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.

A light breeze is enough for Google to lock accounts, and they make it nearly impossible to re-access. And they have no reliable customer service you can call or email.

But the final straw for me was when they started this bullshit of saying “tell me your phone number so we can make sure it’s you”. They never had my number in the first place, so it was clear that this was pure bullshit of them trying to associate real world identities with their accounts.

After that, I said “fuck em”, changed to other providers, and haven’t look back since.

Go ahead and delete my accounts - your service is pure garbage anyway.

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.

Not that enriched if you’re trying to insult people with “OK, Boomer”.

That’s an excellent point and very true.

Who actually gives a fuck?

A lot of people do.

What Reddit has done and is doing is very big news due to their size and the role they play on the internet. Just because you have a teenager’s snarky “who cares” attitude doesn’t mean that this isn’t important to a large portion of the online population, including many of the people who left reddit and came here.

You and everyone else in the fediverse needs to stop with this fanaticism that anything centralized is automatically a bad thing.

I gave up completely on Google accounts after they kept flagging make-believe security issues and made it near impossible to verify that it’s yours.

Even if you have a secondary email configured (and this would be what it’s for) - but oh, no, that’s still not good enough for them.

Then they pulled the utter bullshit of requiring your phone number “so they can make sure it’s you” - but since there was never a phone number associated with the account, this is clearly nothing more than a data grab so they can associate real identities with their accounts.

That was the last straw for me, and I decided that their service was utter garbage, completely unreliable, and not worth using anymore.

I think it’s more accurate to say that up/downvoting is used as like/dislike, with disagreement being a special case of dislike.

But like it or not, you will never get rid of that association because it’s the simplest and most direct interpretation of an up/down vote. It’s just psychology.

Also keep in mind that your feelings on what up/downvoting should mean is really more appropriate at the comment level, whereas, having them represent like/dislike is notably more appropriate at the thread/post level - as the idea for a sub/magazine is that content users like should be promoted and content they don’t want to see should be demoted.

Unfortunately, that makes it even more difficult because now you would want the arrows to mean different things depending on the area they are used.

The end result is that you will never break the link between voting and people interpreting it as like/dislike. It’s the appropriate interpretation for threads/posts, and it then becomes the simplest interpretation for comments as well.

What you can do is have a separate control to indicate whether a comment is appropriate or not. However, you would still run the risk of people weaponizing it against comments they particularly dislike, so I’m not sure whether it would be worth the effort to implement.

That’s a very excellent point and shows the necessary trade-off to make that work.

I disagree wholeheartedly.

Having your voting history public also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc…

I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn’t even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.

Look at everything Amazon has done to their workers and tell me that this isn’t a believable scenario. And that’s just one example.

Having votes public can cause real harm to people.

It also constrains people from participating in the community if the things they support or object to would cause harassment or harm from people who know who they are, which is not always preventable, for example a shared household, using kbin from work (activity monitored), etc…

I could easily see an Amazon worker getting fired because they were logged upvoting pro-union threads. They wouldn’t even need to be doing this from a company network - just accessing kbin once on their network for any reason would have their user name associated with them, and then Amazon can simply monitor their activity on kbin even when they are using it from home.

I disagree with you.

I’ve seen downvoting used very often to very quickly make trolls, spam, and highly offensive attacks disappear at the bottom.

I understand, but it also makes it a lot more difficult to quickly make trolling and spam disappear.

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.

There is no reason why blurred thumbnails can’t easily be made into a user-selectable feature. That makes everyone happy.

If you want forum specific content that is generally considered spicy, go to that forum directly rather than complain that every other forum not handle your need for spicy content in an effective way for all parties.

This has nothing to do with complaining about how other forums handle this.

This is about how kbin handles it, and kbin is designed to incorporate multiple forums from multiple instances. In other words, we’re talking about how kbin should be able to do what it’s designed to do even better.