EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.

Memes are reposts! That’s their defining characteristic! They become memes by being reposted! If they didn’t get reposted, they would not be memes!

Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.

Google is probably mad that AI is doing a better job of ruining the Internet than they are

I’ve heard WD40 works on some glue residues. Couldn’t hurt to try it.

Making generalizations about people is a problem when the generalization is false or misleading, or is being used to make a false or misleading argument, which is often the case. If you’re wondering if a given generalization is problematic, odds are the answer is ‘yes’ otherwise you probably wouldn’t think of it as a generalization.

Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.

If you already struggle with some form of mental illness, it’s probably best to assume that you’re being irrational, rather than ascribe any meaning to this particular thing. There is a lot of random stuff that happens, and you could project meaning onto any of it to create a narrative. Unless you have a good reason to believe that a specific person or group is messing with you (not just a vague sense of unease) then it’s very likely that it means nothing.

Mashing the buttons over and over trying to get the high score.

Ergolf Hitler

Elon Musk has the right idea, honestly. Just put the chips directly into our brains instead of trying to sneak monitoring devices into every home appliance like we’re in an outlandish parody of a Cold War spy film.

I’m not opposed to an electric toothbrush, but that should be the end of it. We did it! We made sci-fi toothbrushes! Let’s pat ourselves on the back for achieving the pinnacle of teeth-cleaning technology, not piss in God’s face by demanding that it also have a WiFi connection and an app and a subscription service.

You cannot convince me that there is any reason to put a computer in a toothbrush. The fact that we have electric toothbrushes at all is borderline absurd.

The actor of captain Picard

Do you honestly not recognize Sir Patrick Stewart? No shade, it’s just wild to think there would be people who don’t recognize him at all, given the length and breadth of his career.

In answer to your question, I can’t speak for Patric Stewart, but my guess is that he chose to play the scene that way because it’s likely that very few people in the Federation smoke, and that’s probably doubly true for people who spend most of their time on a spaceship. My guess would be that Stewart was trying to indicate to the audience that smoking would be somewhat of an anachronism in the 23rd century.

As the saying goes, philately will get you nowhere.

The Simpsons’ version of Bill Clinton.

Give us Mario Kart 9, cowards.

I just don’t even know how you would argue that they aren’t making art. What purer form of artistic endeavor could you name than a child being creative for its own sake? Things like technical skill, novelty, complexity, etc. are qualities that art has, but they have nothing to do with the definition itself. If a child creates something with artistic intent, that’s art. Arguing otherwise is navel-gazing prescriptivism, the same basic argument as Roman statue fetishism and just as tedious.

The only categorical difference between a child’s painting and a professional illustration is that the latter has value as a commodity. If that’s how art is being defined here then we can dismiss this opinion as deeply unserious.