Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.

My immediate concern with tags is descending into what Twitter has become: hashtags have been meaningless for a long while since there’s too much wrongly tagged stuff, different communities often use the same tag for different things, or there are ten tags all for the same thing. All of which means we’d need some form of moderator role that handles tags, and while I think it’s doable, it might take some trial and error to figure out how exactly we divide tags between moderators, how tags are proposed/created, and how tags are grouped/combined (e.g. food, foods).

I swear the “fuck cars” crew are completely deluded from reality.

I see people say what you’re saying (bus vs car road damage elasticity) in “fuck cars” communities, I don’t really see why you’ve decided to attack them collectively. But it’s a pop-community, they’re going to be wrong every now and then either way, please give them some slack. Their purpose is to make an average person aware of car dependency and that it’s generally a negative thing, so that actual urban planners with technical knowledge have an easier time arguing for and implementing realistic solutions, and they’ll take into account the variables you bring up. Think of “fuck cars” like a form of lobbying except it’s done by common people with good intentions - similar to how Japanese coops lobbied for better food safety standards decades ago - rather than wealthy corporations.

Google drank so much capitalist koolaid they thought the company needed internal competition when the main reason they remain so big is because they have big chunks of monopoly power in several key tech fields

What possible use is that?

I’ve noticed “has this sub gotten more right wing recently?” posts reaching the top post of the day in the last 6 months or so. r/norge and r/unitedkingdom being examples. You can automate bots that change a subreddit’s consensus on certain topics by bot-spamming threads pertaining to those topics, especially in the first hour of a thread going up. I don’t know if that’s happening, or if it has more to do with the Reddit protest that saw mods abdicate their positions last June and new mods being responsible for the change… but it could also be a bit of both.

In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason. So those problems are being solved as we speak, depending on where you live.

Kind of, the central government did this in response to Mayor of London Sadiq Khan:

In December 2023, Gove used his powers to “call in” Khan’s rejection of the project, overturning the Mayor’s rejection and turning the final decision to DLUHC ministers.

But the project did withdraw anyway:

However, in January 2024, MSG wrote to the Planning Inspectorate officially withdrawing its plans for the project.

I suspect it has more to do with London being left by advertisers right now. A few years back the tube had all the advert slots filled, always. Today, the advert slots are usually half filled and it’s been like that for years. I expected it to change after COVID lockdowns ended, but it has persisted all the way until now.

It makes me wonder if these anti-porn laws are happening because queer people seem to be more likely to watch porn[1], and because of that, conservatives are looking at it as a causal thing rather than a correlative thing. If porn does help with getting to terms with your sexuality, then these laws should be worrying to the queer community. What conservatives may be doing here is trying to statistically decrease the amount of queer people in society, as getting rid of porn may reduce the amount of people who are aware of their own bisexuality, and those people may never engage with and/or have as much empathy for the queer community as a result.

[1] https://www.thepinknews.com/2019/02/28/more-porn-watch-more-likely-bisexual/

Meanwhile Meta takes great pains to remove any glimpse of an erogenous zone like the most deranged Christian fundamentalist

I’m starting to think the term “piracy” is morally neutral. The act can be either positive or negative depending on the context. Unfortunately, the law does not seem to flow from morality, or even the consent of the supposed victims of this piracy.

The morals of piracy also depend on the economic system you’re under. If you have UBI, the “support artists” argument is far less strong, because we’re all paying taxes to support the UBI system that enables people to become skilled artists without worrying about starving or homelessness - as has already happened to a lesser degree before our welfare systems were kneecapped over the last 4 decades.

But that’s just the art angle, a tonne of the early-stage (i.e. risky and expensive) scientific advancements had significant sums of government funding poured into them, yet corporations keep the rights to the inventions they derive from our government funded research. We’re paying for a lot of this stuff, so maybe we should stop pretending that someone else ‘owns’ these abstract idea implementations and come up with a better system.

Selling sex to kids is just as exploitive and repugnant.

Why are we nuking implied nudity entirely off a website to solve a different problem, i.e. kids having access to their parents’ credit cards?

A lot of which were good mods too. I’ve noticed a lot more racism and otherwise right wing posting being left alone/unmoderated since the protest, in the subs I used to browse actively - nowadays I just check in with them every now and then without an account and the intentional or not lack of moderation is making me want to stop doing even that.

Ah yes, learning moves from porn. Like, we all know women love the finger fish hook in the mouth thing, the violent rubbing of the clit (until she has to physically move your hand away), the slapping of the face, the cock down the throat until she gags and phlegm comes out her nose etc etc.

Are you assuming all women dislike the things you’ve mentioned? Because that’s not true, and you can take a trip to sex friendly commnunities for women and quickly find someone who “likes it rough” or whatever. You can say most people might not like that, and that could be true, but there are still people who do.

If you want to teach sex ed with a better focus on sexual pleasure, then you can do that in the last year of high school or college (when everyone has already reached the age where they can legally have sex), whichever is preferable. We don’t expect to learn maths from a sci-fi movie, but it certainly can inspire smart people to try for new scientific advancements - just like porn can inspire people to try new positions and techniques, if we actually educate people alongside so they’re aware of what is or isn’t necessarily pleasurable to everyone and that you should ask and talk to your partners to get to know what they’re into. Instead of just assuming what they’re into.

It’s definitely a coordinated, global effort. This doesn’t just happen in multiple states and countries all at once by chance, it really feels like some group is conspiring to make it happen. We already got this passed in the UK by a de-facto unelected leadership who whips their party into voting their way.

I have to wonder if it’s linked to how many women saw success with OnlyFans and the like, so they could avoid working in horrible conditions like at an Amazon factory that pretends to have rules on how long you can do work that probably damages your body, and then just conveniently lets it slip that they ended up making you do what was supposed to be 30 minutes, for several hours. Some capital owners are already trying for child labour, so their desire to abuse workers more than usual is already established. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all connected, but I’m not sure if there’s solid evidence, so this is just a fun theory I have.

This is a benefit to the worker. They’re leaving because they got a better paying gig or less work/fewer hours for the same amount of money.

Yes, because there’s no union there to bargain for better pay, bonuses, more time off work, and so forth. Tech is a new industry where workers have more bargaining power on an individual level because expertise is so sought after. Now imagine combining that with unions and we’d probably all be doing 4 day work weeks already, like unions are currently bargaining for in various countries. We’d likely also have more time for tech debt, as unions increase certain types of innovation.

Like, if unions can do this for McDonalds workers after a sympathy strike in Nordic countries:

Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.

Why would we assume tech workers in a very profitable industry wouldn’t be able to get away with even more?

By “IT” do you mean tech? Because as a software engineer, I’ve seen turnover rates of 1-2 years for some of my favorite people I’ve worked with. If they actually had bargaining power, we know via studies done on unions and turnover rates that these engineers likely wouldn’t dip as quickly and take institutional knowledge and their smart brains with them. Tech is so allergic to unions that it is literally inflicting damage onto itself - managers will tell you how expensive it is to hire new people because it takes months for them to catch up to your codebase, but the higher-up leadership is completely unwilling to listen to the data on how to actually retain people. They don’t care if unions increase productivity or that the elasticity between productivity and salary is >1.0 as the unionisation rate grows (per studies done in Norway), because they don’t want to lose their complete control over companies to collective bargaining.