The air was stifling. The kind of air that sits on you, like a hot blanket made of water. The kind of air that makes you understand that the atmosphere is heavy, in a way your high school science teacher never really conveyed. Big, heavy, hot, wet air.

It engulfed ArcticPrincess, squeezed him from all directions with it’s sticky wetness. He curled up tighter in the strange hexagonal hole he’d found in one of the walls of the airport basement. There was work to do, but he wasn’t going to do it. At least today, the world could keep spiraling towards its populist, capitalist collapse without him.

The Fiji Airways Lounge at Nadi airport, incomplete and abandoned. Once, someone had a dream of what this place could be. An architect somewhere, a vision of this space filled with wealthy travellers, the sub-elites, the smaller masses who could afford slightly better treatment while the larger masses endured the gate-surrounded food court upstairs.

Something had gone wrong. Maybe it had been corruption. Maybe the fickle will of the shareholders. Maybe it had been a boondoggle all along, a scheme for furthering the career of a junior executive who’d already moved on to their next, higher paying position. Whatever the cause, the architect’s dream sat half-built. One half elegant workstations, elegantly curving divisions between contrasting flooring styles, elegant chairs and elegant partitions. One half abandoned construction materials, unassembled couches and unfinished, purposeless rooms.

The place felt like ArcticPrincess’s life, like the lives of all the old friends he’d seen on this trip. Grand dreams in the middle of a slow motion collision with reality. In the centre of it all, a weird hexagon cut into the wall in which you could momentarily try to hide. A retreat for writing fiction in style that had also bloomed and died, for a platform whose dream of freeing social media from corporate dominance was also wilting as quickly as it had blossomed.

ArcticPrincess’s phone rang. It looked like he was going to have to help the world collapse today after all.

The claim and evidence here are not logically consistent.

It’s like saying “cyanide won’t make you dead” because, look “people still get dead from falling and crocodiles, even if there’s no cyanide around”.

[citation needed]

Your and his age are gonna be major variables here. Conversations and relationships work very differently at different life stages.

You sound like you’re maybe a teenager? Try asking interesting questions that require some thought to answer, but still leave room for your friend to give an easy thoughtless answer if they want to. Where do you think we’ll be in X years? What’s something you thought you wanted but as you’ve gotten okay have realised you actually don’t? What do you think we do now thar future generations will think is crazy? Listen to his answers and ask followup questions.

Personally, I’ve always been most impressed by directness, honesty, intelligence and courage.

Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?

Allow me to introduce: Firefox vim keybindings extensions. So many more shortcuts if you don’t need to worry about typing characters in normal mode.

A friend of mine just used it to write a script for an Amazing Race application video. It was quite good.

How the heck did it access enough source material to be able to imitate something that specific and do it well? Are we humans that predictable?

Fair enough, but that still doesn’t address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server—full of many people who share their cat meme interests—and see mostly high quality content.

Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don’t know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. “Just leave” avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.

I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out “Eternal September” if you don’t know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.

Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e…, high effort posts)?

If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let’s one person’s time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.

How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?

I have been thinking about this problem recently and believe the solution may be a new fediverse protocol/service that provides:

• Federated Emergent Topic Taxonomies

That is, a model of the relationships (e.g., is the same as, is a type of, is related to, etc) between different communities (/groups/services/instances, etc.) that emerges from the way that users/servers interact with them, that different servers can maintain independently and merge or split by consensus if they choose. Then other services (like Lemmy instances or clients) can tap into this information to provide solutions to problems like the one you describe (e.g., a feed of all the photography communities, regardless of which instance they’re on).

I think there are several big conceptual and technical challenges to implementing this. I’m keen to discuss them.

Does anyone know where I would go to discuss this with the people who care, have struggled with developing new fediverse protocols and/or are best positioned to spot the flaws and possiblities in the idea? So far I see mostly w3c working groups taking behind closed doors.

“New lab rule: no Ph.D. defences in poetry form.”

Still passed and had a grand old time.