Ashtear

This article didn’t even go into the service disruptions Perplexity has had the past couple of weeks. In short, the best thing Perplexity does is give you access to multiple models at once, but frequently when you try to select one for a specific thread, it will throw an error and (quietly) kick the response to your prompt to a backup.

Perplexity’s calling it a technical issue but it looks more like throttling, especially considering API access to Claude is expensive and that’s the one that is having the most “technical issues.” I would have already gone elsewhere if my sub wasn’t free, and if it continues to be this bad, I might end up going elsewhere anyway.

In terms of content moderation? Not in the least. Discord is extremely laissez-faire about it. They intervene when compelled to by law enforcement. I can’t speak to the large server experience, but we’ve run our server for nearly six years and not a single member of staff has ever spoken with anyone at Discord. Every single one of the moderation tools we use are third party.

As a practical matter, Discord provides the communication infrastructure for us and that’s literally it. Irrelevant to the topic at hand. We could pack up and move it all to Matrix tomorrow and our content moderation experience would be just as centralized (that is to say, it would not be).

I don’t think it’s necessarily true that it’s so overly onerous that it must lead to centralization. I’m part of staff on a medium-sized Discord server and we have more than enough coverage to handle objectionable content. As another example, Fediverse instances here have proactively established rules and norms for NSFW content that ensures the communities keep running, and most are still going a few years later after the Reddit exodus exploded their populations.

It absolutely does make scaling up more expensive, but I’ve gone from a fairly libertarian stance on this to now asserting proper community moderation has become part of the social responsibility corps have now when making these spaces grow to have massive reach. And yes, I don’t think big corps do enough on this topic, and it’s another inequity because it’s really starting to look like new organizations are going to have to be more responsible for what content they allow. But I’m all for coming down hard on the big corps. Everyone got by just fine in the 90’s and 2000’s when they had much, much larger customer support/moderator staffs. “It’s too expensive” is the same garbage excuse used for other forms of enshittification today while these platforms make money hand over fist.

This is where I’ve been at on it. On top of that, the stuff that’s not directly exploiting human actors (like drawn or animated content) or pushing their boundaries is still coming out of studios that aren’t exactly known for healthy work/life balance. To say nothing of the kind of fetish content that might come out of those places too, which surely takes its own toll on creators.

If we can offload all of that potential trauma onto computers, I’m all for it.

Ugh, the only thing I hate more than a few people I regularly talk with still using Messenger is having to deal with the desktop client. Now this 🙄

I moved to a web browser but I can’t even get push notifications working.