Leia was a senator, so she very much tried the inside reform route until the literal last possible moment when the entire Senate was disbanded. That's what led to her capture then, I believe:-).

Tbf, it seems like the current "mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation" has actual humans behind it i.e. state-sponsored disinformation as part of modern warfare, as opposed to just sheer random BS pooped out of an algorithm designed to maximize short-term profits for the person trying to use enough buzzwords to get their algorithm bought out by someone dumb enough to fall for their pitch and short-sighted enough to not realize the wider implications... or worse yet, if they realize, who simply does not care.

It reminds me of the story behind the USA tax preparation software companies who intentionally went on a campaign to confuse military veterans and students (seriously!? what kind of evil mfers...!?), and while they got caught and even punished & fined, it was something like a decade later and ofc the original CEO and also the next one etc. had long since received their fat bonus checks, leaving the company holding the bag (liability). Thus it was "a smart move", so long as you entirely disregard ethics. What was presented as a "free gift", to generate good PR for the company, was in reality predating upon people that they deemed would be highly trusting or at least minimally likely to sue them... and they were correct. Now, watching interviews of these tech-bros, I get the same vibe as in like who cares so long as I get mine.

Next? I think you misspelled "current":-D

It probably depends on the magazine... but yeah, people are still people:-).

A lot of the contributors to Reddit refuse to move to Lemmy/Kbin, and at this point I do not blame them - e.g. my notifications have not been working for over a week now, plus ~80% of the time whenever I try to upvote or boost something, it forgets who I am and I have to login again (actually it's not a probability thing: it seems if I do something within seconds of visiting a page it always works, while after a threshold is passed then it never works). Plus on kbin.social at least I believe there are no moderation tools at all. Given how hard I'm being trolled on Reddit (b/c I did not kowtow to a hardcore cadre of power aboosers), I could only imagine how horrible the experience would be if even mods could not remove things? (or... something? easily? at all? I do not know the details) This technology just was never ready for deployment at this stage, and especially kbin.social still seems to be in the alpha software stage. Ofc, even so I am still enjoying it more than Reddit, whenever I do get to speak with an intelligent person, like now:-).

You are not the only one to think these thoughts. Check out the article linked here if you want a fascinating read - I could not put it down! Except I had to, for breakfast then work, but doing so really bugged me!:-P It was just so PERFECTLY aligned with what I had been thinking myself also, which the Reddit protests had spawned in me: in short, Reddit's actions were evil, but it may have done us a lot of good actually... if we pay attention and learn from it all. i.e., the problem was never Reddit, but inside of us all along. Okay so Reddit is also a problem - or a whole series of them actually:-P - but also it is our natural inclination to go that "easy" route, which for-profit corporations are very much looking to exploit, but also there are free ways to reach that same end (which is not a good end).

On the flip side, it could be a Russian troll farm, and Reddit is not even aware of these efforts made on their behalf!?:-P

Disinformation sounds like an intentionality behind it, which in some cases is very much true (Russian sources proven in some cases in order to sow discord).

While the terms late stage capitalism and/or enshittification of the internet may capture how it is oftentimes rather a byproduct of a profit seeking motive - i.e. the disinformation was not the point, it is simply what resulted from the process of chasing profits at all costs not just to be responsible and keep the company going but to make enormous bloated kickbacks to executives and stockholders (at the expense of rather than while feeding forward the product).

It is ironic how the two forms of dis-/misinformation look remarkably similar to one another. Both are forms of destruction and decay, and both result from selfishness and greed, the only difference is whether it comes from an external or internal source, the former wanting to actively destroy while the latter is an even greater degree of malice in not even caring or possibly even noticing the fact that destruction is taking place. Like a zombie apocalypse where they eat and are not even sated as an animal eating would have been, and simply move on to eat again and again and still yet again, entirely unnaturally, according to a level of greed not even physically possible in the past (bc of constraints on stomach size, even if some animals can expand that like a python, yet they still have a limit whereas corporations do not?).

And then you have the whole "who rather than what you know" crowd for whom facts do not even matter so much, being too lazy to consume them personally. Humans are very much herd animals (sheeple) it just is a fact. These will consume the ads, and do not care really what info is fed to them, hence why should a corporation be interested in feeding them high quality info when low quality stuff is received better actually, as well as being significantly cheaper? In fact the users would outright complain if only high quality material were available, bc it is too difficult for them to read. This is an interesting tangent to explore bc it shows how it is not the greed of corporations forcing the misinformation down their users' throats unwilling, but rather corporations properly fulfilling their duties to both shareholders and a majority of users simultaneously, giving their customers precisely what they wanted, asked for, and demanded as in they go to whoever offers that. Who is really in charge here, if not you and I making decisions - Google or Bing or DDG - every single time we do a search?

Here is an interesting article touching upon some of these thoughts: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/113196/An-older-article-that-is-taking-on-new-significance-considering.

I dunno, it seems like it accomplishes its primary purpose well enough? Too bad for you that purpose is to deliver ads to the user to see while doomscrolling...and nothing else.:-(

I haven't watched it yet, but knowing his past work I can already say: his profit motive may suggest otherwise. Engagement culture works for an extremely wide audience, and his base seems to be people that get pissed off by the things that he says, to some large measure potentially purely b/c it pisses them off? That is to say that it is hard to convince someone of something when their job depends on them not understanding it. Okay, now I am ready to go watch it!:-D

The number of users dropping in June when many bot accounts were removed, and then rising again at the same time that >1500 new servers were added, while MAU does not rise at the same rate, seems to suggest that many are in fact likely bots?

However, the MAU is rising, so that indeed is a sign of health even if the precise amount of traffic by humans is unknown.

And bot accounts serve useful purposes too, sometimes posting more worthwhile content than many humans.:-)

Some thoughts:

If there is something you see that is missing - particularly documentation - then perhaps that is an excellent place to start? The older devs may have just been waiting for someone like you to come along and could be ecstatic to hear that you want to make that. Maybe they used/continue to work together in a company or are old friends or sth and did not need that, so you could break the project wide open, making it easier for everyone who comes after you, possibly also changing the very culture of the project and encouraging the more senior devs to write documentation as well, as they make new things or solidify an existing foundation before extending into new territory. And there are so many forms of documentation - Pre/Post conditions, listing dependencies/interactions, plus overall description of assumptions made - that even if some of that exists, the project could perhaps still benefit from adding more, especially from the perspective of a newer team member.

Do not neglect the "people" side of things - maybe try to connect to some of the more senior devs on Discord or wherever they are first? Like on the plus side they could give you pointers, tell you what you can ignore, send you links to documentation that would have been hard to find on your own, etc. Seriously: imagine spending 6 months writing documentation for an enormously-complicated aspect of the code (like a major, central class + all of its dependencies), only to see the entire thing discarded & replaced, and you find out only then that it was always intended that way from the start. (still not a deal-breaker, b/c most of that "6 months" would be you learning stuff and getting familiar with generalities, so not entirely wasted, yet not entirely productive either if you could have been told to have picked a different entry point into the project) While on the minus side, if you see that they are just flat-out idiots, then you can abandon the project now and move on - that is a thing that can happen, and it is better to know ASAP than to only really be confronted by that a year or two in.:-(

Perhaps also consider your "fit" for the specific project. If you are good at many things, but not at the specific things involved there, then there will be a greater cost for you to work in that area, and you will spend more time "learning" and less time "contributing" (plus, how much time will people be willing to devote to helping you do the former, when you have done none of the latter yet?). Ngl, depending on the number and styles of languages involved - e.g. a script that calls an optimized C++ library that then feeds data into making an SQL query that uses a REGEXP into a database that has literally zero documentation anywhere... and so on - and your prior amount of experience with each of them, could take a good several YEARS to catch up, as only a side-project. Even if your expertise could help them - e.g. if you are great at UI/UX while the senior devs are more full-stack but almost exclusively focused on the back-end side - there is still the matter of you needing a way to deliver your contributions to them, i.e. understanding the existing codebase enough to be able to modify it to implement your ideas.

I hope this helps!:-)