I write ̶b̶u̶g̶s̶ features, show off my adorable standard issue cat, and give a shit about people and stuff. I’m also @CoderKat.

  • 1 Post
  • 36 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • I also can’t stand the fact that smokers can take unlimited ‘breaks’ whenever they please just to come back stinking up an entire room with their smoke.

    That feels like a workplace problem. Why would a workplace give them unlimited breaks? And why would nonsmokers not be allowed comparable breaks? This feels odd to me. My recent jobs have been ones where nobody is micromanaging my time, so anyone can take whatever breaks they want. As long as productivity doesn’t obviously suffer, nobody cares. My past jobs in retail didn’t allow smokers to take extra breaks. They’d get the same breaks as everyone else (for an 8 hour shift, that meant a 30 min lunch and 2 x 15 min coffee breaks).



  • The whole CSAM issue is why I’d never personally run an instance, nor any other kind of server that allows users to upload content. It’s an issue I have no desire to have to deal with moderating nor the legal risks of the content even existing on a server I control.

    While I’d like to hope that law enforcement would be reasonable and understand “oh, you’re just some small time host, just delete that stuff and you’re good”, my opinion on law enforcement is in the gutter. I wouldn’t trust law enforcement not to throw the book at me if someone did upload illegal content (or if I didn’t handle it correctly). Safest to let someone else deal with that risk.

    And even if you can win some case in court, just having to go to court can be ludicrously expensive and risk high impact negative press.





  • Tiktok is the absolute worst at irrational censorship. It’s a shame because the site is immensely popular and that means it is full of very interesting content. Yet, this is far from the first unreasonable thing they’ve been removing. It’s well known how Tiktok users came up with alternative words to circumvent words that were likely to get their content removed (e.g., “unalived” instead of “killed”).


  • Strongly agreed. I think a lot of commenters in this thread are getting derailed by their feelings towards Meta. This is truly a dumb, dumb law and it’s extremely embarrassing that it even passed.

    It’s not just Meta. No company wants to comply with this poorly thought out law, written by people who apparently have no idea how the internet works.

    I think most of the people in the comments cheering this on haven’t read the bill. It requires them to pay news sites to link to the news site. Which is utterly insane. Linking to news sites is a win win. It means Facebook or Google gets to show relevant content and the news site gets users. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news sites because sites like Google and Facebook will avoid linking to them.



  • While you’re right that that’s a downside of downvotes, I think that it’s far better than the alternative.

    Downvotes means we have a way to discourage really bad behavior and lets others see that it’s discouraged. For example, suppose someone posts something bigoted. It sucks to see those kinda comments (especially when they affect you personally). When those comments are heavily downvoted, it feels better, since it tells you that the views expressed in the comment are not acceptable. It’s extremely discouraging when I see bigoted posts with a positive score. Without downvoting, they all have positive scores and it’s just “less positive”.

    It’d be nice if reporting was able to remove such comments before anyone sees them, but that will never be the case. Too many communities don’t remove comments fast enough and many more simply won’t remove comments unless they’re really bad, if at all. Some moderators are bigots themselves and others simply don’t have the ability to recognize dog whistles that may be in comments. Or they’re not personally affected by the malicious comment, so they can be more easily convinced that if the comment was politely worded, it’s acceptable even if it’s blatantly bigoted.

    To be clear, it does suck that users will use it as a disagree button for comments that are otherwise good, but that is far, far worth it. The presence of downvotes were a major reason why I used Reddit (and now this) while disliking the likes of twitter.










  • Yeah, I don’t think there’s some obvious number we can use to quantify the success of the Fediverse. It’s more of a feeling. How often do threads feel like they have good discussion? How many niche communities are available to you?

    Past a certain point, more comments in a single thread doesn’t do much. You’d almost never read all the comments in a front page r/AskReddit post, for example. That’s too many comments on the same topic and past a certain volume, quality comments can’t rise to the top anymore, anyway. But there’s so many niche communities that don’t have enough people here yet to take off. Especially local ones.


  • Though hopefully it can avoid the “orphan crushing machine” effect. That was a problem r/UpliftingNews on Reddit suffered from a lot. So many posts that were meant to be uplifting but were completely dystopian. Most commonly Americans posting stuff like “kid saves money to pay for classmate’s cancer treatment” and the rest of the world staring in horror that someone has to pay for a kid’s cancer treatment in the first place.