BillyClark

I have wondered the same about scammers. Like, if their mother knew they were going to do that with their life, she’d probably regret all of that wasted effort raising them.

Every time I get fast food, I have to spend time convincing myself that it’s normal to do this occasionally and there’s no need for self loathing or obsessing over my faults.

So, I don’t really want discounts on fast food.

k

Don’t feed the trolls. Report, block, move on

Very good advice. But if you have some sort of personality defect that makes you occasionally engage with trolls like I do, here is some additional advice:

Make your comment less effort than the trolls. Don’t argue every point. Focus on their weakest point.

Essentially, if you can’t resist responding to a troll because you’re an idiot like me, make it like one short sentence where you point out their biggest mistake, and then if they respond to you and you respond back, keep doing that and never let them change the subject. At least you’re causing them to waste effort.

The problem with infinite monkeys, even in the best case, is that you have to search through all of the bad manuscripts to find any good ones. It’s way more effort than just writing what you want yourself.

There was a Mythbusters episode where they tested how music affects plant growth, and IIRC, their tests indicated that plants preferred loud music with bass over normal classical music.

I’m not sure that you can boil down an old philosophical matter so easily, regardless.

I like to bring up the zombie thought experiment in these situations.

As a person with a long history of intermittent insomnia, I had this bad feeling last night that I’d not be able to go to sleep no matter what.

So, I did what I normally do in those situations, which is probably not the right thing, by the way. I stayed up and tried to distract myself until I forgot about that thought. It usually eventually works, but last night, I couldn’t seem to forget the thought, and at about 4:30 am, I was so tired that I thought I should be able to fall asleep, regardless.

And I did fall asleep, but I think it was around 6. In retrospect, I should have just taken some medicine at midnight.

Three thoughts about Troi.

One is that this is her area of expertise, and she’s had a lot of experience with Data, so she shouldn’t be so confidently saying something like this, which very likely either leads down the path that Data isn’t a person, or that people aren’t people.

Two is that as an empath, she may be unconsciously bigoted against those whose emotions she cannot sense.

Three may be her actual defense, which is that she’s a counselor who is actively counseling a patient. So, it’s possible that a counselor may have to say false things to a patient if those things are the things that will help the patient the most.

The style of interface invented at Xerox PARC in 1973 (and almost certainly used by you if you’re viewing this on a Linux computer) is called WIMP, for “Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer.” Microsoft just stole the name.

I don’t know about Islamic texts, but the Bible doesn’t really say much about hell. If you want to learn about hell, you have to go to preachers. Fire and brimstone is their bread and butter. The more they talk about hell, the more money they make.

maybe the ppl think repeating this discussion again is boring and they dislike it.

See? You don’t honestly believe that’s the reason for the previous comment being downvoted. The person I responded to was arguing the other side of that argument. If people were simply tired of the boring discussion, they’d have downvoted the parent, as well. You can use that same service I linked in the previous comment to see exactly how many people voted like that. This is what I’m talking about coming to the discussion in an honest manner.

btw mastodon and bluesky don’t have downvotes. i think ppl who are here instead on those, decided this way is better. i for one left mastodon in favor of lemmy.

I originally came from Reddit and never saw any appeal in Twitter or Twitter clones whenever I tried them out. Regardless, I don’t think the argument makes sense. Either it’s a good idea or it’s not. If it’s a good idea, then there is no reason why it shouldn’t be used on both platforms.

I do think downvotes are universally a terrible idea, but for the part about reposting from xitter, which is the only point you made with any small merit, that is only relevant to post downvotes.

If they got rid of comment downvotes and left the post downvotes, you’d still have enough data to sort. People could still vote for comments strategically.

Comment downvotes are a clear case. If you’re making a valid argument, and talking about the topic, then the only people who would downvote you are raging assholes. Here’s the list of people who voted for my previous comment. As you can see, it’s got the full public list of downvoters. Strange. One of those usernames looks familiar. One might look at that and come to the conclusion that certain people here are not coming to this discussion in an honest manner.

it’s important to have verifiable studies to cite in arguments for policy, law, etc.

It’s also important to have for its own merit. Sometimes, people have strong intuitions about “obvious” things, and they’re completely wrong. Without science studying things, it’s “obvious” that the sun goes around the Earth, for example.

I don’t need a formal study to tell me that drinking 12 cans of soda a day is bad for my health.

Without those studies, you cannot know whether it’s bad for your health. You can assume it’s bad for your health. You can believe it’s bad for your health. But you cannot know. These aren’t bad assumptions or harmful beliefs, by the way. But the thing is, you simply cannot know without testing.

The mods were on .world. The accounts were from several different instances.

Even if it’s a husband trying to be cute, there might be some negative effect where she initially sees the accepted subject and gets excited, only to have it be a fake message, after all.

I guess it depends on her personality, and her husband would probably know better than me.

Do you know what else helps with sorting? Upvotes.

Do you know what else helps with hiding spam? Reports.

If you have upvotes and you have reports, then you already have all of the information you need as a platform. Downvotes are unnecessary.

Plus, speaking of sorting, accounts that use downvotes get double the votes for sorting than accounts do that only use upvotes. Yet, the types of people who downvote a lot are… well, they’re the assholes. So, you give assholes more control over the platform than good people by having downvotes.

So, downvotes are unnecessary and they give extra power to assholes, making the entire user experience worse.

I complained about this downvoting behavior in the past (on a different account), pointing out specific accounts, and the admins and mods don’t care. They told me not to complain, instead.

This is counterintuitive to me, because 303/2800 is .108, which is between 1/9 and 1/10. But 97 out of 400 is less than 1 out of 4, so it shouldn’t be able to interfere more than twice in a 7 year cycle, on average. But your math looks correct. I must be missing something.

I’m pretty sure I’ve smelled a dead fly before, but not like Lee Mack.