LOGIC💣

Let’s consider the chart for a moment. The black line represents the metal of the hook. The hook shape is to demonstrate the distorted way that people who claim to be centrists are actually the far right. So, the “far right” and the “centrists” dot are both directly on the black line.

However, the “far left” dot is in the middle of the eye. In the hook analogy, it’s not on the line. The “far left” is off the hook.

It’s more like the ancient phenomenon of spaghetti code. You can throw enough code at something until it works, but the moment you need to make a non-trivial change, you’re doomed. You might as well throw away the entire code base and start over.

And if you want an exact parallel, I’ve said this from the beginning, but LLM coding at this point is the same as offshore coding was 20 years ago. You make a request, get a product that seems to work, but maintaining it, even by the same people who created it in the first place, is almost impossible.

For me, the important thing is that this is a vibrant community.

That means that from the mods’ perspectives, they don’t get too loaded down with moderation work, or need to defend themselves and create friction with the community.

It also means that when people want to contribute to the community, they’re not afraid of what the mods will say. If they post without reading the rules, like probably most people do, it’s really the poster’s fault. But if they are afraid to post even after reading the rules, then I think that has a freezing effect on the community.

As for people who are looking for loopholes, I think they’re trying to make the mods’ lives harder, and so I don’t really think they’re worth worrying too much about. They’ll probably get banned sooner or later because that is the attitude of a troll.

Just my opinion. I’ve never been a mod, and I don’t think I could handle that responsibility. I just try to be empathetic with everybody involved.

You’re right. One problem is, even though mods already have the power, specifically saying in the rules that the criteria is subjective sounds like something that a mod would make when they are tired of having to explain their moderation choices.

They can just say that it was low-effort, and problem solved. They don’t need to explain themselves, right?

But when the rules are vague, I think they’ll end up with more complaints from people who have different criteria of low-effort from the mods. This sort of interaction leads to accusations of mods power-tripping.

If the mods can nail down exactly what is low-effort, like, “X will always get removed. Z will never get removed unless it violates other rules. Y may be at risk of the moderator’s mood. You have been warned.” If they nail things down a bit more, then they will probably make things easier for themselves in the long-run than just keeping things vague.

Plus, if the rules are not vague, then people can discuss them safely when the rules are changed. When rules are vague, people will simply be upset that moderation was sprung on them, and everything will be discussed while people are upset. My belief is that people best discuss things while calm, and not while experiencing one person having power over another.

How many ban reversals end up with the return of an active user? My guess is, “very few.”

I haven’t read the article, but I have read previous accusations of the same thing, so I assume it’s the same.

Basically, the new AI companies are all losing money, but they are all investing big money in each other which makes it look like the industry is doing well.

Did you make a similar comment to OP, who only spoke negatively of a well-used and well-understood system?

What is OP’s proposed alternative? What’s a realistic plan to get there?

Here’s what OP said in the body of their post.

Most european countries use 2 round elections or proportional representation.

Although I’m not sure when they wrote that. The post was edited, so it’s possible that it wasn’t there when you first saw the post, and didn’t re-check the post before writing this comment.

What is your reason for saying that?

Just saying something negative makes it seem like it’s a bad idea, but that just encourages people not to change at all. A voting system that tries to satisfy the Condorcet criteria will be far better than any FPTP system.

It’s easier to tear down than it is to build up. What’s your proposed alternative?

I think that there is a time factor and a complication factor. Like the longer the game lasts and the fewer characters available to name, the more people who will name and customize characters.

I wonder how many people completed Skyrim with the name “Prisoner”, though.

As the number of users goes up, it becomes more difficult to enforce that way. Even if many people switch communities, when new ones search for the community by name, the one with the most users will pop up first. And it becomes more and more difficult to justify defederating an instance over a couple of communities if the instance has a ton of big communities.

We need to be careful on Lemmy. Only the fact that the moderators and admins have goodwill are keeping Lemmy from becoming like Reddit. If Lemmy gets big and starts attracting people who want to pay to take over communities, that will stretch the moderator goodwill to the limits.

I don’t know what kind of shitty parties you’ve been to, but normally, when the piñata breaks open, everyone rushes up and gets some. It doesn’t all go to the person with the bat.

Lemmy is a federated clone of Reddit, and Reddit has more users, so most likely, everyone here has either rejected Reddit, or been banned by Reddit, or they are using both platforms at once to reach a bigger audience.

I am here because I was very dissatisfied with Reddit’s administration and moderation and with the way they screwed app devs.

I’m concerned that Lemmy uses the same basic moderation techniques as Reddit, and so it could fall into the same ruin as Reddit. But for now, the moderators I’ve interacted with here have been straight up legit good people. So I stick around.

Title text:

A lot of the highway department’s budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

The sign on the left is mounted on a pole that extends 10 ft 6 in above the ground.

My problem with Rogan is that he gave bad uninformed advice during the pandemic, all because he’s too insecure about how other people perceive him. His insecurities almost certainly caused many people to die.

And I don’t think his show is even worth one person’s life, so he can’t really ever redeem himself.

I actually made the same point in the part that you quoted. I said that I only use downvotes for things that I think mods should remove. You stated it more clearly, though.

And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you’re talking about are “lesser-moderated”, so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.

It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.

That part you quoted is the least important part of the comment. I put it in because I think it’s important that everyone knows votes are public, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with my point. But I’ll just remove that paragraph so that it doesn’t confuse people who only read the bare minimum.

Downvotes are inherently broken. They are a bad idea and they cannot be easily fixed.

Why are they broken? Because users with good intentions don’t use them as much as people with bad intentions, yet the system actually rewards users for downvoting.

How are people rewarded for downvoting? Well, their votes count more. If I upvote a comment I agree with, it becomes more visible. But if I downvote all of the other comments, the one I agree with becomes even more visible. It’s like giving downvoters double votes. And since votes are private on Reddit, it’s impossible to know for sure what is happening. People may even have extra accounts just to get more ability to downvote.

If you reward people for acting in bad faith, then they will keep acting worse and worse.

Moderators cannot understand context, sarcasm or satire

or subtlety. I was once banned by admins for explaining how criticizing a religion’s official dogma is different from hate speech against individuals who practice the religion.