comfy @ comfy @lemmy.ml

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68

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1,356

Joined

4 yr. ago

Moderating

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On no level do most accusations of “sealioning” seem to hold up to scrutiny, in my opinion.

Agreed. While I haven't seen many accusations of it, all the ones I've seen have been false. And like you said, Lemmy has sufficient moderation that I've never seen it happen here.

As for the title question:

Do we need more users ?

We don't need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don't need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, "growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell". I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.

Since the micronation is unrecognized, within the territorial claim of the UK and easily within reach of their law enforcement, I wonder what the Principality of Sealand would have to do before the UK attempt to enforce their laws on them. Would the huge pressure of recording and film industries have enough power to compel them? Sealand have gotten into serious armed shenanigans before, which if one chooses not to interpret their governance as valid, would effectively be ransom.

Their wiki page mentions HavenCo, a data haven which apparently was operational for a few years.

Good example, with the caveat that one would still be subject to the intellectual property rights of Russians, and I'd assume of their allies. (I know I used Hollywood in my example, that's on me)

Thanks for adding the source.

Though it’s hard to find similar places to early 4ch that aren’t nazi paradises.

Yep. Finding the small scattered imageboards which ban or reject politics and combat spam is difficult, but rewarding. And they tend to be special-interest focused sites, like erischan or lainchan, so they're not all going to be interesting to everyone. trashch /comfy/ is a possible counter-example.

Add to it that there are more and more professionals making content for profit, a decade before AI reached this stage. Memes and viral videos became marketing opportunities.

To oversimplify a complex multifaceted question: money went online. Pre-2000s and early 2000s was dominated by self-hosted community sites, like forums. It was often a personal sacrifice to host them, rather than a business like with modern social media platforms like reddit, YouTube, etc.

I've often preferred to stick away from the middle of the internet, the smaller community sites are so much better than for-profit grifter-filled addiction machines. When I see a few people (less of them now) saying "Lemmy is too slow/dead", I think about the sites I love that get 10 posts a week. One particular board occasionally has some new kiddo arriving to a thread and asking a question to (or getting annoyed at) a post made over 10 years ago. And since these aren't sites dedicated to sharing things that other people make, they develop their own cultures. Anyone there to advertise and make money will leave dimeless, anyone there to insert political propaganda will be ignored or laughed at and banned.

Lemmy has some shared traits, and some of the benefits are glaringly apparent when we compare to reddit, but it's still largely a content sharing site more than a creative community.

The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?

I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.

My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd 'sea lions' for a race, then harassing the racist doesn't bother me. Bigots don't deserve peace. It's absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn't want to talk, I just wouldn't care that they're being harassed for airing such bigotry.

(On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it's worth, the author made a comment that it wasn't meant to be "analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics." - but I say it's a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)

Yep. "Hmm, 'unknown?', let's assume they're all Linux!".

Linux is doing well, no need to lie about it!

into that communist architecture feeling

I'm guessing you're talking about the post-WWII low-cost housing Khrushchevka ("commieblocks"), Soviet modernism, or the related Brutalist concrete architecture? (Because in context I assume it's not constructivist, socialist classicism, or non-Soviet styles from around the world)

I've come across some people who have no idea what "sealioning" even means. There used to be a hb user "Ulysses" or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that's the only conversation we'd ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say "no that's not true, stop sealioning".

I feel like some people just think sealioning means "this person keeps replying to my posts", as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.

Blame culture isn't a way forward, both the con and the conned hold partial responsibility. Power doesn't come from thin air, and those who voted for this regime helped empower it.

Yes. There's some good space under my bed.

I don't think other countries care whether Congress calls something a war or not. They didn't even declare the Vietnam War.

Yep. I can't see a reformist answer to the core problems of the US. A US president is still beholden to haute capital who own the mass media, the tech industries, the supermarkets, etc.. A hypothetical socialist president would turn out worse than Allende. In order to solve the core issues of the USA, it would need to cease being the USA and become some other country.

but you’re saying this as an American citizen

What makes you assume we're American citizens?

but this can be resolved by ethical written/animated porn

But animated porn puts both the masturbator AND the artist at risk of wrist injury!

Any specific things? I've seen a lot of broscience floats around about porn's effects, especially around chemicals like dopamine, so it's worth checking further before believing any of it. That isn't to say lots of the claims aren't plausable, but they also might not be reliable.

I'm no expert, but some other concerns I've heard are that porn normalizes unrealistic expectations of sex and promotes misinformation (imagine how someone who only learned from porn might handle issues like consent, preparation and aftercare). I could see those continuing to be an issue with written, rendered and generated porn. But IMO those would still be a huge improvement over the abuse of participants associated with the porn film industry.

When one takes a step back, it's obvious that our own societies have their own ingrained systemic biases. All our journalists and other writers will have biases that they and us might not even notice are biases, since we believe they're just fact.

AI datasets have run into this problem plenty of times, for example when government regulation has told insurance companies not to use factors like ethnicity or races in certain calculations, but it turns out that some ended up indirectly doing it anyway since postal codes approximated race in many regions. There are layers to systemic biases.

Btw this is not an argument against Wikipedia in any way.

I think it's perfectly valid to criticize it for accepting "blatantly false but "verifiable" " edits. I'm aware that the world is complex and perfection is idealistic, especially when it comes to topics where sources are inherently strongly biased, but publishing false information on a site with the format, style and reputation of Wikipedia is a real problem at a scale with far-reaching impact. To shift the onus of fact-checking onto the user is extremely inefficient and negligent.

I'm not even saying that there is a better solution, but it's certainly an argument criticizing Wikipedia.