RunawayFixer @ RunawayFixer @lemmy.world

Posts

1

Comments

389

Joined

2 yr. ago

This makes a lot of sense. I do indeed stick to all on lemmy and the ignorant downvoting that often happens, reminds me of what would happen in default reddit subs like worldnews. My opt in reddit subs indeed had a way better crowd. The frontpage of Lemmy didn't used to be this way when I first joined though.

Good news, thanks for the open communication.

I wasn't party to it from the start since I'm not a vegan and I didn't see the original discussion, but from my understanding: Vegans were having a discussion on the possibilities and risks of vegan cat food, in the vegan community Lemmy world. A Lemmy world admin invaded that discussion and started using his admin/mod powers to push his unsubstantiated opinion on the subject and silence the voice of users who had another opinion. And now apparently there's new rules being added to justify that kind of admin behaviour.

And this is also apparently not the first time that that admin abused their mod powers, since I read a few comments in this thread saying something like "oh, an admin abusing mod powers, that's probably going to be xxx again".

That was all before Musk. Since musk took over, twitter gives in to all demands for censorship by governments. It went from about 50% to basically 100%. I expect that the information of users isn't safe either.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfilling-more-government-censorship-requests-under-musk

Lemmy is still very left though, even when not federated with the tankiest instances. My impression is that it's not an influx of more right leaning people, but rather that the increased popularity brought in a wider audience, which also brought in more people who are unwilling to consider or respect alternate viewpoints, no matter how well argued or founded those opinions are.

I read a post by a vegan in this thread who wanted to try a vegan diet for their cat, so they went to the vet for a plan, tried that vet approved plan, but their cat didn't like the food so they switched back. Imo perfectly reasonable and well argumented, no risk or harm to the kitten at all, and yet massive downvotes.

My scalp condition is that I have too much hair. Too dense and thick, it gets greasy after not washing it 1 day, so I don't even dare to replicate your experiment.

I also used to have a cold weather dandruff problem, but that was solved entirely when I started always air drying after every shower. Thanks to a random tip years ago on reddit. My dandruff problem was apparently because of humidity.

I'm sorry if I come across as preachy in the below post, but I wanted to try and explain to you where the critique is coming from. And also that it's not personal or any widespread resentment.

I (and many others) get what a thankless and also necessary job moderating is. It's not easy to do it well, it's frustrating, it's thankless and without it the community would be dead. But being a moderator and sticking out your neck brings you exposure and you are guaranteed to meet more asshats than you ever thought existed. But the users are not one homogenous group, it's not because one user has flung abuse at moderators, that all users are now suddenly resentful of moderators.

The person you are replying to, put a good bit of time in listing what comments were most up voted, which are probably the comments that found most support amongst the users in that thread. In the same way that we should not be dismissive of what you do or say, you shouldn't be dismissive of what others do or say (or up vote). Mutual respect and all that.

Self reflection is also important, it's important to realize and accept that it is possible to be wrong about something. Doing a mea culpa and moving on is far easier in the long term than doubling down and digging a deeper hole, yet it's a lot rarer because it hurts our ego in the short term.

Their final point about a problem with handling feedback rings true to me:

• You (not you personally, but the team that did that feedback thread) have apparently treated up- and down votes on a thread as a poll and a popular mandate for action, but up- and down votes are not a poll and most (probably most) people don't use them as such.
• Up- and down votes on comments are useful for finding which remarks resonated with or turned away other users. They are not a poll either, and most upvoted are not automatically most correct at all, but they give you a chance to read the room.
• You (now you personally) have thrown shade on the people that up voted comments against the bot, by insinuating that those people might have been bots themselves and that therefore their opinions are irrelevant. Yes it's possible that there are some users using alts, but all those users? Not very likely.
• The best feedback I saw in that thread was not in the up or down votes, it was in the comments themselves. There were some very compelling arguments as to why using a biased site to display bias, was a bad idea. Those comments also had quite a bit of upvotes, so the way I read the room, that was a popular sentiment.
• The person you are replying to made a few arguments and one scathing critique which they probably hoped that you would improve on in the future. Imo a polite disagreement with your previous statements. You respond by being dismissive of his arguments and acting like it's a personal attack. They were sticking to facts, you're making it about you as a person. I really don't think that was their intent.

Nope, that's not how it works.

There are instances that only allow up votes. There are people that will up vote any post by a dev as a show of appreciation for the effort, without necessarily thinking about or agreeing with the changes.

If you want a poll, then you have to do a proper poll. Up- and down votes are not it.

Imo it's much more likely to have never been an actual piece of fruit. The story is probably an allegoric warning for some taboo subject and now we can only speculate on what was originally meant.

My theory: Adam and Eve were convinced by Adam's one eyed snake to fornicate, but then their dad found out and kicked them out.

What happens when the bias checker is biased?

The mbfc site should not be used for anything. It's just the subjective opinions of the site owner (who is misleadingly talking about "we" and "our" in his methodology page), aided by a few unknown volunteers who do some of the "checking". The site claims to be objective, but there's been enough examples to show that it isn't (fe, it says that Fox News is as trustworthy as The Guardian or that CNN is somehow center left).

The so called methodology that is used, is just a lot of words that boil down to "several facets were checked by a human and that human gave a subjective rating to each facet, we then count up those subjective ratings and claim to be objective because we use a point system".

For checking the trustworthiness of a source, I'd say that the mbfc site is about as useful as using CPU Userbenchmark for chosing a CPU. Yes, it's easy to read and more convenient to use than other sources, but it's also a load of horseshit and unless you drill down into the underlying "data", you're just going to draw the wrong conclusions because of how misleading the site is.

My family (parents etc) have mostly learned their lesson now after all the news coverage, but before that I used to resort to hiding my good non sticks whenever they were staying over. If my parents complained about the shitty old pans that were available, then I pulled out my very sticky nonstick ceramic pan that they had roughed up despite my protests. I'm never throwing that shitty ceramic pan away, it's way too effective as a rhetorical ploy now.

Friends I still mostly don't trust since I don't know their kitchen habits well enough, but they're less likely to try to help with cooking anyhow, only with dish washing and there it's easy to hide the wrong sponges.

If your chipped nonstick is teflon, then it's garbage now imo. I would never cook in it again, too risky imo.

And I now realize that I've become paranoid in my own kitchen.

I was wondering what "feminist propaganda" was and apparently it's talking about misogyny.

Another forbidden topic seemed to be targeted at criticism of misogyny at Game Science. The company has come under fire for lewd and sexist comments attributed in media reports to its founders as well as recruiting materials from 2015 replete with sexual innuendos. Those original job postings and comments were deleted, and the company has not commented. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/asia/chinese-videogame-wukong-censorship.html

But this anti feminism attitude is not limited to this 1 gaming company, but government policy under Xi Jinping's authoritarian rule: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/feminism-in-china-internet-crackdown-erase-womens-voices/100165360

It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there's a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.

We've all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the "both sides" argument, for now anyhow.

In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that's one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.

Fox news gets the same credibility rating of "mixed" as the guardian, which should tell you all that you need to know about the credibility of the mbfc site.

Edit for context: fox news commitment to factuality, is so bad that they knowingly air news that they themselves know to be false: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trump/673132/ Rampant misinformation, sitting on news until they can release at a more opportune time, selective reporting, airing heavily edited footage to make their guy look less like an idiot, ... These are all things that fox news does, but I'm hard pressed to find any examples of the guardian doing any of these. And yet still somehow, the mbfc site wants us to believe that the guardian is as untrustworthy as fox news. Somehow I'm not buying it.

Completely. Calling NBC news center left is a real head scratcher, that bot is apparently living in an alternative facts reality.

Has there ever been done a sociological study on how many and why so many closeted homosexuals are homophobic? I can think of 2 reasons as to why, but I would love to see some numbers.

The 2 reasons I can think of: Non homosexuals don't think as much about homo sex as closeted homosexuals, so they are less likely to constantly be thinking about gays having sex and thus less likely to speak out against it. And closeted homosexuals are probably jealous of gays that are no longer in the closet, a case of "how dare those people openly live happy lives doing what I would like to do, but can't because I'm a bigot with a fragile ego". And this last point is probably why it's so often republicans who are like this: it fits with the republican mindset of being "the party of spite".

In a non first past the post voting system, it's less likely that 1 radical party remains in power long enough to screw up the high courts. But it can still happen, case in point Hungary and Poland.

Iirc, Orban had been in power for many years in Hungary and went for a gradual erosion of the independence of the courts. Death by a thousand cuts.

Pis in Poland only had a majority for 2 election cycles, but they needed only the first win to screw up the courts. Instead of a gradual (legalistic) takeover, they went for a bonkers hostile takeover of the supreme courts: https://freedomhouse.org/report/analytical-brief/2018/hostile-takeover-how-law-and-justice-captured-polands-courts

The eu should have kicked out both states out of the decision making process and implemented sanctions, but since that required unanimity, Poland and Hungary were essentially protecting each other from consequences. Now that pis lost in Poland, I hope that the eu takes action and prevents this from happening again.

Inspired by is not the same as based on. I don't think that it can ever be canonical because the time period was never explored in depth by Frank Herbert himself, but I do think that the what ifs of this time period could make for a very interesting premise.

Either way, the showrunner is apparently Alison Schapker, who was also the primary showrunner for Altered Carbon, which I really liked. So I'm definitely going to give the first episode a chance :)

From imdb: "Ten thousand years before Paul Atreides joined the Fremen to lead an uprising on Arrakis to take down House Harkonen, two sisters (Valya and Tula Harkkonen) create the mysterious all-female order called the Bene Gesserit. In Dune Prophecy, the siblings combat forces that threaten the future of humankind.".

Iirc, 10000 thousand years before Dune was the time of the Butler Jihad, when humankind fought against the thinking machines. So I think it's a series based on apocryphal stories on how the feudal society in Dune came to be. Lots of creative freedom for the creators, kinda like Knights of the Old Republic was for Star Wars.