• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Because they’re effective synonyms in common usage. All kinds of jargon get used outside of the original field.

    In general, we all learn words piecemeal. You have to encounter a word to know it exists. The more specific and/or niche a word is, the less likely you are to run into it. Even after you do, you still have to find a definition. If that definition is simplified, or doesn’t come with links to more information than a solid definition, that’s what the person knows, and they can’t know any other usage until and unless they encounter that too.

    Now, that ignores the raw fact that language shifts as long as it is being spoken. Dictionaries follow language changes, and aren’t really good at preventing shifts because they only contain partial information.

    Symbiosis isn’t going to have a full explanation of everything it entails in a general dictionary (though it might in field specific ones the way things like medical terminology have). It’ll have a basic definition and some variants. If you want explant, you go to encyclopedias for basics, then to field specific texts/instructions if you want more depth.

    As you anyway already said in a fairly compact comment, symbiosis contains within its definition other words. And you even gave a simplified definition of those. Now, anyone finding those words through this post will know that there are multiple “types” of symbiosis. But it is never the default to know things.

    Ignorance is the default. We’re born ignorant of almost everything. We die less ignorant than we started, though exactly how much less varies.

    That’s the reason people use the word in the colloquial sense; that’s all they’ve encountered. As long as you don’t act like a dick about it, most people will appreciate the kind of simple expansion you gave in your comments, and you can help people expand their knowledge. But you gotta remember that your pet peeves are meaningless to anyone else, just like theirs are to you. Come at it from friendly, kind frame of mind, and it’ll work out best.


  • I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.

    It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.

    But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.

    Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.


  • Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.

    But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That’s when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.

    I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There’s behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it’s still eye opening.

    The biggest thing I think you’d notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that’s the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don’t. They’ll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.

    So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you’re this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.



  • Your last sentence is contradictory with the meaning of “beating a dead horse” with the usage of the phrase I’m aware of.

    To beat a dead horse isn to waste effort at an impossible or pointless goal.

    When I used the phrase, it was with the second meaning in mind, but the first partially applies if op wanted anyone to do anything about the situation because the dev team isn’t exactly open to some kind of takeover. The most that could realistically happen is that everyone leave lemmy entirely. Except for the tankies, obviously, why would they leave?

    Since anyone that has spent enough time on lemmy to be called a regular user has run across the whole issue at least once, that means that if OP was wanting to raise awareness, the post was also pointless in that regard because it’s kinda impossible to raise awareness past common knowledge and achieve anything useful.

    Now, maybe our usage of the phrase “beating a dead horse” isn’t the same. Language is funny like that. Maybe you just disagree that the post has no point, or that the point it does have might achieve something useful. That’s cool, no worries, disagreements like that are healthy and fun.

    I will say that in the first part of your comment, you actually echoed the point that I made; it is trivial to minimize/block instances in one way or another, including defederation. Defederation is an instance decision, not a personal one. But it is also a personal decision which instance/s we use to interact with the fediverse. There are instances that do not federate with lemmy.ml, and there’s a ton that don’t with lemmygrad.

    So, based on that, I would even argue that, since we have the freedom to choose our instance (with the consent of the host of the instance of course), trying to get an instance that doesn’t already defederate from lemmy.ml to do so approaches pointless since all of the major instances have been around for a while now, and have already taken part in that debate. Maybe you could change someone’s mind with yet another rehash of the same debate, it does happen. But, again, all the major instances have had this debate multiple times, and the hosts don’t seem open to changing just because someone brings it up again.

    New instances? Absolutely have to decide if they want to federate with any of the “iffy” instances. And every user has to decide if they’d rather stick with a given instance that doesn’t match their preferences regarding federation. But, uh, the instance this was posted on isn’t new. The user that posted it isn’t exactly new either. So the fact that they haven’t already made a choice, but instead decided to beat a dead horse (again, using the “pointless” rather than “impossible” usage of the phrase) seems a bit meh.




  • Dude, this is common fucking knowledge, and nobody cares.

    It’s one of those things where the very tankies you’re talking about made it trivial for anyone not wanting to interact with them, their instance, or anyone in specific can just block whatever. And then there’s the instances that defederate from .ml and/or grad, which is a decent amount of them.

    They may be assholes (though they tend not to be in interpersonal ways, only in their political views), but they’re assholes nobody has to interact with for very long.

    You’re beating a dead horse with this one


  • I don’t have that problem because if I can smell their product and it bothers me, I leave whatever place it is.

    But, you should be aware that they may have washed their hands just fine. Probably did. A lot of soaps smell way stronger than you’d think. If the smell is on the hands, it’s more likely to have come from soap or lotion than a perfume/cologne. At least, that’s been my experience.

    Cologne in particular, if it isn’t a spray, you just use a fingertip and then dab unless you intend to crop dust everywhere you go. That’s not typically enough to linger more than maybe an hour on the finger itself. Obviously, some people just douse themselves, but it isn’t the majority of adults using a decent scent because of the expense.

    But, yeah, I feel you. My grandmother was the same way, and of all the things I could inherit from her genes, I got that same kind of hyper sensitivity to smells

    Now, I smoked for a long time and it suppressed it. But then I quit, and holy shit, it came back worse. My wife had to change soap three times before I could sleep in the same room, after I quit smoking.

    And don’t even try to get me into a mall with a bath & body works. Scented candle sections of stores can clog me up for hours.

    Which is a long way of commiserating with you. I’ve had scents “taint” other things before. Often enough that I don’t bother to try and enjoy something after a scent sets off my nose. I won’t be able to taste anything but the smell for up to a couple of hours afterwards, if the scent is strong enough.