That’s surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It’s a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

Not even a body pillow, Anon is a master tulpamancer and made a tulpa of some MLP character.

Here’s what I found in the source code:

My sides went into orbit. ASCII art and a message to people reading the source? I did this with my blog in the 00s!

9:45, on the “universal social network”: this can’t be stressed enough.

No matter how much Musk babbles about “I wanr an errything app! lol lmao”, Twitter won’t become one. The Fediverse however has the potential to become an all-encompassing social network, with different aspects of online interaction being integrated organically.

There’s a future not too far away where you can share a picture, from an account that you made for video sharing, that’ll get a lot of microblogging toots and spark a discussion in a forum. This would be impossible using Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Reddit; but once the interfaces get ironed out, it will become reality for PixelFed, Piped, Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin.

For the morons downvoting the post: STOP SHOOTING THE MESSENGER DAMMIT. Problems don’t go away if you hide them, OP is morally right on highlighting the issue.

In addition to what OP said: check the admin and creator of the instance, outright claiming to be a MAP. That’s just a paedophile under another name.

Yeah, he isn’t multiplying booze like the OG Jesus was.

He’s the modern Jesus.

I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.

And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:

• “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
• feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
• context illiteracy
• unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
• “trust me”

Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.

Let’s see if Lemmy has that too.

I’m aremovedatty today, so why not? :^) [EDIT: yes, it has. I wrote “a bit chatty” without spaces.]

The Scunthorpe problem is an additional issue, caused by failure to identify unit (“word”) boundaries correctly. It can be solved with the current means, or at least tweaked for false negatives (e.g. don’t identify “fuckingcunt”) instead of false positives (e.g. identify “Scunthorpe”).

The problem that I’m highlighting is on another level, that even LLMs have a really hard time with: that each unit can be used to convey [at least in theory] an infinite amount of concepts. They usually come “bundled” with a few of them, but as we humans use them, we either add or remove some. For slurs this has the following two effects:

• it’s possible to pick a word often used as a slur and cancel its slur value in a certain context, or even make it stop being taken as a slur by default.
• it’s possible to pick any common word and use it as a slur.

I’ll post the example that I was thinking about. It doesn’t use a slur but it’s the same mechanism.

My cat is odd. He whimpers for food when we’re dining, chases and fetches toys, and when the doorbell rings he runs to the door, meowing nonstop. It’s like I got a really weird, meowing dog instead. My sister even walks this weird dog on a leash once in a while.

In that utterance the word “dog” is not being associated with 🐶, but to an odd example of 🐱, as the meaning of the word has been negotiated through the utterance. It’s the same deal with slurs: it’s possible to cancel their value as a slur in a certain utterance, depending on the rest of the utterance and external context. Black English speakers often do this with the “n” word* (used to convey “mate, bro, kin” among them), and slur reclamation is basically this on a higher level.

*another IMO legitimate situation is metalinguistic - using the word to refer to the word itself. I’m not using it here but I don’t see a problem with it.

Not even slurs are so much of a clear case. Two reasons:

1. When the right-wingers want to vomit their hate discourses, they’re damn quick to circumvent this sort of filter.
2. In some cases, even the usage of words often considered as slurs can be legitimate. It depends on what the word conveys within a certain context; the OP provides an example but I don’t mind crafting another if anyone wants. (Or explaining the underlying mechanics.)

A third albeit weak reason (as it’s a bit of a slippery slope) would be the possibility that this creates precedent for instance admins and comm mods to say “it’s fine to filter specific words, regardless of what they’re used to say”, once something similar to automod appears. If that happens, they won’t stop at slurs, as shown in Reddit.

It’s sensible to calculate this sort of cost, regardless of being normal or not. However be careful when and how you share this info with your family - because depending on the context, you’ll be basically saying “I put $0.16 over your hourly well-being”. (In special, pissing kids with this is a bad idea. They might even leave the AC turned on needlessly, just to spite you.)

I hope that ad blocking features are eventually seen as a killer feature, driving Firefox market shares up at the expense of “you can’t even block a fucking ad!” Chrome-based browsers.

If that’s gonna happen or not, I have no idea. It depends on how well each side plays its cards. The worst case scenario is Google boiling frogs (i.e. removing capabilities little by little) while Mozilla fails to advertise Firefox in this regard.