EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

This is why I drink on the bus. The bus driver keeps us all safe.

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

If you think you’re struggling for enthusiasm now, just wait until you start watching it.

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

This is grounds for a class action suit

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Hard to believe that anyone involved in AI would stoop to plagiarism.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Smart. Argentina is very vulnerable to a Russian invasion if Russia ever decides to drill a tunnel straight through the earth’s core and out the other side.

Basically fearmongering about China doing what the West has been doing for the last century and is still doing now. Debt-trap imperialism, loss of sovereignty, the crafty Chinese being schemey and underhanded, etc. The headline is all that really matters, these articles should be written by robots at this point.

This is surprising to read. Ukraine was never going to have enough ammo, weapons, or manpower to win the war, but I never thought the western media would run out of cope.

Anthropologists discover evidence of ancient subspecies of humans with gigantic, goose-like penises.

Are there any flat-moon conspiracy theorists? I feel like there’s way more evidence that the moon is flat. We see the same side all the time. If it were round, wouldn’t we see different parts of it? We’re supposed to believe that it’s a spheroid orbiting us at the exact rotational speed required so that the same side is facing us all the time? Be serious.

Conspiracy nut jobs are eating today

Mashing the buttons over and over trying to get the high score.

The question doesn’t necessarily rely on a post-communist society. Assuming so just makes it easier to answer by eliminating some obvious objections, like that they’d have the global financial system forced on them or inevitably become dispossessed and marginalized, all the things that exposure to capitalism does.

The question I have is more about whether there are conditions where non-contact becomes the more ethically dubious position. It seems clear that they don’t want visitors, but if they were suffering greatly or faced existential danger, it would get a lot harder to maintain a non-interference position as you start recognizing that interfering can’t possibly be worse than death.

I wonder, in a hypothetical scenario where we achieve global communism, would it still be appropriate to maintain no contact? Let’s assume for argument’s sake that we can get around the practical issues like disease, would we not owe them some form of consideration? As it stands, I feel like contact with the rest of the world would only make their lives worse and probably end their civilization as they know it, but if we had a far more just and equitable society, would refusing to engage start to resemble a form of chauvinism? Or at least neglect?

I’m honestly not sure what the answer is, or if I’m just wrong and the answer is simpler than I’m making it out to be. I feel like it’s easy to argue for no contact, for a variety of reasons, but is there a point at which non-interference starts to look like a form of captivity?