I'm a huge fan of using it as an ice breaker if you're meeting new people. It's a fairly social game, with "low-stakes" negotiations on the table, so I think it's a great way to see how's people think, interact, and cooperate (or not haha).
I love how different it can be depending on the audience. My partner's family is... almost too wholesome? They help each other out a lot lol. My tech & numbers friends are fiercely competitive in their trading lmao.
Let me know if you have any questions about it!
Edit: If you have a set that includes "3rd Bean Field" cards, just ignore 'em. Later editions removed them because statistically they're almost always a bad idea, so they're really just a trap lol.
Dang, those are sweet! You asked for C&C, but I'm having trouble haha. I see what you're aiming for and it's working well!
If I had to nitpick, I think I'd go after the bases though! Where are they??
I'd love for the bases to give your bugs some context, especially on the bigger bases. Are they on urban concrete? Maybe some road stripes? Are they on some kind of desert? What are they consuming?
I've been looking for the 2nd Ed Ork Codex for months and it's usually overpriced and/or in bad shape if you want to buy it inside the EU.
My friend is traveling to California next August so it would be nice to know about second hand stores / collectors /eBay auctions, etc so he can grab it for me.
@mr_whateley Hey friend! You might want to try asking @california (lemmy.world) or @california (kbin.social), they'll probably have better answers about local spots!
Both seem to have reasonably active users, just with more threads on lemmy, and more posts on kbin. Good luck!!
My son's 5th birthday is coming up and I would like to gift him a board game. Usually only the two of us play and he likes for example Carcassonne Junior, Brandon the Nrave or Karuba Junior. Any good suggestions for a new game, maybe also something collaborative?
If you're open to a dexterity games, I'd highly recommend Animal Upon Animal,Rhino Hero, or Click Clack Lumberjack for that age group. Even left to their own devices, I've seen a group of highly concentrated 6 year olds stack animals surprisingly high lmao.
I'm having some trouble thinking of collaborative kids games, but maybeDixit? That might be an 8 year olds game tbh, I don't think most 5 year olds are subtle enough yet lol.
Hmm, I think I understand your goals here, but I don't fully understand their implementation. I'm gonna reply in sections because you deserve nuanced response!
Hiding Voting Metrics:
Okay, so I participated in a similar discussion about removing downvotes recently.
Right off the bat, one of the key concerns here is that the technology we're using makes all voting public as a baseline. You can opt to close your own eyes (hide them for yourself or for your instance), but other people or instances will still see the votes because ActivityPub transfers information as "users acting upon other content."
So unfortunately this may be a hard feature to shift without fediverse-wide agreement (or fediverse splintering).
Anyways, I have some concerns about the actual goal here, because we can't actually prevent all fear of judgement or backlash. Anytime you say anything, someone can disagree with you by text comment, which can be very strong disagreement while staying within normal moderation limits.
But! I can see that mitigating the effects of voting may reduce the punishments for participating outside narrow echo-chambers, and that seems important. Even if I don't think this is the correct solution, it is a worthwhile discussion!
I propose making downvotes have no effect on reputation. It's okay to know people disagree with you. We just reduce the extent a downvote harms users. I'm even willing to make upvotes have no effect on reputation either, to address some of your later concerns.
This would let people casually agree/disagree with comments as we all seem to like doing. Rather than committing to a full comment when I don't have a meaningful contribution, a little upvote feels like the correct way to say "Nice!" vs no response and letting the author think they aren't being seen. But benign voting would be for just that specific content with no further ramifications lol.
I do find vote counts have benefits for me, letting me feel the pulse of community response, and I'm idealistic about finding a healthy medium!
Easy agreement lol. I'm not really a fan of those emojis reaction blocks you get on discord. They're cute, but people seem to just bandwagon on the fun ones lol.
Discouraging Clout Chasing Behaviors: Promoting Content Quality and Relevance:
I see your goal here, but how would this actually work? Like what buttons does the user see?
Are we all still collectively deciding what counts as valuable contributions? If so, this sounds veryyy similar to what we already have using either upvotes or boosts lol.
"Agreement" sounds like an upvote. I like this content.
"Mark as quality" sounds like a boost. More people should see this.
So what metric(s) do you actually want implemented?
alternative ways to measure influence and impact (insightful comments, fostering discussions, valuable contributions).
If those are the buttons you think we should have, I don't think the internet can be objective enough to make these reliably more useful than an upvote.
If I see buttons saying "Insightful / Fosters Discussion / Valuable", I'm mostly going to just hit any or all of them when I like the content. And I'll click none of them when I dislike content, 'cause duh that's not insightful or valuable!
So what should we actually do to achieve these noble goals?
Engagement, interactions, relevance, and authenticity
Ehh, sorting by interactions can encourage excess commenting or spamming near content you want promoted. More interactions doesn't necessarily mean higher quality. I'm commenting several times on this post, but it could have been one commentary for the exact same content. Should this thread's quality be treated differently based on my format?
Unfortunately, engagement is highest around controversial topics, which again doesn't necessarily indicate the highest quality content.
I'm pretty sure sorting by relevance is how YouTube & TikTok try to serve you content, but I don't think we should aspire to black box algorithms.
Agh, I swear I'm not trying to just shoot down all your ideas. I'm trusting based on your writing that you're open to collective constructive criticism. You're obviously thinking here, thinking more than most people do lol.
It's just that this is a very complex issue, that will need very nuanced solutions. Humans have spent a heck of a lot of time, money and effort trying to figure about it, and we still seem to get it wrong a lot haha.
Huh, okay! I'm mostly nodding along in agreement here.
I was never much of a social media user, however, I think one thing that reddit did right was the awards. Unfortunately, the moderators likely didn't see any of that income (something to keep in mind considering the budding state of alt social platforms). Point being, I think something like that is much more rewarding than an upvote, while a conversation outweighs both.
Interesting, that's unexpected! I'm surprised because I see huge piles of reddit awards as pretty comparable to huge blocks of discord emoji reactions, and you said you don't want the emojis lol. Do you just like that actual money was committed, or what's going on here?
I think we should very cautiously approach how we handle money and transactions affect anything around here, so... strong hesitation lol.
I'd argue that it isn't healthy at all. But this circles back to the clout chasing argument. I think healthy discussion is going to give a user more than an arrow can ever give, while also promoting critical thinking and the development of more substantial connections among users and the community.
Huh. Okay, well. My initial reaction is confusion, but I'm willing to review my beliefs lol.
So of course, healthy discussion is incredibly valuable and positive. But what if I don't really have anything meaningful to say?
For example, imagine I see a thread where someone has refinished their bench (probably in a woodworking or DIY kind of magazine). Let's say I arrive late to the thread too, so plenty of people have already asked all the interesting questions like techniques, what products were used, origins of the bench etc. So usually this is where I'd just upvote lol.
I don't want to pass by with no interaction, so... I guess I'll pick random small talk so they know I like it? "Neat! Can't wait to see your next project!" or something?
So instead of 25 high quality comments and 60 upvotes, that thread likely ends with 50 comments of which half really just say "Nice!" (+ an unknown amount of upvotes). I suppose it's nicer to hear the specific words of encouragement, but it is certainly much more effort and likely a poorer noise:signal in the comments lol.
I know that we NEED more content at Kbin, Lemmy and all the Fediverse in order for them to grow and substitute Reddit and other networks, but sometimes I just feel really happy that I can open my app and read almost everything that was posted in the last few hours without being suffocated by a billion of new posts....
Eh, yeah I can agree with the manageable amount of content! I even try to leave kbin.social set to Federation: Off, so that it's just the local community stuff to look at lol.
I do miss my niche hobby subreddits though, it's hard to live vicariously through other people's projects right now haha
@mizzyc@Rottcodd
I've been pretty relaxed about it, but should I be like, actually downvoting? It does feel slightly more... wrong? around here now, but I'd only been downvoting actually bad content before and it feels overly aggressive to the real humans that'll get hit in the crossfire lol.
@FaceDeer Beehaw removed the downvote button? That's interesting. Did they say why?
I'd guess their argument would be that that the downvote's main purpose is supposed to be to mark irrelevant content, but that's just as easily handled by a report?
That's actually a compelling argument to me. A spammer with a negative reputation almost certainly doesn't care. I'd rather have mods look at someone with too many reports and just ban them and be done with it.
People with acceptable but unpopular opinions ("peanut butter and mayo is the best sandwich") can just have a low non-negative reputation, no need to treat that like a bannable offense lol.
@HamSwagwich I think that's where I'm at too. Replace downvote with report button. If it's really irrelevant or otherwise breaking the rules let's remove it properly. If it isn't, well. It isn't, so let it stay without punishment.
Edit: Oooh, okay wait. Maybe let downvotes stay but make it benign. We're okay with casual upvotes for agreement. We should be okay with casual downvotes for disagreement. Its does let people see that their comment has been seen as is unpopular, compared with just unnoticed. I'm okay with that style of downvote being private.
@HamSwagwich Oh, yeah, that's why I'm suggesting we just make it benign. Like cosmetic only. We can see the downvote count, but it doesn't affect reputation or sorting.
"There's a bunch of people in the back grumbling about this comment lol." It's anonymous but ignorable. Actual sorting is by upvotes, actual content moderation is by reports.
Hmmm, so on kbin.social we already have that actually! Or we have something close to it.
We have upvotes, downvotes, boosts and reports. Upvotes don't contribute to your reputation right now (apparently that's a bug though, but maybe it's a feature haha). Boosts are supposed to be like a retweet, but I think they're taken into account for sort order too.
So we can already boost meaningful content, and report irrelevant content! Nice! And then for personal takes, we could continue using up/downvotes.
Unfortunately downvotes currently affect reputation, and they're publicly listed, so there's definitely conflict around people unhappy about their negative reputations. I've been fairly liberal with my boosts to try to balance that out lol.
To grossly oversimplify the contents of that article, I think federating in bad faith could look like:
Joining the ActivityPub protocol, intending to drown the initial userbase with their own so that the fediverse begins catering to the needs of the majority aka their users.
Introducing subtle bugs that make certain instances function suboptimally, but putting the onus on minor developers to fix it because major portions of the user base comes from them.
Adding features to the ActivityPub protocol that benefit all users, but forces most instances to adopt their practices.
Creating their own version of the protocol "ActivityPub+". It's initially open source and well documented, but increasingly deviates from ActivityPub, until it's functionally closed source fully under their control. It's also mandatory to interact their instances.
Defederating everyone who doesn't fall in step, but that's okay because 99% of content is now on MetaPub anyways. This fractures the Fediverse into confused micro shards (or compliant loyalists).
@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!
I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.
Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.
So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.
This is a slight tangent now, but Tik Tok's Enshitification by Corey Doctorow describes another great example of long-timeline corporate "playbooks" or patterns that are... not good but increasingly common. That's where Reddit seems to be going unfortunately, but at least we can see why.
@Melpomene I'm concerned about the B-Corp getting big, but staying profit driven. Imagine if Steam had an instance. That seems... fine, I guess, for now. But then let's say Steam suddenly acquires the entire video game industry lol. That's definitely a problem. But what if they do it over.. 12 years? At what point are we supposed to realize we're frogs getting boiled?
And non-profits, yeah, you're probably right that they should be fine.
But okay, do you know MEC? They were initially Mountain Equipment Co-op, technically a non-profit. Now they're Mountain Equipment Company, a retail store, but most customers barely registered the difference. This type of thing concerns me lol.
I think B Corps and non-profits can be allowed to make magazines here, that's fine. They just need to follow our rules. They won't like it, but no risk of Fediverse collapse ever, and honestly it's probably best if we get to hold them accountable this way.
I mean Trilium is fantastic app, lots of potential but the developer is struggling on his own, maybe it's because it's younger than logseq or maybe because is open source compared to obsidian. I think it's the best note-taking/knowledge-base/second-brain i know it virtually could link everything you posses toghter to create a...
@da_g Yeah, I actually basically do slap everything in one folder on Obsidian lol. I love that I don't need to spend time organizing folders, but I still find things easily by taking "paths" through my vault!
Ah, no [[links]]? Well. I'm a couple thousand notes deep on that format hahah.
I don't think this is for me, but I've given your post a boost and an upvote! Good luck!
What are some great hobbies for an introvert?
Introverts: which ones have you enjoyed the most?
Beans (boardgamegeek.com)
Anybody play this?...
First Batch of Tyranids Completed
They will need some toxic slime on the bases to really sell it....
NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin
Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:...
Game for 5 year old
My son's 5th birthday is coming up and I would like to gift him a board game. Usually only the two of us play and he likes for example Carcassonne Junior, Brandon the Nrave or Karuba Junior. Any good suggestions for a new game, maybe also something collaborative?
OC Dearest developers. Stop reinventing the wheel!
(Please keep in mind this is something I've written in regards to all of these various social platforms, not just kbin, mastodon, lemmy, etc)...
Sometimes I really like that we still don't have too much content at the Fediverse
I know that we NEED more content at Kbin, Lemmy and all the Fediverse in order for them to grow and substitute Reddit and other networks, but sometimes I just feel really happy that I can open my app and read almost everything that was posted in the last few hours without being suffocated by a billion of new posts....
deleted_by_author
Is kbin.social anti-corporation? Should it be?
I'm seeing discussions on other instances about how a "federated" corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company....
Why is Trilium so unknown? (github.com)
I mean Trilium is fantastic app, lots of potential but the developer is struggling on his own, maybe it's because it's younger than logseq or maybe because is open source compared to obsidian. I think it's the best note-taking/knowledge-base/second-brain i know it virtually could link everything you posses toghter to create a...