God made dragons and eldritch monstrosities the likes of which horror shows can only try to emulate.

But yeah I guess dino bones are cool too? :-P

You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

I wonder where they went?

Is this the new “Honey Badger Don’t Care” meme?

This alone is enough to answer why people need to vote for Biden next term!!!

Life is difficult for redshirts. Fortunately not for long though! :-P

Green is such a beautiful, bright, shiny color… unmissable you might even say. I see it nowhere except the legend though. :-(

If you think about the range of organisms just here on Earth - from single-celled creatures like bacteria, or below that even with viruses that are just DNA wrapped in proteins, to other single-celled creatures like Amoeba (yes, that’s an enormous range still in just the realm of single-celled creatures alone!), to multicellular plants, animals, birbs (haha lolz we know those aren’t real!), and finally humans who can literally split and harness the power of the atom - then extrapolate that to the whole Universe in Star Trek, we don’t need to think that every super-powerful creature seen is a “Q”.

To an amoeba, already every one of the numerous forms of insect life on planet Earth is like a “Q”. In that sense then, Q itself was an oddity - not in being a race with that much power, but in choosing to even bother to interact with the lesser forms. After all, we do not do that, to the ones multiple rungs down on the hierarchy below us (or if we do, e.g. yeast, we don’t “introduce” ourselves to them, as Q did to humans).

I think it is consistent with Star Trek’s philosophy, especially in TOS, that we are not supposed to “know” everything, about the VASTNESS of the large, wide universe it is in:-).

On Reddit, where downvotes are anonymous, my niche sub (20k members but far fewer active) would continually get someone who would come in and downvote every single comment in an entire post. The time that it started and stopped was fairly obvious too b/c like in a Help & Questions megathread with literally 1000 comments, all of the replies would have a baseline value below the starting one (i.e., they would show 0 rather than 1), up until it stopped after which point they would all start at 1. That’s a pretty clear indicator that they were subverting the rules of Reddit. As a moderator, I repeatedly complained to the Reddit admins, who did not seem to give a shit.

I even had screenshots of people on an associated discord server calling out for such brigading attempts. I offered them to the admins, who never took me up on that. It also happened in a much larger, I guess you could say parent sub of 200k members. Hundreds of thousands of people getting downvoted… b/c of one unhappy kid, or someone acting like it.

At least here in the Fediverse we have tools at our disposal that were not available on Reddit. e.g. if you were to block all of those people, I think they cannot vote against your future posts any more? Though it could also be due to a simple misunderstanding of how to use Fediverse tools. And for someone who made their own instance, you could literally adjust the rules - I would guess? - so as to only show the results of voting e.g. for accounts older than X days, or only by members of that community, or something. Though that would take significant effort, both up-front and then to stay in compliance with future Lemmy updates if it was not integrated into the main code, and it would only benefit members of your specific instance.

For someone who so rarely downvotes anything - I usually either just block a troll entirely or at least ignore someone who looks like they may be having a bad day yet feels the need to share that with the entire world - I might not be providing much perspective here! But I hope these thoughts at least were somewhat interesting.

Literally: yes, e.g. https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

For-profit enterprises hijacked people’s various needs to increase their profits, so that they can haz moar profitz while they earn their profits, as they chase even more-er-est profits. It is the same reason why when you go to a website that you have literally never visited before, much less do not have an account on, they have an icon that looks precisely like a “notifications” button, with a badge saying that you have “messages” waiting to be reviewed. 🤮

At least when piracy websites have such things, they also offer to let you download an interesting item, whereas when you visit a legitimate “news” page that someone sends you a link to, they show like 2 sentences before fading out into a full-page blocking advertisement that lets you sign up to pay money in order to continue to read even more click-baity headlines followed by maybe some tiny amount of content, if you are lucky - and even that is most often like one tiny new fact that happened in the last couple of days or weeks but appearing only after 5 pages of knowledge that has been known for decades, or worse yet they just forgo the latter entirely and the entire article is only a paragraph or two.

I am saying: if the true goal of most news websites was truly to impart knowledge then they could have done so better in the 10-second read of the TITLE itself than all the lead-up to get you to come to that page, full of ads and tricks to get you to scroll down further to see more ads, all while wasting your time reading through something that absolutely was not worthwhile.

I am spoiled by such things as https://www.youtube.com/@crashcourse that essentially throw multiple whole entire college curricula at you - THOSE ads would be worthwhile to watch, for THAT content. That is like turning a firehose of knowledge onto yourself. But then other people want you to watch even more ads, in return for far less content.

Kurzgesagt is another example. Rather than simply downvote others or reply with a childish “your (sic) stoopid (sic)”, they instead add to the collective body of human knowledge and experiences by taking an ENORMOUSLY complex subject such as vaccine side-effects, and break them down into <10-20-minute videos that are watchable by the general public, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkVCpbNnkU. THIS IS THE WAY, imho. But, they already do it, and other corpos want/need to make their own profits, hence they use “tricks” like Google SEOs to increase their own rankings while decreasing those of legitimate content such as these from Kurzgesagt or Crash Course.

So, whatever votes might have once meant, or should mean, then or now, at hand is what they are, for good or ill. Just exactly like how vaccine active disinformation exists, so it is no longer enough to cure a pandemic merely by doing all that hard work to create a vaccine - now you also have to work against the disinformation that exists.

And wrapping back to the matter at hand: while *I* might follow these guidelines, and *you* may do so as well, *most* people will not. The likes of Facebook have spoken, training those kids who have now grown up and moved on to other platforms but now others have followed in their wake, and this is the world that we live in now, for good or ill:-(.

You might also be interested in a reply I gave to another post entirely, so linking it here just in case it helps: https://startrek.website/comment/7601231.

I sincerely doubt it. The main reason might be that people actually think that they are “helping” by downvoting?

In their own eyes, such content actually should have their rankings lowered, yes? (most especially in the “those leopards surely won’t eat my face off” sense)

And tbh, isn’t that what a downvote button is meant for? So however sparingly we may choose to use it, can we really complain all that bitterly if others choose to use it more often?

As someone who already follows these guidelines, I believe that most other people will never follow these guidelines. Far worse, even if >95% of the people across the Fediverse were to, that’s still an awful lot of downvotes, compared to the number of people that have heard of a brand-new sub that is trying to get up off the ground.

Lemmy is at best beta-version software - the apps I hear are amazing but Lemmy itself is still relatively undeveloped (most of the time lately whenever I try to up-vote something, I have to do it 2-3 times for it to “stick”, and getting comments to go through is also problematic, sometimes I have to cancel and try again, across multiple platforms and OSes including Android and Mac, Firefox and Chrome). We are desperate for a place that is not Reddit or X, but if we want something, we have to build it.

My suggestion: make downvotes public, not just to admins and mods but to everyone. Tbh I doubt very much that that would do the trick, but it is a thought to try to help people break out of that system of “I am anonymous so I can be as insensitive to the needs of others as I wish” mindset. i.e., if they thought that there might be consequences, then they might behave ever-so-slightly better? But ofc that would only reach the subset of people who actually cared.

I feel the need to be pedantic here: that quote continues on to the very next (and final) sentence being:

Not something that can be done with a simple plugin.

However, anything that is logically possible, is doable, with enough effort & investment - e.g. that infamous quote:

All that quote means is that it would be most simple to do as a back-end task, not a simple front-end one (though even a front-end could, in theory, e.g. slurp up 1000 posts and then use some metric to figure out how to display the most proper subset of 20 from that superset).

But for instance, someone could spin up their own instance, and then add whatever sorting method they wanted to it. However, recall again what happened to DMV.social - anyone who opens up a Lemmy server will be spammed with CSAM, it would seem - so there are other more urgent matters to be attended to first, unless that someone used it purely as a testbed, and made all connections to it to be read-only, or else had a team of moderators willing to put in large amounts of time to fend off those attacks with both manual efforts and also developing automated tools at the same time - e.g. they would need to have technical skill even just to moderate, much less administer the machine (unless, like existing Lemmys, there is a whole team of admins doing the technical parts already). Anyway, I don’t suggest this lightly like it is trivially easy, just to say that it is possible.

It would be beneficial to talk more about these desirable features to ensure that when developers do invest time in them, we’ve already come up with a good and robust solution.

Sure, I am not trying to tell you what to do. Just stating that until and unless someone is willing to tinker with actual implementations - and again, right now their attentions seem to be directed elsewhere, plus while Scaled-sorting Hot may not be perfect it is something (I don’t personally have experience to say if it is better than before b/c I was on Kbin.Social at the time which was totally different - but I thought I heard many people say that it is better now?) - then it is going to be a purely theoretical discussion. Which is probably how Scaled sort got implemented too? Though now that it is built, it could be tinkered with, if there is the will to do so.

But unless you are offering to do any of the actual implementation work yourself, I think you would need to discuss this with the actual admins who you would expect to do that work for you - hence you might try Matrix where they hang out, rather than solely discussing it here.

And then, as you said in your OP, when they say “no” and close all GitHub issues, that, as they say, is that. You can’t “force” someone to do work for you for free - and even if you were offering money, or perhaps offering to do all the “design” work yourself for free, they still would need to agree to actually do the implementation.

Moreover, even if you DID offer to do ALL of the implementation work entirely on your own, unless you do want to spin up your own instance to actually run it on, you still would need the buy-in of the instance admins, for which having the buy-in of the developers would go a LONG way.

So you asked:

Do you have any ideas or suggestions on how Lemmy could better surface content from smaller communities?

And my suggestion is that you cannot walk into someone else’s house and tell them how they should do things. Especially when they have ALREADY said no. They know better what their prioritization is, and what they hope to accomplish over the next month, year, and so on. The absolute beauty of the Fediverse is that you can take all of the existing Lemmy code, which is entirely functional, make a fork of it, and spin up your own instance - and not just run it, but even modify the code to do… whatever you want! And then you can share that code, and benefit all the instances that are running Lemmy too! Discuss.Online, Lemmy.World - all of them, well, those that choose to keep your suggestions, though it is up to each one individually to either accept or reject them, and it is ultimately their call. Reddit does not work this way, nor FaceBook/Meta/Threads, Instagram, Xhitter, etc., but we do, b/c it is “open-source”. The caveat to that being… that someone, somewhere, must put in the actual effort to get it done.

And the people who would normally do that, seem to have said no. I gather that you feel frustrated but… it is what it is. Therefore, of what use is it to talk about any of this, when there is no path forward for it? THAT is how to move forward your ideas: either find or become someone yourself who can implement them, and THEN in talking to them you will actually be in an even better position to understand how it all works, and how it might be changed to work even better than it does now.

I dunno, perhaps I should not have replied at all? Sometimes I do overshare my thoughts and if you disliked that here then I apologize:-). It was my hope to help spur your thoughts along these lines that I was thinking, since it seems to me to be the only way forward. But I guess please ignore me if you think I am wrong, and I wish you luck either way!:-)

Fwiw, I do agree that eventually, when the developers are ready to move forward with this again, they indeed might appreciate a ready-made solution if one happened to be already available by then, but again that assumes that one could be made purely on theoretical grounds alone?

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: “Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.”) - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So… sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each “category” of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still “news”? tbh, “news” is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: “Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%”), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.

Don’t forget the code review!

Oh I loves me some “features”!:-)

This is the model that Wikipedia uses and, while there are most definitely detractions, there are also significant benefits as well. Email spam filters too.

In one sense, it is a lot like irl democracy - with all the perks and pitfalls therein. For one it could lead to echo chamber reinforcement, though I don’t think this one is a huge deal b/c so too can our current moderator setup, and if anything a trust system may be less susceptible, by virtue of spreading out the number of available “moderators” for each category of action?

The single greatest challenge I can think of to this working is that like democracy, it is vulnerable to outsider attack, wherein e.g. if someone could fake 100k bots to upvote a particular person’s posts, they could in a fairly short time period elevate them to high status artificially. Perhaps this issue could be dealt with by performing a weighted voting scheme so that not all upvotes are equal, and e.g. an upvote from a higher-status account would count significantly more than an upvote from an account that is only a few hours old. Note that ofc this only reinforces the echo chamber issue all the more, b/c if you just join, how could you possibly hope to argue against a couple of people who have been on the platform for many years? The answer, ofc, is that you go elsewhere to start your own place, as is tradition. Which exasperates still further the issue of finding “good” places but… that is somewhat a separate matter, needing a separate solution in place for it (or maybe that is too naive of me to say?).

Btw the word “politics” essentially means “how we agree”, and just as irl we are all going to have different ideas about how to achieve our enormous variety of goals, so too would that affect our preferences for social media. And at least at first, I would expect that many people may hate it, so I would hope that this would be made an opt-in feature by default.

Also, and for some reason I expect this next point to be quite unpopular, especially among some of the current moderators: we already have a system in place for distinguishing b/t good vs. bad content, or at least popular vs. unpopular - it is called “voting”. I have seen some fairly innocuous replies get removed, citing “trolling” or some such, when someone dares to, get this, innocently ask a question, or perhaps state a known fact out-of-context (I know, sea-lioning exists too, I don’t mean that). Irl someone might patiently explain why the other person was wrong or insensitive, or just ignore and move past it, but a mod feels a burden to clean up their safe spaces. So now I wonder, will this effect be exaggerated far further, and worse become capricious as a result? Personally I have had several posts that got perhaps 5 downvotes in the first few minutes, but then in the next few hours got >10-100x greater upvotes. So are the people looking at something RIGHT NOW more important than the 100 people that would look at it an hour from then? Even more tricky, what about the order that the votes are delivered in - would a post survive if the up- and down-voting were delivered more evenly, or like a person playing their hands at gambling, would their post get removed if it ever got too many losses in a row, thus preventing it from ever achieving whatever its true weight would have meant? If so, then people will aim to always talk in a “safe” manner, b/c nothing else would ever be allowed to be discussed, on the off-chance that someone (or 5 someones) could be offended by it (even if a hundred more studious people would have loved to have seen it, if they had been offered the chance - but being busier irl, were not offered the chance by the “winner take all” nature of social media posts, where they are either removed or they are not removed, there really is no middle ground… so far).

So to summarize that last point: mods can be fairly untrustworthy (I say this as a former one myself:-P), but so too can regular people, and since HARD removal takes away people’s options to make up their own minds, why not leave most posts in and let voting do its work? Perhaps a label could be added, which users could select in their settings not to show “potentially controversial” material.

These are difficult and weighty matters to try to solve.

I probably can’t solve your issue entirely, but if it helps, one thing I note from your post is that most of your stress seems to come from YOU trying to be too hard on yourself. Did anyone call you stupid? Yes, you did. Did anyone say that you should just quit? Yes, you did. Stop being so mean to your coworker! Yes, even/especially if that person is you!:-D

Second, to get accurate information, LISTEN to your teammates!

I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”

Especially those more senior than you!

when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”

(emphasis added)

What they gave to you to do is on them, but how you handle it is on you. Don’t stress yourself out too much.

Third, yes you got called into a meeting with a senior dev. USE that to your advantage. If you were really were stupid, this is your time to get that crucial feedback - if accurate, then better to get out now before you get too deep and find it even more difficult to change careers. However, it seems to be the case that it is NOT accurate, and that information is INCREDIBLY HELPFUL, and you may want to treat that great feedback with the value that it has instead of dismissing it?

Also, that senior dev can help you boost your skills. How many people get that opportunity? Free training, woot! Even/especially if it is not related merely to technical skills but skills on how to exist in a job environment.

Fourth, you might also want to touch base with whoever created that ticket. They might even say “oh yeah that is still there? I totally forgot about that. Nowadays that would make zero sense, ever since we implemented that XYZ thing about a year and a half back. Just ignore it and go on to something else.” YOU could be the one knocking those tickets out of the park, resolving each one simply as “Won’t Do” citing “owner said so”. Okay, I doubt they will all be so easy, but it’s a thought.

And you seemed like you needed an ego booster. Sorry, I don’t know how to do that well, but the least I could do is spend some time on your issue, so that you know that you are not alone. I hope these musings help some too:-D.

He is telling you to run away - do it, do it now! :-P

Exactly, yeah like I’m not trying to remove myself entirely from “society” - the physical law of entropy means that people need to put in EFFORT to make things happen, and that deserves to be recognized, plus the dev should have a proper means of support to be able to buy food, shelter, etc.

I even tip at restaurants wherever I go. I don’t know if I’ll be okay in the future - I don’t own a home or know my retirement plans, but I don’t think a few dollars will make the difference, but it can boost someone else’s day and that’s really something:-).

I really like Netflix’s player, their CC options, and the quality of their streaming service. It’s just too bad about the content going all over the place, and THAT part is actually not their fault.

Though I just could not do that for Google Music, when they pay the original artists so extremely little:-(.