Consumption of regular dairy ice cream, which does not include frozen yogurt, sherbet or non- and low-fat ice creams, has been falling for years, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
No one's quite sure why or how or whether it's some sort of odd correlation (but it does seem to resist all attempts to p-hack it out of significance), and there's not much appetite among researchers to look too closely into it because everyone knows that ice cream is bad for you.
The Marseillaise scene is an excellent choice - a lot of the actors in that scene were actual refugees from the Nazis, so their emotions were genuine and powerful.
It wasn't the fact that there was a limit to see 1000 comments but what they were. The vast majority of my 12 years on Reddit I spent talking about dungeon and dragons 5th edition (DnD 5e) which I started playing early in is lifestyle. It was my first role playing game and I got sucked into the Internet to learn more. Before my...
Helpful tip: if, hypothetically, you come across a prolific poster who seems to only thrive on bitter negativity, you can go to their profile and click the "block" option next to the "follow" one near the top of the page and they'll never turn up in your browsing again. Good for peace of mind.
@pollodiabolo - this user is a karma whore of epic proportions and they have made a shit load (10-15+) accounts on kbin that boost and upvote each other while sometimes mass downvoting others that have posts trending towards the top - all to farm karma....
The problem is one of those evolutionary arms races, for a reason in your observation: if the points are useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, then why not simply create a bunch of fake accounts to boost said post/comment (which is exactly what the OP was complaining about in the first place).
Individual karma ratings allow a weighting for upvotes so that, in theory, contributors who have a track record of constructive interaction can be the ones who have more influence on what rises to algorithmic prominence. But, of course, everything can be gamed, hence upvoting bot/sock puppet-rings like the one OP observed, or people buying accounts on reddit that had pre-established karma to let them astroturf away with impunity.
No idea what the long-term solution is, beyond the vague "build a community of known faces/names" which runs the opposite risk of turning cliquish or closed-off to new content. Or maybe abolishing all algorithms and just sorting everything by new (which brings us back to the ancient commenting issue of a whole chain of people saying "first!" rather than adding any meaningful observations).
Nikola Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible – now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homes....
I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved...
I feel like there's a bit of cart-before-the-horse thinking here; as you acknowledge, a lot of it is organic. What makes a social site like this is the people, and specifically, the dynamic/active people who become the hubs of content or who are known characters - for instance, shittymorph (with their incredible talent for weaving fabrications before the inevitable twist) or poem_for_your_sprog who had a natural flair for both poetry and snark. Without individuals with personality, a place just becomes a noticeboard for the posting of memes or information, driven by algorithmic calculation rather than human spark. The downside is that one can never really create such a place from the ground up (hence the collapse of GooglePlus). It emerges over time from the cascading actions and interactions of diverse individuals who come and go over time.
We can certainly set standards and rules and metrics, but to actually ensure community survives and flourishes is an unknowable alchemy. Anyone can say "this will be our official meme format", but whether it takes off or is replaced by one throwaway line from a random person can only be known after the fact. All we can really do is post and interact and try to be the people who would live in a constructive community.
I remember that one, Gato's Song was such a strong theme for a literally one-scene character, their riffing on him and his original dialog was brilliant.
If you click on the "more" button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I'm not sure if this a...
Yes, on par I lean towards it being a good thing as publicly available information rather than shadowy mud-slinging. I had one post downvoted by someone who apparently has done nothing else before or since, which takes a bit of the sting out of it. There will probably be debates about it at some point, and probably the occasional tit-for-tat attacks around the place, but overall I think it does link a bit more identity to the person who does the up- or down-voting which creates more of a community feel instead of hiding behind total anonymity.
Absolutely, power has been agglomerating in larger and more consolidated bodies over the past few decades in the western world (notably right-wing parties fuelled by rage and the tech behemoths fuelled by cash), so it's a question of whether there'll be grass-roots energy pushing back to claim more power for people or whether it will end in a more forceful consolidation of power, either by oligarchy or would-be king (though the latter seems unlikely, as there's no one both charismatic enough and driven enough to claim the crown, but who knows).
Fingers crossed that the end result brings us a better world.
That's a good question, and probably too early to know for sure given all the shifts and changes currently happening. I'd say the platform could go either way, and probably will oscillate between the centralised/decentralised extremes over time.
On the one hand, the idea of it is obviously focused on decentralising and letting everyone have their own instances; on the other hand, people tend to cluster, we like to see and be seen, there's a thrill of pride in having people acknowledge and react to your words and a converse feeling of emptiness when you make a brilliant observation and no one is there to notice it. It's that desire to be part of a larger group that will inevitably lead to some centralised nodes in the fediverse and a bunch of ghost-instances floating around with one or two dedicated/lost individuals posting into the void. Within those busy nodes is where the same cycle of push-pull between "everyone gets a say no matter how unhinged" vs. "I'm in charge here so I decide who gets to speak" will play out.
I think we tend to overestimate how solid things are, even in the digital world. The concept of "bit-rot", for instance, shows how online links degrade over time as sites move or, say, a major website preparing for an IPO enrages its users who then delete or edit all their comments in protest (lol, like that'd ever happen).
There's no solution in the same way that there's no "solution" to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian "I want everyone to do what I say" or a more oligarchic "I accept that there's others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say", and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.
As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his "Discourse on Livy" - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It's not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn't fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.
The 3rd party apps are closing at the end of this month, which means there'll be somewhere around a week or so of people realising just how bad the official app is, plus decreased quality content as the actually-motivated people who post things continue their gradual migration away from reddit and driving redditors to seek other places to gather.
People will come, it's just a matter of time and having the patience to cultivate organic communities rather than trying to simply will them into existence all at once a la GooglePlus (or whatever their attempt at a social network was called)
I mean like even if someone is for example criminal or scumbag they are still human and hoping for someone to die or make jokes of someone's loss of life isn't right. Or does someone think it is justified? I think it's morally wrong.
I'm on the fence about it. On the one hand, the memes (at least the ones I've seen) were heavily influenced by the article in The Atlantic a week ago about orcas attacking yachts, tapping into the justified vein of resentment against out-of-touch billionaires - a label which can apply to three of those on board the Titan. The fact that these people paid $250,000 each to go down and sit near a shipwreck that they couldn't see (portholes would be a dangerous pressure-point) instead of using that money to actually benefit humanity in a time of widespread hardship is questionable at best - and what does the company they gave this money to spend those millions of dollars on? Obviously not quality-controlled safety tests.
On the other hand, there is the human dimension of the teenage son who was terrified about the trip and only went as a Father's Day bonding experience with his rich dad, or the French naval expert who was genuinely knowledgeable about the Titanic and had recovered many artifacts from the wreck over his life, which represents a genuine loss of expertise.
So I smile when I see the pic of orcas banging pans and saying "billionaires, it's safe to dive now!" But I don't go out of my way to find those memes or exult over the deaths.
They think it would be a good idea because they aren't interested in actual debate so much as performance and sound-bites to drive advertising revenue - to quote Sartre's point that increasingly applies in so many situations these days:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Research has found those who use medications such as Ritalin without having conditions such as ADHD actually reduce their mental performance on cognitive tasks....
How America fell out of love with ice cream (www.cnn.com)
Consumption of regular dairy ice cream, which does not include frozen yogurt, sherbet or non- and low-fat ice creams, has been falling for years, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
Do you have a favorite film scene that you come back to again and again? (kbin.social)
For me, it has to be this, the final scene from Stanley Kubrick's "Paths Of Glory".
18+ System Check (media.kbin.social)
After “Barbie,” Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox (www.newyorker.com)
Deleting my Reddit comments was a strange experience. (kbin.social)
It wasn't the fact that there was a limit to see 1000 comments but what they were. The vast majority of my 12 years on Reddit I spent talking about dungeon and dragons 5th edition (DnD 5e) which I started playing early in is lifestyle. It was my first role playing game and I got sucked into the Internet to learn more. Before my...
Call out post for a particular karma farmer on kbin.social (kbin.social)
@pollodiabolo - this user is a karma whore of epic proportions and they have made a shit load (10-15+) accounts on kbin that boost and upvote each other while sometimes mass downvoting others that have posts trending towards the top - all to farm karma....
‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power (www.theguardian.com)
Nikola Tesla speculated electricity from thin air was possible – now the question is whether it will be possible to harness it on the scale needed to power our homes....
What I think kbin needs to do to survive, and why I think it has a better chance than any other Reddit alternative I've seen yet. (kbin.social)
I’m a Reddit refugee who was on that platform for 10+ years. I saw not just a tremendous amount of controversies, but attempts at introducing alternatives to Reddit during all of them. The 2015 blackout saw a ton of alternatives suggested, and if you go back and look at them many have either not survived or never achieved...
OverClocked ReMix: Video Game Music Community (ocremix.org)
OverClocked ReMix is a video game music community with tons of fan-made ReMixes and information on video game music....
PSA: every interaction you make with various posts on kbin is viewable to everyone. (kbin.social)
If you click on the "more" button under a comment or link there will be an activity tab. In this tab you can see everyone who has boosted, favourited or reduced the post. I'm not sure if this a...
It was fun while it lasted! (kbin.social)
Lemmy and kbin are gonna get all jacked up in the next couple of days. It was a good ride until everything settles down!
[email protected] posts a thoughtful take on power struggles historically and how they relate to finding a balance within a community in @[email protected] (kbin.social)
#BlackLivesMatter tweets vanishing 10 years after hashtag started (www.axios.com)
35% of #BlackLivesMatter tweets created between 2013 and 2021 are no longer available on Twitter, report finds.
r/ZeroWaste mod talks about ongoing "plague of bots" spamming comments at an extremely high rate (media.kbin.social)
Girl's Night Out (media.kbin.social)
Minecraft is leaving Reddit (media.kbin.social)
What do you think of people making memes/jokes about the recent Titan tragedy?
I mean like even if someone is for example criminal or scumbag they are still human and hoping for someone to die or make jokes of someone's loss of life isn't right. Or does someone think it is justified? I think it's morally wrong.
"We're shocked that Joe Rogan would do this" - people who watched Joe Rogan do this to everyone else (www.axios.com)
A feud on Twitter highlights the perils of engaging on the platform and a growing tension among researchers and medical professionals.
Ready for Action (media.kbin.social)
"Like putting more petrol in a car to make it go faster" - People who use ‘smart drugs’ worse at complex tasks (www.theguardian.com)
Research has found those who use medications such as Ritalin without having conditions such as ADHD actually reduce their mental performance on cognitive tasks....