Yeah, all the time. It’s the easiest way to identify a troll from a random idiot. I don’t have a problem with random idiots, if someone genuinely likes Trump and believes in authoritarianism, that is fine by me. I don’t like them, but at least they’re engaging in good faith. I can understand and work with that.

But, when their comment history is full of pushing people’s buttons or a wide, inconsistent variety of opinions, then it becomes pretty clear that being shocking is the goal itself. That’s an obvious troll, and should be dealt with as one.

edit: Note, I don’t bother voting while I’m there, so I answered inaccurately. I’m just sleuthing to find out if engaging at all is worth my time. If it is a troll, I actually don’t downvote anything, as large downvote tallies amuse them. If it’s probably not a troll, I don’t downvote then either, but I know I can go back to the original comment and actually talk to this person like a human being without wasting my own time.

So, actually I don’t downvote through people’s comment history. I do skim quickly through them though, reading for good-faith engagement. Or a lack of it.

I don’t upvote very often either, since I’m reading and scrolling too fast to bother. Unless I run into a really good post or something, enough to make me stop skimming for a second.

Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we’re still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.

Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.

The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn’t realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn’t necessarily want it to.

Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn’t know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.

It’s like when you’re trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.

This comment is hilarious, and it being downvoted is sad.

I would describe it as a cacaphonic symphony that you eventually get used to. It packs as much information into one sense as you can get from your other four put together.

Much like how you can discern an individual instrument type in a symphony, sight lets you discern individual objects from afar, and gives you a mostly accurate summary of its basic properties.

Also much like with sound, it can be very appealing or unappealing, depending. There’s an intrinsic beauty to the sense itself though. Every object has color, for instance, and color is more like smell. It can give you hints about what something is, but its mostly an arbitrary blend of different “flavors” that combine to create more complex examples.

It’s the super-sense, the one sense that binds them all. When one of your other four detects something, your first instinct is to locate it with sight to determine more information before you do anything else. You “look at it” first. Almost without fail.

Problem with attacking stupidity is its not necessarily fixable. We do not attack people over things they cannot change, like the color of their skin or their sexual orientation.

How do they change their innate intelligence? We’re not all gifted with the same amount. Can your system apply to someone who takes 5 minutes to learn the definition of even one new word? Someone who needed remedial classes, because the average classes were beyond their ability?

We need a system that allows for them too. So, asking for intelligence is asking too much, so that the execution of the method is easily within everyone’s capabilities. Thus, back to the drawing board.

Why does the purpose the data was collected for matter? Either the data is suitable or not. The motive of the pollsters who gathered it is irrelevant, isn’t it?

We’d just get a new one made out of water vapor. I’m sure everything would be fine.

I mean, it’s not a fever. It’s just sitting under a big pile of invisible blankets. Get rid of the blankets and things would be fine.

Call up your local news station and newspaper, offer them the story. If they turn you down, call up another one.

Yet despite the clear creation of echo chambers, which I think is inevitable given how freedom of association works so smoothly and easily online, the Fediverse forces them all to “live next to each other”.

It’s not an entirely separate service I need to go on if I want to see what all the Nazi kids are up to these days.

This forced adjacency and inability to create any blocks stronger than defederation (which is pretty weak, really, compared to what other services can do) is going to have overall beneficial effects in the long-run, I think. Though it’ll certainly cause its fair share of headaches too.

This is underrated. I actually close Lemmy a lot easier and more quickly than I did reddit, it’s not hooking me with dopamine hits nearly as strongly.

As a result, since I know I’ll probably just scroll for a few minutes at a time, I’m more willing to check in more often and toss a few upvotes and maybe a comment or two around.

No, I don’t think the brain really works that way, except in the very broadest sense.

I agree with this entirely.

I do not believe that the Fediverse is an exclusively anti-corporate platform. It’s nature is open to all, even corporations, at a technical level.

Granted, many anti-corporate people came here, but that doesn’t make this a fundamently anti-corporate place. Just their specific communities.

I also doubt many serious Fediverse types are that petty and childish. That’s generally a trait of more short-sighted people. Not a lot of native trolls here, we came here in many cases to escape that behavior.

Is it so strange to think some assholes might just chase us down and bring it to us? What would you do if you were a hate-fueled asshole that wanted to watch the world burn? I’d find nice things and fuck them up, personally. That would be both fun and potentially effective.

LLMs. Despite how absurdly useful they are, I can recall a time when I had the skills of remembering phone numbers naturally and being able to easily navigate with no maps of any kind.

These skills have deteriorated significantly in the past 10 years, and they’re not the only ones. The common thread they all have is my smartphone replaced them.

I fear losing a skill that is less innocuous, from the new tech effectively replacing my need to practice it.

We’re having fun and trying to build a positive space. And we have real potential to succeed in growing large. Can you think of a single faster way to attract trolling on the internet?

It’s a lot more likely than someone like spez taking a break from plundering his company to piss off a modest number of internet randos in some internet corner somewhere, which would barely be a drop in the bucket of his problem anyway.

The overall effect of this is so small, it almost has to be someone(s) with too much time on their hands. If they had any kind of real power, they wouldn’t be wasting their time on these chump change attacks.

I can still hear the theme song…

Huh… so this probably is more sophisticated than a single acct breach then. Lovely.

This’ll definitely be remembered. It’s good for us, we needed the wakeup call.

Par for the course. This system will never be immune to things like that. That’s part of what happens when you decentralize your power. Instead of a single target that can be made highly secure, you have a distributed array of targets.

People should certainly be engaging on here with full awareness of the reality of the Fediverse, not expecting reddit 2.0. We never will be able to offer exactly what they did. We’ll be naturally worse in some areas and naturally better in others.