So fwiw, if you are looking for feedback here, I have ended up walking away from Lemmy (well, I maybe check the front page 1x every couple of months) in part because I think there’s a population of antagonistic users who effectively game the rules by being antagonistic up to the limits of what’s tolerated. My belief is that trolling reinvents itself every few years, and right now Lemmy is in a spot where it isn’t catching up how modern trolling works.

I feel like this is the beginning of the end.

You alienate core users, you react to things in ways that violate your core principles to chase growth, you lose what made you valuable, and that’s where the disenchantment and downward spiraling comes into play.

Oh, that is a good point. If you go down a level then that leaves you with singlethink.

That could be helpful too, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

You have to take it up a level: triplethink.

I was wondering what the point of lemmy was

What was great in the early days of Mastodon is that, for those who could remember, it recaptured the feel of the “early” internet. You could feel distinct and interesting voices, patience and willingness to get into deepdives, where the payoff was from one to one interactions with personalities deeply interested in interaction itself and passion projects.

That made it have a value in and of itself that didn’t depend on competing platforms.

That said, you can feel echoes of typical internet culture all throughout the fediverse now. I don’ think you should measure success or failure on replacing reddit, but its great to have a place ready and waiting to absorb communities that become (say) disenchanted with bad mods.

So the model for replacements I think would be looking at how facebook replaced myspace, and how reddit replaced digg. In both cases, there was widespread user disenchantment at substandard designs and redesigns that disregarded interests of users. I think that kind of catastrophic incompetence and disregard for users was unique to a particular era, and there probably have emerged some industry standards and best practices to stop that from happening in our current internet, for better or for worse.

I think with reddits redesign, it has become increasingly frustrating to the user base, and there is a prospect that user disenchantment with reddit could lead to something, but I think its a long shot. The important thing to remember about reddit is that they caught a wave of exponential growth by not fucking things up, and staying more or less consistent with their product.

I think the best thing Lemmy can do is be consistent and keep doing what it is doing, and not try and reinvent itself. I actually think the website’s functionality on mobile is truly fantastic, the best I’ve experienced from using a website in place of a dedicated app, so I wouldn’t worry about it. I think so much of Lemmy is right in its current for, and 99% of the issue with fediverse products is that the ui/design is being terrible, and it took Mastodon to kind of teach people that it mattered. So yeah, I think the main thing is to not mess with success.

Maybe propublica? I think there are areas of gray and there are areas that are clear, and we can respect the former and take action on the latter without putting on joker makeup and descending into sophomoric relativism about the fundamental impossibility of ever knowing “the truth.”

I was referring to the limited amount of artists,

Yeah, I was perfectly aware. I was talking about how they reframed it in terms of discoverability.

Thank you for the clarifications re: pricing and FOSS. So much the better!

Btw, it is a great feeling to be a member of such a project, not just a “user” like with Spotify. As a listener and member, I have voting rights and can also influence the development of this project.

Agree! It’s almost like a type B Corp, where employees are part owners of the company. I think it’s a good indicator of values.

Thank you for recommending this! This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to find on Lemmy.’ I wanted to figure out how much it costs because it’s a little unclear even on the pricing page. But I see it looks like to pay as you stream up to $11.20.

I will say, I love this way of thinking about their catalog:

the explorer

“I want something new every day.”

10€ ($11.20) at Resonate provides around 4 hours of listening a day – 30 days a month – to wander our catalog.

How can you say a catalog is limited when you get 4 hours of new music a day?? It’s a good way of thinking of it.

It doesn’t appear to be FOSS, but they do say under “what’s next”:

How can we support and collaborate with each other, not just between artists and listeners, but across like-minded platforms?

Strongly agree. Surprising that even YouTube allows descriptions that long.

It’s not about conscious experience, but from quantum interaction

The problem is that the article repeatedly flies very very close to the sun with all kinds of phrasing implying “perspectives” of individuals (e.g. consciousness).

In physics, as in life, it is important to view things from more than one perspective

lengths of space and durations of time vary depending on who is looking.

It seemed to show that by measuring things, we play a part in determining their properties

A century later, many physicists question whether a single objective reality, shared by all observers, exists at all.

For the first time, we can jump from one quantum perspective to another.

At a bare minimum it’s definitely equivocating between “perspective” in the sense of human perspective and perspective in the sense of frames of reference as it pertains to physics. And the article title is “do we create space-time”? Why even bother using open-ended phrasing that flirts with that possibility in the first place? We have so much misinformation that comes from people playing with meaning about the relation between quantum and conscious things that using paraphys upon paragraphs of phrasing that veers into and then out of that implication conveys the same impression as stating it outright.

@jazzjfes posted a full link so we’re good. I was able to look further down the article, and I think there’s some meat there to the QC stuff that is independent of the framing that starts at the beginning of the article.

This is frustrating. From fhe initial framing of the article (part that’s not paywalled) and the title It seems to be, for the 1000th time, insisting that reality is derived from conscious experience, but that is not how that works and people have spent decades trying to correct this misperception.

Anything that can be observable, whether it’s by a person or not, totally without any reference to human consciousness, will have macro scale properties.

It started with Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which showed us that lengths of space and durations of time vary depending on who is looking.

Ugh. Einstein was uncomfortable with the term “relativity” precisely because people might start talking this way. Spacetime is absolute, and the proportions of something distributed through space and through time are governed by rules that accurately predict what you’ll see at different places and times. That’s not quite the same as the implication here that it’s just different for different people.

The hook of the article is behind a paywall so I can’t see any more but it’s a worrying start.

Hmm. Voice recording works perfectly well for me. It definitely should work. May be worth troubleshooting?

I agree that it’s bad, and should be reacted to in proportion, and as I said, there’s a lot of context that suggests that people were taking a legitimately bad thing but nevertheless taking it out of proportion for reasons that didn’t have anything to do with the offense.

I think one of the weird only on the internet style biases that gets exploited by angry mobs is i the nability to take stock of things in proportion to their relative merit.

I like this! I think, like you say, it’s not easy to do, and I think federating/de-federating or subscribing/unsubscribing is an imperfect proxy to your suggestion. What does suck, though is when a community becomes “too big” and, due to a large audience base the cost of mass migration is substantial.

I think of the drift of a place like /r/IAMA - which used to have the slogan " I Am A, where the mundane becomes fascinating and the outrageous suddenly seems normal." It was more about the anything part than anything else.

But it has sense become a promotion platform for celebrities, having almost entirely left behind its original identity.

Or the drift into racist co-opting of half of the joke subreddits. But in those cases they transform and it’s hard to solve by snipping out the mods.

I thought I was gonna end with a clear takeaway here, but I guess not really. Maybe it’s this: insofar as you can stop it by sniping out bad actor mods, there’s a positive there, especially if it can be done without open voting which can be dominated by angry mobs.

I think that little episode sucked, but it wasn’t sufficient reason to bring on the amount of hate it did, and it was kind of opportunistically used by angry mobs.

The background context was that mods were bringing down the hammer on places like /r/thedonald and /r/fatpeoplehate, (my timeline may be a bit off and those are just illustrative, stand-in examples). The spez thing was weaponized opportunistically by people looking for anything to put reddit mods on the defensive. They wanted to do that because reddit mods were taking action against toxic behavior of terrible communities.

His response? “Yeh, but more than one more person might answer it, meaning it would be a list of answers”.

If that sounds as dumb to you as it does to me, then you can see why I’m a little reluctant to thinking that democracy will fix online moderation.

That sounds stupid and bad. What’s frustrating there is people not exposed to accountability (paradoxically happens in “democratic” elections of mods), people can just be confidently wrong and contemptuous. I do like the idea of mods having some accountability (though I also thing there’s a right wing troll thing about always complaining about mods that makes me hesitant to follow that sentiment too far), but some other way than votes to elect mods is probably for the best.

There is no “if”. Should Lemmy grow even 1/100th as well as its founders hope, then it will become inevitable that such people join. The probability approaches 1 the larger it gets.

I’m having a lot of “yes but no” feelings in this thread, and here is another one.

I think the beginning culture of a community has a big influence on what happens downstream, and choices you make in the early days can have long term ripple effects. I also think the structure and features and user experience on a platform have an impact on how people behave on it, and I think there’s a whole grab bag of incentives and disincentives - removing then re-adding karma for text-only posts, disabling downvoting from a user’s comment page, etc. The very existence of upvotes and downvotes, or the way disocverability works, and on and on.

I don’t think that lowest common demoninator is necessarily inevitable, or that if you believe it is that you should use it as a rationale for not doing anything to make it as good a platform as possible. But I also agree with you, that resorting to votes gamifies, and exposes the irrationality of online mobs, which are some unintended consequences.

I guess I think there really are things that can be done (e.g. strong modding, community norms and rules that set a cultural tone), maybe some structural things, but I also believe in the structure as it is now. But I don’t think the democraticizing thing would work as intended.

Are you talking about forking the entire project or federating? If federating, I agree. If forking, I think that’s not practical for most people. I think some mastodon drama had people saying stuff like “don’t like it, then go fork it!” which I think effectively was a way of brushing off criticism without meaningfully engaging.

This led me to think that Lemmy is currently vulnerable to the same problem. I’m wondering if it would make sense to brainstorm some ideas to address this vulnerability in the future.

I think yes and no to this. Yes because Lemmy as it currently exists kind of has the same thing going on. People who create the communities are the creators and that’s that.

But no, because federating is supposed to be a mitigation here. I know that mastodon.social and pixelfed have sometimes shut down signups to purposely spread the userbase across other servers, and perhaps some rebalancing across credible servers can help here.

That would be my first idea.

I think I would veer away from elections because that could have unintended cultural effects. They could be gamed, create inward looking drama that makes no sense to people on the outside, etc.

I like the brainstorming here though, and I agree that your suggestion would help avoid that problem, but its at the cost I think of bringing on some unintended consequences. If we can lean into existing features that would be my option A.