I’ve been an active part of two movements that saw police prosecuted and systemic changes implemented which also included being assaulted by police and requiring medical attention. I’m 100% comfortable with the contributions I’ve made. Every piece of progress and justice I’ve been a part of has involved (as you say), “making it a problem for people with power”, not spouting pseudo-macho bullshit about other people shooting police.

I’ve fought for causes like this for almost 40 years and I’ve never seen people so fucking toothless. Forget actually acting on anything, they don’t even make art art about it. They just regurgitate corporate talking points about guns and sulk on the internet if someone disagrees. They promote other people dying in a hail of bullets or spending the rest of their life in prison and they won’t even send an email.

But it sure is easy to just be stepped back and making a claim for other people to figure out.

A criticism you’re clearly not interested in applying evenly to the people in this thread.

Yeah that’s what I said but it’s unpopular when it’s about something that matters.

It doesn’t matter either way because if they’ve got their knee on the neck of an innocent person, it’s not safe to shoot at them. Hopefully that doesn’t spoil anyone’s virtue signalling, macho fantasy because that’s a tragedy far deeper than the torture, abuse and summary execution of innocent people.

Then I should have the support of the people in this thread then since they’ve made it clear that their preferred solution is tutting and suggesting dumb shit that helps abusive cops.

But oh no! I haven’t been polite enough! I should have just advocated firing guns at people instead.

Sure I do, because he has the solution of a fucking idiot: “We should be able to shoot at cops with our cool guns”.

Maybe you should try getting more upset? If you’re going to do nothing of consequence, you could at least do it with some passion. Even on an anonymous platform with no consequences, all you’re bringing to the table is “touch grass” tone policing.

They’ll scream for blood, but it won’t be the blood of billionaires.

They own the largest communication networks across the globe, both traditional and digital. They have access to the most cutting edge AI technology that’s fast becoming indistinguishable from reality. They’re cooperating with the man in charge of the most elaborate troll farm ever created.

They’ll use that power to keep breeding angry, violent reactionaries who blame minorities and swallow whatever their cult leader tells them to. But that will be rookie shit a decade from now. Forget social media sock puppets, our entire chain of knowledge is about to be undermined. Bullshit, agenda pushing academic papers will be published, filled with bullshit, agenda pushing statistics, fawned over by bullshit, agenda pushing media and cited in bullshit, agenda pushing books. It will spew out at a rate far faster than anyone can possibly debunk and even if they try, they’re indistinguishable from the AI-powered, sock puppet “experts” they’re arguing with.

Laws, regulations and life-altering punishments are the only way to stop them so they’re working hard to ensure that never happens.

As much as you possibly can. Remember that in a neoliberal utopia, each week you’d bring tens of thousands of dollars in for a company, be compensated with minimum wage and then hand those wages straight back to the nearest billionaire in exchange for food and shelter. If you have any money left at the end of the week, that’s abhorrent to them.

Oh you’ve been shooting at cops have you? Following through on your super cool solution?

Luckily, they have you to leap to their defense when someone tells them to act on their concerns.

There’s a long history of protest against police brutality, all over the world. How many have you been involved with? I’m tired of social media being full of lazy fucks who see shit like this and just say “damn that sucks” and go back to doing fucking nothing or pro-gun fuckstains claiming “Somebody should shoot them. Not me of course, somebody more expendable”.

Get them under control then. I’m sick of the fucking “thoughts and prayers” generation.

The slimiest form of whattaboutism. Tankies don’t control a major political party, the highest court, giant media networks or any of the smaller institutions that support those. You may as well be shouldering yourself into a conversation about misinformation and education and drooling “but what about flat earthers”.

Come back with a real problem.

Because “extreme liberals” push things like equality, respect, social progress and accountability and “extreme conservatives” push bigotry, violence, greed and shit that fixes nothing.

If they don’t already, they will. The insatiable desire for profit means that even if you paid them $1000 a month for their dogshit rag, they’d sell your data to make $1001 dollars.

Regulations are the only answer and they have to be both enforced and punished heavily enough to not make it worth risking.

Bingo. Elon has a pathological need to be fawned over and will say whatever he needs to to make that happen.

Initially, he found that warm mouth in the left wing for championing products to address climate change, but he was still being held accountable for his failures and obnoxiousness.

When Trump showed him that reactionaries will love you just being a narcissistic asshole and they could be bought for a pittance, he jumped ship. If a bigger, more easily swayed group of people became available to him, he’d rewrite his personality to pander to them instead.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.

Thanks.

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.