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.

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

As the saying goes, philately will get you nowhere.

The Simpsons’ version of Bill Clinton.

In philosophy, it’s called Pasta’s Wager.

Look into design thinking and in particular ideation. There are lots of formal processes, exercises, activities, etc. that are used by individuals and teams in all sorts of contexts specifically for coming up with ideas. The process is usually one of throwing a bunch of things on the table, sorting through them, getting rid of most of them, elaborating on the ones that seem interesting, then following one to completion, or at least to some sort of first draft/prototype/mockup. You then decide whether or not you want to work on the draft further, or decide that it’s a dead end and start from scratch. The thing with “ideas” is that all of them are terrible and only serve to help guide us towards doing something interesting. Creating things is an intensely iterative process, and what you start with is unlikely to look much like what you end up with after a number of iterations.

Ideas are also all derivative. There are no new ideas, just riffs on existing ones. Even most interesting and innovative works have been influenced by past works, or works from different disciplines, or inspired by nature. If you’re looking to make a short comic, start by figuring out what works and artists and styles you like. Try recreating parts of them, or emulating them, or combining elements of them, and see if the results speak to you. That’s one of the few actually useful applications of LLM AI. You can quickly test concepts, maintain some elements and discard others, do mashups, etc. When something grabs you, try to figure out what it is that resonates about it, then try to recreate it with your own spin.

Ultimately, ideas are just prompts for doing work, and having a good idea (to the extent that such a thing even exists) is far less important than being willing to test a number of ideas to find out what will motivate you to spend real time and effort on creating something.

“Living’ la vida loca” would translate roughly as “Ballin’ the crazy ball”, which sounds pretty fun, tbh

I tried opposing genocide but they threatened to put me in jail for antisemitism

There is no evidence that belief in Santa is harmful to children, nor is telling them the truth. They only believe in Santa for like maybe three years, and they’ll figure it out on their own. The vast majority of kids figure it out by age ~7-8. You can tell them whatever you want, it won’t matter either way.

If you do tell them the truth, or they figure it out on their own, be sure to also tell them that even if they don’t believe, other kids do, and being a Santa-truther will not win them any prizes or make them any friends. It’s a good lesson about living in a society.

It’s all great, but the tiny podcasting mic is clearly the icing on the cake

Ticket scalpers take way more risk, plus they don’t get sympathetic coverage on the news when they’re whining that people aren’t buying their tickets at a high enough markup. Also ticket scalpers aren’t withholding a fundamental necessity from people. Ticket scalpers work harder, too.

Really, ticket scalpers are just incorrigible scamps compared to landlords.

This is an incredibly embarrassing attempt at trolling. You should post it on Reddit, they’d love it over there.

Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.