Oh man, I recently found out not everyone wipes 💩 the way I do and I’m convinced everyone else is crazy. They gotta be walking around with dooty cheeks all day.
Also, I constantly flick my big toes against my second toe making a small raspy snap whenever I’m barefoot and sitting.
I have seen communities where every member is a mod. In order to enter the community a vote takes hold that decides if you can be a member. The decision is usually based on a majority ruling, but veto power is granted to every member.
The idea is that you can find the community online since it’s public, petition for your membership presenting your argument and other social media accounts you have.
Then, members judge if you are going to be a suitable member of the community, if you are going to respect the rules of the community, and cast their votes. Often participation is low on votes, someone vouches for you and a few other people review your accounts to make sure you are not a threat.
Sometimes there is a probation period where you have some power like posting on the community but are not fully fledged mod. Other times you become a mod from the start.
Banning members sometimes is necessary, the process needs to be more strict, maybe set participation requirements and allow for enough time for anyone to cast their votes.
It’s important to keep in mind that allowing everyone to weigh in on decisions does mean they are going to, most people don’t have the context or the time to, but the community needs to remain functional. For these reasons, vote rulings need to be decided on participation and not body size.
Last but not least, my experience is that those communities are much more pleasant and productive to participate in. Not being doxxed on every comment you make, and people actually making an effort to understand your argument, is a game changer.
I smell everything. Dog’s noggin, the insides of books, my morning cup of tea. Everything gets a healthy whiff.
When I’m in the shower, I purse my lips and blow directly against the water coming down because it makes a nice sound.
When I’m reading, I rub the edges of the page I’m currently on super tightly between my thumb and index finger because I like the sound and the feeling. I also rub the tops of my nails when I’m wearing nail polish for the same reason.
My friend pet the dash of his car every time the transmission hesitated. That spot of the dash swelled and popped up in that spot after a year or two because of the finger oils.
From what I’ve seen in your replies, you seem to agree:
Bad actors can easily ruin a community
It’s very easy for bad actors to game popularity-based systems like downvoting posts to remove them or upvoting posts to protect them
Bad actors can brigade communities to make it seem like active members support values different than what the majority actually held before the brigade
You’re dancing around the solution but refuse to admit it: you need a group of trusted users who have a longitudinal relationship with the community. This group of users can follow the community’s leanings over a long period of time, keep the discussion true to the community’s original vision, and easily identify bad actors. You need moderators.
It seems you’d be in favor of more laissez-faire moderation, but there’s still no better solution than moderation. Even if AI got good enough to do the job as well as a human, you’d still need a leader (the community creator or mods) to program the parameters of that AI. The truth is that your anarchist belief system simply doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory, and the only viable solution involves having someone in charge.
We have to assume that the majority of users will not be disruptive unless driven by the environment. Otherwise we might as well stop right there.
Assuming that it follows that such moderation without any individual in power might still be implemented by reflecting the community will through some mechanism. So voting doesn’t work as long as everybody can create a million bot accounts. Maybe there is a way to prevent that. Same with other approaches. I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody can come up with a technical solution for this.
But the same assumption also means that one can rely on the majority of the users to be pro-social. Thus one can lean on this majority of angels to do the moderating.
In the future this will be a period of time I’ll remember clearly, which makes it valuable. Easy times lead to no substantial memories which is effectively the loss of that time.
Dad’s out of town so I’m staying at his house taking care of his dog. I love this dog. But also take this dog for granted a lot, especially when I’ve just come home from work and I’m irritable and overwhelmed.
I pretend that, instead of this being me here and now, it’s a future version of me, from maybe thirty years in the future, when this dog has been long dead. Then I imagine that this moment is some kind of miracle wormhole through time where the me from the time this dog is an ancient memory has been given a few minutes to be with the dog.
Like, I would happily trade my finger and all the money I have for a minute with my mother, who died fifteen years ago. But I can’t.
What I can do is treat the people around me as I would treat my mother in that one minute, if it were somehow granted to me.
Almost like opening myself up to visitation from my future self. And in doing so, I experience more richly and it will actually work. When the dog is long gone, in the ground for decades, I will be able to visit him because I opened myself, which led to deep memory inscription.
Brilliant post, and I try to do the same thing, if I’m somewhere beautiful or profound and I have a few minutes to myself I like to make a “memory bubble” to me it’s like a little snapshot of experience that I work really hard to recall every minute detail ( including my emotional state and sounds and smells, etc…) and then I can revisit them in the future.
I like this because it makes you appreciate where you are at the time more, and gives you good memories to lean on in the future.
Incidentally, I think this phenomenon of appreciating the present by looking through the lens of a future where it’s lost, is the basis of the band name The Grateful Dead.
I’m open to discussion, but now that I’ve existed for a substantial period of time, I’ve found that my most prevailing memories are the ones hard won (e.g. when I almost had to sleep on the streets or ran out of money in a foreign country or got evicted from my flat). Whereas days sat on my couch watching telly, or in the pub having fun with friends, or another routine day in the gym are all blurred memories with no definition and no real sense of elapsed time.
So we were all gonna have a good time and get drunk but now all the money’s gone into the VLTs so there’s no drinkin or gettin drunk or nothing is … how she goes, apparently
Depending on the OPs circumstances, that realization may actually be what is causing them their bad times.
Friend of mine has had ideation for a long ass time and the frequency of them trying to step out of life increased considerably when that realization hit them.
When you're already feeling worthless and without purpose, realizing nothing has purpose and this whole concept of life and living we have is utterly meaningless in the grand scale of the universe, it's not ideal.
What you and I do today is meaningless in the grand scale of the universe, and likely has a tiny effect on what happens to someone living a hundred years from now.
That doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t have a more immediate impact.
Make your neighbor’s day better, because while it won’t matter in a million years, it matters now. So who cares if it costs you a few extra minutes of your life, it makes theirs better, and nothing means anything in the long run anyway, right? So why not make it easier for everyone else here, now? Making other people feel better feels good, so everyone wins, and we can better enjoy what time we have.
Some good points, which don’t contradict the macro-level analysis. I agree and see things this way myself. Life is absurd, so might as well laugh about it and be nice to people while you’re here, basically.
Just imagine that one person in Europe about 30,000 years ago who found himself stuck in some hole in the ground, alone and broken, finally dying of thirst and infection, who left behind four kids and his bonded life partner. They didn’t know where he went, and in only a season she had paired with another mate in the clan. Within four years anything said about this man had wilted to almost never, and forget about anything having been written down or logged in any way.
Forgotten to time.
It didn’t take long then. Might take longer now. But time will still forget us all. Make your mark while you’re around, because after that no one will give a shit.
“I am here, I move forward.” Might do for you. Say it, take the time to see where you are and what you can do next. Even a small improvement is valid, just make sure you move and don’t dwell on things you can’t control.
And it’s true. We don’t survive the trials of life we just molt into the next version of ourselves.
If a certain transformation is going un-completed because it feels like death, it can be helpful to recognize that it is death. That’s no illusion.
To truly live life to the fullest, one has to sacrifice their self to a future person again and again and again. When you finally get there, it won’t be as the person you are now.
I tried sacrificing myself to a future person once. But the future person had the same feelings, interests, and shortcomings. Then the future person realized herself as being no better than the person who sacrificed herself to her.
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
YMMV but to me it’s a comforting thought that, in the very end, nothing you do actually matters. From the most insignificant pauper to Musk, eventually we all die, rot, fade away and are forgotten.
That may be sad, but it liberates you in this moment. It does for me somewhat, anyway.
Hey I just want to say that in my own life, I had a rough upbringing. Lots and lots and lots of emotional abuse, and it wrapped me in a cocoon of inhibition. I was terrified of taking on shame, so I didn’t want to do anything.
The perspective you’re referring to did indeed help me escape the cocoon of fear, to allow me to try things that I was afraid could possibly go wrong.
I took it pretty far. I did intense zen training for about three years, and about nine years in total. I pursued “no self” pretty hard, and it was helpful.
However, at a certain point I had to switch polarity in order to progress. At a certain point I had freed myself of the initial terror of action, but it wasn’t working. The next step, which took me beyond that place, was to reverse that orientation and find things that really did matter.
Not saying you’re wrong. Just saying be prepared to switch vehicles at a certain point. As the buddha said: When you get to the other side of the river, leave the boat behind.
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