It’s really unfortunate that Lemmy handles deleted posts in this way. It’s one of very few genuine advantages of the Reddit platform. Over there, if the OP deleted the post, the text they wrote would no longer be visible, but all the comments under it still would be. And people could continue to have that discussion, so long as they had the link.

I’d rather just spend a fraction of the money on a Nebula subscription.

A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.

True, and that’s important context if you’re trying to get a deeper understanding of how Julius Caesar came to have the power he held before his assassination.

But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

It literally was though. Not a military intelligence tool, but a big business intelligence one.

Niantic was founded by Google and their first product, Field Trip, and their first game, Ingress (a much better-designed game than Pokémon Go, btw) were pretty obviously about gaining geolocation data for Google to improve their products like Maps and Shopping.

Honestly I’m a light hobbyist myself. My exposure to history is primarily via YouTube channels like the excellent Historia Civilis (their series on Julius Caesar and the downfall of the Roman Republic is stunning) and via games like Age of Empires.

I just don’t understand how someone interested in antiquity can possibly fall for Trumpism. The fall of the Roman Republic was presaged by a guy literally trying to get elected to office so that he could escape prosecution for illegal abuses of power, and the legal system standing aside and saying “yeah, we’ll let you do that in order to maintain the peace” and then falling into civil war anyway.

How much of that sounds familiar…?

CCTV produced an article asking “six shocking questions” about “US doping scandals.”

Hilarious, considering they had a known doper on their swimming team at the Olympics who was banned in 2014 and then banned again after destroying testing samples in 2018. Not sus at all…

IRC as in the old-school chat protocol?

It kinda felt like exploring Mars. But eventually I found things

Even the world wide web felt like that until shockingly recently. I remember circa 2005 just typing in random words .com and seeing what you’d find, or discovering a cool new website by word of mouth at school.

I remember vising pig.com and discovering a delightful page consisting of nothing more than a giant picture of a pig and the text “this domain is for sale” that lasted years. These days it’s probably one of those shitty for sale landing pages.

Reddit is notorious for astroturfing

The worst is when a business are the moderators of the subreddit about their business. This used to be against the rules, I’m pretty sure, but was never enforced and I think at some point they silently dropped that rule. It creates a gross conflict of interest.

I’m not sure I agree that disabling downvoting really solves the problem. It might help, but not a huge amount. Because you still end up with people upvoting stuff they like and not upvoting stuff they don’t. So instead of being +1/-1 it becomes +1/+0. The stuff that they would have downvoted still ends up sinking towards the bottom, just perhaps not quite as quickly as otherwise.

I do think your thoughts about quote Xits are really interesting though. It’s a two-edged sword. On the one hand, by amplifying what you’re disagreeing with you do also provide an opportunity for more people (rather than less, as on Reddit) to be exposed to it, potentially changing their mind. On the other hand, it’s a tool ripe for abuse and creating more harassment, especially since the people you’re amplifying it to are usually primed to agree with you.

On Lemmy the safeguard to mod abuse is instance admins. On Reddit this can take place, but rarely does. The only time admins on Reddit really step in is when mods are allowing illegal behaviour on their sub, or when mods are protesting against their own shitty behaviour. But on Lemmy it’s much easier to reach out to an instance’s admins if something is going wrong. Mod actions are all public, so you can create a post explaining what happened and it’s not just a “he said/she said” situation.

If they aren’t being responsive to feedback, the appropriate response is to start up a new community, preferably on a different instance. Or, in the extreme case, to block that instance entirely. You can even build a consensus to doing this with a “panel” consisting of…every user on the platform. That’s essentially how !tenforward@lemmy.world became the de facto Star Trek meme community, rather than !risa@startrek.website, after the mods of the latter community were shown to be abusing their powers and the instance admins refused to take remedial action.

I think you missed their point. Yes, the specific beliefs held by the Reddit hivemind are specific to that platform. But the idea that Reddit has a hivemind is a natural human factor. So Reddit’s hivemind might be a centre-left liberal hivemind, HN’s might be more libertarian, and Lemmy’s is more leftist. But there’s some degree of hivemind on any platform that exposes users too each others’ content and where participating in those public discussions is the point.

A site like YouTube or Facebook lacks as much of a hivemind effect, because people aren’t on there for the discussion. They’re on YT for the videos, or on FB largely for their friends. Though both YT and FB comment sections are also proof that lacking a hivemind is also not a sign of quality.

It’s the eternal September.

If it wasn’t for the shitty European weather I’d be seriously considering moving there, tbh. Have become fully orange-pilled over the last few years.

Yeah, the catch here is that it’s a feature that my native language does at least sort of have, just applied in a way that makes it not clear. When it’s a feature I’m completely unfamiliar with, I’m more likely to be on guard for it, if I’ve learnt it. But here I didn’t even think about it, because it was an element I am familiar with, so I never second-guessed my intuition, even though that intuition was wrong.

The biggest, most monstrous dildo you can find.

He never uses it. Just befriends it and talks to it like in the original. Just leave the possibility hanging there.

English is the only language I’m even vaguely proficient in, really.

Le francais est le loin ma deuxieme langue la plus forte. Mais ce n’est toujours pas tres bon, et je dois passer beaucoup de temps pour ecrire dans francais, et generalement rechercher quelques mots ou expressions. Mais ma grammaire est assez bonne, je pense.

I also spent a few years learning Spanish, but almost none of it stuck. And a few years learning Korean while living in Korea. I learnt a few of the necessary words and phrases relating to restaurants and taxis, and some very rudimentary grammar. And being able to read the script is a neat party trick. And one year of actual Vietnamese education + a few more years of peripheral exposure to the language while I lived there. Even less of it stuck than the Spanish though.

Oh damn. It didn’t even occur to me that we were talking plural here lol

Obviously you’re right.

(Or, let’s be honest, more likely « Quelles langues parles-tu ? »)