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  • 40 Posts
  • 228 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • The rules are written so the admins and mods can maintain their positions and feelings without having to explain themselves.

    There is no requirement that they must explain themselves. The beauty of the Fediverse is that if one doesn’t agree with an instance, then they don’t need to interact with it.


    Its an insistence that whatever they do is right because they own the place.

    It is their instance to run as they see fit. I make no attempt to force my opinions on them for how they should run their instance. I can only voice my personal opinions and challenge them to be accountable to theirs.




  • Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.

    Note that even if a study is currently reproducible, it will only continue to be reproducible until it isn’t. There isn’t something fundamental that makes a specific scientific study objectively true or false — that isn’t how science works.


    When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.

    I understand that that’s likely well-intentioned, but, imo, it’s rather subjective — it’s more often a matter of relative perspective. That being said, it would be in your best interest to set as clear and precise definitions as you possibly can.


    Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

    What does this statement mean? You are banning anyone from sharing anything that is not peer-reviewed…?


    We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance

    That’s a bit of a stretch.



  • When I use a website as a source, at the time that I access it for information, I will also save a snapshot of it in the Wayback Machine. Ofc theres no guarantee that the Internet Archive will be able to survive, but the likelihood of that is probably far greater than some random website. So, if the link dies, one can still see it in the Wayback Machine. This also has the added benefit of locking in time what the source looked like when it was accessed (assuming one timestamps when they access the source when they cite it).




  • Imo, it likely was/is due to the voting system — and, in a similar sense, awards. Redditors want to increase their Karma scores and seem to, at least subconsciously, view it as clout. So they’ll create posts with the intent of farming these points — ie they post things that they know will get a specific response from the masses. What also doesn’t help, and is something that Lemmy similarly suffers from, is that there generally is no established concencus on how votes should be used. An upvote could mean agreement, or that a post is funny, or that it’s good quality, or that it’s on topic for a community, etc. A downvote could mean that the person disagrees with the post, or that they think that it isn’t relevant or they simply don’t like the OP. In reality, all that votes do, at the fundamental level, is tell the algorithm where it should place posts — a post with a large upvote to downvote to ratio gets shown higher up and more than one with a smaller ratio. This creates a sort of feedback loop where the posts that get farmed for upvotes get shown more. This biasing towards only upvotes creates a bias for content. People don’t want their post to be buried, so they’ll only post what they think will get upvotes. And since upvotes are usually used for things that illicit an “agreement” response, only posts that people agree with will be shown.

    The solution to these issues, imo, is to create an obvious standard for how votes are used and change how they’re interpreted by the algorithm. Imo, Facebook was on the right track with how they were using emojis as the voting method. People generally react to posts with emotion, and an emoji well represents that. You could potentially still have an up/down form of vote (alongside the emotional voting options), but it would be standardized to only be used as a metric for relevance/importance/correctness. This could be enforced by moderation, if votes were publically viewable, by allowing moderators to remove people that are vote brigading (not including emotional votes). Emotional votes probably shouldn’t be considered by the algorithm so that emotional bias can be avoided. Or, at the very least, there should be different algorithms that take these voting types into account I’m difderent ways. In addition to this, also removing the gameification aspect (not showing (at least not publically) total scores on profiles).




  • Your requirements are pretty strict

    Ha, I honestly thought I was being pretty lenient with just requiring what I thought were, more or less, the base requirements for a pill tracking app.


    Didn’t get the encryption point

    If I understand you correctly that you mean that you don’t understand the point of encrypting the data, the reason why I want that is to protect unauthorized access to the data if the device becomes compromised.


    MedTimer

    I’ve been using this one for a bit, and it does the job pretty well. It definitely is lacking polish and is somewhat buggy, but it’s certainly usable.


    MediTrak

    I found this one’s UI was rather cumbersome. I would choose MedTimer over it.


    Home MedKit

    I hadn’t heard of this one! It looks well made. It’s a shame one cannot input entries on any day though. I’m a little wary of a Russian app whose development history I cannot read, especially given that it’s such a small app in terms of popularity, but it seems genuine. The development cadence is perhaps a little lacking.