• 5 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • That which reinforces bias from innapropriate confirmation or unduly limits discussion of counter views.

    The problem is that if that toxicity is widespread enough, and accepted enough, it does interfere with any discussion of opposing viewpoints. When helpful comments that advance the discussion are consistently burried under dozens of unhelpful ones, it makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, and incentivses those whose opinions that go against the ingrained group-think to leave. Akin to the Nazi bar allegory, allowing that sort of toxicity to fester just chases off anyone who doesn’t want to join in, leading to a echo-chamber.









  • The distinction is in the civility, not the topic. I just used AI because its one of the worst for it right now. People tend to see liking AI (or not hating it enough) as a good reason to attack people - again, not just death threats, but things like attacks on character, or other toxic behaviour. For a more mundane example, there was recently a post on the No Stupid Questions community, asking how Christians could justify not being homophobic or anti-abortion. The question itself, despite its validity, is downvoted significantly, and about half the responses are edgy, unhelpful quips rather than genuine attempts to answer the question - many of which with positive scores. That sort of thing is widespread, which quashes genuine discorse, thus, creates an echochamber.


  • I would argue Lemmy is less of an echochamber as I see more genuine LGBTQ2S+, Anarchist, Tankie, Antifa that reddit ever had. I think the smaller population here just chopped the top of the gaussian distribution curve, amd we have, relatively, a few less “normies”. People passionate, and articulate about their things.

    I would argue that the open and often extreme hostility towards ideas that go against the group consensus still make it more of an echochamber. Like, for example, if you say something positive about AI and are spammed with deaththreats and other bad-faith character attacks, you’re not going to stick around, and even if you do, you’re not going to feel safe expressing that opinion, and that option will be effectively stompped out. This sort of behaviour is still very common, even outside of .ml, and just because some topics are more free than Reddit, doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist.




  • Personally, I haven’t noticed a decrease in content, but I have noticed a significant dropoff in quality of content, and in it’s place, has mostly grown toxicity. None of the racism, or anything that extreme (although, from what I’ve seen, my instance moderators have been doing a good job,) but so much of the content is insults, unhelpful snark, doomerism, elitism, and just general bad-faith arguments. It feels like all those who wantted to be helpful or supportive have given up or left, meaning no high-quality content and no meaningful discourse.

    That said, it also feels like a wider cultural shift thats happened in the last year or so. Online culture as a whole feels more toxic, with fewer places to go for positivity or constructivity, and far more hate and abuse.


  • Generally for me, its all about the flow-state - generally anything with a strong primary gameplay loop thats not too hard to learn, but impossible to master. Roguelikes specifically tend to scratch this itch, since the genre is all about finding a strong core gameplay loop, and than milking every drop of enjoyment out of it. Things like Slay the Spire, Roboquest, or Crypt of the Necrodancer. Others games I like, that do this really well are arcade indie games like Hotline Miami and Anger Foot, and esports titles like CS2 and DotA2.

    That said, my more niche interest in games is in hyper-specialized or experimental hardware. This includes more common stuff like VR, or flight sims with HOTAS, but also less intentional stuff. One of my personal favorites that unfortunately no longer works, was playing CS:GO with a joystick for movement. The analog movement allows for way more percise control in movement, and including allowing you to walk silently faster than is normally possibly. The downside is fact that you couldn’t counterstrafe, although given that I almost exclusively use the Negev, it wasn’t much of a downside.


  • Time Ghost’s channels are, IMO, the gold standard for history content. Its very in-depth, but they’ve so-far covered WW1 on their The Great War channel, WW2 on their World War 2 channel, interwar periods, and their current focus is on the Korean War on their channel, The Forgotten War by Indy Neidell.

    All of their channels focus on covering these time periods chronologically - usually one episode a week, covering that week’s events. Most of these individual episodes are 10-20 minutes long, but again, they release a new one weekly, so it will take a long time to catch up. As well as these weekly episodes, they also create some specials covering specific topics, and they produce the occational long-form documentary, such as their 12 hour long video on Pearl Harbor or their 24 hour long video on D-Day.