MyMindIsLikeAnOcean

No complaints, and thank you very much for making it.

The only thing I can think of is when I open the app I’ll sometimes see a post I’m interested in…but the feed will refresh, and I can’t find the post again. It’s not common the first post is one I’m interested in, I just don’t always remember to not look before it refreshes - so it’s mildly annoying. Not a huge deal.

The “transitional phase” definitely isn’t communism, and I would argue the term was co-opted by people as a pretext to execute different ideologies…especially in the examples you’re using. The word communism is used as a weapon by too many. You can’t just say “The USSR was bad because of communism, end of story”, for example. It was never communist, and I would argue it eas never trying to get there.

It’s absolutely wrong to call those countries communist. Each example is different. When authoritarian states use labels…they’re generally meaningless. Is North Korea a republic? Was The Soviet Union?

You’re using all these fraught terms like “socialism” and “liberalism” incorrectly. You’d be far better off by defining your terms, rather than just throwing them around. I mean…you don’t really sound like you know what you’re talking about. The Nazis rose out of National Bolshevism, after all.

Thanks.

I never really paid attention to votes…not even on Reddit. I’m old and I just say what I say. I’ll hand them out to reward effort…but beyond that the count miss me.

Yeah…it’s the app I use. It’s pretty slick.

Interesting…I’ll check both those out.

Thank you.

I sort of get it. I get the concept. I don’t really understand what I have access to in addition to “Lemmy”. I get that my interface is different because I use Blorp…I get that whatever address a user is posting from comes with a set of admins that moderate their users and choose what instances they see. I guess I don’t get the scope of the whole thing or what I’m not seeing and why. I sort of understand that the “channels” are hosted on particular instances.

I’m a refugee from Reddit and instantly preferred this because I don’t get random automatic false positive warnings from the system, and there no mods harassing me and abusing the auto moderation system….so far. Maybe because everybody isn’t a bot and/or picking a fight with me.

No, fascism and communism aren’t “opposites”…that’s the fascist framing…and that’s my point. It’s extreme centrism and “both sidesing” to claim they are. They’re only opposites if you preface your argument with good v evil…and you didn’t. Fascism is a dangerous system that’s arguably ever-present and destroys humanity….while communism is a highly ideological philosophy that’s never existed. Don’t be confused when highly socialist and authoritarian countries are labelled as communist…they’re no more communist than the DRC was a democracy or a republic.

Tankie is the word you’re looking for: authoritarian communism…and it’s important you use the proper word, because authoritarianism is antithetical to communism. If you didn’t know what the word meant…why did you even comment?

The topic was a conversation about whether or not certain Tankies have an outsized influence on Lemmy, and if that’s bad. The consensus seems to be that they can’t.

This is the “radical centrist” position, and it’s serves the fascist power structure.

None of the things you’re comparing to each other are equal or opposite. You’re functionally saying “I consider good and evil to be equal, I tolerate intolerance”.

I’m not sure if you stand behind your examples, because you didn’t really say anything.

For starters…if you wanted to address the topic you would have compared apples to apples ie fascists to tankies. You can’t casually imply fascists and communists are two ends of a spectrum and both have interesting points to make, that’s absurd: the former are evil, and the latter are dreamers. The rest of your examples are similar.

The topic here is “what level of tankie propaganda are we dealing with, and is it appropriate to allow them to control what we read”.

I’m new to this place…I still have no idea what’s going on and little idea of what an instance or my instance is.

…but I’m an OG internet user and what you’re describing sounds like EchoNet FidoNet?, or one of the various networked BBS systems pre-internet. BBSs, or groups of BBSs would frequently drop in and out of the networks, and the forums/threads from the absent BBSs would still be there…but in a “cleaved” state. Very confusing to a user who used multiple ‘Nets (which was everybody).

I “opted out” about 8 years ago. I just ignore all the aspects I hate. I’ll hang out for Christmas dinner…but won’t accept or give gifts…within reason: if somebody at work want to give me a trinket, I’m not going to make them feel like shit about it. I’ll say merry Christmas etc

It feels so good not to be running around at the mall at the last minute to buy something useless. Makes birthdays better because I put more energy into them.

The way it was described to me by some academics is that it’s useful…but only as a “research assistant” to bounce ideas off of and bring in arcane or tertiary concepts you might not have considered (after you vet them thoroughly, of course).

The danger, as described by the same academics, is that it can act as a “buddy” who confirms you biases. It can generate truly plausible bullshit to support deeply flawed hypotheses, for example. Their main concern is it “learning” to stroke the egos of the people using it so it creates a feedback loop and it’s own bubbles of bullshit.

No shit.

I actually believed somebody when they told me it was great at writing code, and asked it to write me the code for a very simple lua mod. It’s made several errors and ended up wasting my time because I had to rewrite it.

I thought “tech crunch” was something silly that Silicon Valley (the TV show) made up!

I’m guessing they’re ideologically opposed…but united by a shared love of children that’s much more important to them.

Gonna sound like 20-20 hindsight, but I never found Chomsky to be particularly insightful or interesting in the first place. Same with people like Malcolm Gladwell and Naomi Klein. They’re just “meh”. Yeah, they say some things I agree with…but that’s low hanging fruit. They’re always wrong and no more valuable to me than random people I know or meet.

This is key.

If there weren’t bots…Reddit would make its own bots. Reddit dances a fine line of allowing the population to be a certain proportion of bots because they increase real engagement by picking fights with its real users, as well as creating never-ending “content” for people to read and vote on. They only ban bots when real users notice they are bots - which is less and less frequently - even though Reddit has the tools and information to ban them long before that point.

Reddit could easy eliminate almost all of them, but that would be expensive and they’d lose real users as a result.

We can absolutely blame AI for everything. The reason AI took over Reddit is because Reddit fired their human moderators in favour of AI moderation. It’s basically a vicious circle of bots learning how to avoid being banned, and auto moderation learning how they’re avoiding being banned…repeat.

…the obvious problem being that bots are valuable to Reddit because they increase real engagement…if there weren’t bots, Reddit would make its own bots to do basically the same thing. Reddit only wants to restrict bots to a certain proportion of the population, rather than eliminate them.

Let’s be real…Reddit itself is moderated by AI.

People who moderate subs should be called “hall monitors” or something. It’s rare to find moderators who are actually moderating with impartiality, rather that being petty and taking sides. They also have tools to exploit the Reddit auto-mod system.

It was enshitified ages ago.

Seem like he’s a typical academic. I get it…you prefer to muddy the waters and shoot the messenger then engage with the content. Alternate view to…something you didn’t read? I assure you it doesn’t “demonize socialism”…it just chronicles events according to disclosure/a “data dump” of declassified files. It’s not ideological…it’s for eggheads who don’t want to read thousands of documents. When I read it it just helped me understand the playing field better.

The problems with the USSR weren’t with socialism, you’re missing my message. They were with capitalists corrupting it from within. There’s certainly an argument to be made that too much control was allocated to regional bureaucrats - when targeted positive/idealistic authoritarianism was more appropriate while socialism was in its infancy. But this in the context of just Russia, because I don’t agree with the expansion that created the USSR: my opinion is it created an unmanageably large state with too many “distracting” regional issues that were ripe for capitalists to exploit. Those faithful to the cause were simply stretched too thin and they couldn’t deliver a meaningful improvement to enough people, largely because the guilty regional bureaucrats weren’t loyal to the cause and they created systematic exploitation of the people they were tasked to help. Obviously I’m being unrealistic…just trying to get closer to 20/20 hindsight.

That’s a ridiculous way to frame a public university employee…but I’m just going to declare an impasse and drop it if we can’t agree on facts.

Talk about virtue signalling and purity testing, yikes. Still, thank you for the conversation, I will admit I’m a little amused at you trying to “out socialist” me, but I don’t feel I need to list my credentials in return…I’m comfortable with how militantly virulent I am on the subject of socialism ;)

Like I said: put two leftists together, and they’ll find a way to argue. I’ve been guilty of it too…it is what it is.

I gave you evidence…and you ignored it. I can provide additional evidence beyond ‘54, if you acknowledge those archives.

You believe Marxism allows for the billionaire and political classes in China that control the means of production? Bold.

You don’t “own” Marxism, btw. Most Marxists I know at least acknowledge and criticize the very large problems in the USSR and China. I mean…I also could be considered a Marxist…but I consider myself a post-Marxist because he’s been improved on. I also think we can do better than Marx the man as a foundation - don’t get me started on Lenin, lol. The weird thing is I like Stalin (but Che all the way).

This isn’t zero sum: I’m not saying either is all bad because they have kleptocrats and billionaires. We haven’t even broached the topic of what I think about the USSR and China as a whole (because you’re so hung up on denying their systematic problems in favour of focusing on the positives?) in contrast to what we see in the western democracies (for example) you’re typing as if i condemn them and I prefer the USA, or something…not a thing.