Yes, unfortunately. Or at least seems to.
This person was an eye-opener for me in terms of how deep political groupthink and unquestioning belief can go. He’s an intelligent person in a highly technical position that requires plenty of reasoning and thought, but if the right political commentator says something, it is absolute truth.
The overwhelming thing I remember is a sense of “Huh, I guess this is it.”
There was a possum in the middle of a busy road, acting oddly. Walking in slow circles, pausing to stare, wandering back and forth… just generally acting odd. I was concerned it might be rabid, and nobody else had called 911 yet, so I did. Gave them the info, they connected me with the local dispatcher, and that was that. Didn’t stick around to see what happened.
When I got home I found out that Possums are almost never rabid. Poor thing had probably been hit by a car. Animal control probably would’ve been a better option, but when I’d called I was actually worried for anyone else who stumbled into it.
Bonus points if it’s, “He’s childish because he’s so emotional.”
And then we wonder why men are closed off emotionally.
Huh. Today I learned. Neat!
Many of your examples of “bad” moderation are more about site administration (including use of tech tools and appeals) than the degree of moderation. Like, yes - Reddit’s moderation ecosystem, particularly in large subreddits, is fundamentally broken. Powermods, lack of accountability, malfunctioning digital filters, mods who lack of options for alternatives (or, where those alternatives exist, they are frequently overwhelmingly cesspools)… it’s got issues. But this isn’t about “more” or “less” moderation; it’s about poorly-applied controls in the first place.
I’m not so sure Lemmy is so “perfect” either. I’ve seen plenty of moderation based on political views rather than actual misbehavior here, and conversely plenty of actual hatred and bigotry getting a pass because those in charge of a give space viewed it as aimed at the “correct” people. Likewise, while the Fediverse allegedly lets parallel communities develop, in reality it can be hard to overcome the inertia of people moving towards a popular community, unless the mods/staff there really screw up.
Okay, so what’s the actual right amount in a given community?
My admittedly cop-out answer is “That depends on the community”. There were some where extremely rigidly-enforced rules - particularly about quality or contents of answers or posts - helped to ensure communities retained a high degree of quality and reliability in what was posted. But others might want a more casual, relaxed space to goof around in - including in ways that others might not like - which require looser rules.
And that’s really the rub: There’s no absolute right answer. We can point to lots of wrong answers, but getting it right is a complex journey for each space. My personal focus is that whatever level is agreed on, it must be fairly applied for all users. You cannot be passing one user’s slipup and coming down hard another. Be fair.
…and in the end, there will be people who simply cannot follow the rules, no matter how clearly they are explained.
Depends on the magnitude of what is being warned of.
“Warning, graphic gore”? Absolutely appreciated. “Contains scenes of actual combat, those with PTSD may wish to leave the room”? Yeah totally reasonable. “This book contains vivid descriptions of sexual abuse”? I can see why people would be squicked out by that.
But then we get into the absurd side of it. A film about the Holocaust, needing to warn its viewers that some contents may be distressing? Wow. You don’t say. A memoir about a tragic death, needing to put a warning that… someone dies? “This politics discussion may discuss slavery, racism, and oppression”? Oh no, we have to think about upsetting things that happened!
And before someone suggests those are unrealistic hyperbole, those are all things I’ve seen. I don’t feel those are helpful.
All you are saying here is ‘anything i declared bigoted shouldn’t be tolerated’.
Yep. Basically this. And to bring it back around to OP’s question:
[Opinions] you mention without a caveat immediately makes people jump to conclusions or even attack you?
…well, it feels like this is a great example. Suggest that the fediverse has a bit of a bigotry problem, and you immediately get hit with an implication that no, everything is fine, if you’re not happy then you must actually be the bigot!
That Lemmy can be just as bigoted, hostile, and close-minded as the sites it set out to replace; it drives out views which aren’t in line with the gestalt majority. This thread, then, mostly gets answers which are on the mildest end because those who actually hold opinions out of step with the majority know damn well not to speak up, or, well… be immediately othered.
Yes, for one particular reason: I’ve always favored longer, slower posting - structured responses to earlier posts with multiple paragraphs to propose a point, explain, and support it. Including the ability to quote / link back to multiple different posts in a thread if needed. The… for lack of a better way to put it, “Reddit-esque” style of branched comments to a post (which includes Lemmy) is nice because it allows multiple parallel discussions rather than one dominating one, but it also seems to discourage longer, more in-depth responses. It also means that interesting ongoing discussions which I’d love to get into can get buried down later in the comments.
Like OP, I recognize that there’s nothing actually stopping me from doing this on Lemmy. There’s chat and sort-by-new, and of course I can link as many other comments as I want. But the overwhelming trend is towards shorter, snappier answers before you move on to the next comment chain or post; discussions rarely last more than a few hours, whereas forum threads used to be able to keep them going for days.
Oh! That is very good. Sounds like a nice balance of “ability to remove yourself” and “ability for others to find their comments” too.
It’s frustrating for me as well. I’d sometimes like to go back and look at a conversation I had once before - so I don’t have to manually unearth whatever point or evidence I had in that post - only to find I’m actually unable to.
What really frustrates me is that if a post is removed or - it seems like - the parent of comment of a conversational thread, I become unable to view any discussion in that post’s comments or conversational thread. I get that people might want to remove their own posts, and that’s just fine - but one person removing my ability to view anything else in the comments doesn’t seem great.
Combination of:
And matte paintings. Never forget the legendary artists who turned paintings into scenery, or the camera workers who managed to blend in the actors to them.
Generative AI was vaguely funny when it created trippy, acid hallucination images and incoherent druggy ramblings of text. I know an author who fed their own content into an early LLM (small language model?) and the bizarre, yet undeniably “his” stuff it produced was worth a laugh. I wouldn’t say I “liked” it, but it was kind of amusingly quirky.
What was depressing is how quickly people began to claim AI content was “theirs”. As someone who ran a fiction-creating community, people were so eager to latch on to what AI would spit out that they began to create convoluted things for the early models to “depict”.
Whatever it is, I’m inclined to like the versions where FTL is a teensy bit dangerous. Not necessarily 40k’s “FTL is actual hell and frequently fails in terrible ways”, but more… it’s risky. It’s a mundane risk, maybe. But still, there’s that little bit of risk in the background and it needs to be approached carefully…
Like, Babylon 5’s hyperspace is an actual place you make trips into, but it’s also highly nonlinear, and so it is entirely possible to get lost or stuck if your ship malfunctions. Also, there are living things in there which may not be friendly.
Even Star Wars’ Hyperdrives can be dangerous. It doesn’t get played up in the stories much, but a malfunctioning or improperly programmed hyperdrive can strand you in deep space, subject you to severe time dilation, or just splat you against a realspace object.
Admittedly the “don’t know what’s on the other side” bit is a little iffy. Sure, they’ve got that little wheeled robot they use a couple of times, but after a while you’d think they’d do something as simple as “stick a camera on a pole through the gate first.”
The setup is just perfect too. “All hands - brace for turbulence.”
And you’re thinking, No. No way he’s going to do that.
AND THEN HE DOES.
Oh, I’m aware of them. Sorry, I should have been more clear!
What I was more speaking about is running historic equipment over long distances on main-line tracks. It’s startlingly rare in the US; most of the railroads (even shorter ones) don’t like historic equipment on them, so with a very few exceptions historic trains are limited to short excursions along tracks owned by the museums.
In fairness, we are now seeing a huge surge in steam locomotive restorations in the US. But I think there is only a single museum in which can even run main-line electric equipment at all.
Very neat, thank you! I wish we had more like that in the US.
And this infuriates me because the market for those suites is so oppressively terrible.
Like, hell, I don’t even need the full suite of simulation and modeling tools that they come with. Just give me a rock-solid parametric CAD engine, a decent rendering suite tacked on to it, and I’d really love it if anyone in this market could start investigating Linux compatibility! Hell, I’d even pay for that - just not the awful licensing regimes the current offerings operate under.