The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.

Thanks.

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.

Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

Oh yeah that’s right. Sorry, I haven’t put a game out for a long time.

deleted by creator

I have mixed feelings on it.

When I was putting out games, publishing on Steam would mean a guaranteed 1 million impressions on the “New releases” list. That’s incredible exposure for an indie title, which often succeed or fail on exposure alone.

But 30% can be a lot for those same indie teams, especially combined with taxes. You can put years of work into a title and lose half the money it earns to groups that didn’t directly contribute at all. It can easily be enough money that long-term support or follow up games just aren’t viable. It can be your entire outsourcing budget or a whole employee for a year.

And after that initial exposure, you’re not getting much for your perputual 30%. The value of Steamworks can vary greatly game by game so you could end up paying $30k for $100 of bandwidth and minor marketing through things like sales and rich presence.

I would much prefer to see something like “30% after the first $X in sales”. Their cut would kick in only after they’ve demonstrated their value as a platform and small teams wouldn’t have to watch a company with billions of dollars take a very large bite out of their very small pie.

I’m growing increasingly skeptical of “people are complicated” being anything more than a method of shaming people for discussing certain subjects.

We need to discuss groups of people and that inherently involves generalising their beliefs. Nobody is going to track down every single person in that photo and confirm the nuances of their racism just in case they thought it was the line for hot doughnuts, so the conversation people are having here becomes impossible.

Your mother’s specific views on black people don’t matter to any conversation people are having in academic or social media circles. We’re all perfectly aware that individuals have more complex opinions but we’re not talking about individuals.

But even more bizarrely, why do you think your mother’s views are some kind of “gotcha”? She was racist when it came to you dating a black person, which she inherently attempted to hand down to you. For the purposes of this conversation, we absolutely know what group she belongs to. She’s doesn’t get a free pass just because she didn’t have the whole set.

It would also perfectly fit to Nazism. Just another view they coincidentally share right?

And what are those recommendations exclusively based on? Just because two thoughts in a row give you a nosebleed doesn’t mean everyone falls for such lazy apologism.

They don’t want to filter it for themselves, they want to filter it for everybody or better yet, stop it being produced in the first place. They make their tantrums as public as they can for a reason.

The other way a giant truck can solve your “driving my kids around” problem is via the massive blind spot in front. If you’re impressed how much you can fit in the back, wait until you see how many tiny little skulls fit between the road and your line of sight.

GIMP is bad. If the problem was simply that it was “different to PS” then other apps like Krita and Affinity Photo would have the same reputation.

If a user goes looking for a tool or feature and it’s not in the first place they look, that’s a problem of “didn’t really practice that much”. If experienced people need to look up how to do basic operations and their reaction is “that’s fucking stupid”, then the software is bad.

To then say “well why don’t you help the Dev team then” is insane. I’m not spending hundreds of hours digging GIMP out of bad design decisions when I could just use better software and I haven’t seen any evidence that my PR would even be accepted.

Nobody needs excuses and apologism, they need Blender for image editing and GIMP just isn’t that.

Charismatic, intelligent people don’t need fascism nearly as much as dumbfucks do but even for the few who get sucked in anyway, there’s easier and more self-serving ways to express it than a grueling, always-on position in the Republican party.

But ultimately the answer to both “why don’t they run someone actually good” questions is “because it would be a threat to neoliberals and their record profits”.

They accomplished the majority of it by simply showing up. They didn’t need their guns or elaborate criminal conspiracies, they just applied for positions of power (however minor) and used that power to push their agenda and support their dogshit friends doing the same.

Meanwhile, progressivism on the internet has been taken over nihilistic neckbeards that just sit back and watch it all happen, making worthless promises about how if it gets too bad, their for-profit firearms will bail them out.

We used to get arrested.

Drop the bullshit. You’re using short people and lone women as human shields for your hobby.

Are we really supposed to believe your dogshit gun laws are an act of feminism? You’ve put 100% of American women in more danger by arming criminals, rapists and domestic abusers and you want to claim it’s all worth it because the less than 20% of women who want to carry guns are possibly safer.

Which of course they’re not anyway. The moment they know a man is a “brandish your gun” level threat is when that man grabs them or pulls a weapon on them.

And you know what happens next don’t you Mr Action Hero? If the man is already in grappling distance, she gets disarmed and then probably killed with her own weapon. If the man has already pulled his gun, she gets shot before she can aim and fire her gun.

The best thing women can do to keep themselves safe is to avoid men who are walking red flags, like gun-owners that throw women under the bus for their own self-interest and awkwardly brag about martial arts training and being immune to stun guns.

Or they’re just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about “open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos” were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.