I think blanket downvoting happens regularly in political communities and discussions, and a lot of time you can see it without even looking up any votes: if every single comment in a six-comment thread has two downvotes and three upvotes, it’s pretty clear. I looked those political ones up a few times but don’t even bother anymore. Everywhere else, by which I mean non-political and/or non-controversial topics, it genuinely seems to be just a core handful of users.

And no, you’re not an outlier, just a decent person. I like to think most of us vote for actual cause, and that it’s only a handful who don’t. But at some point I do think the admins are going to have to deal with it, because downvoting just to downvote IS toxic and does tend to have a stifling effect on the discussion and community as a whole.

Yeah, you’re definitely getting a better experience in Ireland with both Amazon and Temu/AliExpress, so I don’t blame you. Kinda have to cross your fingers and hope for the best, or have it shipped with all the added shipping costs: no truly good options. But people who don’t do a lot of art will never understand why you have to have so many different supplies, or why one paint is not the same as another, or why paper isn’t just paper, and “But you already have fifteen blues!” Yeah, and now I’m about to have sixteen, lol. Just the way it is.

These single downvotes were never followed up by further commentary, and at least one of them looks like a voting-only account with zero posts, so the more I looked the more they just seemed like fuck you votes.

I really don’t think there’s any link to content at all because I did this across multiple communities (whatever I don’t have actively blocked that crosses my feed) and it was largely the same handful of downvoters throughout, but with outliers here and there. I wasn’t taking notes, but when I started to see the same names over and over in wildly disparate communities it seemed less and less likely it had anything to do with content.

Because the fediverse is still fairly small, downvotes stick out a lot more. A number of them I think, “How could anybody downvote that?” and just wonder because often they seem to be “I had a shitty day and I particularly don’t like YOU” downvotes.

I often sort a thread by Top, and even the highest voted posts are often +(big number) -1. Because I personally do not downvote without cause, I assume they are sincere, but then it becomes a question of why, and I could never figure it out. Okay, whatever, no biggie.

But recently I had some time on my hands and I am aware of lemvotes.org, so one day I saw this again and decided to just informally start looking up these weird ass loner downvotes. Nothing sustained, just whenever one stuck out to me as being why??? I’d go and look it up. I’ve been doing this for roughly 2-3 months now, no schedule or commitment other than whenever I felt like it, across the board, no attention paid to community or post content (other than anything political pretty much not being worth the trouble, lol).

What I expected was a variety of usernames attached to these single downvotes.

But what I saw was a core handful of users across the board, with the occasional outlier.

Kinda pathetic, honestly.

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ – it really cuts down on the slop, even for images.

I don’t know where you are located so this may not apply to you, but in the US for branded art supplies I always go with DickBlick or Jerry’s Artorama, because in addition to the usual “stick it in a bubble bag and see how damaged we can make it before it arrives” Amazon shipping policy, branded art supplies are now being counterfeited on Amazon, like so many other things.

I already could not safely buy liquids (Gamsol, OMS, etc) or soft supplies (paper or canvas pads, single watercolors) because of careless shipping, but now I won’t even try because of counterfeits. If you want the branded version of something that already has budget knockoffs, say an item like Holbein or Caran d’Ache colored pencils where the real thing is vastly more expensive than others in its category, you’re taking your chances on Amazon. Amazon has been selling counterfeit fountain pens for years, even low end pens like Lamy Safaris which always blew my mind, but now it’s a lot of things in the art supply world.

So now I only get cheap knockoffs there, anything under $50. Anything over that, or anything liquid or bendable/breakable, I go with a real art supply store. It’s absolutely worth it, they pack it all very carefully, excellent return service when I’ve needed it, and I can still pick up deals better than Amazon without ever having to worry about the possibility it’s a counterfeit and I just wasted hundreds on a scam.

If you’re not in the US you may be having a markedly better experience, so disregard. But in the US, Amazon for branded art supplies is a big NO for me.

this is just dumb and you should feel bad for spending so much time writing it

I don’t think he did, though he may have touched it up. It’s old. I remember seeing it in the 90s with a number of “if [OS] were an airplane” schticks along the same line. Unix was the one where passengers all brought parts and tools and assembled it on the runway.

They’re here to stay

Eh, probably. At least for as long as there is corporate will to shove them down the rest of our throats. But right now, in terms of sheer numbers, humans still rule, and LLMs are pissing off more and more of us every day while their makers are finding it increasingly harder to forge ahead in spite of us, which they are having to do ever more frequently.

and they’re going to get much better.

They’re already getting so much worse, with what is essentially the digital equivalent of kuru, that I’d be willing to bet they’ve already jumped the shark.

If their makers and funders had been patient, and worked the present nightmares out privately, they’d have a far better chance than they do right now, IMO.

Simply put, LLMs/“AI” were released far too soon, and with far too much “I Have a Dream!” fairy-tale promotion that the reality never came close to living up to, and then shoved with brute corporate force down too many throats.

As a result, now you have more and more people across every walk of society pushed into cleaning up the excesses of a product they never wanted in the first place, being forced to share their communities AND energy bills with datacenters, depleted water reserves, privacy violations, EXCESSIVE copyright violations and theft of creative property, having to seek non-AI operating systems just to avoid it . . . right down to the subject of this thread, the corruption of even the most basic video search.

Can LLMs figure out how to override an angry mob, or resolve a situation wherein the vast majority of the masses are against the current iteration of AI even though the makers of it need us all to be avid, ignorant consumers of AI for it to succeed? Because that’s where we’re going, and we’re already farther down that road than the makers ever foresaw, apparently having no idea just how thin the appeal is getting on the ground for the rest of us.

So yeah, I could be wrong, and you might be right. But at this point, unless something very significant changes, I’d put money on you being mostly wrong.

If you allow artists to display their work in various communities along with the ability to post links in their profiles, but you restrict actual posts to disallow self-promotion, it’s the best of both worlds, IMO.

In other words, if you can’t include self-promotion in your community posts, but everyone knows you have the links in your profile, it attracts less grifters and keeps the feed clean, while allowing anyone interested to contact a poster directly or ask them promotional questions via DMs.

That said, hosting a full-fledged marketplace is not a good idea, IMO. There are laws and banks involved, which mean lawyers and taxes, and volunteer management does not work for that. There are already marketplaces that do that well, and allowing artists to post their own links of choice in their profiles will let them steer actual business to other platforms, while keeping the fediverse for display, review, share and critique. My opinion, anyway.

That’d definitely piss off some powermods.

Keeping a handful of power mods and occasionally hiring them to be paid Reddit admins was a great way for Reddit C-suite to run most of the top subreddits while maintaining plausible deniability and the (false) appearance of impartiality. Admin got to control the direction of literally hundreds of millions of Redditors fairly directly through the powermods without ever looking like it, and in return powermods got to do pretty much whatever they liked without restraint or consequences.

For example, remember Aimee Challenor and how admin kept quashing that mess for weeks until it got Streisanded beyond their wildest dreams and it hit the media so that they were forced to act, pretending all the while that they didn’t know? And that was some sick shit. We can all point to various examples of overt rule-breaking behavior by powermods that Reddit did nothing about even when faced with incontrovertible proof, to the point that it’s kind of like their trademark not to do jack shit until/unless it hits the media, and then it’s all apologies and “we didn’t know.” Whatever.

The powermod arrangement was unethical and duplicitous, but clearly fantastic for both sides, which is why they never changed it. They made little noises with their mouths and words came out, but that’s literally all.

But now, suddenly, after all this time, Reddit admin sees a need to drastically reduce the reach of powermods, even though in 2023, it wasn’t the powermods that rebelled: it was all the thousands of others. For the most part the powermods proved their loyalty. And not only that, but with bots running most of the site and creating more than a little of the content, the actual reach of any powermod just isn’t what it used to be anyway.

In fact, Reddit’s not actually doing anything but making and enforcing a rule that no single mod can directly control the Reddit experience of more than 500,000 users, going by sub membership. It’s very new and very tight restriction of power and influence that applies to “less than 0.1% of active mods” going by the above post.

So why now? There is literally no reason for this mutually beneficial arrangement to end now after all these years . . . unless Reddit admin has something planned that they know will piss off even the powermods, and are trying to ensure that no single person or small group of people has the ability to lead an effective sitewide rebellion.

They’re planning something that the powermods could and would fuck up for them, is my guess.

So when the clock Reddit has set for this change to take effect, look carefully at what happens next, because this is neither arbitrary nor some newfound ethical concern they pulled out of their collective ass after all this time. There’s a reason. And whatever it is, I am personally thrilled to be nowhere near it, on a site where my desire to interact with other humans means I create content for Reddit which they use as a noose around my neck to control what I may say and to whom, and as a driver for ad delivery, while they scrape it, sell it to data brokers, and sell it again to train AI, all while denying me the ability to permanently delete my own words. Fuck Reddit. That place is cancer.

This is the way. I have a decade+ old HP OfficeJet that I more or less inherited, and it has pigment black ink but dye color inks. When the colors are fine but the black is not, it’s because the black (pigment) cartridge is blocked again. It does this with both HP and third party blacks, though, so it’s definitely pigment vs. dye thing. Easy enough to clean with isopropyl, as you said.

But just to be clear, when we bought new earlier this year, it sure as hell wasn’t HP. I’ll ride that old OfficeJet and my 20+ year old LaserJet until they die, there’s no chipping of cartridges and I’m quite good at printer repair as long as parts are available and it’s not too complex, but otherwise I’m done with HP.

I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.

Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?

There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.

Gay folks can be edgy shitheads too, though. I would not let any of my queer friends get away with using the word “gay” as a pejorative. I’m not asking that you push back against them, just understand why I choose to do even if you don’t.

Not every gay person is a self-loather, kid.

Note: I had deleted my two comments because I genuinely did not want to offend, but when I realized that these “gay” observations, made by men my age who are simply glad to still be standing after the debacle that was the latter part of the last century, were being taken for internalized homophobia I put my comments right back. If anything they are celebratory and may they ever be so. Given what these guys have survived they have every right to be happy, and as far as I am concerned so does every gay person. Nothing wrong with being gay at all, and never has been.

So you need to sit down with that self-hating shit, because it does NOT apply to Every Gay Person Ever.

That’s fine, but having heard so many times from openly gay people statements like the following, and I quote,

“Gay.”

“That is SO gay.”

“Gay.”

“Gay!”

“Oh. Yeah. Gay.”

. . . you have to accept that at a certain level of commentary, the call is coming from inside the house.

TL;DR: I don’t know what looks gay because I am some self-proclaimed cis-het expert on gayness; I know what might look gay because I was personally tutored by obviously authentic experts in the field. Just sayin.

I’m sick and tired about hearing about Zorinn when there’s a dozen excellent Linux distros that aren’t derivative trash that astroturf social media and pass off other Foss projects as their own.

Your quote, but when asked to name a better “easiest distro for Windows users” Fedora KDE was the best you could do.

Somebody asked you a genuine question, looking for real information, and out of this “dozen excellent Linux distros” you came at her with, you lazily just shat out the name of a single one, and that being one of the more advanced distros out there.

Hell yeah, try harder. People who ask genuine questions deserve genuine answers. Unless that’s just your best and you need pity.

Nothing against Fedora KDE, it’s the best of the best, but it is hardly the easiest for a noob to Linux: just the install process alone requires a working understanding of the Linux filesystem and partitioning if you’re not using the entire disk space, you have to understand root vs sudo, god help you if you want to encrypt a disk, and there’s a lot more CLI at every step than other distros. Try harder.

I’d be surprised if he does. If he’s “sick and tired” of hearing about Zorin, it’s because Zorin is getting a lot of deservedly good reviews from the Windows crowd right now. If it really were ass he’d have nothing to say about it. The only social media I’m on is Lemmy, and I tried Zorin because it was highly ranked on Distrowatch, so if people are getting “astroturfed” elsewhere it’s news to me.

But you should know I tried over twenty (conservative estimate) distros before I settled on Zorin. USB drives are cheap, and you can try as many distros as you like without ever having to install one. Don’t take my word for it, nor his: buy a handful of USB drives, create some LiveUSBs and start trying out whatever distros catch your attention. I found distrowatch.com to be a good front page to the distro world, with rankings and extremely detailed reviews: start there if you’re looking for a fairly exhaustive list of what’s out there.

Oh, they’re customer focused, alright: focused on scraping customer data via the installed OS to feed to their AI and then aggregate for sale to other data brokers and/or interested governments.