OpenStars

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 3 points 10 months ago

Okay but also... they aren't there (Reddit) either, anymore. Who knows where they went - possibly nowhere, or switched to lurking (either here or there), or X, or Mastodon, or Bluesky, or just nowhere.

I almost dropped off of social media altogether myself, after making the mistake of replying to a comment in Chapotraphouse and another in lemmygrad.ml. Sometimes silence is significantly better than having to put up with toxicity.

Aka some of us choose the bear

And the rest are tired of moderating against those onslaughts.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 6 points 10 months ago
[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 13 points 10 months ago

It's bc you try hard to ignore them, and they like that:-)

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 10 months ago

Hopefully they'll work on stuff like this - but I don't know their prioritization.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 10 months ago

Echoing Chrono Trigger again - you could skip all grinding, and then rely more heavily on item usage in the final battle (megaelixers and the like) or better yet, not, and it became much more fun, and either way you see and therefore expect battles, rather than them feeling like an interruption to exploration.

And if you really got bored, either on the first playthrough or a later one, there are so very many ways to mix up the teams, with new skills to "discover", or try out if you read them from a guide.

It has its downsides (gfx, length I guess if you ignore the New Game+), but damn no wonder it is widely regarded as hands-down the single best JRPG of all time.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Oh absolutely that is correct - once you've "blocked" something, you cannot then interact with it later, as it is a rather hard cutoff. I suppose you want to see something like a "remove from my feed" - basically a "hide this community from me until I want it" - rather than an actual, full-on "block". Which is notable then that e.g. a user block of an instance is even softer than that, allowing you to see and reply and receive replies from people (though you don't get notifications for those, unless they specifically tag your username). So community blocks are harder than people would like, and instance ones are softer, so they really aren't hitting the sweet spot in-between.:-)

Yes, I suppose I want that too - a "community hide" option, rather than full community block:-).

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

If it helps to reveal my personal bias: I recall personally taking a look at that bot when it first came out, and commenting against it, plus downvoting it often after that. I did not go so far as to block it but nowadays I do simply ignore it every time I see it. I am not a fan - and this despite the fact that I consistently say things along the lines that we (as humans, and a global Lemmy/Fediverse community) NEED such a tool.

Though after reading through the comments, I have more respect for it than I once did. It seems an imperfect solution to a difficult problem. There are definitely kinks to work out, like how it receives advertising money and looks to be giving kickbacks to the LW admins, as they are the ones receiving either all or at least a portion of that money. Mind you, those funds might not even defray a fraction of their operating costs, so I cannot come down firmly on the side of a "judgement" here, just saying that the deeper one peers into this, the more murky the situation gets, when money gets involved.

Also oddly, I both have more respect for it, yet potentially less than ever before, given how it may inappropriately combine unrelated scores in a manner that serves to further right-wing propaganda. HOWEVER, again, that is nation-dependent, which while this is in reference to a global community, the bot itself seems to originate in the USA, so again... if someone wants to make another one, then they need to get busy and make it happen - which I noted seeing one such example, and the admins say that they welcome it and would love to add it to the bot to present both.

Anyway, what I find most highly striking is how both sides have valid points. Not the REEEEEE obviously (sadly, that appears on both sides as well - which is all the more notable when coming from a position of leadership and authority than a mere user who wants to vent their uninformed opinions), but beyond that, the admins are right to say that e.g. what other options are available that do not cost money that is not available to be spent? And yes, as you pointed out, the community has a valid point that they don't want to merely block it and move on, b/c then new users are going to still be exposed to it - if it is true that it is a bad thing, then it needs to be opposed from existing at all, or at least the labelling must be substantially improved. "First they came for..." means that we live in a global society, so that things that impact others (the least of these...) should be cared about as well, rather than our concern restricted to solely those matters that affect us directly.

And too, the community PAYS for the admins. I don't know how much, but some, so there is a sense of "ownership" there. Hence people not wanting to simply switch over to e.g. !globalnews@lemmy.zip, which is quite a nice alternative even if people don't seem to know about it (lemmy.zip says that it has 2.72K active users/month, compared to lemmy.world saying that !world@lemmy.world has 12K).

Another aspect is how the bot must be "opt-out" rather than opt-in. Much like receiving updates from ChapoTrapHouse or people's comments from lemmy.ml are on so very many instances (especially lemm.ee) - there are some things that should be opt-in, rather than people exposed to that crap first and then they have to opt-out. The counterpoint is that the technology available for Lemmy suck ass; and yet with the heavy still further counterpoint that Lemmy is still better than most anything else I have ever seen? So the admins seem to have a point that while the tool being opt-out rather than opt-in is not ideal, that is a limitation that they are constrained to having to work with.

Ultimately, as you said, it boils down to (like Reddit): will people simply put up with it, or move? !globalnews@lemmy.zip exists, and !world@quokk.au seems more problematic but it too, and someone can always create another. Or someone can do the hard work to create actual GitHub repo feature requests, like adding in a sentence to say how much the bot is biased towards the USA definitions of left and right, or they could create a post to talk about it. MOST people talking about it though - including myself - are not all that well-informed about the situation, especially prior to reading these links that Blaze offered today. Thus it will require someone actually stepping up to do work, or else what good does all the complaining do? That much at least I understand from the admin & mod's perspectives, even as I also understand the other side's POV that the situation is far from ideal, and might even be a for-profit conspiracy to drive up advertising revenue from their tool, on their instance, in their community, that nonetheless uses (abuses?) the federation principles to be sent out to people around the world. Thus the situation represents a microcosm of "news" in general around the world: ultimately, who is going to pay for it, and if nobody, then how can we complain when it goes away (or awry)?

This ofc is a lot of words to say that "I do not know fully what is going on, but it's interesting nonetheless". :-)

jon stewart eating popcorn anxiously

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 0 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Wow, much drama.

It sounds like adding one sentence to the effect that the ratings are centered using the USA metric would go so very far. Like adding units to a temperature measurement - someone could argue that they prefer Celsius (or Kelvin or whatever) to Fahrenheit, but at least Fahrenheit is better than no unit designation at all.

But the admins and mods also seem so very, very tired of all the BS that they have to wade through, that they aren't all that receptive anymore. I sympathize.

Part of the drama seems to be that buried underneath all the REEEEE responses, there are legitimate underlying worldview/POV issues, namely whether a bad implementation of a good idea is at all helpful vs. the purity argument that nothing that I don't like can be allowed to exist.

And ultimately, while I did see one heartwarming exception (backed up with admin support by calling for such), the vast majority of people simply complain about wanting better-er-est service entirely for free. As opposed to making an alternative, e.g. a different news community on Lemmy, which would require actual effort put forth by people volunteering their time as mods. Which probably should be done anyway to avoid the monolithic mega-community structures that we all tried to get away from on Reddit - and has been done in at least two cases, though most people commenting seemed entirely unaware of that.

And then the justification issue on top of all of that messy background as well.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 7 points 10 months ago

Well, I'm not going to argue against hard evidence like that!

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 15 points 10 months ago

Arguably, it has been tested, several times. Each time it failed, after a fashion. We should be concerned what message that sends to the next person who would contemplate engaging in such impeachment-actionable behaviors.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 10 months ago

And that is all that matters, to them, forever moving forward 🤮.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 10 months ago

Example 1: when one side wants to bully the other, but the latter does not wish this, how do you solve this problem? Defederation it is then.

Example 2: when someone claims that the Tiananmen Square massacre did actually happen, that user gets blocked from all communities, including those they have never heard of, on lemmy.ml. This is not so rare - and this is straight from the Lemmy developers themselves, i.e. a feature not a bug. It does no good to pretend otherwise.

Example 3: when people refuse to label their kiddie porn properly, others must label it for them, or risk getting into trouble themselves, bc regardless of what some other website chooses to host, the federation model says that if your instance federates with it, then it is content that you are sharing as well. Though actually, I find the Fediverse mostly friendly in how it labels NSFW content, yet it refuses to label toxicity in a like manner - e.g. the brigading attempts organized on hexbear against other communities on different instances. If only a label could be affixed to Chapotraphouse, like "beware ye who choose to enter here...":-).

I find your comment extremely biased towards your own POV and desires, but overall there is much more subtlety and nuance in interpersonal connections, e.g. sometimes women choose the bear, and rather than say that it is "silly", it might behoove people to listen to why that choice may have been made?

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