Lvxferre

Petition to keep Chile in place because I need my semi-cheap booze and if they’re moved as a bridge between Spain and Canada I’ll need to pay more for that booze.

I wish that it was darin (darling). It rolls off the tongue so much better.

I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.

Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.

Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue:

As others said it was a conscious decision of the developers, as it’s gamification of the system and they aren’t big fans of that.

I agree with this decision.

The Fluff Principle* makes easy-to-judge content get higher scores, and we do see it Lemmy. It isn’t a big deal because fluff ends on its own specific comms, but once you gamify the aggregation of score points, the picture changes - now you’re encouraging people to share content that they believe to score high over content that they believe to be contributive.

Additionally a publicly visible karma enables a bunch of poorly thought mod practices, like karma gating (“you need +500 karma to post here lol”) or automatically banning people with low karma (even if it might come from a single post/comment).

*“Hence what I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” (Source)

This is a load of horse shit. If something gets downvoted cos its xyz and all xyz content gets downvoted but the xyz content is in a community of xyz. Then the net effect is zero.

People don’t browse only by “subscribed”, nor they know magically all communities with their desired content. As such no, the net effect is not zero because the downvotes still affect the visibility of the whole community, reducing its discoverability and of the content within it.

Also i swear to god the admins are fucking with me by unblocking the people and communities ive blocked previously.

That’s likely a bug, and irrelevant in this discussion.

If u cant handle a couple downvotes then u probably shouldnt be making porn.

True but irrelevant. Specially because what I’m saying does not apply just to porn, it applies to every bloody type of original content, SFW or not. And we definitively do not need reasons to discourage OC production here.

If the objective is incentivizing good behavior, here’s another idea: reward upvoting and make it costly to downvote. Details TBD but other forums have done it and it works.

A simple way is to make downvotes “cost” more clicks. For example:

• if you want to upvote someone, you click the arrow up button and you’re done.
• if you want to downvote someone, you click the arrow down button, then a pop-up confirming it.

It isn’t too much of a deal if you downvote people sparingly, but if you’re consistently downvoting others it would get annoying.

Additionally, PieFed has a feature in line with your idea: up/downvoting people gives you “attitude”, and if your attitude is too low (too many downvotes in comparison with upvotes), a warning mark appears near your username. Mods can also use this as a piece of info to decide how to handle you, as users who are consistently downvoting others are typically combative.

Upvoted as unpopular, per the rules of the community.

I don’t think this would be an even remotely good feature.

You never know why someone specific up/downvoted a piece of content¹; at most you can pull up some possible explanations, but if you treat any as certain you’re just assuming². As such you’ll be blocking a lot of people based on things that you don’t even disagree with.

1. not even when the person announces why they’re up/downvoting something, like I did.
2. treating something uncertain as if it was true. The bane of social media.

I’m trying to be realistic here, OC would be nice, but we probably don’t have the numbers, and more importantly, we are competing against Reddit 2024.

I get it - and it’s a fair point. Identifying the problem is always easier than to solve it.

I don’t think that was the right call, Discord and Slack are absolutely the wrong tools to maintain a forum

They definitively aren’t - and even if Discord was the right tool format-wise, going to another locked-in platform is the same as asking “please abuse me again”.

EDIT: fuck, it just clicked me why you said so. Discord might be a good place to advertise Lemmy, indeed - good catch.

The issue is that Reddit became a place to host OC because it had such a large userbase.

It’s a feedback loop: users attract OC, OC attracts users. We [Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed users] can feed this loop from one, another, or both sides at once, and I believe that currently we should be focusing on the OC side more.

Originally, it was just a link agregators based on votes, there were not even comments or subs.

That is true. However there’s a catch: Reddit’s main competitor Digg was also just a link aggregator, while our main competitor (2024 Reddit) is already way more than just that. We don’t have the luxury to follow the same steps as Reddit followed and hope that we’ll succeed as Reddit did.

There is some OC created here in !inktober@sh.itjust.works for instance

Some of that content is really good, but it’s missing contact info that can be backtracked to Lemmy. It’s content made to consume inside Lemmy and nowhere else.

but realistically, if someone made a nice infographic today, would they really only post it here on Lemmy, and not share it on Reddit as well, the picture itself, without any reference to Lemmy, to avoid their publication to get removed?

Yes if they are specifically creating said content to nurture Lemmy. And then as people share someone else’s content in Reddit, they can’t simply remove that authorship info, even if it’s a link to a Lemmy profile - that’s the same as lying that you created what you didn’t create, you know?

Edit: Instagram and Twitter would also be places to reach a much wider audience compared to here

Instagram could be worth a try.

I think that Twitter would have the same problems as you mentioned for Mastodon (people preferring the microblogging format), plus the same that we get from Reddit (your typical 2024 Twitter user isn’t healthy to have around).

Damn, that’s a bummer.

Perhaps the question is instead “how?”.

Like, instead of looking where we should advertise Lemmy (is it Reddit? Mastodon? Old style forums? etc.), what if we advertised it through original content? If it’s good enough it’ll be shared by people who aren’t even Lemmy users, and reach multiple places at once. If we include in that OC links to our profiles (as authorship) it’s automatically bringing people here, from a more diverse userbase, as they seek more of that stuff.

I feel like this strategy is actually viable nowadays, unlike (say) before the 3rd party app fiasco, since for at least some content we already reached a critical mass.

Infographics in special are a really good way to do so, I think. And the format is flexible enough that you can put anything in an infographic, from cooking stuff to some fandom (I’m looking at the Star Trek fans in the Fediverse) to how to degoogle yourself or even political stuff.

‘Witch hunts’ sounds like somebody got called out for their bad behavior.

I can’t speak for the OP, but on general grounds:

Witch hunts aren’t the result of someone being called out for their bad behaviour. It’s when someone assumes that you behave badly.

Or, for a slightly less sloppy definition: "to witch hunt is to publicly denounce someone or something as coming from a socially undesirable group of people, without rational grounds to do so. Note that the last part is key here.

But where would users for this specific format come from if not largely reddit?

As old style forums went out of fashion, I think that a lot of people simply disengaged, instead of migrating. I wonder if we could make this chunk of the Fediverse a bit more friendly towards those.

Mastodon would be also a good source of new users, I think. The format is completely different, but for some people preferring one or another is about their mood.

I also think that the Lemmy userbase should be recruited from more different places than just Reddit. The main difference is “why” - I care about norms, not normies; Reddit culture established all those shitty social norms that bring out the worst of everyone: irrationality/stubbornness, soapboxing, entitlement, so goes on.

Witch hunting is only an issue here because of that Reddit culture - because it’s what make someone

• assume that someone else is a witch, without rational grounds to do so;
• keep stubbornly insisting that someone else is a witch even after being shown contrariwise;
• screech at anyone who defends the not-witch “why are you defending a witch? You must be also a witch REEEEE”.

I think that a good solution for this problem would be instance admins and moderators to explicitly disallow witch hunting, and admins defederate from instances enabling such behaviour. (Or potentially bring it to legal grounds since witch hunting fits nicely the legal def of libel in plenty countries.) But that’s just me throwing ideas, take it for a grain of salt.

Federation with Threads is by no means a big concern nowadays, since most instances did the right thing and defederated it.

And sadly, my Twitter/𝕏 thread with the company in private message is going nowhere. 😿

Sometimes “friendly” “reminding” a company about the relevant laws does wonders, making them return such “display” of “attentiveness” in a more timely manner. (Translation: they reply faster if you threaten them with the specific law.)

In this case the Ley Federal de Protección al Consumidor, article 17, second paragraph got you covered:

El consumidor podrá exigir directamente a proveedores específicos y a empresas que utilicen información sobre consumidores con fines mercadotécnicos o publicitarios, no ser molestado en su domicilio, lugar de trabajo, dirección electrónica o por cualquier otro medio, para ofrecerle bienes, productos o servicios, y que no le envíen publicidad. Asimismo, el consumidor podrá exigir en todo momento a proveedores y a empresas que utilicen información sobre consumidores con fines mercadotécnicos o publicitarios, que la información relativa a él mismo no sea cedida o transmitida a terceros, salvo que dicha cesión o transmisión sea determinada por una autoridad judicial

You // need // some // Xanax // /s 😁🍻

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO STOP IT!!! /s

Serious now. It doesn’t work here, since there’s no audible ping for every reply that you sent me. It’s more like in whatsapp*: I definitively don’t want to mute some people, but I wish that they didn’t send me multiple short messages.

*inb4 I hate whatsapp but not having it in Brazil is social suicide.

Messaging:

• People who reply to direct text questions with 5min audio recordings.
• People who use Enter as if it was the space bar, sending 10 messages for what could be easily sent as one.
• People who treat their requests as of utmost urgency, but when you contact them back take hours or even days to reply back.

Online forums:

• The sort of illiterate fuck who treats “but” as if it contradicted everything preceding it.
• People who feel entitled to have ELI5 versions of the text content produced by other people. (i.e. throwing a tantrum because of difficult words, text size, or even conceptual complexity.)
• Usage of “lol” and/or “lmao”. (I mentally translate those into “I’m braindead and should be treated accordingly.”)
• The sort of dead weight that focuses too much on specific words being used to convey something, instead of what it conveys.

Before watching the video:

No, English is not a creole by any sane definition. It’s a West Germanic language with some North Germanic and Romance influence, that’s it. This is clear when you look at creole languages typically…

1. having simpler and more regular phonology and using less contrast than the parent languages;
2. having simple syllabic structures, like CV or ©V;
3. breaking the comparative method once you try to apply it to them;
4. having grammars that typically look nothing like the ones of the parent languages.

Those are all consequences of how creoles originate: to keep it short [sloppy definition] they’re the result of speakers of 2+ languages interacting, with no side understanding the others’ language, but still reaching some compromise.[/sloppy definition] The phonology and syllabic structure get simpler because it’s typically what all sides can distinguish; the comparative method breaks because all the creole vocab is borrowed; and the grammar is something anew because it’s generalised from those ad hoc rules, as needed by the speakers. And this happens relatively fast.

In the meantime, look at English:

1. If anyone thinks that English phonology is “simple” or “regular”, look no further than the bloated vowel system. Typical for Germanic languages by the way.
2. The syllabic structure goes up to CCCVCCC (see: “strengths”).
3. You can backtrack a good chunk of the vocabulary all the way back into Proto-Indo-European, through the comparative method. Specially core vocab.
4. The grammar is basically Germanic. And even the differences from [say] Dutch or German don’t really fit periods with more interaction with other languages (such as the tribal invasion of Britannia, Danelaw, or the Norman rule), they’re gradual and better explained as the result of internal development, for example the noun case system kicking the bucket due to phonetic erosion.

That’s because English, like other non-creole languages, is the result of a somewhat stable linguistic community slowly changing their language over time. Stuff like the Norman conquest had some influence in the lexicon, but that’s it, it was just a Romance ruling caste eating “porc” and “mutton” while the huge majority of the population, the Germanic-speaking lower caste, was raising “pigs” and “sheep”.

I believe that this myth that English is a creole language is mostly caused by clueless people who look at a language as nothing but a collection of words, just like they would confuse an animal with its fur.

As I’m watching the video:

We already know that English borrows from everybody,

English is not even special in its propensity towards loanwords. Just look at Romanian or Japanese.

This picture is misleading as it implies that Germanic vocabulary in English was [all/mostly] borrowed, when it was mostly inherited.

Also, when it comes to Latin+Greek vocab, it ended in almost all European languages, not just English.

[Keisha Weil, PhD] Creole languages are basically languages that were created by different communities of speakers who came together and needed to interact with each other.

English already doesn’t fit the definition - since it’s trivial to show that it’s the result of Proto-Germanic slowly changing over time, not some sort of “creation” by different communities of speakers coming together.

(That said props to Dr. Weil, that’s a great way to explain this stuff to laypeople.)

[about pidgins]

A quicker way to explain pidgins is that they’re the sort of coarse communication used by speakers of different languages, when they want to finish a task and get over it, not really interested on anything past that. They typically have incomplete grammar, a small vocab, no native speakers.

And as the video mentions, pidgins can evolve into creoles, once speakers feel the need for more than just “finish it and get over it”; for example, once children start learning that pidgin as their native language and they want to express themselves. In this process the “gaps” of the incomplete grammar and vocabulary get filled, the phonology gets systematised, and you get an actual language.

extended pidgins

That’s mostly an intermediate category for a communication system that is already more developed than you’d expect from a pidgin, but still not a full-fledged language like a creole. I don’t think that it’s an useful concept, but that’s perhaps just me.

Why are they not teaching students in their home languages? [exemplified with Kreyòl]

[Dr. Weil] That’s a really good question. And I preface this with saying I understand why it’s not taught, even though I personally believe it’s wrong [to not teach in creole languages]. Creole languages, for most part, they’ve always been considered like a bad version of a European language. French, English, Dutch, those are real languages, where Haitian Kreyòl and Papiamentu and Jamaican Patois, because they’re so young, they’re not real languages yet.

Emphasis mine. It has barely anything to do with being a “new” or an “old” language; if it was an old language people would discriminate it another way, but the discrimination would be still there (like “it’s primitive” or “it’s just a dialect”, or worse), untouched.

It’s all about power. Languages piggyback on the power of their speakers, and languages associated with disempowered linguistic communities are often degraded into “this is not an actual language, it’s a bad version of [insert another language]”.

Here is where Dr. Weil could have inserted her talk about people of colour, and it would be extremely meaningful and accurate - because racial issues are one of the things disempowering the Kreyòl, Papiamentu etc. speakers, and creating this idiotic stigma behind creole languages.

Is English a creole language?

[Dr. Weil] Ah! I can guarantee you there’ll be other linguists who will tell you “no, English is not a creole language”. But when you ask them to break down why it’s not a creole language, is it because black and brown people are speaking that language, that makes it a creole language?

No, it isn’t. As I’ve explained at the start of this comment (and I’m glad to have done so before watching the video), a creole language has a different origin than a non-creole one.

Dr. Weil dropped the ball here.

We don’t call Montréal French a creole language.

Can someone informed on QC French argue for/against this point?

We don’t call Afrikaans a creole language.

Okay, that’s bullshit.

Afrikaans is outright called a creole language by at least some authors, such as Hein Willemse. Other authors - such as Hans den Besten - claim that it has a mixed creole origin. But academically speaking nobody relevant is trying to deny Afrikaans’ roots on Dutch-based creoles dammit.

Why are we not calling English creole languages? Because it [English] didn’t just pop out of some place, right? It didn’t just magically appear.

Why is she outright ignoring the definition of a creole language that herself provided, to lean into an “ackshyualy all languages are creoles” discourse??? Why??? Just to build a strawman and beat it to death???

In fact, do we even need the word “creole” as a descriptor to separate the languages out?

Yes if you want to talk about the origins of languages like Sranan, Kristang, and so many others. And talking about origins is important:

• it explains better why each of those languages has its own unique features;
• it explains the similarities between them;
• it highlights the history of colonialism, that made a lot of those languages to be;
• it gives their speakers a sense of belonging, because “here’s how my language was born” is part of their rightful linguistic identity;
• it gives linguists another window to look into Language - as the human faculty - through how those languages are formed.

We [people in general] should not be assigning a judgment of value over those varieties, as if they were inferior to non-creole languages. However that judgment would be still there even without the term, since their speakers are typically poor and non-white.

Or alternatively we can ditch the word so the prejudice against those creole languages surfaces under another disguise, while we wash our hands and pretend that we defeated that prejudice.

Some linguists, including Dr. Weil, are saying no.

Perhaps because she’s ignoring her own provided definition of a creole language to pretend that all languages originate the exact same way?

Yup, I got that you don’t mean that everyone is a bot there. I just don’t think that there aren’t so many of them as you’re saying; it’s certainly not as much as half the users, or even the activity (bots tend to be more active than actual users).

They’re still wrecking damage on the place though. Eventually they’ll reach a plateau in proportion, but their numbers will go down, alongside the actual users.