@FaceDeer@kbin.social
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FaceDeer

@FaceDeer@kbin.social

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

FaceDeer,
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From their perspective, someone just moved into their house one day and when they objected they said "let's compromise, you can keep half of the house." No wonder they rejected that compromise.

Unfortunately we're now a couple of generations past that initial event so it's a lot more complicated at this point.

FaceDeer,
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It's possible for both sides of a conflict to suck.

FaceDeer,
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So anyone who follows the Geneva Conventions is a doomed fool?

FaceDeer,
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That's not how the burden of proof goes. The article is making a claim. It's on the article's authors to prove it.

FaceDeer,
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For some reason /r/SubredditDrama is awash in admin bootlickers these days. Makes the threads on these subjects rather unfun to read.

FaceDeer,
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There's also the Ernest Hemmingway quote from The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?"

“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

FaceDeer,
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Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.

FaceDeer,
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PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.

FaceDeer,
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Ironically you'd need something like a cryptocurrency if you wanted to implement something like that for the Fediverse.

FaceDeer,
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Actually, that sounds like exactly what I would be advising them to do in a situation like this. Reddit has been bloating itself with new features that nobody has been asking for because it keeps trying to turn itself into Facebook or Discord or whatever. If Reddit needs to become profitable I'd suggest cutting those and focusing entirely on what Reddit already does better than its competitors. Link aggregation and threaded discussion. Do just that, but do it better. That would allow them to shed some massive expenses both in technology and in staffing without impacting the income from its core business.

They didn't do that and it's probably too late now. I don't know how Reddit would be able to shed its Imgur-like image and video hosting at this point, for example.

FaceDeer,
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Well, things always end eventually. The important thing is that Reddit was good while it lasted.

FaceDeer,
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I joined the Century Club and it was just kind of boring. I rarely ever saw a thread I felt compelled to comment on. I suspect it's because there really wasn't much of a common interest behind it. Didn't know about the 10-year club but I suspect it would be similar, perhaps with more of a "aren't kids these days awful" vibe.

FaceDeer,
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Yeah, it wasn't a bad place. I'm sure a lot of people would expect it to be full of threads about how century club members were better than the low-karma plebs or discussing tips on how to farm more karma or something, and it was nothing like that. I mainly recall it being a place where people would share tragedies in their lives and commiserate on them, knowing that they had a relatively "private" place to be discussing that sort of thing with people they considered "peers." I just didn't find it to be compelling discussion most of the time.

FaceDeer,
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Replace the mods with who? Reddit doesn't have an endless supply of compliant free labor they can just assign willy-nilly to whatever subs they desire. Especially now that the masks are off about what Reddit admins really think about moderators.

FaceDeer,
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And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?

And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.

FaceDeer,
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The most annoying part is that the guy who doesn't believe in the spikes is the one who's closest to being able to pull himself off of it, if he were to try. His spike doesn't protrude beyond his chest as far as the others.

Also how are they speaking when their lung cavities have been completely filled with spike.

FaceDeer,
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Indeed, those slight distortions are a surefire clue that this art is a witch!

The AI image checkers are of course great evidence and never return false positives, but just to be sure I'd like to see whether the image sinks or floats when thrown in a pond.

FaceDeer,
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Another fun fact; the Red River is very prone to spring flooding because it flows such a great distance north. The headwaters thaw out and start flowing while the river's outlet is still frozen over. Many cities and towns in Manitoba have dikes around them and turn into islands during the spring flood. Winnipeg has a flood diversion canal to guide the floodwaters past it each spring.

I think I just ran out of fun facts about Manitoba.

FaceDeer,
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The Fetish-Trigger Episode.

FaceDeer,
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Yes, that would be preservation. I don't think they'd have ever got in trouble for doing that, even if it was technically a copyright violation. Probably not even if they had some sort of limited "lending" system so that rare texts could be read by the few who were interested in them. The problem came when Internet Archive flung their gates wide and let everyone download freely, at that point they became a piracy site and got hammered like a piracy site. That's counter to their goal of simple preservation.

FaceDeer,
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Frankly, good. As it always should have been.

Internet Archive is not Library Genesis, the two organizations have very different functions and should be structured very differently.

Internet Archive is for preserving data, not necessarily distributing it as widely as possible. If distributing the data puts the preservation of that data at risk then don't distribute it, keep it stashed safely away. Maybe a decade or two from now things will change and they'll have the only copies, and keeping them snugly away out of sight will have been vital to preserving them after that point. Internet Archive has a public corporate presence that makes it easy to donate to and easy to run their servers, but also makes them easy to sue. So avoid doing anything that gets you sued.

Library Genesis, on the other hand, is piracy central. Their mandate is distributing this stuff and sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the publishers. So they're structured entirely differently. They run on the shady side of the internet, making them hard to donate to but also hard to sue. They should be the ones "fighting the fight" right now. It would be sad if they got taken down but not an irrecoverable tragedy, a new Library Genesis can rise again.

Internet Archive are being idiots by poking the bear like they have been lately, it's like they're carrying a precious irreplaceable baby and they've decided to take a run through a minefield. I hope they learn from this debacle.

FaceDeer,
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This is part of the classic The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this" post chain. It's definitely part of my headcanon, if only in general spirit instead of literally that's-what-happened. It conveniently explains so much about why these shows focus so much on humans. It's like reality TV, it's pointless to focus the camera on the well-adjusted ones.

Edit: I should mention that my headcanon extends humanity's hold-my-bear mad science bent to the social sciences. Why else do you think we so rarely see other multi-species governments, or when we do it's just a boring old "boss species conquered a bunch of subordinate species"? Humans were probably warned by the Vulcans that different species tended to have incompatible governing interests and doctrines and the humans thought "but what if we gave them all a vote anyway and see what happens? Maybe a Federation will go twice as fast!"

FaceDeer,
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Once again the Onion is prophetic.

FaceDeer,
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The "now" of this comic is actually 2014, almost a decade ago.

Wonder what the actual "now" cell would contain today. I guess a screenshot of this comment about it being a decade old.

FaceDeer,
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The fire claimed the lives of 36 people and injured 33 more.

At that point whether the company "stole" ideas becomes simply immaterial.

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