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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • When we bump up posts that we like instead of relevant ones, those things get the visibility. I think.

    Yep, I haven’t actually checked the ‘Hot’ algorithm code (it’s publicly viewable) but I believe so. And there’s another related tough-to-solve phenomenon in any social media site where the most populist, simple, agreeable things are likely to get the most upvotes/likes/etc., and therefore the most reward. So unfortunately, a front page is often filled with low-meaning content like those jokes, or shallow but agreeable populist platitudes (which there’s nothing wrong with if you’re here for entertainment, but is an issue for more serious communities). I think tons of moderation is also the only cure for that, because I can’t think of an alternate bump system that works (for example, forums which use the ‘last bumped’ system reward posts for getting replies, so flame and troll posts that start rapid arguments rise to the top instead, and posts often just say ‘bump’!)

    As in, I don’t see what would be done besides tons of moderation or short post restrictions. Something I don’t find feasible

    I agree. There could be tricks like auto-moderation software detecting replies that a comm/instance staff considers to be an issue (e.g. a reply just saying ‘this’ or ‘lol’) and auto-replying with a caution against low-effort posting, but false positives could be a pain so it all comes back to more moderation staff in the end. It’s ultimately a network with a very open and growing community, unless you’re in a smaller private community. And Lemmy enables those to be created, so I can be happy with that if I ever want to create a more serious place.



  • The only reason I hang around here is because there’s no forum equivalent

    Equivalent of what? A place where you could make your own communities? (without spinning up a server or being a disconnected island) Yeah, I can only think of imageboard examples of reddit-like DIY community sites, and those… really aren’t what you asked for (very few had intelligent discussions, and by their nature, they mainly just attracted people who got banned from more normal communities).

    Unless mods wanted to spend 24/7 making sure people didn’t use FOSS Reddit the same way Reddit was used, that was always going to happen, if it hadn’t then people would have went back to Reddit to doom scroll again.

    Exactly. There’s not really any point to me crying ‘we’re not a reddit clone! we’re not a reddit clone!’


  • Good question. Especially since a lot of these are things I only notice in hindsight.

    • Volunteer to implement helpful hints at a systematic level, even small things like linking the join-lemmy.org documentation on the signup page by default, and adding placeholder text for instance and community admins to see and tweak for their own rules. I say ‘volunteer’ because the devs were, and are, far too busy to do everything themselves.

    • Create and share around image/infographic guides on why Lemmy is different to reddit. This could actually have been a good promotion tool too, back when we really needed it. I actually hastily made a quick one during the sudden migration, but I don’t think it’s worth digging up, it was very basic and not well thought-through.

    Then again, some people had no real problems with reddit except for the API stuff. The people who came here earlier often had complaints about reddit’s overall community trends, you know, people replying to headlines and clearly not reading the actual article at all, empty fluff like a random pun being the three highest rated comments, buttloads of junk replies like ‘wow’, ‘this’, ‘i wish i could upvote twice’ to scroll past. And I don’t think there’s much I myself could do to fight things like that, without putting in far too much time and effort (this site isn’t my life!).


  • Honestly, I regret not putting more effort into setting up a good foundation here before the API drama hit. There was a chance to fix many of the problems of reddit, and poor communication just let people import all the problems right back.

    Hell, people are still calling communities ‘subs’. Even basic stuff like that. And I’m not blaming people for coming into a place without learning about its culture, unfortunately that’s just normal and it happens. I’m just annoyed we didn’t create ways to educate them easily, like guidebooks and introductions on the sign-up page.




  • I was initially siding with Israel as they were hit first, but their response has made me rethink things.

    To generalize this out to other wars and conflicts, even regular old arguments, there are almost always pre-existing conditions and tensions leading up to the first major attack. Even things like WWI, where the catalyst was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But there is quite obviously more to the atmosphere, national ambitions, etc. etc. that make it so that the separatists wanted to assassinate him, and make it so that Austria-Hungary wanted to invade Serbia and used this as an excuse. A war would have happened anyway, no matter who attacked first.



  • I had decided to abstain from commenting on this subject further. Pretty much every reply I have received is a variation of ‘fake news’ or ‘racist cunt’.

    Yeah, kneejerk reactions get tiring. I tend not to use reddit-like or twitter-like forums much because of how low-effort and unempathetic most posts are. ‘Read the news title, get angry’, might as well be the motto. I’m glad you appreciated it.

    Affirmative action based on […] economic prosperity would help the most people in need and capture many more who would otherwise fall through the gaps.

    This absolutely is and should be fought for, alongside other movements. The concentration of wealth at the top has just accelerated after the main COVID crisis. Our whole economic system funnels wealth to those with capital, and their influence on our political system and mass media is the root cause of most issues in our society. My caveat is that affirmative action re: economic prosperity won’t solve this, the problem runs so deep that affirmative action will ultimately be inadequate, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. We need a systematic overhaul… far far far far easier said than done.

    That said, economic equity doesn’t cover everything, as many Indigenous people have other priorities that aren’t strictly economic, a major one being land rights. A somewhat-known recent example of the issue is mining companies destroying sacred land or historical artifacts, another is traditional use of the land to live off of. I admittedly don’t know enough about land right to explain in proper detail, but it’s one of the main demands that protesters have demanded for decades and decades.

    I would argue that abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, and anti-discrimination laws have done far more to solve systemic racism than racial affirmative action.

    I agree, and I would say that this doesn’t mean affirmative action isn’t still important. To take a metaphor from the Civil Rights struggle, that anti-discrimination is taking the knife out, there is still a need to heal the wound before we can say things are fine. We’ve abolished the most blatant aggression like non-suffrage, but done very little to make amends on things like colonisation and centuries of repression and land possession.

    Generations of loss and disadvantage evidently still exist, and will remain without positive interference. Disadvantage is cyclical, it doesn’t heal by itself, poverty is an self-evident example of the cyclic nature of powerlessness. And to re-emphasise, this applies generally to disadvantage, not just disadvantage caused by colonisation or racial disadvantage.

    As a side note, I’m not sure if it’s even correct to frame this as about race, Indigenous classification just inherently matches up with race since the historical inhabitants of Australian land were all, to use a racial term, Black indigenous Australians, and we’ve historically just grouped them all together when it comes to the social concept of race because they’re not White or Asian. The ill-advised and quite frankly worthless Voice proposal was about them being the native peoples, not about them being a certain race or having been racially discriminated.







  • Given this definition of racism, it creates an interesting problem: how can one solve systemic racism, without doing actions which take race into account? If someone needs help, is it unfair to treat them the same as someone else who doesn’t need help? Or would it be more unfair to treat them the same as someone who doesn’t need help, and therefore keeping things the same, leading to them still needing help? And, regardless of whether it’s fair or not (subjective morality), is it more beneficial to society (material outcome)?



  • Their argument is that the Voice isn’t even something good. It doesn’t give Indigenous people any powers they didn’t already have, and the Voice can be ignored just as easily as the advice of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody recently was. Interview with the Black Peoples Union describes in better detail.

    But even if that weren’t the case and they did think it wasn’t worthless symbolism, successful collective bargaining doesn’t just settle for every first offer. So I don’t know why you’re claiming it’s a bad strategy, it’s how unions have won important gains for workers. It’s a strategy that has been historically shown to work when applied correctly.


  • That isn’t a useful definition of racism. It’s sounds alright, although it’s ultimately idealistic, it doesn’t hold up when applying to material circumstances.

    As for why people think having different rules for different groups is good, I think one of the simplest ways to sum it up is: Equality of treatment will not give equality of outcome until there is already equality of conditions. Treating all people the same isn’t fair in the real world.

    As a thought-experiment to demonstrate: If we have two people, one has $200 savings after rent and the other has $10,000,000, you can’t make them more equal or make the money more distributed by treating them the same: if society wants to reduce poverty (which is obviously a good thing for society, to have less people in poverty), it makes some sense to supply the poorer of the two with money, but it makes no sense to supply the richer: they already have more money than 90% of people! There isn’t a moral or ethical benefit in giving them more money, they don’t need the money as much as others do, it’s not how to achieve fairness or equality.

    The generalised point of that being, if a group is disadvantaged and the status quo is keeping them disadvantaged, solving that will require special treatment. Treating Indigenous people the same way as always just keeps the systemic racist status quo, and to solve that, the Government will inevitably have to treat Indigenous people differently. That’s a consequence of trying to create a more equal outcome in an unequal environment.

    The same goes for other types of disadvantage, of course. I am obviously not trying to imply that all people who aren’t indigenous have all the advantage they need! Ultimately, everyone who is not a mega-multi-millionaire is disadvantaged, but we can’t fix that all in one change. We have to start somewhere.