OpenStars

The culture definitely changed - you are right about that. I was not there at the start as you were, but ultimately, how could it not have? EVERY culture changes all the time, and e.g. the Rexodus surely had a large impact even since we all left it. Though the burden of expressing that point clearly I suppose is on you, and the burden of understanding you is likewise partially on them, i.e. communication is a 2-way process. The difference is that you spoke first, and then when others challenged you as to what you meant, you ramped the matter up by several notches and accused the other person of literal brain damage. This was hyperbolic, and attacking the messenger rather than the message, and after that many people stopped listening to you any further, seeing how you were speaking emotionally rather than logically, or challenged you still further. The responsibility for what they say is on them, but the responsibility for what you said is on you.

And yes, some people literally do seem to have brain damage, but intended as light-hearted or not, you did jump to that rather quickly... and while I am seeing that you do not enjoy being judged, yet you were very quick to offer your judgement to the other person... Why worry about what children are saying about you? But yeah, you did call them brain-damaged, and again that part is on your shoulders.

You catch more flies with honey than vineager. Do what you will with that thought.

Okay but don't forget the chain here: there was OP, there were responses to OP, and there were responders to the responders to OP. Somewhere in those someone said that it was great that someone could ignore the sadness ("What a privileged life you must lead where you can simply ignore all those things without it mattering."), i.e. that they had that privilege. You seem to agree, and I also agree insofar that if you want to block something, then do it - I've long advocated for such. But instead of responding with agreement the next person said:

Almost anyone can ignore all those things without it mattering.

Okay so do whatever you want... so long as others can do the same. My point with the funeral analogy was to say that if someone wants to be "not sad", that's totally fine, but why rub it in others faces, especially those who want to be "sad"? (again, not referring to OP here, nor the person responding to them, but the person responding to them)

e.g. black people very much are fearful that the likes of the KKK will ride openly again, and women are likewise very much feeling the impact of the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decisions, plus there's that whole SCOTUS ruling awhile back...

Anyway, do whatever you want. So long as you allow others that same freedom as well, you won't be a hypocrite.

That makes sense - we'll go with that:-).

Lemmy isn't run for profit - mostly (though there are some amounts of money involved, and moreover power & fame) - but being based off of Reddit still uses that identical model. And then similarly for Mbin, Sublinks, Piefed, Tesseract, etc. Someone would need to basically do all of having an idea for alternative mechanisms, and also write the code for it, and also start up an instance, and promote it to let others know, whereas a failure in any of those steps would prevent its acceptance by the global community. Plus while all of that is going on, all of Facebook, Threads, Xhitter, Bluesky, and yes Reddit can continue to innovate, possibly stealing the idea out from under someone and twist it to meet their profit-seeking needs, though conversely those also generate ideas that non-profit sources can steal from as well.

One example is Reddit's automated CrowdControl (an optional feature available to mods of all subs) - instead of a mod needing to outright "remove" an unpopular comment in a post, it simply gets collapsed by default, thereby working against the trends to maintain an echo chamber by allowing people to post dissenting opinions in the identically same space as the majority of the community, who control what they want to see with voting. Similarly posts that are too lengthy could be cut off after a point, needing you to click to continue reading, but thereby allowing you to scroll past something that you don't want to spend time on. But these are tiny things, and still many people wouldn't bother making all that many comments that they know in advance will be unpopular, b/c what would they even gain from such? (besides a brief relief to get something off their chest, but how many can keep coming that way, for weeks and months and years?)

One reason for that is the power dynamics, which regardless of for- vs. non-profit organizations, still offer greater power to one "side" or the other of a transaction. Voting for instance is anonymous, whereas posting is not, hence voters (even lurkers!) have more power than content creators. All someone has to do is spin up their own instance, or join one of the many that do not require even so much as an email sign-up, and they can generate as many votes as they want, for "free". As so many discussions have highlighted, "content creators" really are at a severe disadvantage, compared to unethical voters, mods, and ofc admins, especially for those first few vulernable minutes where it hasn't received any upvotes yet. After all, *I* may offer fewer than one downvote per day, maybe per week, and also routinely sort content by New, but that's not what others (seem to) choose to do. So should downvotes be rationed? Or the source made publicly viewable? Mbin does the latter btw, though as "reduces" not "downvotes" shared with Lemmy.

Which further illustrates the trend towards echo chambers: they tend to work, to cut out some of the bull crap - if you ban an agitator then all of their BS goes out the door with them, their downvoting, their harassment, their toxicity, etc. BTW speaking of harassment another example of unqual power dynamics is the sending of messages from different people - e.g. I did not know what ChapoTrapHouse was all about, so when I replied there and subsequently received messages from different users for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, and then again from something in lemmygrad.ml, I had no control at the time but to receive those notifications. I almost left social media entirely b/c that is an absolute waste of my time & attention, and by flooding me with unwanted spam they essentially took away from me the normal intended functioning of the notifications feature. But then the ability to block those instances was added, and now after blocking them + lemmy.ml, I enjoy myself here. The only way offered to me to not receive tens and tens and tens and tens of replies was to cut myself off from them, i.e. curate my feed which is if not full-on echo chamber at least is one step towards it. And yet... what other alternative is there? Ignore my notifications entirely? There are SO MANY of them, but only one of me, and this unequal power dynamic leaves me with no other choices - after all, it's not like I can apply filters to my notifications, where I could still receive messages from them but just not treat them as the same, absolute highest-priority status that is assigned to every other notification also. Also, prior to the blocking of the instance they had the ability to live rent-free in my head, as I would need to read every one of those before I could know what it was about. This is not "fair", nor equal, hence illustrating that echo chambers are not the absolute worst things in all of existence - rather, they are a poor solution to problems that are far worse (e.g. not having an echo chamber, perhaps rather having nobody at all in a community that remains willing to speak, or possibly even to lurk anymore, i.e. its death).

These are the tools that we have. If we want better, we need to make them. And this will require emotional intelligence that most of us seem extremely unwilling to ponder. e.g. one idea, which seems to sound to most people to be really bad, would be to implement what we already kinda do as humans, and assign greater weight to people based on their community-specific karma. This would be horrible for new people joining, but if someone has been posting half of a community's content but then ten new people join, not posting anything at all but instead harassing the existing users and downvoting everything they see that does not match what they want, then those votes should count as "lesser" than the pillars of the community whose votes should count for "more". New people can always start new communities of their own - ofc that gets back to the "discoverability" issue - but it would virtually eliminate some of the less-organized "noise" trends that so often pollute social media streams, similar to how anti-cheating or captcha devices work, as in if they can do as well as a human who knows the material, then that's arguably more of a success more than it is a failure? :-P

But it would also come at a severe cost, of tying together a community's content to its content creators. And yet... is that such a bad thing? It essentially distributes power from mods to the users, but not all users and rather those who contribute the most. But maybe this idea really is a horrible one - in which case, again, we would need to make a better one, somehow.

This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they'll never need to do so ever again.

One election, to rule them all... ~and~ ~in~ ~the~ ~darkness~ ~bind~ ~them~

There are other cues - the letters at the top of each of the others, but bottom of the upside-down 6/9.

Urg, needs more T-virus if you ask me.

I'm guessing it says "either I'm being forced to use this language or it's the only related one I know how to use, but only halfway":-)

“That a … 65-year-old votes like a 5-year-old suggests that there is something in our genes that probably drives decisions,”

Well it suggests something alright. :-|

Some bold assumptions, if you ask me!

I give the best bananas, people say, nobody in the whole world gives better bananas than me 🍌, and when I give a banana, some assume, I don't just give a banana, but see they're coming, their (sic) rapists, and they're not sending their best people, but when i flush the toilet it doesn't work quite right and that's why folks, that's why when I give this monkey the best banana in the world, that's why people don't think it be like that but it do.

People keep saying Python, despite how it (1) sucks, and (2) is super annoying to keep up to date, with package management and the like, unlike Perl that is more stable. Though Python is also easy to use and powerful and extensible.

But I think each language type is what it is and has its own set of tradeoffs and balances. Unix is hyper-stable and secure but limited, Perl is powerful but requires discipline to use to full effect, and these days most people don't bother to learn it. Python is... "common", is perhaps the best way to put it:-). C/C++ is even more powerful, the latter bloated, and blamed for most memory management issues (although really, how much of that is merely bad programming practice? Okay, so it allows such though).

And now Rust is the new hot thing.:-)