More Glitches in the ATS Matrix

[l0st]

"Worse" and "Better" are subjective in this context.  I disagree that politics made ATS worse.  I personally think it made ATS even more relevant.  Worser or better-er.  Politics made ATS worse for some people today, and better for the same people tomorrow (on a different subject).  It depended on the day. 

How many times can Roswell be discussed, or Area 51, or Bigfoot, or some blurry picture?  Politics are the new conspiracy du jour. 

What made politics 'worse' for some people was when their own personal political ideology got challenged.  This wasn't some distant blurry picture which was taken thousands of miles from their back yard, it was something real, and something right on their front doorstep.  It affected them personally.  It was reality, sometimes going upside their head with an opposing and equally credible viewpoint.

Politics may have made ATS 'worse' for the moderators, because it required much more 'work' to moderate fairly (and some were not able to do this).  Discussions were much more passionate and filled with emotion because they were closer to people's hearts, they had an actual and real effect on their lives...today.  Politics wasn't some distant concept, or some fantastical thing, it was real and it was in their face. 

Politics was one of the things I loved most about ATS.  Just about every discussion on any topic can be distilled down to politics...even Roswell, Area 51 and Bigfoot.  With politics included ATS rose to the highest levels it ever got to prior to that.  Oh sure, some old-time members got disgusted because their favorite topics were getting squashed by all the other noise, but then 'mud pit' was created to contain that.  With politics included at ATS, people could discuss anything at all; there were no limits to discussions.  When I first joined ATS in 2013 the ATS stats were still climbing, and 'mud pit' had long been established by then.  ATS was a bastion of free speech, something few other websites can achieve.

The mantra of this website is "Deny Ignorance", and one would be doing the exact opposite of this by denying that politics have a very real impact on people's lives today.  It would be denying reality, which is the antithesis of denying ignorance.

I feel that I am on the same page with you with nearly all of this, but I'll disagree with ruining ATS. The discussions had there and the stellar moderation that allowed them to happen IMHO have not existed on any other CT sites anywhere on the Internet and the loss of this forum of discussion is almost the "silver spike" that will kill the community entirely if it has not already.

I agree that it's nearly impossible to talk CT without politics. They are, on many levels, intertwined. The issues arise with HOW these discussions are handled, in my opinion. Making a statement about how one disagrees with a premise is one thing, personally ttacking and even sometimes stalking and harassing other users both online and IRL draws a line in my book.

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Not a lawyer.  Can't make assertions about the state of the law except as an opinion (which I'm willing to bet will be 'wrong' in some manner.)

While it is true that entire object of posting on social media is not to keep secrets or make money, it does not translate that posters "have no rights" with regard to what they post.  After all, we simultaneously must accept responsibility for what we post.  Where there are responsibilities, there are rights.

Should "we contributors" actually be left in the uncomfortable position of NOT being allowed to "secure" our own inputs and efforts to create?

I think this will be an important matter, not to be simplistically discarded as "of course you can't have it" it "belongs" to the commercial site as "property."

But by that token, if it is provided freely, anyone should (in theory) have access to it... even if it is to "train" AI.

The issue with "scraping" is how much it impacts the service itself, since it is intensely machine-taxing, rendering users to suffer the impacts on the system itself.

Now "industrial" scraping is another matter.  They are doing it for some manner of "profit" and that makes it germane to commerce law.

I think, at least in the US, any scraping of data can be interpreted by the courts as "scraping for profit" ergo my personal conundrum on this issue.

If someone with access to darko wants to convince him to hand over the message DB for indexing, I'm willing to do that and would be much easier than scraping. I highly doubt this will happen, though. I'm really not interested in anything other than indexing the text content of the original messages as they were posted and for no other reason to allow others to benefit from the research that has been accomplished there over the last 20x years.

I can't speak for ATSs current service plan, but the roughly 160GB proposed on ATS could be a significant data bill for the current owner if not unlimited.

And anyways, the data I personally really want (Fukushima) has been inaccessible for years so far as I know so anything I do would be for the benefit of the community as a whole and not necessarily for myself personally.