They named themselves W but those draconian ID requirements are an L
Anna Zeiter, CEO of W, has told Bilanz.ch that W stands for “We.” Meanwhile, the first of the Vs that make up W stands for “Values,” and the second for “Verified.”
“The fact that W comes before X in the alphabet is certainly also a welcome coincidence,” Zeiter said.
Was curious if the”W” had a deeper meaning to it. Turns out it’s actually two V’s that form a “W”
Stupid name, vv, or vave would’ve been better. Besides, it’s not like they’ll register v.v as a domain, or even www.w.vv
Digital Voyeurist Values Verified
you mean it doesn’t stand for Wumbo?
Spyware disguised as a “social media platform”, hard pass.
I am staying on mastodon for the micro blogging, not interested in centralized shit. Also, recommander systems are a plague.
We are?
Hold my hand and let’s say yes together.
will require identification and photo validation
Straight from the book “How to kill your app before launch”, page 1.
data privacy at its core
Looks like they haven’t seen the obvious conflict with requiring id + photo, unless they plan on manually review every application.
After reading the article, it sounds like they’re just making yet another xitter clone with the hopes that govt figures will use it. Govts could just spin their own mastodon or similars for a similar effect.
Yup. Nothing and I say nothing makes a service less secure for privacy than requiring your ID and photo. That data will get leaked. It always does.
Most of EU countries has some sort of electronic identification system (in Italy SPID and CIE). You can simply ask to validate against it when creating an account and then you are good. You are verified and there is no dato to be leaked aside the data you decide to put into the system.
Considering the amount of bots and trolls everywhere I can see a certain appeal on an app that requires an id verification to be honest.
But if they’re doing it half-assed as most services (send photo of passport, take a selfie), it won’t be a challenge for AI to generate random IDs and a matching avatar for photo/video verification. The only way this could work is if they’d verify your ID by reading the NFC chip inside the passport or ID card.
True. I’d be up for that, but honestly more for a real social network for friends and family, like Facebook once was, than for a debate forum like Twitter. That demand could maybe endure that it would remain a friends only network…
There needs to be high-quality discussion about how to make sure that users of social media platforms are humans instead of bots, but it needs to be a discussion happening in the open and not behind closed doors.
Right now, the approach is to not talk about it and assume that verification can only happen via photo. It could also be done in different ways, such as using a QR code that you get at a supermarket; or by only allowing 1 user account per physical device (which would make bot accounts expensive). There’s lots of possible ways and none of them are discussed.
to ensure that its users are […] who they claim to be
I dont’t want that either. Maybe for verified accounts this makes sense, but not for the average shitposter.
They figured it out. They damn well know they are going to spy on everyone with this.
After reading the article, it sounds like they’re just making yet another xitter clone with the hopes that govt figures will use it.
Nothing puts me off more than advocating for a new product or set of technology without reasonably comparing it to already-existing technology. They should dedicate a section of their homepage to an explanation what’s the difference between their system and Mastodon.
cough cough Mastodon.
@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu
2 years old
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https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission
It has over 3k posts and 145k followers. Mastodon posts don’t federate to lemmy unless they tag a lemmy community
I stand corrected. Thank you.
If you don’t delete your comment next time, others can see what stands corrected ;-)
Clicking the original link shows 0 subscribers and 0 posts on a two year old community.
Uh, Mastodon exists?
I’m assuming they want to compete with X/Twitter.
If they built out a Mastodon network with government support, then it would.
… so you don’t think Mastodon is a worthy competitor?
How about Bluesky?
I like Mastodon but it can’t compete with X. The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many. Its greatest benefits are also its biggest barriers to mainstream appeal.
Bluesky says it’s decentralized, but at the end of the day it’s an American company.
They just aren’t the right tools for this particular job. What this “W social” wants to be is “European Twitter”.
the “lack of discoverability” is the only reason we’re talking about this problem in the first place. algorithms have utterly fucked the world and if no one stops them we’re beyond fucked so the fact that someone thinks it’s bad and is unwilling to try using a platform you need to curate your own content on (like reddit before it went to shit) is just people willingly stepping into the lions mouth.
Then it sounds more like they want to be the European next Bluesky.
what in particular do you mean by lack of discoverability?
like, i want to see posts from communities that i already subscribed to, but because there’s more than 1000 communities on the fediverse and i’m only subscribed to a small countable subset of them, i inevitably lose out on a lot of content. (The “all” feed sucks unfortunately). So how to solve this?
The lack of discoverability is non-starter for many.
The Fediverse significantly lacks behind on the Content Discoverability technology.
I guess this is because there was a loud public outcry in the last 20 years that whoever makes your feed (this is called an “recommendation algorithm” or abbreviated “the algorithm”) has a lot of political power to decide what you see and what you don’t see, and that’s frowned upon. Because everybody that has power over what you see and what you don’t see is bad. That is why nobody wanted to provide an recommendation algorithm for the fediverse, because they would expose themselves to wild accusations. There should be an open-source recommendation algorithm, though; I’m sure of it.
Should’ve called it Z. Is just as good as X. In fact, is two better.
*Comrade has entered the chat*
Y tho
only Ws in the chat, guys 😎
Checkmate, Elon Musk.
I genuinely thought this was an Onion post.
I know Europe might seem like a country of you’re illiterate, but um it isn’t. W is a Swedish company with a dumb idea at the core of its app
Oh sorry, I forgot Sweden is in Africa. Or that referring to an app as European implies that Europe is a country. Luckily there are still people like you to educate us all /s
Should just have said it stands for Wordfeud, which would be commical.
Should’ve named it Y or Z. You know, like +1…
There is no future in social media unless it’s decentralized. Gonna assume this is dead on arrival.
You didn’t read the text? It says decentralized.
I have little faith that means what you think it means.
