this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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The big problem is going to be when someone decides to start spamming and vote manipulating with bot populated private instances that automatically re-spawn themselves under a new name whenever they are blacklisted. Eventually, the standard will have to move to whitelisting over blacklisting, and once that happens the whole premise of federation starts to fall apart.
E-mail spam filter is funded by google and other multibillion megacorporations though, and they just outright block or rate limit unknown providers. I'd say it's not gonna be as easy to do it with fediverse.
Agreed 100% but again, I wonder if we have enough resources to actually make it good while also keeping it free, both in terms of monetization and in terms of outside influence and biases. Twitter and others spend a lot of manhours on it and mastodon still doesn't have it either for example, it's not even being worked on afaik (or nobody talks about it).
I say we give each person one up or down vote on each piece of content. Then, people should be able to sort by the sum of those up or down votes (with up being worth +1 and down being worth -1).
I’m not sure, but I suspect a system like that might have content moderation built into its structure.
Moderation itself can be gamed. A moderator who’s a bad actor can cause a lot of damage easily by “gaming” the moderation system.
Mutliple moderators are because more centralization means easier corruption. If you extrapolate the diffusion of power to its extreme, you arrive at crowdsourced moderation.
It’s true that crowdsourced moderation can be gamed, but it takes some effort and that level of effort only goes down by adding accounts with moderating powers.
A moderation team is easier to corrupt than a totally decentralized voting system. That’s like the entire argument for why we like democracy: it’s harder to corrupt a populace at large than it is to corrupt a cabal in authority. It’s possible, but it takes more effort making it as good as you can get in terms of incorruptibility.
I mean, I get the concept of democracy vs republic.
The key point is that in a republic the few who hold more power are elected by the many to rule them. Moderators don't work like that.
If we do mod elections, I'm all for it. Sometimes (as they would say in ancient Rome) you just can't get it done without a dictator.
If we want to elect some temporary mods to deal with temporary existence of problems that can't be solved without absolute power, that's a lot more reasonable than having permanent mods that aren't elected.
To see how democracy is an attempt to avoid corruption, think of that rebellion as a forceful objection to a corrupt centralized power structure.
Actually I don't think large populations have been corrupted.
I think that the media has been pushing the narrative of populations getting corrupted, of cultural viruses turning people into weaponized zombies, in an attempt to undermine the perceived value of democracy.
It's why I've made fediseer.com to prepare for this inevitability
So I went to the website. It explains what it does, but not much how.. Or maybe I'm too dumb to get it. Could you explain how the verification happens? How does this system work?
Did you read the devlog? I got into more detail there. Just so I don't explain everything from scratch
Hey one thing I learned while canvassing for a politician is that it can be really beneficial to repeat yourself when it comes to articulating a message, instead of articulating it once then passing copies.
The more times you write and rewrite the same explanation the better it will get.
I had not. I see it now. Looks real cool! I hope it works.
I think these problems might be solvable with auto blacklisting instances based on their age, how their users behave and what % of comments and posts of them are flagged as spam
How would an instance grow if it's auto blacklisted by everyone? Doesn't make sense
One thing that is feasible is for established instances to give votes from new instances a lower weight. So, no blacklisting, but until they have been around for a little while to be able to calculate that their activity corresponds to their size and that nothing is off, upvotes and dowvotes could be ignored or given a lower weight.
Thats the problem. It would be very difficult to get a new instance off the ground unless you were an insider or had inside connections. If you have a cabal of existing admins acting as gate keepers you could keep outsiders from abusing the system easily, but you are also walking right back into the centralized control federation is supposed to prevent.
Welcome back to IRC. :)
Well non-federated forums can grow by word of mouth and similar. Being federated does lower the barrier of entry for interacting but it's still possible to visit the instance the old fashioned way. You probably still need to rely mostly on word of mouth anyway, even if you are federated.
Yes, age alone shouldn't lead to getting blacklisted. But if an instance is two days old, already 50+ accounts from there were banned on your instance for being bots and besides that there was no real contributions coming from that place, this might be a candidate for auto-blacklisting.
Maybe we'll move to a system where only upvotes from that home's instance matter. After all karma is meaningless anyway and is just used for short term discoverability, maybe kbin1.social doesn't care how kbin2.social votes on kbin1.social threads (or any lemmy example instance)? If you subscribe to kbin1.social then you hope that they will upvote their content appropriately the same way you expect them to self-moderate appropriately. Dunno, just thinking out loud
Will it? Even if we get to the point where there's a whitelisting system, major instances will still be federated. There could be even a transitional small instances federation.