I still get into this sort of dumb argument all the time, so I kind of get why the other users were arguing the troll - even if you don't know why their comment pisses you off, you still get pissed and it's hard to not react when pissed.
Once upon a time, there was torrential rain. Such heavy downpour that the animals saw their homes flooding. They run to the hills, the flooding got worse; they run to higher hills, the flooding was still getting worse; eventually they couldn't help but gather together onto the largest hill of the region.
Such a ruckus wouldn't go unnoticed by the Mboi Guazú, the giant serpent; she woke up from her deep slumber, feeling a bit peckish. Unlike most animals she could see in the dark, and what she saw was a feast. Such abundance of prey! She could even ignore their meat, and go straight for the tastiest bits: the eyes.
So she ate the other animals' eyes. One by one. She ate so many eyes that they wouldn't fit the serpent's belly, but she kept eating them. So the eyes started appearing over her body, in-between her scales, creepily emitting light. The more eyes she ate, the more eyes she would have over her body, to the point that she was bright, she was light, she was fire.
She has become the Mboi-Tatá, or the "fire serpent". And she still roams those lands, looking for prey, burning the path as she goes through. If you ever find her while roaming, don't ever forget to close your eyes - and hope for the best.
Okay, that doesn't answer your question but I was in the mood of sharing a bit of the Guarani mythology, the fire serpent. This version of the myth is the one from the Mbyá.
If anyone wants I don't mind sharing other Guaraní myths. I also remember a few Kaingang ones.
I'm checking the Curated Tumblr thread and modlog. Holy fuck, what a shitty user - clearly behaving passive-aggressively. I've seen more oldschool forums being ruined by those than by the ones hurling insults.
[Warning: the following is my opinion, not some incontestable truth.]
It's less about bending rules and more about enforcing them by spirit, not letter.
Reusing your example: I think that you did the right call there - sure, the post doesn't "share" a cool website, but it's still about one. It might not fit the letter of "find a cool or useful website on the internet. Share it here so others Lemmings can bookmark it too.", but it's still well within the overall spirit of the community, and why that rule is there on first place.
Another example: my comms often have a rule against off-topic, but if people start some friendly chitchat in the comments (they do it often) I leave them alone. Because the spirit of the rule is to avoid content that would derail the community, and that chitchat won't do it.
You'll often get rule lawyers trying to "mmm, ackshyually, the rule says that orange socks aren't allowed, but my post has a reddish yellow sock". That's unavoidable even if you enforce rules by the letter; nothing ever written is completely unambiguous, there's always some grounds for alternate interpretations. As such don't feel discouraged by them.
Note however that what I'm saying does not mean that you should disregard the letter of the rules. Don't - the rules should be still listed in a succinct and accurate way, both to guide your comms' users and justify your actions; it's a matter of transparency. Instead edit the written rules over time, to address issues that makes their letter betray their spirit.
If the objective is incentivizing good behavior, here’s another idea: reward upvoting and make it costly to downvote. Details TBD but other forums have done it and it works.
A simple way is to make downvotes "cost" more clicks. For example:
if you want to upvote someone, you click the arrow up button and you're done.
if you want to downvote someone, you click the arrow down button, then a pop-up confirming it.
It isn't too much of a deal if you downvote people sparingly, but if you're consistently downvoting others it would get annoying.
Additionally, PieFed has a feature in line with your idea: up/downvoting people gives you "attitude", and if your attitude is too low (too many downvotes in comparison with upvotes), a warning mark appears near your username. Mods can also use this as a piece of info to decide how to handle you, as users who are consistently downvoting others are typically combative.
Upvoted as unpopular, per the rules of the community.
I don't think this would be an even remotely good feature.
You never know why someone specific up/downvoted a piece of content¹; at most you can pull up some possible explanations, but if you treat any as certain you're just assuming². As such you'll be blocking a lot of people based on things that you don't even disagree with.
not even when the person announces why they're up/downvoting something, like I did.
treating something uncertain as if it was true. The bane of social media.
Kika thinks that human arms are made of rubber. She asks to be petted, and then gets further and further from you, and then looks at you with a "why did you stop?" face. If you stand up to get closer to her, she runs towards a specific corner of the house (that changes from time to time, currently her cardboard box), because apparently being petted there is the bomb.
Siegfrieda has some deep connection with... mats. She likes them so much that she never leaves them alone, they're always out of the place and messy. The kitchen mat in special - sometimes she rolls herself into a makizushi with it. (And yet she still doesn't know how to get inside her pocket-folded blanket by herself.)
Most of the time I make my meals from the scratch. Exceptions are usually takeaway food; I only buy stuff like frozen lasagne and the likes very rarely, it's expensive and it doesn't taste as good. (In fact even a few of my spices is homemade.)
As others said, in your case (provided that you're the one in charge of cooking) it might be sensible to buy the store-bought pancake mix for the sake of your wife, and then prepare the rest of the food as you typically do.
you dont. Because chomskyite grammar sucks sweaty balls.
Well, that explains a lot.
Frankly the way that I handle syntax nowadays is completely heterodox - the tree is just a convenient way to represent some pseudocode-like "rules", nothing else. My framework is completely proto-scientific and it probably has more holes than a sieve, but it isn't a big deal since my main area of interest is Historical Linguistics anyway.
On pragmatics: it's a really amazing field to dig into, but professors with "strange interpretations" are a dime a dozen. Often because they're too stubborn to ditch their favourite framework even when it doesn't work for something - for example, trying to explain politeness expressions through the maxims won't work, and yet some still try to do it.
I did well in pragmatics. My bane was syntax - that professor did a really poor job even to explain the basics, for example I still don't know why the hell you're supposed to spam XP, X' and X in generative trees even if they won't branch out anyway.
What you said immediately reminded me Grice's "Logic and Conversation". The author outline what he calls "conversational maxims", that resemble a lot your five bullet points - except that they don't just apply to technical writing, they're more like principles that we "automatically" use in human conversation. They are:
Maxim of quantity - "be as informative as possible and needed, and no more."
Maxim of quality - "be truthful; don't give false or unconfirmed info."
Maxim of relation - "be relevant; say things that are pertinent to the discussion."
Maxim of manner - "be clear, brief, and orderly; avoid obscurity and ambiguity."
Those four maxims are constantly being violated by the speakers, as they're in conflict with each other. For example, clarity (maxim of manner) often requires simplifying things, to the point that they aren't as accurate (maxim of quality) as before.
This is relevant here because, if you can't avoid violating those maxims, you need to reach a compromise. And good writing is about finding a good compromise for the target readers.
I'm fine with replies correctly filling what I've deleted with actual and meaningful info.
Instead, most of the time, I regret it due to some reply misrepresenting what I said - because the replier is now assuming shit, or interpreting literally a figure of speech that I've used for brevity, etc.
I don’t think that was the right call, Discord and Slack are absolutely the wrong tools to maintain a forum
They definitively aren't - and even if Discord was the right tool format-wise, going to another locked-in platform is the same as asking "please abuse me again".
EDIT: fuck, it just clicked me why you said so. Discord might be a good place to advertise Lemmy, indeed - good catch.
The issue is that Reddit became a place to host OC because it had such a large userbase.
It's a feedback loop: users attract OC, OC attracts users. We [Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed users] can feed this loop from one, another, or both sides at once, and I believe that currently we should be focusing on the OC side more.
Originally, it was just a link agregators based on votes, there were not even comments or subs.
That is true. However there's a catch: Reddit's main competitor Digg was also just a link aggregator, while our main competitor (2024 Reddit) is already way more than just that. We don't have the luxury to follow the same steps as Reddit followed and hope that we'll succeed as Reddit did.
Some of that content is really good, but it's missing contact info that can be backtracked to Lemmy. It's content made to consume inside Lemmy and nowhere else.
but realistically, if someone made a nice infographic today, would they really only post it here on Lemmy, and not share it on Reddit as well, the picture itself, without any reference to Lemmy, to avoid their publication to get removed?
Yes if they are specifically creating said content to nurture Lemmy. And then as people share someone else's content in Reddit, they can't simply remove that authorship info, even if it's a link to a Lemmy profile - that's the same as lying that you created what you didn't create, you know?
Edit: Instagram and Twitter would also be places to reach a much wider audience compared to here
Instagram could be worth a try.
I think that Twitter would have the same problems as you mentioned for Mastodon (people preferring the microblogging format), plus the same that we get from Reddit (your typical 2024 Twitter user isn't healthy to have around).
Like, instead of looking where we should advertise Lemmy (is it Reddit? Mastodon? Old style forums? etc.), what if we advertised it through original content? If it's good enough it'll be shared by people who aren't even Lemmy users, and reach multiple places at once. If we include in that OC links to our profiles (as authorship) it's automatically bringing people here, from a more diverse userbase, as they seek more of that stuff.
I feel like this strategy is actually viable nowadays, unlike (say) before the 3rd party app fiasco, since for at least some content we already reached a critical mass.
Infographics in special are a really good way to do so, I think. And the format is flexible enough that you can put anything in an infographic, from cooking stuff to some fandom (I'm looking at the Star Trek fans in the Fediverse) to how to degoogle yourself or even political stuff.
‘Witch hunts’ sounds like somebody got called out for their bad behavior.
I can't speak for the OP, but on general grounds:
Witch hunts aren't the result of someone being called out for their bad behaviour. It's when someone assumes that you behave badly.
Or, for a slightly less sloppy definition: "to witch hunt is to publicly denounce someone or something as coming from a socially undesirable group of people, without rational grounds to do so. Note that the last part is key here.
![Lvxferre [he/him]](https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/333d03a0-bcae-434b-a8d1-7dfd18962d20.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
I still get into this sort of dumb argument all the time, so I kind of get why the other users were arguing the troll - even if you don't know why their comment pisses you off, you still get pissed and it's hard to not react when pissed.