• 28 Posts
  • 435 Comments
Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月19日

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  • View from the Top.

    I saw it when I was in my twenties with a friend because we (two mostly straight guys) thought we were going to see the latest silly Mike Myers movie. And then it turned out that he was barely in it! They just took all his scenes and put them in the trailer! The actual movie was a very dull romcom staring Gwyneth Paltrow and some guy who I don’t remember being in the trailer at all.

    When it ended, we walked out of the theater and just said to each other ‘What the hell was that?’.

    Also, I think Shallow Hal kind of falls in this too. I don’t recall the trailer being great, but it had to be good enough that it got me to see that terrible movie.

    Also, I don’t know if this qualifies, but I remember that The Cable Guy staring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick was the first time I saw a movie and realized that a trailer can be misleading. They deliberately promoted it like The Mask and Ace Ventura. I think I was like 12 when I saw it, and it creeped me way the fuck out.

    It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s actually a better movie than people remember, but the misleading promotion was a great way to ensure the movie didn’t find its audience.




  • I feel like a lot of people are missing the obvious conclusion that everyone involved here is awful.

    Maduro? Brutal dictator. His domestic opposition? Violent fascists. His international opposition? Absolute war criminals.

    It’s really sad. My primary opinion is that the US needs to leave Venezuela the fuck alone. If you want democracy in Venezuela, you can’t get it through sanctioning the population into starvation if they don’t vote the way Chevron tells them to. Did Maduro steal an election? Yes! But his opposition at home and abroad isn’t mad that it wasn’t fair: they’re mad because they think it’s bullshit for him to steal it after they stole it first!

    Get the fuck out and let them actually decide what they want. The US is the clearly the greatest villain in a story with no obvious good guys.





  • The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

    This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

    Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

    It does two key things in particular:

    1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

    2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

    Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.