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frogman frogman @beehaw.org

just frogman

he/him

Posts 9
Comments 34

"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy"

A quote loosely attributed to Aldous Huxley, but contested here.

"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not dream of escape. A system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, slaves would love their servitude."

I interpret this as pro-socialist, but it seems it has roots in anti-communism? Food for thought nonetheless

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just curious, why are downvotes not allowed on beehaw?
  • i feel like this incentivises 'controversial' posting. content that is designed to illicit a response, good or bad. i feel like this is another avenue to creating an inflammatory space.

  • just curious, why are downvotes not allowed on beehaw?
  • i think platforms like youtube strongly benefit from a like/dislike system because it performs an entirely different function. beehaw is about conversation and dialogue. the way that the downvote button is used on these types of platforms disincentivises meaningful dialogue and silences unpopular opinions, which in turn can further silence minority groups. that's not what we want here.

    there's arguments for both sides, but i really like the lack of a downvote button here.

  • just curious, why are downvotes not allowed on beehaw?
  • This is a comment from alyaza, one of the mods:

    vote brigading is one part of it, but another influence of this decision comes from Tildes, where the emphasis is on quality of discussion and the site accordingly has feedback mechanisms to reflect this–most prominently in lacking a downvote button. (although i should also note we’re going for a more laid-back attitude than Tildes has.) while i’m sure there’s a theoretical way to minimize their impact while maintaining their function, downvotes can easily be used to artificially sway opinion, punish unpopular opinions, etc, and their utility is actually somewhat minimal as a website feature and community control mechanism.

    the going theory in removing them therefore is that to express disagreement, you’ll have to at least put some thought into why you disagree with a post, and ideally that will be expressed in the form of a comment which can be used as a further jumping off point for conversation and dialogue. (alternatively, i guess, you could also just accept a disagreement as not necessarily worth your or another person’s time, and move on.)

  • The indictment describes Trump showing classified documents to unauthorized people. So why wasn't he charged with dissemination? Possibly because more charges are coming in a different venue.
  • how are you guys reading this; does everyone have a subscription to The Atlantic or do you have some sort of content blocker to bypass the "subscribe to continue reading this article"?

  • Amazon accuses customer of racism & shuts down their smart home
  • i agree in terms of what we have right now. but without users engaging with the videos on that platform, we'll never see any platform change unless there's spooky investor money thrown into it.

    as "power-users" (ew) or tech-literate people, i feel like we should be the ones doing the early adoption.

    for anyone who doesn't want to use odysee because there isn't many videos, I recommend the Watch on Odysee extension. when you open a youtube video it'll automatically redirect you to the Odysee upload, if there is one. it's available on Chromium and Firefox.

    become the change you want to see :))

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • I agree that it's not fully "there" yet, but it won't get "there" without users engaging with the videos. I try to use PeerTube for any YouTube creator I enjoy that uploads there. For example, Linux Experiment has started uploading there so I'll be tuning in weekly to see his news updates.

    Let's still support upcoming platforms where we can :)

  • Declassified report reveals that the US government is buying troves of data about its citizens
  • there was a guy who was racist so amazon shut down his smart home (i don't know the extent, but inexcusable to me nonetheless).

    just some hypotheticals. please tell me i'm crazy and please tell me exactly why i'm crazy. this is dystopian:

    imagine someone attends a protest and the government uses this intel (see original post) to know who they are and plants evidence to incarcerate them. or starts a public shame campaign like in china.

    imagine legislation that set out to “mitigate the effects of control that smart home providers have over citizens” that allowed government access to its’ data

    imagine if bezos could just get a letter from the biden administration saying “this guy is bad, shut down his house and activate his smart locks"

  • 7 really is worse than 6
  • The average sleep cycle is 1hr30mins. I think when we sleep for 6 hours, we complete 4 sleep cycles and wake up refreshed. When we sleep for 7 hours, we wake up mid-cycle. At ~8 hours, we wake up before we get stuck into the middle of a sleep cycle or enter REM.

    I read this somewhere online, someone who knows more can verify if this is the actual science. If not, it's a fun hypothesis I'll choose to believe :p

  • *Permanently Deleted*
  • Since we're on Lemmy, which uses ActivityPub, I'd first recommend using PeerTube since it's also a fediverse ActivityPub platform. But it's pretty small right now.

    Alternatively, Odysee has an established creator base and it's easy for YouTubers to sync video uploads, so it has a real chance at becoming mainstream if we can push adoption outside of the tech-sphere.

    In terms of just YouTube privacy-respecting frontends, with your browser I recommend using Piped or Invidious.

    For more instances for privacy-respecting front-ends, this link is a good resource. Furthermore, you could consider installing the LibRedirect extension to automatically redirect you to privacy-respecting frontends.

    On Android, I strongly recommend downloading LibreTube or NewPipe from the F-Droid store. LibreTube is actually really pretty, so I prefer it to ReVanced on that basis as it doesn't require any level of login to manage a subscription list I think. Newpipe is already very well established and I use it personally, very good app.

    Happy to answer any questions, but I'm not an engineer, I'm just a guy :p

  • why I ended up leaving Reddit today
  • i didn't notice the lack of swearing until you mentioned it, that's so bizarre lol. i didnt even think about it but it's pretty cool :p

  • Amazon accuses customer of racism & shuts down their smart home
  • a bit off-topic but relevant nonetheless:

    i know i'm probably in the minority opinion here, but there are better privacy-respecting (and google spiting) platforms for viewing these videos than the official youtube website and rossman has been vocal in his support for these; particularly Odysee. below are 3 different projects, Odysee which is a whole separate and sustainable project, and piped & invidious which are privacy-respecting frontends to youtube. i think in future it'd be valuable to link these alternatives instead of the official youtube link.

    https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/amazon-accuses-customer-of-racism-shuts:2 -- Odysee

    https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s -- Piped

    https://yewtu.be/watch?v=NfiIXooD77s -- Invidious

  • Reddit front-end to not support Reddit (Libreddit)
  • thanks for this, i edited the post. that slipped my mind entirely.

  • /r/Conservative is going to save Reddit
  • so i did cave in and open https://libreddit.kavin.rocks/conservative/new and i promise you all, if this was an ironic subreddit, i would've pinned this to my browser.

    it's just too goofy right now and they're all so proud, i cant help but love it.

    i hope they continue to "conserve" reddit LOL. @bumblefumble said it best:

    "Nothing says conservative like being happy about big and sudden changes."

    EDIT: replaced link with libreddit alternative

  • Reddit CEO: We're Sticking With API Changes, Despite Subreddits Going Dark
  • this article was from 2 days ago, hopefully there will be new light tomorrow. although, reddit's history of corporatising at the expense of users, and their respect thereto, is still significant. let's hope to see some awareness from the less technically & socially active reddit user-base tomorrow :p

  • Poland vetoes EU LGBT statement and opposes domestic violence directive
  • "waaa waaa, i wanna commit hate crimes >:(" (hyperbole, not a real quote)

  • i was displayed as logged into a different user? lol

    I refreshed my page a while ago and saw that my username in the top right was belonged to someone else, and the profile picture was wrong. I checked my profile and everything seemed fine but the drop-down in the top right still had the other user and pfp. When I appended their user ID to the URL bar, I found their profile and it had the pfp that was showing on my end.

    I posted and it worked fine, my user was attached. Just a weird visual glitch? Saying it for the sake of saying it :p

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