“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.