blightbow

blightbow, 10 months ago

Pretty much this. It still gets a lot of flack for being operated by the developers of Lemmy, but there are a large number of users and communities that exist on lemmy.ml for no other reason than it being one of the larger original instances. Most operators of high-volume instances are unlikely to take action against lemmy.ml unless a situation develops that gives them no other choice.

blightbow, 10 months ago

The compromised lemmy.world admin posting a status update to /m/random on kbin is totally not sus at all.

Edit: Nor is the fact that the post language is Afrikaans.

blightbow, 10 months ago

@ernest This smells like a probing attempt to me, you might want to take a look at the data of this post under the hood.

blightbow, 10 months ago

This user made a terse "status update" post to /m/random on kbin right after this one (with a post language of Afrikaans??), which makes no sense at all. Do not trust any status updates coming from this lemmy.world account.

blightbow, 10 months ago

It's over for reddit, they just don't know it yet.

It's less that they don't know, and more that they don't care. IPOs are about unloading your bags onto someone else.

They've consciously decided that the value of the content they've already captured is worth more than the value that future content will bring them. Now they just have to get out from under the pyramid before it collapses.

blightbow, 10 months ago

The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always "September" to the more experienced users.

It's the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

It's tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn't change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can't last when cultural dilution sets in.

(no, I'm not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

God that’s an insufferable take

Then what do you propose doing about it?

It is a community name with history and traction. You don't like the name, which is fair. What is your solution? Rehashing the same thread that others have had before you is a choice, but that should not be confused with a solution.

Your problem is that the community has this name. Renaming a community/magazine is not a thing. The only solution is to convince people to create a new community and move the circlejerk there, and the first step is for someone to create it.

If you're going to operate from a perspective that the onus shouldn't be on you to put in this work, then who are you trying to convince to do the work for you? One of the moderators? Some random person subbed to the existing community who isn't you? Then you should probably be directing your focus at achieving that objective instead of invoking the old man yells at cloud meme, well-intentioned or not.

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Edit: The original thread was locked on lemmy.world so this discussion won't be going anywhere. All of us kbinners are just talking to ourselves. :D It's unlikely that this discussion would have had a productive outcome anyway, the OP was repeatedly trying to turn this topic into "white people versus everyone else" if you look at their deleted comments in the moderation log.

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

#shittymemedetails: It is a little known fact that /u/spez has a cameo in the original Badgers flash video.

nooo, it's a spez

blightbow, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

It regretfully doesn't matter how intellectual they are if the two-party system forces them to let their anti-intellectual minorities run the party. Once a governing body decides that keeping power away from "the other team" is more important than their principles, they cease to have the merit of those principles. Middle of the road negotiation simply ceases to exist. Either you have an overwhelming majority and don't need the other party's consent, or you have a narrow majority and policy making gets held hostage by the most belligerent minority faction within the party. When that belligerent faction is anti-intellectual, the result is the current shitshow.

Since American politics are right-leaning on the Overton window, that makes both parties more susceptible to getting kneecapped by their most right-leaning belligerents when they hold a narrow majority. A narrow Republican majority gets kneecapped by the Freedom Caucus, and a narrow Democrat majority gets kneecapped by the likes of Sinema and Manchin.

blightbow, 10 months ago

You… know it's possible to be a conservative without being a Republican, right?

If you want to say there are no politically relevant conservative intellectuals, that I would agree with.

Agreed on both counts, yes.

blightbow, 10 months ago

Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.

blightbow, 10 months ago

kbin lacks an API with an equivalent feature set. Ernest is aware of this and it's on the bug tracker. Any working apps for kbin are using site scraping as a temporary workaround. In layman's terms it means the app developer is doing a lot of extra work that will mostly get thrown away when the API rework is complete. Artemis is the only one currently doing this off the top of my head.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

It is possible, but a major US election requires a massive burst of popularity to avoid splitting the vote of the majority candidate having "less shitty than the other guy" policy positions. Failure to breach that threshold hands the victory to the majority candidate with the shittiest position on policies.

The simple test is this: has your third-party candidate achieved a realistically high margin of popular opinion behind them? I'm not saying be a slave to polling, but it isn't rocket science either. You will know if a third-party candidate has momentum behind them. They have charisma that sucks people in. They are somehow getting attention regularly driven to them despite the majority candidates pumping much more money into the news media.

If the third-party candidate doesn't have something bordering on a revolutionary ideological movement backing them, they aren't going to make that cut in a nationwide race.

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Edit: I'm not saying give up. Donate to causes you honestly believe in. Volunteer. Do what you can to make a difference. Support local government efforts to implement ranked choice voting in your state, which can and will break this system. (look at Alaska) But when it comes to casting that final vote, be realistic, even if it means voting against all the hard work you just put in. Sunk cost fallacy at the expense of giving away victory doesn't help anyone.

blightbow, 11 months ago

A troll is insincere yet playful.

I chuckled at least. A troll's motivation for the rise that they seek is largely inconsequential, as is the delivery mechanism. ;) Let's not go and disenfranchise the majority of the internet's trolling population with narrow typecasting!

While we're on the topic of trolling, are you familiar with Sealioning?

Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".

It's a rhetorical question, no need to respond. Someone else might learn something they didn't know before today. :)

blightbow, 11 months ago

14 day old account on its home instance, its only posting activity is within this thread, and both comments are low effort outrage farming with images.

The emotionally evocative hyperbole in the second sentence was pretty good though. Is it your own material? If so, can you write some more persecution porn for us? You don't need images as your crutch, you've got some real writing talent going for you here.

blightbow, 11 months ago

Nah, it's just your addiction to outrage farming on Twitter/Facebook showing. :)

blightbow, 11 months ago

Source? I am happy to shit on spez, but my sphincter’s aim must be true.

blightbow, 11 months ago

Thanks. Direct link to the pimp daddy comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36298422

It's not just that he allowed them to exist, he created a special one-of-a-kind "Pimp Daddy" trophy to award to the moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrophyWiki/comments/mohrlg/reddit_trophy_pimp_daddy/

There is some whitewash in the comments there: "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award for keeping things clean, but consider that he contributed the vast majority of those subreddits' content himself by cruising social media for salacious pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and the award is named "Pimp Daddy."

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

“Pilot to bombardier, Operation Starfish is go!”

“Donut holes browned! Repeat, donut holes are browned!”

blightbow, 11 months ago

Giant meteor. It didn’t win the 2020 election but maybe this is a stage it can compete on.

blightbow, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

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Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse

blightbow, 11 months ago

In the meantime, you can use the gear icon and enable compact mode if you want to do less scrolling. The icon is hidden below all posts on mobile unfortunately.