I’ve been an active part of two movements that saw police prosecuted and systemic changes implemented which also included being assaulted by police and requiring medical attention. I’m 100% comfortable with the contributions I’ve made. Every piece of progress and justice I’ve been a part of has involved (as you say), “making it a problem for people with power”, not spouting pseudo-macho bullshit about other people shooting police.

I’ve fought for causes like this for almost 40 years and I’ve never seen people so fucking toothless. Forget actually acting on anything, they don’t even make art art about it. They just regurgitate corporate talking points about guns and sulk on the internet if someone disagrees. They promote other people dying in a hail of bullets or spending the rest of their life in prison and they won’t even send an email.

But it sure is easy to just be stepped back and making a claim for other people to figure out.

A criticism you’re clearly not interested in applying evenly to the people in this thread.

Yeah that’s what I said but it’s unpopular when it’s about something that matters.

It doesn’t matter either way because if they’ve got their knee on the neck of an innocent person, it’s not safe to shoot at them. Hopefully that doesn’t spoil anyone’s virtue signalling, macho fantasy because that’s a tragedy far deeper than the torture, abuse and summary execution of innocent people.

Then I should have the support of the people in this thread then since they’ve made it clear that their preferred solution is tutting and suggesting dumb shit that helps abusive cops.

But oh no! I haven’t been polite enough! I should have just advocated firing guns at people instead.

Sure I do, because he has the solution of a fucking idiot: “We should be able to shoot at cops with our cool guns”.

Maybe you should try getting more upset? If you’re going to do nothing of consequence, you could at least do it with some passion. Even on an anonymous platform with no consequences, all you’re bringing to the table is “touch grass” tone policing.

Oh you’ve been shooting at cops have you? Following through on your super cool solution?

Luckily, they have you to leap to their defense when someone tells them to act on their concerns.

There’s a long history of protest against police brutality, all over the world. How many have you been involved with? I’m tired of social media being full of lazy fucks who see shit like this and just say “damn that sucks” and go back to doing fucking nothing or pro-gun fuckstains claiming “Somebody should shoot them. Not me of course, somebody more expendable”.

Get them under control then. I’m sick of the fucking “thoughts and prayers” generation.

Don’t be coy, tell us what you think we should be using it for.

I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of “more X, no matter what”. Usually that’s profit, but I don’t think it’s mandatory.

If they don’t already, they will. The insatiable desire for profit means that even if you paid them $1000 a month for their dogshit rag, they’d sell your data to make $1001 dollars.

Regulations are the only answer and they have to be both enforced and punished heavily enough to not make it worth risking.

Bingo. Elon has a pathological need to be fawned over and will say whatever he needs to to make that happen.

Initially, he found that warm mouth in the left wing for championing products to address climate change, but he was still being held accountable for his failures and obnoxiousness.

When Trump showed him that reactionaries will love you just being a narcissistic asshole and they could be bought for a pittance, he jumped ship. If a bigger, more easily swayed group of people became available to him, he’d rewrite his personality to pander to them instead.

The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.

Thanks.

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.

Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.