Eh, in my experience they’re pretty good half the time, and mealy and bland with just a bit of sourness the other half. Similar to gala apples in that way, I’d say

The trouble is, these sorts of trolls will take no issue with simply replying to themselves on multiple accounts, gaming engagement algorithms by buying popular accounts or stealing popular content, etc. Theyre almost certainly going to get the visibility they want either way, if they know what they’re doing.

Hence I think that it is important to visibly show dissent against them, especially if you get enough people in a community to do it as to leave them visibly in the minority (okay, moderation would be even better, but the viability of that depends a lot on the space), to combat the effect wherein people go along with views that they perceive as being typical of those around them. Such a thing isnt truly an argument, at least not a good faith one.

I get where you’re coming from, im just not really convinced that it works as well as the conventional wisdom about trolls suggests.

I think it depends on the type of “troll” tbh. The traditional kind, looking to get a rise out of people for amusement? Sure, they need you to interact, and starving them of that attention kills the point. But nowadays we also use that term for people trying to shape public discourse in a dishonest fashion, such as when governments attempt to manipulate foreign public opinion, or politically motivated people pretend to be a different position in order to discredit it.

These kinds are slightly different I think, because their goal isnt necessarily to get a rise out of people, just getting seen enough times is enough to normalize their message in people’s heads.

For that kind, it might be a good idea to present a counter-narrative, so that people that come across them dont subconsciously get the idea that the troll’s message is one with wide public support. You wont change their mind by arguing with them of course, but that just means that the point is not to change their mind, but to drown them out essentially.

Since there is insufficient cell differentiation at conception to produce any reproductive cells, does that mean that according to the white house, all people are legally non-binary now?

Something that occurred to me this morning is that its a bit worse than just them sucking up to Trump with that to get unbanned; to my understanding, he’s just stated he wont enforce the ban law, so if he was to change his mind, he wouldnt need congress to pass another I dont think? He’d just need to start enforcing the existing one. That means that TikTok has a strong incentive to continue sucking up to him throughout his whole term, to stay on his good side. But it goes further, because it also creates an incentive for other corporate social medias that compete with TikTok to do the same (though admittedly, their owners seem to want to anyway), in the hopes that they can convince him to enforce the ban again and remove some of their competition.

to be fair (not that Trump really deserves the benefit of the doubt at this point), the clip doesnt really make it clear if he’s saying they rigged the 2024 election in his favor, or if he’s referring again to his conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was rigged against him (with the implication being that he was “supposed” to win the 2020 one and therefore would have been ineligible to run for the 2024-2028 term)

That seems unlikely to me tbh, even an inept revolution can be dangerous to a government, and that would require a level of government control over media and long term planning that would be nigh impossible to use without the common person being somewhat aware of it. Id suspect it’s more something like celebrating revolutionaries being part of the US’s “founding myth” so to speak, and a lot of movies being made here. Having your heroes be rebels is an easy way to tell the audience theyre “the good guys” in such a culture.

I had usually seen it explained that the genie is somehow magically enslaved into the whole wish granting thing and, as one might expect, quite resentful of that, so finding ways to twist wishes they’re forced to grant into something undesirable to the wisher becomes a way to rebel

Part of the nature of the fediverse is gonna be instance drama, since there are no higher admins to take disputes to between instances, and posts that affect the status of a large instance (like discussions about possible de-federation, or large communities migrating between them) are naturally going to get a lot of attention on their respective instance that will drive them high on /all feeds.

Not sure it makes sense anyway tho, like, if you threaten two people with a gun, but youve only got one bullet and they see that, theyre not gonna be like “oh, he cant shoot both of us, so we have nothing to worry about”. A 50/50 chance is still pretty scary.

Wasn’t it his idea to ban it in the first place, to try and force a sale to a US company? Given that hasn’t seemed to have worked, I wonder what changed to make him change his mind, was it just that Biden went through with it, or did they bribe him, or maybe just so he can go tell users that he “saved” one of their favorite social media apps?

I actually like the intro sequence for Enterprise. Was honestly my favorite star trek intro until I started watching ST again recently to see the newer stuff, and have liked the one for Strange New Worlds even more.

I just use the thing in Firefox where you can attach a website link to the home screen so that it acts like an app and doesn’t show the url bar when opened, that seems to result in the feed being composed of pages (though going back a page isn’t an option at the bottom, just going to the next one.)

It’s possible for platforms under the influence of the Chinese government and right wing American billionaires to both have harmful censorship.

To be fair, our ancestors, evolutionary speaking, didnt resemble us that much if you go back far enough. A system that just considers a few key features a “child to be protected” is probably more adaptable than if every change in appearance had to be accompanied with a corresponding mutation to whatever gives us our mental picture of what our young should look like, for them to still get taken care of.

To be fair, it is hard to hold a proper democratic election with part of a country occupied. Either you hold an election in which people in those areas cant vote and while risking division during a time of crisis, or you dont hold an election and in doing so risk democratic backsliding. Im not really sure that there’s a good answer to that situation

To be fair, the universe is also so old as to allow quite a bit of it to have reached us by now even limited to “unreasonable” timeframes.

It’s mainly just that, since information can be copied without removing access to the original from the current possessor of that information, I don’t see a good justification to restrict use of it. If you steal something, the original owner loses while you benefit. Since the unexpected loss is probably felt worse, this is a net negative and therefore a bad thing. But, if you copy information (which IP by nature is), you can give it to an arbitrarily large number of people without even taking it from the original, enough benefit to in my opinion outweigh the frustration that loss of control causes. Capitalism adds another element given it also ties monopoly over a given bit of information to artist compensation, but even without capitalism, I don’t think information should be seen as property

The way I tend to feel about this is that it’s a jerk move if you’re mocking some other group, or reasonably could be seen as mocking them, or try to claim that you/your group invented the thing you’re using, but otherwise, borrowing stuff people like from other cultures is just one of the ways cultures evolve.

I can see some people objecting on the grounds that imitating something distinctive makes that thing less unique to the original group, or that an imitation by outsiders won’t include some aspect important to the original and then that people that see the imitation won’t get that aspect.

I can certainly understand why those feelings could lead to frustration, but applied strictly, the idea that certain things belong exclusively to the cultures that invented them both requires forcing people into precise boxes as to which culture they belong to, and sort of resembles a type of socially enforced intellectual property, which, being against IP as a concept, is something I feel like I’d be hypocritical agreeing with.

Try fresh baked bread right out of the oven. I swear whenever my bread machine finishes, I get through the first third of the loaf within the first half hour and then take most of the week to finish the rest.