Punctuation that denotes pauses like , ; : should be placed based on where the writer wants a pause and how long the pause should be, or when needed to avoid ambiguity, NOT on the bullshit arbitrary grammar “rules” that got made up to sell grammar books and enforce the class divide.

It’s very easy to find classics full of “bad” grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it’s in fact not bad.

Put on some music and sing your motherfucking heart out. 👍

This is always a good idea, but it’s an especially a good idea if you have a lot of energy that you can’t just will away or let go of. Sometimes when you can’t calm down or slow down, you can redirect and reframe that energy instead, until you’ve vented it out.

It’s so, so easy to end up just scrolling through social media - fediverse included - or through youtube or whatever just because it fills your mind with bees so that you don’t think about your problems, rather than because it is actually what you’d most like to be doing.

The creeping despair cloud has come for me.

I think that’s only visible to people on your instance that doesn’t have downvotes disabled? It doesn’t show up to me as a beehaw user, at all, and I don’t think it’s getting calculated into the overall score I see or the position of the post.

And on comments on posts I’ve made on beehaw, I cannot see any downvotes, either. (Do not tell me how many you see lol).

Reddit also spreads fake news and shit, though. The communities you participate in determine whether you see it, to a degree, but nonetheless. Like, when Bernie was running for Pres, the Bernie Sanders subreddit had everything that looked good for his chances upvoted, and everything that looked critical of his opponents (including the same accusations of Biden being a pedo that the far right likes to make) upvoted, and comments or posts that were like “… Wait a minute this doesn’t seem to be true” or “this over here isn’t a good sign” or “Bernie isn’t popular with these Black voters for xyz reasons” or whatever would get downvoted to the point people didn’t see it. Voila, echo chamber. I say this as someone that voted for Bernie.

That said, I do wonder if a system that eschewed votes altogether might be better. Like old forums.

Does that really balance it out, though? A downvote or pile of downvotes won’t persuade the person who made the bad argument that they’re wrong, nor will it persuade any lurkers. The bad argument can stand without an explicit refutation, or without the person who made it even knowing why they were downvoted (always a frustrating experience).

Here, you can still see which argument is the most popular, because you get the initial argument A, then because there are no downvotes we’re more likely to get a counter argument B, and then you can see easily which of the two has more upvotes.

And if people keep talking, there be more nuance this way, I think. It’s not limited to a binary option of bad vs good, and you can maybe more “I agree with x, or think you might have a point about y, but I disagree with z because…” Vs someone with a nuance opinion instead just deciding if they think it’s overall more bad or more good and voting in a way that erases the nuance.

Edit: also, people arguing in bad faith because bigotry can just be reported and booted altogether

You can’t - it’ll look like your downvote went through on your side, when you downvote from another instance, but it doesn’t actually show up for anyone else or change the comment score.

When I looked at it briefly, I saw so many posts with no comments at all. Maybe I just didn’t know how to search it? But it felt dead, compared to here. I’ll try again though.

I think nobody has the same feeling for how much a downvote or upvote weighs, too.

One might person might think, hmm, I disageee mildly = downvote, and the downvoted person might see that and think “oh, they hate this, why are they so mad?” and then you get the useless little argument about votes after that sometimes.

Especially with negativity bias making 1 downvote feel worse than 1 upvote, to most people.

That sounds kinda awful to me, because it could be used to just disappear unpopular comments complaining of racism or transphobia or whatever, or even just to disappear a comment saying “I hated this really popular game actually because xyz”. It sounds like something that would exaggerate the hivemind effect of downvotes rather than alleviating it, and probably be used to silence even justifiably angry or emphatic comments, if now you can’t even see the few comments that disagreed with the majority in a thread.

That… Sounds fantastic, actually. Although I could see people just generating puppet accounts to send harassing messages that only the victim and mods see, and switching accounts when they get banned. Could go especially bad in situations where the mods are also kinda in on it, as can happen (see also: organizations that turn out to have been “secretly” openly racist all along, in a way that was invisible to white workers but blatant to black workers, and that kind of thing).

We can even hide the fake internet points!

I like see my little piles of upvotes though. But maybe it’s bad because ultimately it means I’m giving importance to the external validation of strangers, and the flipside of that is being easily affected by downvotes too. It might be better to hide scores (in profile settings). But I also kinda don’t want to because it shows someone read my comment/post and I didn’t waste my time, even if nobody replies.

I’ve had similar worries, but overall I’m coming around to the idea that for cases of bigotry it’s better to just report the bigot and maybe also yell at them (which is allowed) than to put it to a public vote and hope that lands them at -200 downvotes or whatever. Not being able to downvote them stings a bit, but if they get reported and booted reliably, I think it’s worth the tradeoff.

Especially since reddit definitely had the same problem in a lot of cases anyway. Sometimes, in some subreddits, transphobia would be downvoted. But in others, the “”“polite”“” or even blatantly not “polite” transphobia would be upvoted. Sometimes even in places where I didn’t expect it.

(looking at you, gaming subreddits mad about some trans people asking you not to buy a wizard game, jesus. That ~2 weeks was hell on the internet. And meanwhile, posts calling for people not to pre-order games, or to boycott games that have microtransactions - those are acceptable and go right to the top, apparently! Ugh.)

Edit: ditto for the similar problem of “” polite"" biotruths-styles sexism and racism.

Replying to my own comment instead of making said comment even longer:

I hope that, for all the problems ChatGPT and co. is introducing to the world, it might sufficiently grease the wheels of translation to make communication between different countries’ scientists and scholars much easier. Imagine if every scientific paper could just be auto-translated, even if imperfectly, well-enough to be easy to read and reasonably understandable, at least enough to indicate where someone might want to dig further.

Granted, this speculation ignores the problem that there are already FAR more scientific articles than any scientist can read even if they look exclusively at those published in their own language. And the replication crisis is still a thing. But still? It would make it easier to find what you’re looking for if you’re searching for studies on some niche topic. And easy translation might at least make the top-tier, most well-respected scientific journals of other countries more accessible and more widely read. Although perhaps with the handful of expensive top-tier journals I suppose there might already be human-provided translations for those, I don’t actually know.

/jesus I am fucking rambling today. Ah well :)

Edit: ditto for history. Easier historical collaboration between countries would be invaluable. Especially with the number of times I’ve seen an article like “ancient ruins discovered in the Amazon!” where the ‘discovery’ turns out to actually have been a really popular spot with the locals for years, and it’s just that the information that it existed never traveled far enough to reach archeologists. Which touches also on the issue of archeology as it exists, with primarily white and western archeologists traveling to other countries to excavate and study and often abscond with their artifacts, being oftentimes part and parcel of the colonial project, but this comment is long enough.

I too am sick of both-sides-ism for the same and similar reasons. It’s not the case that each side in every debate is argued in equally good faith, nor that each has equal scientific basis, etc. I think the net effect of a policy like this would just be to entrench the culture of giving any and every blatantly hateful/wrong opposite a legitimizing platform.

Personally, I’d prefer the abandonment of the pretense that media can ever be unbiased, in one way or another. I’d rather media be upfront about its biases, and have journalists be encouraged to try to be as skeptical as possible of their own side (or something like that) while being open about which side is theirs, rather than have “unbiased” and “neutral” news sources, written by people who are humans who therefore do have opinions, that inevitably still do shit like repeatedly post identical transphobic op-eds, or articles with titles like “Locals dismayed over homeless encampment”, and simultaneously claim to be unbiased. That type of title regarding the homeless, as an example, prioritizes the housed locals who are upset (about area cleanliness, sidewalk accessibility, drugs in proximity to their homes, whatever) as being the newsworthy story, and their opinions as being the ones you should take into consideration, rather than prioritizing the fact that a bunch of people - who are also local to that area but not acknowledged/valued as such - are unhoused and living in misery and exposed to temperatures, etc, as being the newsworthy story. Regardless of how you feel about the homeless personally, it’s an article title like that takes a perspective on a situation, privileges one party in the situation over another, but it presents that perspective as ostensibly unbiased and purely factual, and in so doing it just hides its own bias rather than actually eliminating it.

And, in that particular case, I personally believe it encourages the populace as a whole to devalue and dehumanize unsheltered and drug-addicted humans in favor of only caring about whether housed people can see them or not. But if the journalist was able to be upfront with and maybe even explicitly acknowledge their own bias in some standardized way in the article, it might make that bias less invisible and lead people to put more consideration into the matter in general and be less likely to automatically absorb whatever the bias in the article is.

I also just think that truly unbiased, purely factual media is impossible to achieve, and that journalism’s traditional quest to do so is a fool’s errand that historically has not worked out.

I wonder whether/how journalism’s core tenants and cultures might differ between the Anglophone world and other countries in other parts of the world, like South America or Africa. I feel like differences like that could go fairly unnoticed because of the language-barrier - like, how often do Americans or British folks read translated news articles from other languages, and how often do Journalism students in the anglosphere learn about other countries’ home-grown journalistic traditions or methods? I’d be willing to bet the profession of journalism as practiced in the west would tend to almost-exclusively consider only academic articles and philosophies generated by its own cultures and institutions, seeing as that’s how it has tended to go in the sciences and other disciplines.

There have been many separate occasions that some amazing scientific discovery was made in one country, like China or Italy or Greece or wherever, but the anglophone science community didn’t find out about it at all because it wasn’t published in English or in a popular English journal (or, in earlier times, wasn’t talked about amongst anglophone science societies or in scientists’ letters or books). I think I remember reading that Mendel, the Austrian monk who discovered the basics of alleles and the mechanism of genetic variability and inheritance, by way of years upon years of careful and meticulous experiments, went almost entirely unknown as a scientist (until decades after his death, when his work was rediscovered, and when other people discovered the same things independently or replicated his experiments), and that this may have been due in part to the fact that he was Austrian and published and presented only in his language. He also just didn’t do a lot to promote his work, supposedly, but I remember reading that the initial crickets in response to his life’s work rather discouraged him from further promoting it and from further scientific endeavors.

/pardon, several of those paragraphs are a bit run-on and word-salady perhaps, aaaand I’ve gone on several tangents, but I must stop editing this comment now for fear of spending too much time on social media vs the rest of my life.

That is my favorite way I have ever heard anyone express that wish.

Some lint for you (accuracy may vary):

Bee family trees, if you follow a queen down through drones and workers and other queens, follow the fibonacci sequence. The fibonacci sequence is also reflected in the structure of spiral seashells. Source: Some book I read about the fibonacci sequence many years ago.

Flamingoes are motherfucking TANKS. Seriously. Their ability to survive in absurdly harsh environments that would kill other animals is wild.

Only female reindeer lose their antlers in wintertime (disclaimer: this may depend on species of reindeer?)

Some guy (Russian I think?), when a computer informed him that nuclear missiles had been fired at his country and he was told to return fire, correctly believed the computer to be bugged and refused to fire the missiles. So uh. Thanks, guy. He went and lived out his life normally and never got appropriate thanks for saving a shitload of people, I think. Source: memory of wikipedia article, may be wrong on some details so really I should be double checking those before repeating them but here you go I’m too tired for that.

Some other guy survived BOTH the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, and lived to old age afterwards. Somehow both the literal worst luck, and the best.

There is a parasite that latches on to ants’ feet that does not harm the ant - in fact, it fully replaces the function of the ant’s foot, including forming a claw to help the ant grab stuff like it would with its actual foot. There is also a similar parasite that replaces a fish’s tongue (yeah I hate it too).

Octpuses only live for like 3 years max, and the females die after laying their eggs. Meanwhile, they are really, really, really smart, like dolphins and parrots and crows. Imagine being that aware and smart, but only living 3 years. It disturbs me.

Uranium glass, which is exactly what it says on the tin - glass made with a teensy bit of uranium in it - glows in the dark in (typically) bright, cartoon acid green.

Whales can and do communicate across vast distances because their calls carry much more easily in water than sound carries in air.

Hammerhead sharks’ heads detect electrical fields, and they use these fields to locate their prey. Run.

The whole alpha/beta/omega wolf pack thing is complete bullshit, retracted even by the person who first popularized it, and he has spent years upon years trying to scrub out that idea he unleashed into pop culture but has been unable to.

Elephants’ feet are very sensitive, able to feel minute vibrations from miles away, and they can communicate with them. Also they do NOT make the thumping sound that is foley’d into nature documentaries - they walk silently. Also, the bottom of their feet looks like swiss cheese and you should not google that if you have tryptophobia.

Edit 2: most bees are solitary bees, and many look nothing like a honey or bumble bee. Many “save the bees” efforts end up counterproductive because they just boost domestic honeybees where the honeybees are an invasive species, and where some native plants are exclusively pollinated by a specific species of native solitary bee.

This is why therapists often highly recommend gratitude journaling. I’ve never been a fan of the 'gratitudec name of it, but the basic idea is you make a habit of writing down (and thus deliberately paying attention to) the positive and nice things in your life, and that counteracts negativity bias and makes you notice the good things more. Even when your current situation is awful, you can still find stuff, like a nice sunny day, or a friend giving you a compliment, or a cool fact you learned, or a tasty scone and suchlike. After a while it becomes a habit to pay more attention to positives even when you’re not writing it down.

I’m already starting to recognize some recurring usernames here, and on reddit that only happened for me in one (1) subreddit that was great albeit run by kind of a clique.

That kind of thing can push people away from new hobbies just because they aren’t familiar with reddit though.

And if downvotes are disabled, then either they just get ignored and drowned out by other posts/comments, or someone points them to the wiki and they still get the answer they wanted.