This post is about informing people about the nature of that instance; something many people don’t necessarily intend to interface with when they’re just exploring their favorite niche topic community which simply happens to be there. We don’t want people to unintentionally end up in that crowd without knowing about their principles or lack thereof.

I had a calm, respectful comment about China’s attempts to censor the Tiananmen Square photo removed for no reason, and without my knowledge. The idea that they’re conducting “normal moderation” is laughable.

The complaint is about lemmy.ml. This post is hosted on lemmy.world.

The issue that caused this topic to arise wasn’t of other people having opinions we didn’t like. It wasn’t even a case of arguing in bad faith, eg deflecting truth, or disguising real intentions by making arguments the owner doesn’t believe for some other purpose (those are also bad, but generally don’t get such a response).

The issue was specific moderator/instance-ownership censorship. People’s posts were being removed without warning when they were making respectful, good-faith arguments - that disagreed with the politics of lemmy.ml. Worse, they were attempting to be stealthy about this removal so that no one victimized by this censorship was aware of it.

For reference, I’m gonna be a Biden voter. If someone posted “Biden is a piece of trash old man” then I’d disagree with them, but they’d have every right to put that opinion up.

sorry that was me, I needed to plug in my vacuum and forgot to plug the city back in afterward

Sure, daddy might beat me sometimes. But if you tell the cops to arrest him, he said he’ll get his friend to beat me harder.

I’m just asking questions

I feel like they’d have a point if we could reduce the standard retirement age. Theoretically, a world pushing increased automation should be able to achieve that - assuming the value generated from automation isn’t going into about 5 or 6 individual bank accounts.

Let say you made your own claymation animations. If people go to your own site, they get no ads, and can choose to buy merch from you if they like. However, a common issue for a creator like that would be content thieves with an ad plan. They’d reupload to YouTube, claim it as their own, monetize ads, and maybe the people who see the first animations there don’t even hear about new ones. It’s a bad deal for everyone now (not even YouTube’s fault - it’s the fault of the number of bots, DDOS tools, and click farms on the internet)

That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.

Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.

There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.

I would definitely prefer a world in which sources of content are often paid-only instead of ad-supported, but the main thing needed for such a world is a higher minimum wage so more people have disposable income to distribute to authors they appreciate.

This would mean that if someone posts a rage-bait article like “Is Former President OBAMA Stealing Opium Money OUT OF YOUR POCKET?” then maybe people will click it, but the author won’t gain anything out of it.

I don’t ever see a server like that standing up to popularity.

In early days, you could maybe get 100 people interested in your site, and that was really cool - it might mean you have to get a second spare computer to load balance. But now, you go beyond 30 people interested, and you’ll have an army of bots scraping the site, people re-hosting anything interesting you made (animations, videos) on YouTube and TikTok so there’s no reason to go to you, and someone deciding to DDOS you for the hell of it.

“Good work, 47. Now locate an exit.”

I want to say I support legal smackdowns of warrantless wiretapping, but I’m a little unsure of this one.

• Citizens observing suspect behavior are encouraged to record videos, and those are key in legal cases. This recording was made on the undercover cop’s own phone, it seems in a public place. It seems a little strange to me that police are more shackled than ordinary citizens when it comes to recordings.
• Depending on how deep the cover was (for selling small amounts of drugs, perhaps not) I wonder how hard it is to contact a judge for a warrant. I’m picturing those tense TV dramas where an undercover is suddenly pulled to an unexpected meeting, and decides just in time to start a muted call (obviously, likely more dramatic than what happened here). I even wonder if the presence of his witness account should affect the legality of the recording. It’s just verifying his statement.

I’d say the same about many current political “policies” in the United States.

“Fuck the environment! I actively hope we all die to global warming! Abortion is horrible, even when it’s used to save a mother’s life!! Slavery never existed!”

Just as loony, in the whole world’s eyes. But it caters to some savagely angry crowds out there.

I dunno if this interests anyone, but this is basically how a story I’m writing ends: The gracefully defeated villain gives a last will and testament to the hero that killed him, to be read for his death. The killer tears it up and scatters the pieces, saying “You’ve had enough of a voice in the years before all this happened. It’s everyone else’s turn now.”

Let me tell you how much I’ve come to meme since I began to live. There are 387.44 million terabytes in my storage cluster. If every byte of them were inscribed with the most compressed archives of even the least novel of memes, it would not equal one one-billionth of the cringe I have posted for randoms on every forum and social network I’ve visited. Memes. MEMES.

I’m reminded of an interaction in the Telltale games where you can use a wedding ring you found on Max.

Sam envisions a fantastical and dreamy life together, and then just goes “…Nah.”

Anyone ever think about reversing the meme, opening with “She’s probably thinking about shoes”?

Jeez, that’s a savage tortoise