquired” by another Bezos (like The Washington Post was) or Bezos himself.

The gaslighting becomes so much easier as there’s less and less journalism to turn to.

Over the years, the US federal government has more or less defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, citing budget cuts.

The government spends over $7 trillion USD a year now, and that’s just the feds. Tax revenues are maybe half that, and you hear the Democrats go on and on about “deficit reductions”.

Does it sound like they care how much they spend on anything or what the deficits are?

Neutering NPR and PBS and leaving them vulnerable to corruption by Bill Gates, Amazon, Bezos personally, Exxon, and Walmart, and countless others, ensures that they’re only slightly less bad than the “corporate media”. The only reason they’re kept alive at all is because they can claim to be “public broadcasting” and “fair” and the idea of that is laughable. Federal funding is like <1% of their budget.

They may be chartered by law to do some things, but when 99% of your money comes from the James Bond villains, you don’t piss off the James Bond villains.

To chart the decline in the American media is difficult. No matter where you think the bottom is at, you’re wrong and it gets worse. It’s such a sewer that millions of people either have been or will be newly unemployed at the end of this another year, and they’re still talking about a “tight jobs market” even though there’s “a lot of layoffs”.

It’s written in such a way that any individual person who happens to read this crap is supposed to think that it’s just a problem for them that they’re unemployed and nobody is calling them.

That’s pretty sick, honestly.

What’s even sicker are all of these businesses that got “Paycheck Protection” money.

Now the news admits 75% of it failed to reach any workers, according to a study conducted by the United States Central Bank, specifically the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve. $600 billion out of $800 billion went to the rich.

Specifically to people like the Indiana slumlord who drives 3 Cadillacs and cheats on her taxes, and fakes eviction letters to the Township trustee to get her tenants “poor relief” vouchers payable to her. You know, “job creators”.

I’m sure she was very happy that President Trump was there to hand her $12,000 that open records show that she didn’t have to pay back.

You put this all together and it’s obvious what’s going on. They think that with the appropriate amount of brainwashing, they can hold the riots back while they continue sucking our national treasury bare.

Pretty much all of the corruption is open, indeed some of it is even reported on, but when did you see the article about the PPP that I just mentioned. Now, right?

They say that you know a country is circling the drain when its people become decadent and start favoring “Bread and Circuses”, or as the Roman term was, “panem et circenses“.

Last year, as part of an attempted turnaround, Gannett hired a new executive with a background in “Entertainment and Gaming” to “build a customer obsessed platform”, all anyone wants to do is sit in their home staring at a 5″ phone screen watching “streaming apps”.

Hell, Chicago Mayor Lori “Beetlejuice” Lightfoot recently signed an agreement to turn Chicago over to NASCAR for TWO WEEKS, insisting that $500,000 to let them tear up our streets and make noise and a mess and draw drunken crowds to one of the most violent cities in America, was a great deal.

(For comparison, Lollapalooza pays the city $2 million to be there for 4 days, occupying part of Grant Park.)

“Beetlejuice” claims Chicago has a lot of “closeted NASCAR fans”. (I haven’t seen any.)

The ultimate costs of having the NASCAR spectacle to the taxpayers of Chicago is “unknown”, but that hardly matters.

The government can steal from you to pay for whatever it wants.

And distracting you from the lousy government (which is taking bribes among other things), is a good investment of your hard-earned money.

The incestuous relationship of the mainstream news, entertainment, and politics is where one hand washes the other.

The wealthy do not want to pay for programs to compensate the unemployed.

The dying news media makes for easy takeovers, which become a psyop splog for Bill Gates, Bezos, Musk, Cook, and the rest, and the politicians get their “numbers”.

Like, “2% unemployment. There must be something wrong with you, bro.”

The best advice I’ve seen, from someone on one of my chats, was “Don’t trust your employer and keep your fixed expenses down as much as you can.”.

I’m sure NASCAR in Chicago will fix everything. That government could be given all of the gold bars in Fort Knox and they’d be broke again next month.

No, JWZ, Discord is not “IRC with pictures”.

Jamie Zawinski made a comment about Discord basically being “IRC with pictures” somewhere along the way, but it’s actually not.

What Discord does is way worse. It pretends to be IRC plus all of these neat features, so that it can rope people in and centralize their communications, and log everything they do.

They have this thing that they call “running a Discord Server”, which is bogus, because you don’t run the server. They do.

This means that anything anyone ever does on Discord is subject to failure if the company goes out of business or has downtime.

According to Wikipedia, once Discord got enough people used to the free version, they started imposing artificial limits on what you could do, and then selling you subscriptions to get the things you were doing before. This is pretty typical of proprietary software, especially “web apps” like Microsoft 365.

When users got together as a community to make robot programs (like you could always do on IRC) to play Youtube music, ad-free, Google sent DMCA attacks and Discord removed the bots.

When people who had various political beliefs that were not popular among the fascist woke “left” started gathering on Discord, Discord promised to Cancel them.

(Did they, eventually do that? I don’t know, but the fact is that they can.)

We may disagree with other people’s opinions, but having opinions isn’t illegal in a civilized society. Woke trolls use Big Tech to silence their opposition and then again to whine and destroy them professionally.

Discord stepped in and disrupted Wall Street Bets, for making rich people look stupid and causing them to lose some money.

This is just a small list of things they can do.

With IRC, we’ll still have it in 20 years and know how it works. Governments won’t be able to tell the “IRC company” (there isn’t one) to ban end-to-end encryption, which government officials themselves use to prevent leaks, or to shut down servers that they don’t like. If they tried it, it could be hosted somewhere else. If you get banned on one server, you can go somewhere else. If your ISP or government tries to blockade it, you can use an obfuscated VPN or Tor tunnel and use it anyway.

Most tech companies just end up doing whatever the government tells them to in order to not have any of their own business activities suspended. In some cases, this includes being unmasked in order to be executed.

The first step in avoiding a trap, is knowing of its existence.

Discord is not “IRC with pictures”. It’s a trap.

Zawinski seems to be more of a hipster who made good on the dotcom hysteria and then went on to rest on his laurels, occasionally amusing himself by buying a bar, and some Macs, which he swears up and down work fine even though they lock him out of his computer.

(In a recent post, it wouldn’t even let him program software and compile it because Apple didn’t sign those make and python binaries.)

The Macs are (still) more buggy than any GNU/Linux distro I’ve ever seen, according to Zawinski himself. (Who goes on to quote problems in GNU/Linux that were solved 13 _years_ ago as reasons for hating GNU/Linux.)

I think he shouldn’t be listened to for advice about software and using it.

IRC can do all of the important things you need it to do, and it hasn’t gotten much fatter than it was in the 1990s, despite having a new version on the way.

How many things on your computer can you say that about? Remember how slow Windows 98 was on the internet, on dial up? Remember progress bars taking forever, and pulling down menus being painfully slow?

Why is it, today, that your laptop is thousands of times faster than your desktop PC was then, and yet it feels like we’ve made no progress at all?

Windows has gotten morbidly obese to the point even a new computer feels slow right out of the box, which is alarming, and something they use to drive hardware sales, even though they’re like a shittier Apple now. Your PC is three years old! Throw it away! Windows 11!

They throw parties for themselves. They pull a string and OMG MSFT! Joey, Michael Larabel, and SJVN dance for them. It’s sad.

But a few things certainly don’t need to get much fatter and more horrible as time goes on because they’re controlled by a community process (like some GNU/Linux operating systems), and IRC is definitely one of those things. Leave IRC alone! 😉