It’s not a form of censorship, it’s a form of democracy.

If you are not ok with a downvote reducing visibility, then by extension you should hate upvotes just as much, since they reduce the visibility of everything else.

Caucausing isn’t really comparable to coalitions in my opinion, because all the formalisms are missing.

Bernie Sanders has no actual power within the party, no matter how many people voted Democrats because of him.

Compare the situation to an actual multi-party system with coalitions. Sanders would have his own party and there would be 1-3 other parties that are currently part of the Democratic party. Each of these parties would collect separate vote shares which would lead to some of these parties being larger and others smaller. Voters would have to choice to express which exact political direction they prefer instead of just having a binary choice.

After the election, coalitions would be formed. These coalitions wouldn’t have to be along the current party lines, but e.g. moderate republicans and moderate democrats could form a coalition with eachother. This way, coalition-based multi-party systems tend towards moderate compromises, while two-party systems tend towards extremism.

In a multi-party system centrists represent reason and compromise, whereas in a two-party system they represent boring blandness.

In a coalition, each of the coalition partners hold power, because everyone of them can end the coalition. This means, more compromise is necessary and someone like Sanders cannot just be ignored for decades.

Such an american comment. So indoctrinated into the two-party system that it’s impossible to even imagine anything else.

Have you heard of the concept of coalitions?

If you want to have lucid dreams, set an alarm clock to two hours before you have to wake up and another one to when you have to wake up.

With this two-hour interval you should wake up right in the middle of the dream.

Once that works out, keep telling yourself that the next thing you’ll experience will be a dream when you fall asleep after the first alarm.

With a bit of practice you should be able to get to lucid dreams.

For what it’s like to dream: Imagine being in a simulation, and whenever you look somewhere or you think of something, your brain autofills whatever you focus on.

Say you are on a beach. So you think “How did I get here?” and while doing so, your brain generates a memory of you driving there with other people in the car.

“But who are these people?” And the brain fills in your wife and your son. “I didn’t know I had a wife and a son.” And the brain fills in memories of your first date, the wedding and the birth of your son. And so on.

For me, the biggest tell that I am in a dream is that electronics UIs don’t work. My brain isn’t fast enough to simulate e.g. a working smartphone interface. They are always screwed up and non-functional.

That’s your problem then. A downvote is not a slap in the face. It is a very soft way of saying “I disagree” or “I don’t like what you are saying”.

And yes, we do that in real life.

There is no expectation that everyone has to agree with you, either offline or online.

If you have such a big issue with downvotes and such an enormous misunderstanding what they are, move to an instance that has downvotes disabled and you will never see a downvote again.

A downvote is softer than a negative comment, and if you think a downvote is a slap in the face, how should I interpret your negative comment? A kick in the face?

@JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world is on somewhat of a crusade against downvotes. They have quite a few comments like that, where they get personally offended by the concept that someone might not like what someone else has to say.

In this thread it was super clear who was downvoting and why. The first comment in this thread was just about clarifying that.

John Oliver

Tbh, not even that is guaranteed. Lemmy (or the fediverse in general) are really not that privacy-focussed at all.

While the people running your instance might not be sifting through your data, nothing would stop anyone from doing so. Everything you post on Lemmy is public, and even if all major instances would somehow block scraping (which they don’t), a scraper would only need to create their own instance and ActivityPub would just deliver all of the data in a nice and easy to process way.

The big advantage of Lemmy is that it is not controlled by one large corporation (and instead by a bunch of faceless, unknown randos on the internet), not that posting stuff publically visible on the internet is somehow more private.

Sheep are also incredibly gross and dirty animals that don’t clean themselves. Think of a goat but with long, curly hair that collects every bit of dirt.

Tbh, getting into lemmy is quite a bit more complex than e.g. into Instagram or other centralized social media platforms.

Compare this:

• Choose which social media platform to use and land on Instagram
• Download the instagram app from the default store of your phone’s OS
• Create an account
• Done

with:

• Choose which social media platform to use and land on Lemmy
• Choose which app to use. There’s like 20 of them, some great some not so, some active, some abandoned. There’s no guide or anything, so you’ll have to google and/or try 5 of them to find one you like.
• Choose which instance to use. There are literally hundreds of them and you don’t even know where to start. You have no information, but this choice is central to the kind of lemmy experience you will get.
• Google and find join-lemmy.org. Now you got a one-liner for each instance together with user count. So naively you sort by activity and land on lemmy.ml.
• Create an account
• Figure out what .ml stands for.
• Repeat step 3-5 because account transfers between instances don’t work.
• Repeat step 3-5 because you landed on the likes of lemmy.ee or feddit.de, and the instance closed down
• Done, until your instance closes down

Slight hyperbole here, but choosing an app and instance alone is complicated enough to scare away lots of people.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

Your fault that you weren’t born as an aircraft!

Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.

If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.

Now go back to your link and sort by “Je 100.000 Einwohner” and see how that changes the list.

Tesla even has the best data source for a control group in house: those of their customers who don’t use autopilot.

They use identical cars with identical security features and Tesla has all the data. It would be trivial for them to compare those numbers.

As you say: there has to be a reason why they don’t go for this extremely low hanging fruit.

And type B just realized how insecure it is.

They just named it like that so it’s easier to remember where pengins live.

At least since the original penguins had been hunted to extinction.

Leaving in the hat is a nice touch.

That’s pretty much what I mean. If the thing one the most proud of is a high IQ, then that person probably doesn’t have a lot going for them.

whereas conservative almost always look within their own ethnicity first

Funnily enough, I don’t really see that happen. At least in my group of friends, the ones with the Filipino wives (and other wives from far away) are usually very conservative. They are then also very happy to talk badly about her family, her relatives and people from her country in general, but “she’s one of the good ones”.

Maybe it’s due to the fact that they can’t find a local woman who’d accept them, and that way they get a wife with very conservative values who’s also happy to talk badly about her family/relatives/people.

(Also, the fact that it’s illegal for Filipinos to get a divorce, with the only exception being if they are married to a foreigner and that foreigner starts the divorce process outside of the Philippines might be seen as a bonus by these guys.)

Also going around parading your IQ falls straight into the rule “the more a person brags about some great personal quality, the less strong it is”

Or it’s your only quality. The main reason to join Mensa is that you haven’t accomplished anything better since the IQ test you took as a youth.