That is simply wrong. Public pressure can certainly be effective. In any case, it’s definitely better than doing nothing at all.

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I’m curious to see if our esteemed Federal Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has anything to say about this. Well, actually not, because he’s more of a U.S. lobbyist than a representative of the people, and so he certainly won’t level any criticism at his employers.

That makes it pretty clear that most executives are the worst possible people to run a company. Well, that’s just how it is when ruthlessness and greed are the only criteria used to select top executives.

But hey, even if they were to lose their jobs because they’re burning through so much money, things will go on as usual: Anyone who’s ever held a top management position will always be hired for the same role somewhere else, because competence is definitely not the deciding factor here. Never was, never will be.

Your skepticism is understandable and justified, but unfortunately it is precisely this skepticism that Israel knows how to exploit.

Not only does this criminal state invest billions in influencing public opinion—specifically targeting legacy media outlets believed to be reputable—but it also systematically kills journalists who attempt to provide independent reporting not controlled by Israel.

They are evidently pursuing a strategy so unscrupulous that it is absolutely unprecedented in recent human history. For obvious reasons, there are few reliable sources on this, but these older, scientifically collected data should give an impression of the sheer scale of the problem.

I’ll just copy a comment here that I posted more than a year ago—not the slightest thing has changed in the meantime; quite the contrary, since the U.S. continues to shield the criminal regime of Israel and thereby actively supports the genocide of the Palestinians:

Israel deliberately kills journalists, as evidenced by the fact that more journalists have been killed in Gaza in the last two years “than in the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War (including the conflicts in Cambodia and Laos), the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined”.

Source: Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs - News Graveyards: How Dangers to War Reporters Endanger the World (full paper here)

Edit: Fixed the link to the full paper as the url changed since my original comment.

Wow, the billionaires seem completely convinced that U.S. citizens will go along with anything… well, hmmm… who’s going to argue with them… it’s true, after all, that they do…

Yep, sorry. But hey, this thread definitely has its fair share of mudslinging. Hope you’re getting your money’s worth.

Hmm, well, the moderation workload does need to remain reasonably manageable for you guys.

I can’t really judge that, of course, but perhaps you could identify specific topics from the modlog that have repeatedly caused problems in the past. For example, posts about political parties (such as the two U.S. parties or the far-right AfD in Germany, etc.), political movements like MAGA, politicians like Trump and his allies, wars (such as the current U.S.-Iran conflict), or technologies like LLMs.

You could also try surveying the community itself to identify such “controversial topics,” perhaps in a pinned post, where you could set a minimum number of upvotes per suggestion for a suggestion to be included.

I think this would yield a number of concrete examples that illustrate what is meant by “no politics.” The more examples there are, the clearer it would probably be.

Thank you very much for the background information. And also for the time you spend moderating—that is truly commendable and is indeed very much needed.

Perhaps I should have reached out to you directly, but I was so outraged that I didn’t, especially since this wasn’t the first post of mine you’d removed for the same reason.

Well, looking at all the downvotes here, it seems your approach to “showerthoughts” is being liked and even vigorously defended by many.

As I said, I see it differently and consider it very dangerous to define community rules so broadly that they simply leave the decision of what’s allowed and what isn’t exclusively up to the moderators. In your case, this seems to be done with caution and reasonable consideration. Nevertheless, I believe that rules must be clearly defined and transparent from the outset so that it’s clear what to expect. Likewise, to ensure that decisions are not made purely on a whim.

As I said, I consider the “no politics” rule unsuitable for this, since there’s simply no such thing as a topic that might not be political to someone.

But since many here seem to see it quite differently, I’m probably wrong. Still, I simply can’t accept that it’s a lottery whether my posts will be allowed or not in a general community that doesn’t have a fixed topic.

Therefore, I have to accept the rules and just post elsewhere, where there is no such rule. I think that’s better for everyone, since my posts at your community only seem to lead to conflicts, which is certainly not my intention at all.

If you’d like, I’ll delete this post here right away, but it seems to me that it might be a good way to gather some more opinions on the rule in question.

Please let me know if you see it differently—in that case, I’ll delete this post here immediately.

Well, I simply didn’t have the motivation anymore, so I didn’t take the time to look for a community where this post might not have been removed.

However, since I’ve often found myself starting to read a post and leaving a comment on it, only to discover that the post had been removed because of this arbitrary “no politics” rule, I thought I’d use this admittedly salty post to point out what kinds of posts are currently being removed in one of the largest Lemmy communities.

I think it’s important for people to be aware that a community whose name suggests it’s a place to share your thoughts with others is, in fact, a community where a kind of “thought police” decides—based on their own sensitivities—what people get to see and what they don’t. That’s exactly what this “no politics” rule amounts to, because any topic can be interpreted as political if you don’t have a clear definition of what “political” actually means.

I don’t understand how so many people can think it’s a good idea to give moderators a rule that allows them to remove posts at will. It’s like banning posts about mathematics in a physics community—it’s simply absurd.

Thanks for the heads-up! I guess that’s what I’ll do. It’s a shame that the largest communities, of all places, are censoring themselves like this.

I’ll spare you any “hot takes” in the future by no longer participating in your “community” all together. That way, I won’t have to deal with the thought police who rule over your shower thoughts.

I can understand that moderation is time-consuming, but it’s pretty absurd what you’re pulling. It’s nothing short of arbitrary censorship, because there’s nothing in the world that can’t be called “political” in one way or another

So, in short: Mission accomplished—another user silenced who was disrupting your addiction to entertainment with pesky remarks about reality.

Don’t worry, the bots will keep you well entertained. You don’t need to post anything at all; you can simply leave your comments and receive automated replies that fully take your feelings into account.

Don’t worry, the bots will take over here, too—with delicious meals that are very healthy.

Thank you very much!

I wasn’t aware that this was such a big issue in the Fediverse that there are already dedicated communities discussing it.

Until now, I’d assumed the matter was somewhat settled since the larger communities on .ml now have an equivalent elsewhere. I’ve come across this problem several times elsewhere as well (the “no politics” rule, even though the post wasn’t political in any sense), but I guess I’m just completely out of the loop.

So it’s probably more a case of it being a different overlord (the U.S. instead of Russia).

I can only conclude from this that even platforms like Lemmy on the the Fediverse are controlled by billionaires. That might sound a bit like a conspiracy theory, but given their unscrupulousness, it seems all too likely to me.

Either way: for me, the matter is clear—you can’t express your opinion here either.

It’s disillusioning, but at least now I know how I need to conduct myself here.

Can you name a single topic that isn’t political? And: How can you fail to see that such an indefinable rule is completely out of place in a free network? You must know that there are immeasurably wealthy people who have no qualms about buying their way to impose their worldview. How can you still believe it’s a good idea for many of the largest communities in the open Fediverse to establish rules that are so vague they not only make arbitrariness possible but actually encourage it?

You could have posted this comment on my post if it hadn’t been removed by the mods at ShowerThoughts because it was apparently too political—at least according to arbitrary Rule 3, which always comes into play whenever something is posted that the mods don’t like, or maybe even those who send them a little money… I have no idea how things work there, but in any case, there’s no way to have a debate on this issue.

I’m afraid, unfortunately, that it is precisely the idea that anyone could understand everything without much effort that makes people so susceptible to utter nonsense.

This also gives rise to the impression that so-called intellectual elites are nothing more than charlatans who want to pull the wool over the public’s eyes with their incomprehensible “intellectual secret language.” So people end up looking to idiots who, while having not the slightest clue about the subject, explain things in a way that anyone can follow—even without knowing anything about it themselves—or at least believe they understand all the “nonsense” those snobby scientists are spouting.

In my view, this effect—which definitely exists—also clearly reveals who is primarily responsible for it: namely, the operators of the major social media platforms, all of whom are billionaires that have a genuine interest in ensuring that the masses allow themselves to be duped.

If that were not the cause, this effect would have to occur particularly among the financial elite as well, and people would be asking en masse whether their vast power might be unjustified—yet this does not seem to be the case at all among the general public.

This in turn gives rise to the schizophrenic state whose effects we are witnessing today: People distrust science, but they do not question the goals pursued, for example, by climate change deniers, who by no means came up with their narratives on their own, but are well paid to spread them as widely as possible.

I fear that this problem could only be solved by significantly reducing the influence of billionaires on public opinion—but in our system, where they wield almost unrestricted power, this unfortunately seems virtually impossible.

Indeed!

“The bubble doesn’t want cheap useful things,” Doctorow said. “It wants expensive ‘disruptive’ things: big foundational models that lose billions of dollars every year. When the AI investment mania halts, most of the models are going to disappear, because it just won’t be economical to keep the data centers running. The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100 billion IOU. AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”

I think that pretty much sums it up.

The problem seems to be that it takes competent employees to get anything useful out of an LLM in the first place. However, it is these very employees whom the greedy CEOs want to replace. So the result is that an incredible amount of money is being spent on absolutely nothing.

The logical conclusion, then, should be that it would make more sense to replace these useless CEOs with AI. Since they’re just making idiotic decisions for a lot of money anyway, there could be lots of savings.

Unfortunately, however, that will never happen, because contrary to all that talk of KPIs and such, what really matters in the upper echelons of management is never efficiency, but rather ruthlessness and brown-nosing.