Posting highly formatted but substanceless empty fluff is not a “writing style”, it’s spam. A human is certainly capable of doing that if they set their mind to it, but occams razor strongly points to automation.

I’m starting to understand why you often find yourself accused of being a bot… 🙃

Umbrage is our word we need to take it back

One cannot win an argument that does not exist

An LLM cannot “argue” full stop. If you find yourself in a debate with the text outputted by an LLM bot you have accomplished nothing besides wasting your own time (which is the entire point).

The problem with automating social media posts is that they definitionally cannot have “merit”. The primary function of slop is not to “argue” but to “flood the zone with shit” and create a plausible consensus for whatever opinion the person running the LLMs wants. We saw this with paid humans before LLMs. It’s not new.

A human will never be able to win a debate against an LLM bot “on the merits” because their function is to waste your time. An LLM cannot stand on merit, cannot hold a position, and cannot construct an argument. The words that are output by an LLM have no connection to any inside mind or model of the world. The only way to win a debate with an LLM is the same way you win a debate with a troll: identify the hallmarks and refuse to engage.

“a revolt” as if there when weren’t a million alternative communities on Reddit and Fedi already.

Self censorship is the worst kind.

I used it for a number of years (it was very cheap if you bought the 3 year plan) the speeds were good and as a n00b I appreciated how simple it was to get up and going.

Ironically the reason I gave it up was when I switched to Linux full time!

Yeah I agree with that. I think ideally the real “balance” is going to swing in wildly different directions depending on the instance and what kind of experience it wants to provide.

Yeah I fully agree re: blocking at an individual level, but I’m just saying I also understand why someone may encounter the fediverse and be turned away at the prospect of putting in so much work just to even see if they like it. Admins need to step up too.

Totally but in practice they’re not, and that’s the issue, imo. We’re halfway to being Voat with a trans-flag colored paint job

Hah well… for starters I would say emotionally mature people don’t tend to make demands of the people they’re replying to.

I know a handful of people that tried Lemmy at my insistence but found the overall culture even more insufferable than reddit and honestly I don’t even blame them. I fear that a lot of folks here are so desperate to “beat reddit” that they are willing to tolerate the most repulsive behaviors and it’s only going to push the mature people away.

I hope I’m wrong, but for someone who doesn’t care about decentralization, being “not reddit” is really all I can see that we have going for us.

I’m convinced this is true. Ever since the big redesign in 2018 (holy shit was it really eight years ago?) that kind of homogenized the whole platform, it became clear that the people reddit was trying to attract was not the communities but the mindless scrollers.

But the paradox was that some person had to want to post the content and make it feel alive, but that person is not needed anymore.

Facebook is entirely slop, scams, and bottom of the barrel memes but they make billions from attracting the dumbest users who will click on ads and that’s where reddit wants to be.

This is interesting but oddly difficult to parse, ironically the writing style has LLM vibes with all the fluffy generic statements and overall lack of density.

I don’t get why they leave up removed posts like that, they used to just disappear completely unless you somehow knew the URL.

First of all most mods didn’t make their communities.

Whether or not it’s a biological community or was adopted by a new mod it is irrelevant, imo. Someone made it what is today and that’s the mod I’m talking about.

you’re presuming the bans had anything to do with rules

No, I specifically said “for any reason”. I mentioned rules to highlight that the mods themselves write the rules, and can interpret them, or add to them however and whenever they please.

You seem to assume, again, that people are only banned for breaking rules.

No again my point is the exact opposite. Mods can ban for literally any reason they choose and they are not obligated to communicate a reason why to anyone.

The mods don’t have to, and don’t bother, telling you what rules you broke.

Exactly. Any rules are irrelevant as they are written by the people enforcing them anyway.

That’s official reddit policy.

It is, but I think that mandating that people respect it when someone says “leave us alone” is a good policy. Reddit sucks hard, but having site-wide bans of people who don’t understand/care about basic consent is step zero to having any healthy online community.

There are already widely-federated instances that allow their users to behave a lot like Voat users, sadly.

Yeah that’s fair, but the fact that they’re having CEOs on at all and allowing them to hype their product is enough for me.