Actually, one bizarre research finding is that, “among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day is associated with a lower risk of heart problems”.

No one’s quite sure why or how or whether it’s some sort of odd correlation (but it does seem to resist all attempts to p-hack it out of significance), and there’s not much appetite among researchers to look too closely into it because everyone knows that ice cream is bad for you.

The Marseillaise scene is an excellent choice - a lot of the actors in that scene were actual refugees from the Nazis, so their emotions were genuine and powerful.

The bank heist opening of The Dark Knight is perfectly structured and paced.

And apparently it is adult-themed and explores millennial angst and disenchantment, because reasons. Yes, really.

Helpful tip: if, hypothetically, you come across a prolific poster who seems to only thrive on bitter negativity, you can go to their profile and click the “block” option next to the “follow” one near the top of the page and they’ll never turn up in your browsing again. Good for peace of mind.

My obscure nostalgia moment from the N64 was the game Blast Corps, where you had to destroy buildings with a range of vehicles to clear a path for a nuclear missile on a truck. Getting the side-swiper to skid just right was so satisfying.

And of course Banjo-Kazooie, as much for the immersive soundtrack as the colourful worlds.

The problem is one of those evolutionary arms races, for a reason in your observation: if the points are useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, then why not simply create a bunch of fake accounts to boost said post/comment (which is exactly what the OP was complaining about in the first place).

Individual karma ratings allow a weighting for upvotes so that, in theory, contributors who have a track record of constructive interaction can be the ones who have more influence on what rises to algorithmic prominence. But, of course, everything can be gamed, hence upvoting bot/sock puppet-rings like the one OP observed, or people buying accounts on reddit that had pre-established karma to let them astroturf away with impunity.

No idea what the long-term solution is, beyond the vague “build a community of known faces/names” which runs the opposite risk of turning cliquish or closed-off to new content. Or maybe abolishing all algorithms and just sorting everything by new (which brings us back to the ancient commenting issue of a whole chain of people saying “first!” rather than adding any meaningful observations).

I remember that one, Gato’s Song was such a strong theme for a literally one-scene character, their riffing on him and his original dialog was brilliant.

I feel like there’s a bit of cart-before-the-horse thinking here; as you acknowledge, a lot of it is organic. What makes a social site like this is the people, and specifically, the dynamic/active people who become the hubs of content or who are known characters - for instance, shittymorph (with their incredible talent for weaving fabrications before the inevitable twist) or poem_for_your_sprog who had a natural flair for both poetry and snark. Without individuals with personality, a place just becomes a noticeboard for the posting of memes or information, driven by algorithmic calculation rather than human spark. The downside is that one can never really create such a place from the ground up (hence the collapse of GooglePlus). It emerges over time from the cascading actions and interactions of diverse individuals who come and go over time.

We can certainly set standards and rules and metrics, but to actually ensure community survives and flourishes is an unknowable alchemy. Anyone can say “this will be our official meme format”, but whether it takes off or is replaced by one throwaway line from a random person can only be known after the fact. All we can really do is post and interact and try to be the people who would live in a constructive community.

I’d say the more incredible part is how Twitter is still going, and how people are still actively there, in spite of the rolling dumpster fire that’s been happening for literally months now.

Oops, good catch - “link rot” was the term I was thinking of, should have wiki’d it before so confidently posting.

That’s a good question, and probably too early to know for sure given all the shifts and changes currently happening. I’d say the platform could go either way, and probably will oscillate between the centralised/decentralised extremes over time.

On the one hand, the idea of it is obviously focused on decentralising and letting everyone have their own instances; on the other hand, people tend to cluster, we like to see and be seen, there’s a thrill of pride in having people acknowledge and react to your words and a converse feeling of emptiness when you make a brilliant observation and no one is there to notice it. It’s that desire to be part of a larger group that will inevitably lead to some centralised nodes in the fediverse and a bunch of ghost-instances floating around with one or two dedicated/lost individuals posting into the void. Within those busy nodes is where the same cycle of push-pull between “everyone gets a say no matter how unhinged” vs. “I’m in charge here so I decide who gets to speak” will play out.

Yes, on par I lean towards it being a good thing as publicly available information rather than shadowy mud-slinging. I had one post downvoted by someone who apparently has done nothing else before or since, which takes a bit of the sting out of it. There will probably be debates about it at some point, and probably the occasional tit-for-tat attacks around the place, but overall I think it does link a bit more identity to the person who does the up- or down-voting which creates more of a community feel instead of hiding behind total anonymity.

Eternal September? At this time of day, at this time of year, localised entirely within the fediverse?!

Absolutely, power has been agglomerating in larger and more consolidated bodies over the past few decades in the western world (notably right-wing parties fuelled by rage and the tech behemoths fuelled by cash), so it’s a question of whether there’ll be grass-roots energy pushing back to claim more power for people or whether it will end in a more forceful consolidation of power, either by oligarchy or would-be king (though the latter seems unlikely, as there’s no one both charismatic enough and driven enough to claim the crown, but who knows).

Fingers crossed that the end result brings us a better world.

I think we tend to overestimate how solid things are, even in the digital world. The concept of “bit-rot”, for instance, shows how online links degrade over time as sites move or, say, a major website preparing for an IPO enrages its users who then delete or edit all their comments in protest (lol, like that’d ever happen).

Semi-relevant xkcd

There’s no solution in the same way that there’s no “solution” to winning rock-paper-scissors. The cycle is endless because the desire to be in control is a key part of human nature, whether that be an authoritarian “I want everyone to do what I say” or a more oligarchic “I accept that there’s others at my level, so we can cooperate so that everyone else does what we say”, and any attempt to change those systems requires an equivalent amount of force that can all too easily lead one into side-tangents of trying to keep said force focused.

As a side note, Machiavelli identified the cycle in politics in his “Discourse on Livy” - a powerful and strong-willed individual takes power (e.g. Caesar or Napoleon), his descendants wield power with less and less efficiency until in time the aristocracy seize the reins, and they get more and more corrupt and out of touch until finally the people rise up and enforce some level of democratic sway. Unfortunately, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, which is exhausting, and so over time things run down until some powerful and strong-willed individual takes power and it all starts again. It’s not purely linear - an aristocracy can be subsumed into a strong individual leadership (e.g. the popes in the 19th century grabbing power back from the cardinals) and a king can be overthrown by a democratic uprising (e.g. Louis XVI of France - though technically it did go through a brief aristocratic moment, as he re-convened the parliament to try and get around the nobility who wouldn’t fund his wars, indicating his powers had weakened). But in general we oscillate between these three modes of social organisation because of the difficulty in centralising power and in then keeping it from being corrupted (i.e. using it for selfish purposes) once it is centralised.

People will come, it’s just a matter of time and having the patience to cultivate organic communities rather than trying to simply will them into existence all at once a la GooglePlus (or whatever their attempt at a social network was called)

The 3rd party apps are closing at the end of this month, which means there’ll be somewhere around a week or so of people realising just how bad the official app is, plus decreased quality content as the actually-motivated people who post things continue their gradual migration away from reddit and driving redditors to seek other places to gather.

Ironically, “thou” was actually the informal pronoun vs. the more formal “you”.