wonderingwanderer

If you want to put it that way, you could also argue that anything posted on the threadiverse, or even more broadly, on the internet, is meaningless attention seeking.

Or you could recognize that we need more content on the threadiverse to get more people engaged to reach the critical mass where we have a network effect which encourages more organic engagement, so anybody posting is doing their part to contribute to a greater cause.

If they set up a comm with a bot to repost the top three posts a day from a specific reddit comm, what’s the problem? Depending on the instance, maybe the admins don’t want to host that and view it as bloat. They can make their own rules. But on an instance that allows it, or on someone’s own instance, what’s the problem?

If someone doesn’t want to see it, they can block the comm. If nobody upvotes it, it won’t clog the all feed. If nobody comments on it, what’s the issue if it just sits there and stays empty?

I think an evil necromancer has been using McConnell’s meat suit as a puppet for years now already…

Wait, if Ole Grim is being detained, then who is going to harvest the souls of dying mortals? Does this mean we won’t be able to die, or that our souls will simply be trapped somewhere between the realms of the living and the dead? Hmm…

I think that’s an overly reductive analogy. Of course the backend web server knows what it processed on its own hardware, but it doesn’t need to know the IP that the request originated from (if using a VPN) and it certainly doesn’t need to fingerprint the browser with hidden scripts.

Likewise, the browser probably doesn’t even need to make that information available to those scripts. There are extensions to block some of it, but apparently not all. And blocking some things can break some websites.

But there’s no reason the chef in the back should be running a forensic analysis on the fingerprints on the ticket, the footprints on the dining room floor, or the crumbs swept up at the end of the day. And if you suspect that they will do this, then it should take be overly complicated to wear gloves, and maybe some boot covers, and possibly a full hazmat suit if you’re really worried about dropping crumbs and dander.

Not that all that should be necessary, because it shouldn’t be standard practice for web servers to collect all this data to begin with…

Yeah, that makes sense. I like that idea

Resoundingly

Of course it’s an ideology, but it’s the ideology that enables the greed. The greed would exist with or without it.

When billionaire oligarchs destroy the planet and people’s lives in order to make themselves richer, they’re not doing it on ideological ground. Most of them don’t care about ideology. Their ideology is just how they brainwash the public into voting for politicians who will help them continue to dominate the economy.

The words per bubble is how the text is presented, ergo it’s the formatting…

It seems like you’re assuming I have a retributive approach to justice, and I think that’s where this disagreement is coming from. I don’t though. I don’t think bullies should be punished just for the sake of punishing them. That wouldn’t be effective.

Sure, the focus should be on making the victim whole and making the bully stop being a bully. The first part of that I think is beyond the scope of this discussion. I assume we would agree that it would take some research-based approach likely involving counseling and social support. But I’m not here to hash out those details because it’s not my expertise.

As far as making the bullying stop bullying though, that requires either extrinsic interventions, which would be reactive and circumstantial at best, or giving the bully an intrinsic motivation to stop bullying. Most people are motivated by the desire to be a good person and treat others with kindness. Those people aren’t bullies in the first place. Bullies don’t have that motive.

So what could motivate a bully to stop bullying? Well, you wouldn’t bribe them with nice rewards for good behavior. That would be unfair to people who were never bullies in the first place, and to the bully’s victims.

Psychologically speaking, extrinsic motivators fall into two broad categories: rewards and punishments.

So how is that not bringing us full circle? Because the punishment here isn’t strictly retributive. The point isn’t to get back at them because “fair’s fair.” The point is to force them to stop bullying by making it more painful to them to continue bullying than they find worth the intrinsic reward they feel from bullying.

Maybe it sounds crass to say we need to cognitively/behaviorally condition bullies to stop bullying, but what else can you do besides asking them nicely to stop? What do you do when they refuse?

The point is the direction, yes, but the formatting is inconsistent. In what situation is the formatting ever “the point”? And yet it’s important nonetheless.

The way it is is what seems butchered. Using consistent formatting isn’t “butchering the dialogue”

That makes sense. I guess it would mainly only work for posts linking to articles, but we already have that honestly

You said not to punish them. How do you intend to teach them empathy if all they learn is that they can get away with doing what they want?

I was a child once. I got bullied by other children. Some of them grew up, some of them didn’t. But you know what never helped? The adults who focused their ire on me anytime in stood up for myself, instead of having my back or telling the bullies to knock it off. No, they just told me I’m supposed to be better than them, so I’d get in just as much if not more trouble than they did, because “held to a higher standard” or some shit.

All they did was create a feeble, traumatized, spineless adult who lets others walk all over him because he’s too afraid to stand up for himself, not because he’s intimidated by bullies, but because he fears the authorities and feels he doesn’t deserve the ground beneath his feet. An adult who bottled up all his emotions, because there was nowhere else for them to go, until years later when he couldn’t hold in the pressure anymore and his psyche started rupturing into mental breakdowns and became entirely unable to participate in society.

Except no on ever says “it’s okay, it’s understandable, he has trauma.” No, people say “That guy’s crazy, stay away, he’s mentally unstable, ew.” They say “stop blaming your childhood, you’re not a victim, trauma isn’t real, you’re clearly choosing to have mental breakdowns because you want attention and it makes you feel powerful” which is entirely counterfactual.

So no, don’t let bullies off the hook because you think “punishment” is a naughty word. All you’re gonna do is enable them to push their victims over the edge, with no recourse but to feel backed into a corner and have to fight their way out.

I’ve never shot anybody, because that’s not something I would do. But I can definitely understand how enduring years of that kind of treatment can make someone feel like they have no other option besides seeking vengeance, making others feel the pain that those others had made them feel. And to an unbalanced psyche in that sort of state, everyone who minimized and dismissed and ignored their pain when they cried out for help might seem like valid targets. That doesn’t make it right, but from a psychological point of view, it’s easy to see the direct line of cause-and-effect, if you take a moment to remove those socialized glasses of admitting the facts only when they’re comfortable.

A large proportion of school shooters were victims of bullying. That doesn’t mean we should stigmatizing the victims and ostracize them further, although that’s probably the response most “normies” would jump to. But that would exacerbate the problem. No, the problem is to reduce the prevalence of bullying, and give victims sufficient avenues for redress and support, so that they don’t feel like they have to fend for themselves while backed into a corner with their hands tied behind their back and pushed daily beyond the reasonable limits of what a human psyche can take until they can’t take anymore and finally snap.

Bullying should absolutely not be tolerated but IMO the emphasis should be on restoration and justice instead of punishment IMO.

That’s such a limpwristed response to bullying. The average bully doesn’t care about restoration and justice, that’s why they’re bullies. No amount of righteous indignation or high horsing is going to make them care.

The proper response to bullying is the same as the proper response to tyranny. Not appeasement and pandering, but an uncompromising commitment to putting them in their place.

Oops, that was just a poptart. We’ll release a statement later vaguely alluding to a software malfunction without actually apologizing or assuming any responsibility.

Except this is different. That book burning was due to ideological reasons. This one is due to pure greed and disregard for collective knowledge

Ah, I see. Yeah, it is a ghost town…

Welcome to capitalism…

Are those things like mouse jigglers? It seems those would only work if enough people use them to create a blanket of obscurity.

Isn’t there any hardware that just… doesn’t log this stuff in a way that’s retrievable by backend server scripts?

I’ve said this a number of times over the past couple days, but if there’s an instance for mirroring subreddits, where niche subreddits that don’t have an equivalent here yet basically get a carbon copy and a repost bot to stock them with relevant stuff from over there, that could fill in some of those gaps and make the fediverse a more attractive alternative.

It won’t have the same level of engagement right away, but it will provide a place for that engagement to occur, and as more people start using it it will create a network effect. As things stand now, we’re missing a lot of those niche communities.

Damn, that sucks. We really do live in a dystopian hellscape…