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.

“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."

We’ll get to that, if you want an hour long tedious point by point debate where you constantly argue definitions and split differences.

But first, what I’m telling you now is that “oh, so you didn’t want me to look at the facts” is a totally obtuse and disingenuous paraphrase and a signal that nobody on Lemmy should bother trying to reason with you, because you aren’t willing to try.

Somehow the rest of the world, including everyone you were arguing with, were able to see it from the same set of “tHe FaCtS” and see the obvious and you weren’t, and you don’t want to do any self-reflection unless lead by the nose through god knows how many tedious paragraphs of details, fighting every step of the way. More responsible people, such as Nina Kruscheva are able to do that on their own.

Totally obtuse answer. I’m saying that your assessment of what counted as “the facts” and your interpretation of them was completely wrong, and possibly driven by biases that you may want to examine further, and I gave you the example of another person who, in a similar case took ownership of their mistake.

If you think a JV debate team game where you try and twist my words into “oh, so you didn’t want me to look at ThE fAcTs?!”, that’s just a signal in favor of the conclusion that you have been and are continuing to be completely disingenuous. These are just not adult answers.

Again, nobody owes you minute by minute explanations. And yes, you were demanding those. About 20 minutes had passed from your last reply to the parent commenter to your next comment declaring that they ducked out of the thread, as if failing in a duty to respond to you.

Now you’re constantly refreshing the page minute by minute, hour by hour, demanding that your confidently incorrect denials of obvious facts be responded to in detail.

That’s ridiculous and it’s wasting everybody’s time.

It’s unfortunate that literally everyone you were arguing with apparently was able to see the trajectory of events more clearly than you.

Hopefully some self-reflection will be in order and you can see if the same errors of judgment are compromising your ability to evaluate subsequent events in Ukraine and make excuses, and if your counterparts making the same arguments as you are similarly blind.

Nina Khrushcheva, a professor at the New School, spoke to NPR this morning. Like you, she was dismissing talk of an impending invasion as Western-driven hysteria. She confessed on the air that this was a major embarrassment for her, which I found to be a nice moment of accountability. Surely you can follow her example.

“Russia is not massing troops bombing invading occupying Ukraine.”

Again, you’re delusional if you think anybody owes you minute by minute responses to everything you say. Go for a walk outside.

Because they didn’t respond to dozens of comments from you on a minute by minute basis? Get a grip. Nobody owes you that.

It’s hard to do a lot worse than literally being wrong about an invasion every step of the way in real time.

I know you are being sarcastic, but there were a handful of people across Lemmy insisting there was no invasion coming.

They said that the military buildup didn’t happen, that it was just the latest in a history of false alarms, that it was just the west warmongering, etc. and basically spent the last week calling people crazy for suspecting that any attack was on the table.

Oops, just wrong about an impending war where the evidence was screamingly obvious. No biggie.

There is a substantial new troop presence at a scale without recent precedent and you’re just trying to change the subject. It has recently been reported as 190,000 troops. Literally none of the articles cited by you or your friend have those kinds of figures.

So to recap:

• The Rostov base has nothing to do with anything
• a news cycle about a picture has nothing to do with anything
• The timeline of previous buildups have nothing to do with anything.

You’re just cycling through stupid derails, one after another. Next you’re probably going to post a news article about how a reporter said something wrong about Russia in 2017 and say “what about this?!?!” And that, too, will have nothing to do with anything.

You’re continuing to waste my time and yours, which I’m guessing is the goal here.

That has nothing to do with the recent escalation of military presence, which I know that you know, so why are you wasting both my time and yours?

The stupid, it burns. There’s 130k to 150k possibly 190k troops there now. No previous article mentions that number of troops. This represents an escalation, which is higher than any number in the articles you are linking which means…there are new troops there that were not previously there before. Kinda weird that I have to say something like that out loud.

This also completely ignores the fact that the largest country in the world, specifically massing troops on all borders of a specific country isn’t the same as having them distributed anywhere in the country.

so of course the military is stationed there

What are you talking about? They weren’t stationed there until just this year. And they’re stationed in Belarus, Moldova, Crimea along with forces in the Baltic Sea.

On the contrary, the statement contains several paragraphs of argument clarifying that these do not represent the interests of Canadian unions, that their demands are unhinged (the downfall of a democratically elected government) and their actions and motivations are rooted in ideological extremism. The racism etc illustrates the thing they are talking about. These are all perfectly legitimate as arguments.

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.

I’m sorry, you’re just dead wrong here. In normal everyday parlance, references to Mozilla include their staff.

That’s consistent with how we normally talk about companies in pretty much any context.

Lemmywinks, of course!

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 you 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.

Yeah, he wrote - Mozilla staff - and not Mozilla and everyone who is connected to it.

I don’t think there’s any normal usage of the English language where Mozilla doesn’t encompass “Mozilla staff.”