A thousand outlets shouting into their megaphones drown out the independent voice. That is censorship by avalanche.

You can still find a blog or a Substack if you already know where to look. That does not change the fact that the high-authority cluster—owned by a short list of billionaires and running coordinated or mutually reinforcing framing—dominates the backlink graph, the search rankings, and what institutions treat as the default. Identical or near-identical language has already been documented across local markets (Sinclair must-runs and similar chain practices). The same dynamic scales online: major outlets link to one another and to a narrow set of favored sources, so an ordinary post starts with near-zero inbound authority. The text stays public; the attention does not arrive.

“I don’t read those papers, so I’m not censored” only works if censorship means a gate that blocks your personal browser. It does not address what happens when the megaphones are concentrated and the ranking systems reward that concentration. The independent voice is not deleted. It is rendered practically inaudible. That is the mechanism.

Moderators are a special kind of special.

I got banned from the entire site for "circumventing" subreddit bans, which was because some of my alts were fed subreddits by the algorithm that I was not supposed to be on.

You will not replace us!!!

But with a little stretching of English grammar, we might replace us.

Nonononono. Build prosperity. Build progress. Build civilization. Build job... Uh, timeout on that one.

Please don't look too closely or ask what any of it means in practice, because we can't have you standing in the way of prosperity and progress.

It's been a decade and a half. Just because a person knows how to compile a kernel doesn't mean they can't also be a Luddite at the same time.

Well that escalated quickly.

"Point us to an post about a guy given a job he is clearly unqualified"

That's literally my point -- the post isn't about the person in charge of the ministry! It's about them testing Collabora and the users just having too many issues with it. I guarantee if it was the same exact story and the minister had a male name none of you would have done this deep dive and criticism.

And why do you think she is unqualified? The Minister of Digitization doesn't need to be an expert on digitization, they need to be competent at high-level management and understanding how laws and policies work. Did she do something wrong? Would someone else have somehow convinced the 37 or however many employees who tested it not to hate it?

Yeah but for some reason Slashdot commenters jump to targeting people mentioned in the stories when they have a female first name.

I can paint you as a monster. And if I say it often enough, enough people will believe it.

But he's arrogant. You can't make anyone actually believe it. You can just make them plapper it for loyalty purposes - which is what you're doing now.

They're independently funded in much the same way the Nobel peace prize is politically independent. Of course the prize sometimes goes to a deserving candidate still. And sometimes Guardian publishes something good.

Just, as David Graeber reminded us, never, ever forget their ratfucking of Jeremy Corbyn. And remember it's things like that they will spend their carefully built up goodwill on.

It says something that even though Lula is fairly close to Russia and China (the whole BRICS thing), and was endorsed by his close friend Julian Assange in a rare public statement, even US democrats can't feel bad about Trump's and Facebook's preferred candidate losing.

These points are all flawed, and if I thought you wrote them, or even understood them yourself, I'd bother writing a full rebuttal.

Not half as violent as allowing obsolete approaches and flawed architecture to remain out of some weird combination of concern for backwards compatibility and sentimentality.

Python 2 users were supported for more than a decade after 3 came out, and there was a LOT of migration tooling released. CIOs may not want to be forced to upgrade too often, but if they think upgrading once every 10 years is too much, then they need to quit and get into something more aligned with their expectations. Perhaps blacksmithing.

Audiophilles will be convinced they can hear a difference. They can't, but they will be convinced of it.