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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.

“If you invade there will be sanctions.”

“We don’t care”

“It will make finances not as good”

“We don’t care”

“That means you can’t pay your debts”

“We don’t care”

“Ok then”

Invade

“Hey, why can’t we pay our debts?! Let’s make up an imaginary conversation that selectively excludes critical contextual details and absolves us of blame in the most adolescent way imaginable”

🙄

Of all the ways you could possibly interpret it, you deliberately chose the most most ridiculous interpretation.

A more reasonable interpretation is to note that internet atmosphere of highly censored political discourse, comments spreading fake news, comments encouraging warmongering and comments derisive of Ukraine have a place within political discourse on China’s internet.

That this is permitted a place on the spectrum of acceptable opinion is the point. It’s easier to caricature the point by exaggerating it and then disagreeing with the exaggeration.

You have to take it up a level: triplethink.

The point is not to make sense, it’s to make a frivolous low effort claim. It’s kind of like the liars dividend, because it’s a lot easier to be lazy and say something that’s wrong, than it is to put in the effort to correct the wrong thing that was said.

The liar’s dividend is about demanding something obviously true be proved to the satisfaction of an unreasonably skeptical person which requires all kinds of effort above and beyond what we normally require to establish day to day beliefs.

This is a little bit different. It could be called the trolls dividend. The goal isn’t really to refute the article, which can take a lot of effort, it’s to kind of split the difference with low effort trolling. Much more efficient.

Thank you for the time and effort you put into patiently explaining what is basically an embrace/extend/extinguish strategy by Google.

These kinds of convos are frustrating, because a one-browser monopoly over the web should be so obviously bad that you don’t need to explain it. But, the golden rule of the internet is that you will always find someone who wants to die on the most ridiculous hill, for no coherent reason.

I think I explained why I think you can call this successful without having similar numbers to reddit.

Widespread user adoption is important, but that is being achieved. I don’t think I agree that the specific criteria of “being more used than Reddit by FOSS enthusiasts” is a make or break criteria that decides whether this is a success.

I think Lemmy is functional, usable on its own terms, and aside from not quite doing enough to ban trolls it’s valuable in its present form.

I would distinguish it from, say, diaspora, which I don’t believe has reached a critical mass of users and frankly just isn’t designed well enough to really get off the ground.

There’s a cat and mouse game every few years where you have trolls who poison communities, and communities that adapt their community norms in response, and then trolls who adapt their behavior to new communities norms and on and on.

I think modernized community norms for 2022 would identify most of the stuff you are doing: expressing disagreement through antagonization and ridicule, gish galloping, one-dimensional focus on controversial subjects, lack of gracious contrition when wrong or even when right, and a cumulative net effect of constantly creating hostile back-and-forths as within the bounds of what it means to be a troll who poisons a community in 2022. If it were up to me we would update community norms on Lemmy to exclude this kind of behavior.

You make dozens of comments on a daily basis attacking people over and over, you were catastrophically wrong about fundamental facts relating to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, evinced no willingness whatsoever to engage in self-examination about why you were wrong, and you can’t seem to express disagreement without antagonizing others, have an irritating inclination toward self-satisfied last-wordism which doesn’t make you right but just wrong in ways that are tedious to litigate, and your entire comment history is a history of you arguing with other people 24x7.

I can’t think of any thread on lemmy where you did anything that was contributing to building a positive community and I think the community would be more healthy without you here.

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.”

Uh-huh, thanks. Whataboutism remains a fallacious and frivolous tactic for derailing. There is no point made by whatabouting that couldn’t also be made the same without intentionally using it for a derail. So, nice try, but no.

What’s your next article?

Whataboutism ✔️

Can we set up a daily whataboutism counter for Lemmy?

This is completely all over the map, so I’m dismissing most of this as unresponsive and returning to the original point: I don’t think bringing USSR’s history in the 20th century is as pertinent or helpful to understanding the relative influence of Nazism in the armed forces in the Ukraine in 2022, I think OPs characterization relied on analysis more proximate to the present day and more directly related to social forces that speak to what is happening there.

You’re now throwing a whole lot of unrelated stuff at the wall all at once talking about things independent of that comparison: saying there’s “formalized” representation in the Ukraine army, bringing up how it’s a “whitewashing” and how OP is disingenuous etc. etc.

I’ll just note that these versions of reality don’t align with what I’ve seen in western media™, which have noted that those arguments appear to be emphasized out of proportion to their significance, and the backdrop that these arguments are occurring in, is one where they are functioning as a propaganda role in justifying intrusion in Ukraine, and have largely been dismissed by sources I follow that have commented to the NYT and NPR.

I suspect you’re just going to that that argue that characterization as western lies, and demand elaborate, point-by-point thousand word explanations, and insist that failing to engage with you in such a manner means I’m scared or whatever. I’m just gonna roll my eyes and move on with my day. That’s gonna be the process in disputing anything: I’ll make one point, and the subject will expand to cover a dozen new things.

The point here is that the history of USSR in the 20th century isn’t as relevant to the convo as you were trying to suggest it was.

historically the main protagonists against Nazism.

That zooms out so far from the specifics of the Ukraine/Russia comparison as to relocate this whole conversation to a different context, totally unrelated to the conflict that this thread is intending to speak to.

It’s true that USSR expended lives and resources at tremendous scales to fight Nazis, and it’s true that nazis and nationalists are attracted to military and exist in present day Russian and Ukranian armies. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, and the historical record of the 20th century is too remote to offer any meaningful clarification.

At best it just invites you to make indirect, speculative inferences. We have much better, more current reporting we can and should rely on.

I think, as OP pointed out, it’s inherently the case that these elements are disproportionately attracted to armed forces, and that in and of itself is adequate to explain their presence in the army of any nation with cultural exposure to nazism.

That’s a diagnosis that’s relevant to nazism as present day social phenomena, and more pertinent to the conflict than the historical record you are choosing to substitute in it’s place.

Thank you for keeping on top of that. the spiraling process of baiting long replies (some from me, oops), and just existing not being banned is basically validation for them.

Replying to me by saying “oh so you didn’t want me to look at the facts” is a completely disingenuous and juvenile equivocation over ordinary terminology.

It’s a signal that you are not even trying to engage in good faith. If people on Lemmy saw nothing other than this chain of comments it would be sufficient reason to never engage with you.

“Russia is not massing troops bombing invading specifically invading Kiev in particular."