FaceDeer
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit, is now exploring new vistas in social media.
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As illustration of this fact, over here on kbin.social I can check this comment’s “activity” and see that the four upvotes it’s received so far are from @VieuxQueb, @kakes, @density and @Treevan. The timestamps are visible too.
This isn’t some sort of sneaky doxxing, its presented just two mouse clicks away in the standard kbin interface to anyone with an account. I wouldn’t be surprised if fancier tracking systems get implemented, maybe right in the instance or maybe with some kind of RES-style user script, to let you see patterns in who is upvoting or downvoting whom more easily.
This isn’t to say that people shouldn’t upvote and downvote freely, just keep in mind that it doesn’t work like Reddit did. This is public information here.
I only ever found two uses for karma on Reddit.
There were some subreddits that imposed a limit on commenters requiring them to be above a certain karma threshold before they could comment or post, which most people would probably pass in a matter of weeks. I can see the use of this as a spam prevention mechanism, but it’s a pretty trivial thing if you’re a “real” account that’s sticking around for a while.
And when I passed 100k karma I applied for membership with the “century club” subreddit out of curiousity to see what was going on in there. Turned out it was pretty boring. Oh well. As far as I’m aware there’s no such thing as a “private” community in the Fediverse so this wouldn’t even be possible here.
There is no “the community”, though. These names don’t “belong” to any one specific group of people, there’s no “there can be only one” mandate.
As an example of why “there can be only one” is a bad thing, there’s /r/StarWars and /r/SaltierThanCrait over on Reddit. When the Disney Sequel trilogy came out there were some Star Wars fans who liked it and some who didn’t, and it became such a contentious subject that those who didn’t like it were literally driven out of /r/StarWars and had to create /r/SaltierThanCrait so that they could discuss their opinions without being downvoted into oblivion or outright banned. Why should they have had to give up the name StarWars, though?
Another example is /r/Canada and /r/OnGuardForThee, which was a similar sort of schism - /r/Canada got “taken over” by right wing moderators and those who weren’t of that particular political bent ended up having to make a subreddit with an unrelated name. Why should one group and not the other get to name their community “Canada”?
I think the key for people who are confused about this is that it’s necessary to consider the part after the “@” to be just as much a part of the community name as the part before it. There’s no such thing as a community named “No Stupid Questions”, with no @whatever after it, because all community names inherently include that portion.
As an alternative solution there are issues for “multireddit”-like features, this issue for Lemmy, and Kbin has one here.
Interesting, I didn’t notice that this community was hosted on lemmy.world. Yeah, my understanding of how ActivityPub worked was that lemmy.world would have to act as a “relay” for these message to make it out, even though you’re on sh.itjust.works and I’m on kbin.social. I could easily be wrong about that, or perhaps lemmy.world is managing to stay just functional enough in the background to keep traffic flowing.
Edit: Never mind, lemmy.world seems to be back up. I just visited their front page and it loaded fine.
An amusing related concept; the interesting number paradox.
To put it in mathematical terms, people are subject to Poincaré recurrence given enough time and space.
Firstly, you’re assuming an American legal jurisdiction, which is a bad assumption in a global Fediverse.
Secondly, being “legalistic” at all is unwarranted. “Freedom of speech” has broader meaning than just what some specific constitution or some specific set of laws says. If someone is arguing that there should be free speech on an instance then saying that “free speech only applies to government restrictions” is just as relevant as your argument about quartering soldiers or whatever. That is, it’s not relevant. Instances can have “free speech” if they want to regardless of if they’re governmental, which means we can argue in favor or against them having free speech if we so desire.
When I’m feeling sad about the people I’ve lost over the years, I like to ponder the vast gulf of time and possibility that lies ahead. The human mind is probably not as complicated and unique as we like to think, so perhaps someday there’ll be an ancestor simulation of some sort in which we get to meet again.
Your username is quite suited to this mindset so hopefully it helps. :)
I’m a full-blown atheist. My dad died a couple of years ago and I “talk” to him frequently simply because I’m accustomed to doing it and it’s a nice thing to imagine. I know full well that there’s no magical way he’s still around and listening to me, but humans gonna human and there’s nothing wrong with having quirks like that.
I recall reading a study a long time back where researchers put people in fMRI machines to monitor their pattern of brain activity and then asked them to consider some kind of ethical question. Some of the subjects were told to talk to an attendant who was physically present, some were told to talk to themselves about it, and some were told to talk to whatever deity they believed in about it. The brain activity patterns for talking to someone physically present were different from the brain activity patterns for talking to oneself, but the activity patterns for talking to oneself and talking to God were identical. It was a neat result.
Edit: It’s not exactly as I remembered it, but given how human memory works I bet this is the article I was thinking of.
A related fallacy is the Gish gallop, in which an endless stream of bogus arguments are spewed out faster than any of them can be refuted. Even if it’s really easy to refute each one individually, the constant stream is overwhelming and then eventually the user can go “aha, you couldn’t refute X!”
This is a major example of why I despise the left/right “spectrum” that is so universal in political discourse these days. These views are not simple enough to be defined along a one-dimensional axis like this.
I’m increasingly fond of the 8 values test, which splits things up along four distinct axes. Still too few, but definitely far better than just one.
“Pure paradigm” programming languages are really just toys for research and experimentation, IMO. I remember taking various courses on these sorts of things and, for example, the OOP prof would say “one of the cool things about pure OOP is that there are no loops or if statements. Now, here’s how you go about faking a loop or if statement using pure OOP, because it turns out you really need that to accomplish anything.”
In the real world you’ll want to use whatever works best, which often means a language that contains a bunch of features from different paradigms merged together. Ideally in a rational and well-structured manner, but given how much usage Python gets that’s clearly not a fundamental requirement.
65% of Americans already believe that there’s intelligent extraterrestrial life, which is about the same as the percent that identify as religious so there must be a fair bit of overlap already. Americans used to be a lot more religious just a few decades ago but I don’t have historical belief-in-aliens percentage at my fingertips.
My expectation is that a remote-radio-signal-only detection of alien intelligence will have almost no effect on society, not in the near term anyway. It’s too abstract to factor in to most people’s lives. Finding relics within our solar system from long-gone visitors might have a bit more of an impact because I expect there’d be a “gold rush” to find more, since they may have practical value and are limited in supply. The only thing that would have a serious and widespread impact would be actual live aliens (or “live” alien AIs, same thing really) in the solar system itself. At which point the outcome is basically “what outcome do the aliens want this to have? That’s the outcome we get.”
You’re clearly not getting into the spirit of the current mass hysteria and/or witch-hunt. I’m going to have to ask you to either pick up a torch and/or a pitchfork (note that picking up only one of the two will immediately indicate insufficient hysteria, though you are of course free to do so) and join that queue over there in a disorderly fashion.
I don’t know if Lemmy has an equivalent, but in Kbin you can block a whole instance as a user. For example, I went to https://kbin.social/d/lemmygrad.ml and in the upper right corner in the “DOMAIN” box there’s a standard block button. I expect it means I will not see any comments or posts that come from anyone on lemmygrad.ml.
Some years ago I read an amusing article about Conservapedia, discussing how half the contributors were genuine right wing lunatics and the other half were trolls pretending to be right wing lunatics and nobody could tell who was what. I suppose it’s possible that Lemmygrad is like that too. But there are definitely genuine lunatics in the mix, regardless.
It’s not just technically publicly available, though. Anyone can go to an instance that displays it (which is basically all of them) and take a look right now.
This is a thoroughly unbottled genie, the only way you’re going to get it back inside is if every instance was to agree to hide this information and defederate from any stragglers that don’t. It’s infeasable at this point. IMO hiding the information on a few individual instances is only going to give a false sense of security.
Whats the completion of the sentence “I think it’s good that everyone can see who up/downvotes them because ___”?
Then they know the information is out there, and they can use it themselves to spot people who are abusing the system.
And regardless of whether you think it’s “good”, the information is out there.
If votes by nature have to be public due to necessary operations of the ActivityPub protocol the entire argumentation becomes meaningless.
They do, that’s why I said having them public is what lets voting be a thing.
There are instances out there that already hide some aspects of voting, beehaw.org doesn’t show downvotes in their interface for example. But I expect that someone who’s keen on being a troll or stalker will gravitate towards instances that have that information at their fingertips. Hiding the information from the interface of a particular instance doesn’t make the actual data go away and a different instance can show it just fine.
Well, one upside is that it lets voting be a thing, since ActivityPub is public by nature.
It should be possible to build bots to detect these voting patterns. Reddit had plenty of user-created bots that helped moderators identify toxic or otherwise undesirable users to ban, something like that could be done in the Fediverse too. It’s pretty early yet - there isn’t even an API for Kbin as far as I’m aware - but once something like that is in place you might not even notice when your stalker gets caught.
You can block people like that. And you will be able to see that they’re “retaliating” against you because of the transparent voting system - you’ll be able to say to the admins “look, this guy’s done nothing over the past six hours except downvote every comment I’ve ever written” and if you’re on an instance that cares about such things he can be taken care of.
An average user isn’t an unsavoury troll.
I don’t see how ActivityPub could be adjusted so voting is anonymous. Not without letting instances just make up whatever vote totals they want with no way to tell that something shady is going on.
(Actually, I can think of one way to do it, but it’s very complex and involves blockchains so I wouldn’t expect an average user to want that either).
Since these are inanimate objects that are incapable of comprehending respect or disrespect by themselves, this meaning is imposed solely by the humans involved in this process.
A common analogous situation is the burning of American flags. Lots of Americans freak out over it, the official “Flag Code” says burning is actually the respectful way to dispose of them, and most non-Americans just roll their eyes over the whole kerfuffle.
That said, I have a bunch of books I’d like to get rid of and that I know there’d be no demand for and I’ve got them stashed away because I know I’m going to have soooo much trouble actually physically dropping them into the recycler. Humans are irrational and superstitious, even when we realize that we’re irrational and superstitious.