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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Part of it is the standard crisis of capitalism, the profit you get from doing the same thing always declines, so over time you have to push up revenue (increasing prices, forcing people to pay, showing more ads, gathering more data, etc) & push down costs (fire engineers, run on less hardware, etc)

    Part of it is capitalisms natural tendency to create monopolies, and the lack of competition in a given field causing the company to then lose sight of what it’s good at to compete in a bigger field.

    Part is that interest rates mean loans are no longer cheap, so taking on debt to get customer, to at some point down the line make money, is a less viable plan. Twitter is a special case where the bad loans are because that was the original deal not interested rate related, and Musk is trying to pull all of the enshitification levers at the same time.

    Part is that CEOs generally don’t have a fucking clue about their products or what they are doing (it’s a circuit job about who you know/blow, not what you know), so once one CEO starts firing/enshitifying, the rest just copy them so as to not be left out.



  • Capitalist trade necessitates competition & states, even if you ignore how violent setting up that trade network was, the need for competition to push profits up means you need to put down local competition or regulations (e.g the US (where the biggest companies reside) need to coup democratic leaders that get in the way of profits, such as the Iranian coup, etc), but people don’t like that so you end up with counter revolutions which puts forces hostile to the US in power, and eager to give the US a bloody nose (but mostly through proxy wars).

    And that’s without even getting into the trade creating Cheneys who want war because it is profitable.









  • Respectfully: Fuck that.

    If you want to find the best instant rice recommendations on Lemmy, Lemmy should have a functional post search function, rather than me relying on a malevolent corporate entity like google to index all the content.

    Search has gone to shit as the Internet has embraced social media sites, an upside of this is that wikipedia+Lemmy+key word search, mayas accurate as asking Google Bard or bing, and they can be built on entirety open tech.


  • Not really sure what you think is wrong with karma? most of reddit’s problem IMO come down to bad moderation.

    But for comment scoring, there are really just 3 methods I’ve seen:

    • Generic Up/Downvote - Reddit
    • Categorized Up/Downvote - Slashdot - This worked on a technical forum to keep technical knowledge near the top, while still allowing stupid/funny comments further down the page, plus it made ignoring stupid/funny threads easy
    • Personalized Up/Downvote - Facebook/Twitter/etc - basically build a profile of users you agree/interact with, and then weight their interactions accordingly to predict what content you’ll like/hate.
      • I believe Ticktok take this to the next level, because 90% of users don’t up/downvote, ticktok logs the passive act of continuing to watch content as a partial upvote making their algorithms train on the average users likes/dislikes faster.

    You could probably combine Personalized & Categorized, but I’ve AFAIK not seen it done.

    I think the problems with moderation are harder to solve, because you have both bad-faith moderators & good-faith but easily played moderators as problems, and you also want different dynamics as forums grow.

    I think lemmy could really experiment with good moderation & meta-moderation and if the developers are interested anyway, be a far better forum as a result.

    • Peer review of moderator decisions is something Slashdot did that went quite well. Once you’d been an active user with good “karma” for a while you would occasionally be asked to review other users votes, I think a similar thing could be done for moderation decisions
    • Elected mods. For subs above a certain size, having moderation essentially boil down to whatever the guy who created the sub decides, is bad. I don’t know exactly how it would work to prevent abuse, but as subs grow, at some point it would be good if the community chose the mods.
      • even short of full fledged democracy community approval of mod appointments would certainly reduce the amount of mod drama where it 1 bad head mod, will purge the other mods and replace them all with sock puppets.
    • Users-led replacement of bad mods, similar to electing mods, it would be good for users to “recall” a bad mod.
    • Transparency over mod actions, I understand that with the number of Nazis & other assorted trolls online reddit chose to let mods, moderate anonymously, but it really means you have no idea who is doing a good/bad job in many subreddits, some level of transparency for all but the worst content is key.
    • Moving subs, as lemmy instances have some control over the content of the subs that reside on them, it would make sense for there to be some method for the users + mods of a sub to decide to move it to another instances. This not only prevents admin abuse, but also encourages competition between instances for technical administration & content administration.
    • Splitting communities , sometimes subs grow “too big” and have different subcommunities that end up fighting for control of a sub, it would be good if there were a way of these communities splitting into 2 rather than fighting over the original name. not sure how it would work, but thinking about how r/trees & r/cannabis split or something similar. Maybe /r/canabis could become an combo of /r/canabisnews & /r/canabismemes, where users can just ubsub from the 1/2 of the content they don’t want.
    • Letting users weight subs/filter subs how much of subs they see, sometimes I’ve unsubbed from a high-content sub, just because while i liked the content it was overpowering the rest of my feed, it would be nice to have users configure how much of a sub they see (especially if combined with Categorized Up/Downvote), rather than complaining about “bad moderation” I can just personally choose to see less of what I don’t want.

    Anyway thank you for reading/not-reading my ted talk, but I suspect this will come up again so now I can copy/pasta it.


  • It’s pretty easy, i got banned from a couple of subs for being left-wing (apparently calling out brigading from far-right subs was against the rules).

    But i got a sitewide ban because I used an alt to ban evade (can’t remember the exact post, but somebody was asking for advise wrt to COVID in a legal sub (I was originally banned for for encouraging a user to get funny but illegal payback on their neighbors), and it felt urgent enough that I was fine getting banned.).

    Once you get a siteban, trolls will flag report all your posts even on subs your not banned from, or at least whenever I brought up that r/UKpolitics is modded by a literal fascist, I’d get a new site ban for “ban evasion”, to the point where pretty much any encounter with a far right troll or YIMBY would get me a ban.

    The admins also seem to work very closely with certain moderators, as was shown when they leaked a trans employees information to TERFisland subs.

    So while powermods can’t get you a sitewide ban, some have the ear of the admins who can keep an eye on you until you break a sitewide rule.

    And on a site which has alt-right subs, it’s hard to at the very least walk right up to the line on the rules wrt treating all commenters like humans.