Yeah I also expect MS will see W11’s poor uptake (iirc, W10 actually increased market share over the last 12 months) and will see it as necessary to extend. Probably more to reduce the risk of bad press from a serious security incident, rather than because they’re afraid people will switch to Linux.

I’m more surprised at PewDiePie, tbh. Jason runs a Mastodon instance, with the account notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com (I’m hoping that by leaving out the @ sign before the local username, that won’t send him an unwanted notification), so the fact that he’s also a Linux user is less surprising. I don’t watch PDP, but I gather he has a very large and impressionable audience, so him promoting Linux should be good!

Ok I love bike lanes now

Ok but if you haven’t already, you really should watch the channel’s videos. They’re insanely good, and show why good city design is good for bikes, but it’s not just bikes.

Clickable links, for sure. But machine-handled links like RSS feeds and ActivityPub subscriptions? Maybe not.

Denethor never meets Aragorn to make the accusation.

Of course, with an embedded direct link, you could put the title text in as alt text:

Unfortunately that won’t always show up in the same way title text does.

part of every xkcd comic is the hover text.

Yes…that would be why you would link directly to the comic…?

This comment perplexes me. A direct link to the image? Why not either embed that link so the image appears here on Lemmy without clicking a link, or link to the comic page which has both the comic and the title text?

And I hope youhave learned to sanitize your inputs not fucking use generative AI for grading

Ftfy

I think it’s a discussion with having, but I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer to it. I think as a default, it’s probably a good idea. Don’t create more specific communities when more general ones will work.

As an example, Reddit has /r/Brisbane, /r/movingtobrisbane, and /r/brisbanetrains. But there’s only !brisbane@aussie.zone (there’s also a trains one, but it’s dead and irrelevant for these purposes, IMO), and I think this is for the best. Anyone interested in the more specific content can easily go to the more general community, and there’s likely to be at least a passing interest in that anyway.

But there are times when a more general community is inappropriate, because the audience for one of the specific parts is not interested at all in the other specific parts.

And I think your BG3 example is a good one of the latter. A general gaming community is not a good place for detailed discussions about a particular game, because most people in a general gaming community aren’t interested in that. They’re a good place for announcements about games and larger scale discussions about franchises, developments, and trends in gaming. But not about specific strategies, lore theorising, or patches of specific games.

If you can expect a majority of the audience for a particular Community to be uninterested in a significant amount of content, that’s the sign that a more specific Community should be made, IMO.

I thought it was “things a programmer says to a client (while rolling their eyes) after the client gives nonsensical feedback.”

Ah right, thanks. I only searched for “meta”, not “announcements” when looking for an answer to my question before posting. But looks like my instance stopped federating that community a year ago anyway.

Right, but this comes down to that same discussion I alluded to but largely wanted to avoid (due to irrelevance) about whether the downvote is for disliking content, or whether it should only ever be for off-topic and spam. You’re just never going to get a situation where people stop using it for content they dislike.

Is it? It’s already been established elsewhere in this thread that there’s a pyramid of users. The majority lurk. The cast majority of what’s left only ever vote. The majority of the rest only comment. And only a small fraction actually create posts. We’re not going to change that just by hoping.

But you’re right, it would be better if they posted. And that’s why I suggested DMing them to initiate a conversation. I’d ask them if they could post more of their own stuff.

In the case you describe, I think it’d be appropriate for a mod of the targeted community to ban them

I thought that at first too, but I recently thought of a counterexample, so I’m not so sure. See my top-level comment if you’re interested.

My initial reaction when I read your posts was 100% support for banning them. They’d be better off blocking the community so it never shows up in their feed. But in the hours since, a counter argument occurred to me that I’d like to present.

Lemmy is, as many have said, still a relatively young and small platform. The range of content on it is limited not just by what subjects have communities, but what the individuals posting in those communities happen to be interested enough in to share.

A user might not want to block a community because they do like the subject of that community and want to read about it. But maybe only one user is actively posting content, and the subset of interest in the subject for user A just doesn’t match the subset of user B. Naturally, they end up downvoting all the content at present. Where in a hypothetical that there were hundreds of active users posting in that community, the user would only downvoted a small fraction.

As a hypothetical, imagine I create a !classicalmusic community. I’m a big fan of classical music, especially Beethoven and the Romantics. I post a heap of discussion about Romantic theory, recordings of Beethoven Symphonies, Rachmaninoff Sonatas, etc. Because it’s a small community, I’m the only one posting.

Then you come along, a huge Bach fan. You don’t mind some Classical era stuff like Mozart and Haydn, but you can’t stand the Romantic era. You downvote everything I post.

In my opinion, unless you want to get even more into the weeds and enforce the idea of “downvotes are only for off-topic and spam content, not for dislike” (which, I agree in theory is how the best users treat it, but let’s be honest…it doesn’t happen in practice), I don’t think I should ban you.

Maybe I could send off a DM asking you to explain your downvotes, and I would ban you if you came back and said “I don’t want to see classical music in my feed” (along with a recommendation that you use the block feature). And I’d try to encourage you to participate more in submitting the stuff you do want to see. But an attempt to figure things out some other way would be better than a ban, in that case.

Wait, can mods see who voted on posts? I thought only admins could!

I doubt anyone would ever object to banning for the behaviour you described here. But unless I’m way off base, I don’t think that’s what OP is talking about.

What you’re talking about is basically inauthentic behaviour. Maybe it’s a bot, maybe it’s a real person deliberately interfering with a community using sock puppet accounts. What I think OP is talking about is a real user using the platform in an essentially honest way, but which happens to involve downvoting all the posts from one community. There could be a few reasons behind that, such as the example OP described of a user who actually has no interest in ever seeing the community, but doesn’t know how or doesn’t think to block the community. On all other communities, their behaviour appears totally normal.

Let me guess, some cis people with gender neutral names like Taylor and Alex and Kirby were being misgendered because of it?

Edit: well, the official reason is that there’s a law that bans them from banning it, passed in 2023.

“may not require or prohibit a member of the armed forces or a civilian employee of the Department of Defense to identify the gender or personal pronouns of such member or employee in any official correspondence of the Department.”

Guess rule of law isn’t completely gone then.

^Just mostly^

Oh wow, an unironic “thanks” for this. I legitimately couldn’t work out what “gym” was supposed to mean.