A person’s perception is highly informed by how well or poorly they understand the subject or situation in question.

Let’s say you got stood up by a first date because they got hit by a car on their way to you. Your perception of them is going to vary wildly depending on whether or not you know the facts behind why they didn’t show up.

Similarly, knowing how you actually fit into things at your job - i.e. your importance to your working group, the company, it’s customers, society itself, allows you to have a more accurate set of facts to base your perception on.

So yes, the truth matters.

I’m going to have to disagree with you on this.

People have all sorts of beliefs that can qualitatively be proven as right or wrong. For example, all the wingnuts who believe that the COVID vaccine has trackers from Microsoft. Their beliefs are 100% bereft of reality.

Now, can they go ahead and act on those mistaken beliefs? Sure. But that doesn’t make their beliefs correct in any way.

While I get that this is an article geared to laymen/the general public, I do think we should be holding science communication to a higher standard.

I agree with you 100%.

It’s worth pointing out that feeling like you work in a pointless, meaningless job doesn’t necessarily make it true. This paper is solely about people’s perceptions, not facts.

You won’t find that level of detail in typical articles, because they are intended for the general public and are intended to be an overview that a layman can comprehend.

However, the paper itself, which the article links to, has more detail including deformation testing.

I think the protest crippled reddit considerably. It robbed reddit of a significant number of quality users and moderators, caused an extreme amount of media attention, and created enough of a problem for Google that they had to change course in order to compensate for all the broken links and noticeably poorer search results.

The main reason it looks like it had a much smaller effect is because a lot of missing users have been replaced by bots. And given how hostile those bots are with respect to moderators and the protest, it seems clear that they were put in place by reddit themselves. So don’t be fooled by “traffic is normal” announcements and metrics. They mean nothing by themselves.

The protest caused a lot of users to start looking for alternatives and it shed a lot of light on the fediverse, giving it an incredible amount of exposure. People now know that it exists and know that there are alternatives to reddit.

Remember, the worst is yet to come after June 30th when those API changes take effect.

That’s understandable. I was just confused that the site that appears to list kbin instances is missing this one.

However, we appear to be showing up now in that site list, so all is well.

It’s also important to note that individual users can block an entire instance as well.

Just click on the name of the instance in parentheses next to the title of a thread and then click the Block button there.

Oddly enough, they initially mentioned kbin.social directly, but we’re not on the list anymore.

We’ve been replaced by https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list , however, we’re not listed there, either.

You’re absolutely right that a good politics sub (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the term “magazine”, but “sub” is nicely generic) requires good moderation.

But if kbin largely consists of reddit’s most active users and moderators - the ones who care about the community as well as principles and values, then I think we have an excellent start.

A number of years ago, they stopped recommending and teaching tourniquets because they were concerned about people losing limbs unnecessarily if tourniquets were to be applied unnecessarily.

However, then the Boston Marathon bombing occurred and the California nightclub shooting and they realized that they had made a tragic mistake because a lot of people lost their lives when they could have been saved.

So now, tourniquets are once again recommended and taught.

It’d be awesome to be a classier/more serious version of Reddit.

Those things are not mutually exclusive. You can have higher standards for the serious subs we host as well as having porn related subs as well.

Just subscribe to the ones you want and ignore the others.

I understand what you’re saying. However, echo chambers aside, I found reddit very useful for political discourse. Even for subjects that had a hive mind response, there were often a few comments that presented the other side in a very well thought out way, with details and citations which would give some folks a reason to rethink their knee-jerk response.

In addition, one of the biggest problems in the US is that lack of political engagement by younger folks. So having those news articles and discussions on a popular forum gives them that visibility into the world of governance and allows them to both develop a desire to vote for change as well as having better knowledge of the issues and how different political figures have acted and what they really stand for.

So I welcome that discourse and having political subs.