The dotnet conference is happening right now and I was surprised to hear a couple of the speakers advertising their Bluesky. They had accounts on other social media too, but that seemed to be their main one. These are tech enthusiasts so it makes some sense, but it’s always seemed like an afterthought whenever I’ve seen profiles linked before.

On reddit there was r/comedyhomicide for these cases where someone felt the need to tack on a random reaction to something funny. As if the viewer needs to be guided to what their reaction should be. It always reminded me of a laugh track.

I don’t see why you would think that. Someone like Bernie was too radical for the American left to win a primary, no way he would be considered more appealing to America at large in the general.

It’s frustrating because Biden/Harris are too moderate to capture far left voters and too radical to wrestle the center from a populist like Trump. And it seems many disenfranchised voters are content to stay at home because better isn’t good enough. I’m not trying to absolve them of responsibility, but I genuinely think Democrats could make great strides if the left was as good at banding with each other as the right. Instead, the Democrats lost the popular vote for the first time in twenty years.

Trump is projected to win the popular vote too, the first time a Republican presidential candidate has since 2004. There are more of the other guys showing up at least.

Fair, but it looks bad when they seem to be promoting a side and silencing another as a platform. They disabled email signups for accounts from Israel for over a year. Yes, this also affected Palestinians, but it was in reaction to Oct. 7, an event that Israeli users would certainly want to bring attention to for fostering sympathy. The stated reason was to prevent graphic material from being posted, but this hadn’t been implemented for Ukraine or other wartorn areas.

They also endorse streamers that are very overtly pro-palestine. Some of them did an “Arab” to “Loves Sabra” tier list of other people on stage at Twitchcon. Twitch later deleted the vod/clips of it.

Well, Rumble, Kick, and 4chan still exist. They are much more hands off for moderation. But I wouldn’t recommend them as nice places to explore. Moderation has its benefits too.

Compared to Twitch, Youtube is less involved in censoring based on message but much more reactive for DMCA stuff and demonetization.

And other people have pointed out that Lemmy and the fediverse in general have moderation that is entirely dependent on your instance.

I felt the same way (spoilers for whoever hasn’t read it). The protagonist just kept encountering significant people where it seems like there’s going to be a struggle to overcome, leading to character development and newfound maturity, but no. He just moves on to another scene instead and they’re not seen again. It was just annoying.

The teacher that feels he’s not living up to his potential? The private school friends that he hangs out with but often finds frustrating? The childhood friend who he shares unexplored romantic tension with? The nuns whose meals he pays for despite having dwindling funds? The prostitute he just wants to have a conversation with? Her pimp, who attacks him? The potentially rapist family friend? For pretty much all of them a relevant conflict is initiated just for him to leave it unresolved, probably after labeling them a phony.

The only exception is his sister, who he sees like two or three times. And then the final conflict at the end is like: “Hey sorry for taking your birthday money so I could keep wandering around these past couple of days instead of talking to our rich parents.” “That’s ok, I forgive you. You’re my brother and I love you. But I worry about you sometimes.” “Yeah anyway, I’m bitter about the world so I kinda want to disappear into the wilderness.” “Please don’t do that.” “Ok I won’t.”

The entitlement comes from the idea that these are basic features that should be available to them for free, in addition to everything else included in the free service. They are the sort of things casual users may not even be aware of. If they don’t think the extra stuff is worth the price, they can just not buy them. But thinking they are overvalued is not the same thing as thinking they should be free.

If you think the standard experience is adequate then why resort to piracy?

Because I use these a lot and want something better than the standard service when it’s an option. If you wanted to sell a car for $5000 and someone offered you $10,000, would you say no because $5000 was adequate?

Because you don’t think they are important, as if the important features to you are universal?

I guess “importance” is relative, so I’ll clarify; they do little to contribute to the main function of the apps. Youtube is a video platform, so it should allow you to watch hosted videos. Discord is a voice and text messaging app, so you should be able to send messages and join calls. They are robust enough that you can do many other things with them too, but these secondary offerings are sometimes more limited if you don’t pay. The people that do choose to pay supplement the cost of offering the basic services to those that don’t.

First time I’ve seen someone else mention it. Definitely an underrated show with a lot of wild ideas.

Maybe this is a hot take, but this post is very entitled. Custom server emojis and using a video platform for audio only while your phone is sleeping as basic features? You can be annoyed that these are the features they chose to be premium or you can be annoyed by how much premium costs, but you are hardly missing out on the standard experience without them. Frankly, there are better choices to complain about being premium, but compared to the past the amount of stuff we can get from the internet for free at great convenience is incredible.

Also, piracy is easy. If you use the platform a lot and don’t want to pay you can often get a premium or better experience with a bit of time invested for some setup. I use xManager for Spotify and ReVanced for Youtube. Both give me an ad-free experience for free and are more customizable than the legit application. ReVanced especially allows me to get rid of a lot of the UI I don’t use, change input actions, skip sponsor/intro/afk segments, and a lot more. There might be something for Tiktok too now but I haven’t looked.

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but getting a compromise from a debate is not a primary goal. For competitions, the goal is usually to demonstrate and practice debate skills and the topic and positions matter less. For more serious debates, it is meant to be a way to expose people to the strengths of your position’s arguments and expose the weaknesses of your opponent’s. It’s valuable as an opportunity to persuade an audience of people who haven’t been firmly entrenched in either position, or who may have only been exposed to one side’s arguments in earnest.

The framework does presume both viewpoints are valid, since both sides are expected to believe in their position, be rational, and be reasonably well-informed. An invalid perspective would not be argued by someone meeting these criteria. It does not presume equality as that would be preemptively judging the quality of the argument. Either the debate platform or the other debater would presumably not agree to a debate with someone who cannot be expected to meet these criteria.

People already can block individuals easily though. But I agree on the problem with centralized control. Preemptively removing posts/comments should only be done for things that clearly violate rules or are such low quality that it is very likely seeing the content would be to the detriment of most viewers, such as spam or advertisements.

It would be interesting to be able to vote on tags that apply to content so you could ignore stuff that was political for example, but that would just be abused more than current systems.

Thank you for sharing this. Mod abuse is both important to call out and entertaining to see when drama unfolds.

Yes, there is the possibility that self-reported cases are untrustworthy. But there is no reason to think vegan cat owners would be more biased than non-vegan cat owners.

My desired outcome is simply showing that it is possible for cats to be healthy on a vegan diet. I only need one example to show that. And there are examples of such cats in the study my link had. At least for its tested disorders, reported vegan cats on average were slightly less likely to have at least one. The majority of both groups were in fact “healthy” (having no measured disorder). The difference between the healthy rates is small enough that it can be explained by variance and other factors contributing to health besides diet, and that’s fine.

Before anyone starts, yes there could be health metrics not being measured that are relevant to the spirit of the idea being explored. But you need to measure easily quantifiable things. If you just asked “Is this cat healthy?”, you would have some owners disqualify a cat for having a cut on their paw, and others disregarding serious concerns just because there hadn’t been a diagnosis. This is as wide a scope as you can expect to explore a qualitative idea with.

Unless you are suggesting that literally every owner reporting a healthy vegan cat in the study is just lying, my claim is supported by the study. And if you thought otherwise, you invented a different claim and assigned it to me.

I genuinely want people to engage honestly with other people’s arguments made in good faith. I know Lemmy is ultimately a collection of largely anonymous internet users, but still, I expected better than what I have seen in this thread.

See, this is actually good reasoning for why owners shouldn’t force a vegan diet on pets. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done well, but the difficulty in meeting dietary needs creates significant health risks for many owners’ cats. And it’s fine to leave it there, but it doesn’t close the door on the idea forever.

I noticed you forgot to include a very important contextual sentence for your myopathy quote:

Only three studies [27,29,30] have carried out hematological and/or biochemical analysis of blood in cats that were fed vegetarian diets, and it is worth noting that sample sizes were low. Cats on a high-protein vegetarian diet exhibited hypokalemia which accompanied recurrent polymyopathy [29]. There was also increased creatinine kinase activity, likely reflecting the muscle damage caused by the myopathy, and reduced urinary potassium concentrations. Potassium supplementation prevented development of this myopathy, strongly suggesting a link between the potassium and myopathy.

Meaning there was a health problem when one of the cats’ dietary needs wasn’t being met, which no longer appeared when the deficiency was corrected.

Even so, no one was trying to claim every conceivable vegan food mix is healthy for a cat. Of course trying to switch an animal who would be a carnivore in nature to a healthy synthetic vegan diet would be difficult. But there only needs to be one diet that succeeds to show it’s possible. And unless you’re going to claim literally all of the vegan cat guardians who reported healthy cats are lying about their cat’s health or diet, that requirement has been met.

What? That wasn’t my source, and it was a different comment chain created after my comment. How am I supposed to have read that?

Anyway, to be clear, the source commenter claimed it is impossible for a cat to be healthy with a vegan diet. All that’s needed to refute that is an example of a healthy cat with a vegan diet. So I found an article discussing how that has been observed. That’s it. But many people in this thread are either unwilling to concede this or are creating strawmen.

I know this isn’t serious, but most of the cats reported to have vegan diets were indoor only, so they wouldn’t be hunting wildlife regardless.

Look, block who you want, but I don’t get this adamant rejection of reality. You think a thing is impossible, someone shows you a study stating that the thing does happen, and you still insist the thing is impossible. You don’t even give a reason why. But you have the nerve to say others are being irrational?

To all the other free thinkers using the disagree button for dissent, reflect on if you are actually open to having your mind changed about things in the face of new information. Being occasionally exposed to sincere people that challenge your way of thinking is healthy. You may walk away with a more accurate view of something you previously dismissed, or even if you don’t have your mind changed, you are enriched with the confidence that your views can withstand a degree of criticism. And you don’t have to reply if you don’t want to argue or whatever, but at least be honest with yourself so you can grow.

I took that last line to be sarcastic.