satori [she/her]

homeowners are the new gamers

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • it’s basically just when you challenge previous mainstream history, i.e. history as determined by all of the entrenched institutional gatekeeping mechanisms of academia for whatever era. that’s a good thing for people who think that e.g. cold war historiography is distorted

    a lot of the time you’ll hear wrt ancient or medieval history revisionist scholars starting to consider things more from the perspective of average working people of the time instead of taking at face value the received wisdom (i.e. spin) from the wealthy who wrote the old histories. or a lot of the time liberal society moves forward or information comes to light etc and the universities can be a site for revisionism of their own old histories. the 1619 project is a good example of mainstream historical revisionism.




  • downbear

    voting on comments is a broken idea.

    there’s this terminally reddit-brained sense I think that even when you’re powerless to argue you can still get a little hit of smug satisfaction by using your power as a vooooter to make your voice heard. I’ve been in too many reddit discussions where the thread is scored 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0 etc because the dumbshit lib I was talking to was shaking with nerdrage and smashing downvote on all of my comments the instant I hit submit

    even at its best the whole idea is laughable, that you can use votes as a kind of consensus protocol to figure out which comments are good. I imagine a medieval herald unfurling a big scroll and proclaiming the final tally-

    +3 from the few people who are already familiar with the subject
    -5 from people who are thinking about this for the first time in their lives and aren’t convinced
    -3 from tone police who think the other person was being more civil
    -5 from people who vaguely recognize that the comment is arguing against someone on their team and get defensive
    -20 from dogpilers who don’t really have an opinion but see that the score is already negative and want to do their duty

    public voting breeds annoying echo chambers. everyone looks at the scores to see who’s right and then thinks they’ve learned something even though there’s no signal in there. the notion that whoever happens to be around is even equally qualified to have an opinion on something is kind of a wild leap, and not how anything usually works outside of reddit. that fiction is constantly breaking down and you end up having to police “brigading” and deal with awful power posters getting a huge advantage from name recognition. reddit isn’t stupid and has been trying to unfuck it for the last 10 years with raid detection and crosspost limits and options like hiding scores on new comments. I remember slashdot experimenting to figure out an answer even another decade earlier. on the orange site you need a ton of karma to use the downvote button at all. the default lemmy model of upvoting/downvoting just does not work

    I don’t think I ever used reddit again after hex removed downbears, it’s that much better. everything feels different. I mean I still don’t like hex - upbears aren’t great and everyone should be anonymous - but it’s a lot better than reddit