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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • The more important point where the graph is misleading.

    While their market share went down, that says nothing. The market exploded over that period.

    Total installs is the thing you want to graph.

    Or Monthly Active Users, which has been mostly flat or slightly declining since 2019, the oldest date that Firefox currently lists on their website. Because all sorts of graphs are publicly available on that site.

    I’m also certain that I can find data going back further.



  • Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

    Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

    Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

    After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

    It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

    STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

    Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.




  • Ranked Choice is an Ordinal voting system that fails Arrow’s Theorem.

    In some rare cases, it can produce a result even worse than First Past the Post. There are a bunch of flaws in RCV, because it was invented before mathematical evaluation was as robust as it is these days.

    Simulation, and some unfortunate real world examples, show that if you vote in and election with at least three somewhat viable candidates, and keep strategy in mind, you can rate your preferred candidate second and improve their chances of winning.

    No voting system should be able to do this. RCV has more flaws in addition to this already game breaking one.





  • I’ll add in, Ranked Choice is a bad choice. The “edge cases” mentioned in the post can happen in any and every election using the system.

    If Ranked Choice were the only option besides what we have, it would be a slight improvement, but there are far better options.

    STAR is simple, and does everything that RCV claims to do, but actually fails to do.

    Something to keep in mind for the push to reform voting laws after this election.



  • Sometimes bad shit happens again and again and instead of actually talking about why this happens again and again, the news media pretends to be “unbiased” so they ignore the racism, misogyny, bigotry, and just general rage and hatred that fuels most of it.

    instead of actually focusing any time on that, and their role in it, the news media will blame the left for being “too extreme”.

    It’s not a new phenomenon. The New York Times famously didn’t report on the fucking Holocaust except in the broadest strokes.

    In fact their coverage at the time was almost identical to the way they’re covering the genocide in well, there are actually half a dozen in progress around the world right now.