• 13 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Thank you both (@NinjaFox@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org) for taking the time to make this post not just more accessible but somewhat more bit-/link-rot-resilient by duplicating the image’s info as a text comment.

    We don’t talk about it as much as authoritarian censorship, ip & copyright related takedowns, and their ilk, but image macros/memes often have regrettably small lifetimes as publicly accessible data in my experience. It might be for any number of reasons, including:

    • because many of them are created on free generator websites that can’t afford to store every generated image forever,
    • because people often share screenshots of things instead of a link to it,
    • because for-profit social media websites are increasingly requiring account creation to view previously accessible content,

    or (more probably) a combination of all three and more.

    In any case as silly as image memes are, they’re also an important vector for keeping culture and communities alive (at least here on the fediverse). In 5-10 years, this transcription has a much higher chance of still hanging around in some instance’s backups than the image it is transcribing.

    P.S.: sure, knowyourmeme is a thing, but they’re still only 1 website and I’m not sure if there’s not much recent fediverse stuff there yet. The mastodon page last updated in 2017 and conflates the software project with the mastodon.social instance (likely through a poor reading of it’s first source, a The Verge article that’s decent but was written in 2017).

    P.P.S.: ideally, OP (@cantankerous_cashew@lemmy.world) could add this transcription directly to the post’s alt text, but I don’t know if they use a client that makes that easy for them…



  • I think downvote anonymity is the bigger part of the problem, not downvotes in general. Unless I’m misunderstanding, what you’re proposing amounts to “if you want to downvote in a community you’ll need to make an account on it’s instance”. This would be a nice option to have, but it should also remain an option.

    In your +50/-90 example, showing at least the instance provenance for votes allows more (sub)cases. If I can see that 55 of the downvotes come from the instance hosting the community, that’s potentially a very different situation than if only 5 do. Or if 70 of the downvotes come from a pair of instances that aren’t the community host. The current anonymity of these downvotes flattens these nuances into the same “-40”, which I agree isn’t great when it can lead to deletion - but I’d argue that’s also an entirely separate problem that might be better addressed from a different angle. I find that disabling downvotes from other instances entirely flattens things just as much if not more, just not in the same manner. Instead of wondering how representative a big upvote or downvote count is, I’m now wondering how representative a big upvote count is, period. That might seem like 50% less wondering but with no downvotes at all it might also only be about 50% less votes.

    I’m not convinced silencing negative outside contributions won’t just shift the echo-chamber-forming to one that’s more based around a form of toxic positivity and/or reddit-style reposts and joke comments, either.

    Revealing from which instances downvotes come from doesn’t prevent opinion downvotes but it allows dulling their bite. The same is true for opinion upvotes.

    From my understanding votes are more-or-less already somewhat public on lemmy between it’s implementation and what federation needs to function properly. At the very least, each instance knows how many votes they’re getting from the other instances. We should embrace the nuances federation brings to the problem instead of throwing them away entirely.

    So much thought has been put into “how do we convey the different instances’ character and their relations to each other to new (potential) users in a way that doesn’t a) overload them and/or b) scare them away with content that rubs them the wrong way” in communities and posts like these, when potentially we just need to render more visible the data that is already present on the instance servers.

    I’ll acknowledge up-front that the “just” in the previous sentence is carrying a lot of weight; data viz is not easy on the best of days and votes have so little screen real-estate to work with. On top of that, any UI feature that can make what I’m suggesting palatable and accessible to non-power users would also need to be replicated across most popular clients. They’re written in a motley assortment of programming languages and ecosystems, and range from targeting browsers to native smartphone OSes, so the development efforts would be difficult to share and carry over from one client to the next. Still, they’re called votes: there’s a lot of prior art in polling software and news coverage of elections from the past few years that should be publicly accessible (at least in terms of screenshots, stills, and videos of the UI, if not a working version of it to play around with).

    On top of this, I don’t know how much effort this would require on backend devs for lemmy (and kbin/mbin I forget which is the survivor, and piefed, and any other threadiverse instance software I’m currently unaware of). I wouldn’t expect keeping track of vote provenance to prove immensely difficult, but it could cause some sort of combinatorial explosion in the overhead required by the different sorting algorithms proposed (I’m ignorant on how much they cache vs how often they’re run for lemmy, for example).

    I can’t foretell if this would “solve” opinion downvotes on it’s own, but I do think it would contribute to the necessary conditions for people to drift away from the more toxic forms of it. It could also become another option for viewing feeds on top of “subscribed”/“local”/“all” + the different vote rankings.



  • The issue isn’t just local. “This is predicted to cascade into plunging property values in communities where insurance becomes impossible to find or prohibitively expensive - a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008,” the report stressed.

    I know this isn’t the main point of this threadpost, but I think this is another way in which allowing housing to be a store of value and an investment instead of a basic right (i.e. decommodifying it) sets us up for failure as a society. Not only does it incentivize hoarding and gentrification while the number of homeless continues to grow, it completely tanks our ability to relocate - which is a crucial component to our ability to adapt to the changing physical world around us.

    Think of all the expensive L.A. houses that just burned. All that value wasted, “up in smoke”. How much of those homes’ value is because of demand/supply, and how much is from their owners deciding to invest in their resale value? How much money, how much human time and effort could have been invested elsewhere over the years? Notably into the parts of a community that can more reliably survive displacement, like tools and skills. I don’t want to argue that “surviving displacement” should become an everyday focus, rather the opposite: decommodifying housing could relax the existing investment incentives towards house market value. When your ability to live in a home goes from “mostly only guaranteed by how much you can sell your current home” to “basically guaranteed (according to society’s current capabilities)”, people will more often decide to invest their money, time, and effort into literally anything else than increasing their houses’ resale value. In my opinion, this would mechanically lead to a society that loses less to forest fires and many other climate “disasters”.

    I have heard that Japan almost has a culture of disposable-yet-non-fungible homes: a house is built to last its’ builders’/owners’ lifetime at most, and when the plot of land is sold the new owner will tear down the existing house to build their own. I don’t know enough to say how - or if - this ties into the archipelago’s relative overabundance of tsunamis, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, but from the outside it seems like many parts of the USA could benefit from moving closer to this Japanese relationship with homes.







  • Labeling the AfD as far-right is clearly wrong when you consider that Alice Weidel, the party’s chairwoman, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? I beg to differ!

    Fuck you. There were gay Nazis. There are gay neo Nazis today. Fascism cares about power more than any internal consistency. The moment those gay Nazis are no longer useful to their higher-ups, they’ll be disposed of.

    When will someone with more reach than I, a random internet commenter, start saying this shit to his face!!! The people who are swayed by his bullshit rhetoric are not coming here to read our takedowns, and I can’t tell if I can expect them to read the counter- and response op-eds…




  • Joyeux Noël aux jlailutin·e·s !

    Je suis très content. J’avais récupéré presque 1m³ de pelotes de laine dans le grenier de mes grands-parents après le décès de ma grand-mère. De l’adelphité des oncles et tantes à ma génération, tout le monde a grandi avec au moins un habit tricoté par la grand-mère. Aujourd’hui, il y a maintenant 4 petits qui n’ont jamais connu (vraiment) leur arrière grand-mère et qui surtout n’ont jamais eu de tricot venant d’elle. J’ai cherché en ligne un patron assez simple de chaussons à crocheter, et ai eu le temps d’en faire une paire pour le plus jeune.

    Il est super heureux et j’ai des commandes de la moitié du reste de la famille pour en avoir aussi 😊





  • Jayjader@jlai.lutoF-Droid@lemmy.mlAwesome Fdroid Games
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    2 months ago

    I got really into chip defense. The concept is a really fun twist on classic enemy hp mechanisms in tower defense. However I think the game’s controls design “scales” poorly with its difficulty curve. Building a new “tower” takes too many taps for the game to continue running in the background. Same for upgrading towers. The worst is when starting a level, you kind of need to rush placing towers to not mechanically end up in a fail state.

    If the game let you build and upgrade when paused (or at least queue up those actions to be executed when un-paused) I would have continued playing it.