I want to do the downvote thing but I can’t help but upvote this low reputation comment…

This

Exactly. They can’t get anything they want out of it but they can get a lot. Especially if it’s moving upwards.

It’s a contradictory/inverse relationship.

They can turn their market cap into liquid cash by borrowing against it. They can also pay directly in stock. E.g. how some pay their employees with more stock than salary. They can use their stock to buy other firms. The stock price and therefore market cap is not just an abstract number.

I see a SATA cable, this machine is too new.

I don’t mind it too much. If the community itself can deal with ir by voting on the posts, it’s a more democratic solution and it has a built-in consensus. Mods killing it makes life easier but it produces more quesrions among the community abt whether that was the best course of action. Kinda like how some people feel about being censored on .ml, no offence. Isn’t that a dialectical relarionship of sorts, the effects of more vs less moderation?

I guess it depends on the people’s culture. If they come from a lib background, less moderation is more productive. If they’re used to authority taking care of things instead of them having to do the work, then more moderation is better suited or else people would complain mods aren’t doing their job.

And speaking of moderation. OP got banned. 😄

Been uasing ZFS with USB drives since 2019 or so. On Raspberry Pi 4, then on real computers. My laptop is on a single SSD. ZFS is the only reason I figured I have RAM issues two years ago. No errors would show up on a couple of passes of Memtest86+.

Keep Vista, get out to join the protest!

Yeah, I do spend too much time here but I think it’s important to keep the community active because we haven’t won the anti-corpo social media war yet. So we have to overcontribute in content, funding, etc. From each according to their ability, etc.

What I’ve noticed:

• The posts themselves follow almost identical structure. Large quotes with poster emphasis.
• The posting topics is almost identical.
• The reliability of sources is hit-or-miss on all posts. Some are from legit sources, some are from really questionable ones. The questionable ones are common between accounts.
• The communities where they’re all active are the same. Lately there’s a bit more separation where some accounts frequent some communities more than others. E.g. some time ago we used to get Hotznplotzn, randomname and Scotty in !Canada. Now we mostly get Scotty.
• When you engage in conversation the lang expression, attitude and arguments are identical. This when I really noticed the pattern.
• I’ve had multiple accounts from this set group up/down vote their/mine comments, deep into a discussion that didn’t attract other up/down votes.
• I’ve had a discussion that reached a dead end with one account, only for another to show up and restart it from a different angle attempting to reach a different conclusion. E.g. first discuss an economic side of some China-related issue, reach a dead end, restart with human rights abuses side on the same topic. That’s while having the group up/down voting action going on.
• Two of the accounts were created on the same date, on two different instances, a few minutes away from each other. This was the smoking gun for me that this is the same person.

Some of these aren’t damning on their own, but put altogether make me believe it’s one person. Also they never deny that when pressed. The conversation just stops and they disappear for a day or two until the next post.

a disgruntled Hong Kong exile with too much time on their hands

Quite possibly. I think they may live in Germany or be German because I’ve seen some activity in German. Who knows. I doubt they’re a paid actor because there’s enough money in the official media machine pushing this line so I think you’re right. Someone who really hates China/CCP/CPC, perhaps for a good reason of their own, with a lot of free time. It really sucks because there are really interesting discussions that can be had on any of these topics. There’s another guy around here whose family emigrated from China because they weren’t having a great time with the 1-child policy among other things. He’s in the US and can have rational and interesting discussion about this stuff without bursting in flames.

E: Here’s a recent unhinged discussion with Scotty.

My display is working fine.

Pretty sure these are all the same person. If you ever engage, you can recognize the same asshole attitude. I’ve seen multiple of them up/down vote comments where no one else has. Don’t think they do that anymore cause it’s too obvious.

It’s not even 1 account. It’s a collection of sockpuppets. I started noticing them when they started posting in !Canada@lemmy.ca but apparently the streak goes quite further back. The latest ones are Sepia and tardigrade.

I’ve also suggested changing tactic a bit from being a complete bad-faith asshole to good-faith commenters to at least being nice. Nada.

🫡 A natural consequence of leftist ideology.

Corporations refer to this as work-life balance.

Blasphemy!