Like I mentioned, just because you dislike something, doesn’t mean it’s actually unfavourable, or that other people shouldn’t see it, and that holds true a lot of the times, unless you’ve sort of geared yourself such that what you dislike is also something unfavourable. But even so, you can’t assume that other people would be or do the same.

And yeah, they’re functionally the same, but the intent is different. The point here is that votes have intentions behind it, and what we’re telling you is that it shouldn’t be a self-centric intent.

For your last question, I actually don’t really have a good answer for you. I’ve seen many people react in similarly clueless ways in order to rile others up. I’ve also seen too many who can’t look at things pass their own lenses, can’t properly put themselves in someone else’s shoes (despite claiming they do, but what actually happens is that they’ve set up a convenient strawman of the person and put themselves in that instead), and can’t think for the sake of others, and how this shows through how they use social platforms. So I guess I’m being wary.

There’s likely no such thing. How you interpret upvotes and downvotes is up to you. But don’t you think that’s a more much more useful measure than “I like this” and “I don’t like this”?

1. Nobody knows who upvoted or downvoted, at least if you don’t get to see the database or server logs. This means nobody would really know if you in particular liked some post or comment or not. IIRC Lemmy doesn’t even show you what your upvotes and downvotes are. This means you wouldn’t remember what you upvoted or downvoted.
2. What we like or dislike has nothing to do with what is good for more people. We can dislike something, but it doesn’t mean that that something isn’t good for ourselves, or everyone else.
3. Votes can sway where a post/comment appears depending on the sorting option.

Given all that info, you should know that votes matter not for yourself, but for others. Want something to be more visible up top in the Top sorted comments? Upvote. Up in Hot? Upvote. Want them down the list? Downvote.

So then the final question is, well how should I decide what do I want to be more visible and what do I want less? That’s really up to you and what you think your relationship with other people and your world is. You want chaos and like watching the world burn and have yourself caught in that too? Upvote crazy takes and downvote the sane voices of reason and care. Want to promote a healthier world where people have useful conversations that help each other in their lives? Upvote those good comments that do so.

Get your mind off the kind of Facebook voting treadmill where it’s your own visible voice and that everything is just about “me, me, and me” and focus on others for once.

Ofc, if you want to be a troll, have at it and do whatever you want. I’ve wasted my words on you, but I’ve at least left some words for other people.

As a poke at Emacs’ creeping featurism, vi advocates have been known to describe Emacs as “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

:P

Because unlike emacs gang, we don’t need to build an OS to browse Lemmy.

How bout you go back and let your friends know that if they’re in need of a good editor, try Vim ;)

On the last point you talked about, “prove it definitely will become such a future”. You simply cannot prove that without going there. What we’re seeing is not a natural course of actions, so we cannot simply derive the consequences like we would be able in science. Even in science, often times, the best we can do is probabilistic. The best we can do is show that such a future is possible, and that given the evidences, we may be able to conclude that the chances of realizing such a future is so and so, with caveats to known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

I’ll admit that chalking it up to defeatism is a stretch, but it’s not too far in my opinion. It’s the admission that the “machines” (though it’s really just big tech companies with a vested interest in as much data as possible so that they can sell it one way or another for profit) have already won and there’s not only no point in struggling against it, you get something out of it. I don’t necessarily agree with the gun analogy as I find it difficult to distinguish that from a threat of your life, but I see where you’re coming from: the easy path towards what most people current perceive as a modern life of tech is built in a way that pushes people into line as products, by enticing them with a “service” and taking advantage of their FOMO, and all other ways are either too much work or too technical for the common person.

When these services that people have come to rely on gets enshittified, these people would then just shrug and say “well what can you do,” maybe send some angry message somewhere into the aether and continue with the service, continuing to be a milk cow.

For myself, I see privacy as a tool towards encouraging a healthier variety in the ecosystem. It is a way to attain at least some healthy level of anonymity, as you would walking down streets in different parts of the world, so that I do not have to constantly maintain a single, outward personality everywhere I go. Supporting privacy is my way of saying I don’t like how many big tech business works, by essentially exploiting human nature and stepping all over it. That IS ideological; I simply believe that we can do good business without resorting to dirty tactics and opportunism; that humans should not be milk cows to business or capitalism.

That said, I have some vested interest in having more options: my interest and hobbies are niche and none of these services can or will sufficiently provide for what I seek. By the milk cow analogy, I do not sufficiently benefit from the blanket offers of these businesses. I also do not like the consequences of which they bring to humans and their relationships, and not fixing those consequences is out of a conflict of interest where they are motivated to exploit human nature and relationships to profiteer off us all, as is the many examples that we’re all starting to see and realize from capitalism.

True.

And they’ll follow that up with a somewhat snarky comment that “You’ll be eliminated by the machines first.”

There’s worse.

They already know everything about me anyways. If I can exchange my data for some free and easy to use service, I’m more than happy to give.

I hate defeatism.

I swear, these bad EULA updates that basically force users to “accept the agreement, or we’ll brick your device” needs to fucking stop and be made illegal. The price that’s set for a product, especially a damn physical product, should include the acceptance of an existing EULA, and it should be honoured even when new ones come out and the user chooses to not accept the new agreement. You’ve basically never owned the product if companies can just pull the rug underneath you, and render your hardware useless. And you can’t foresee such changes too; a predatory company can acquire one that you’ve trusted and pull this shit. It’s borderline daylight larceny.

A washer beep is like a webhook: if the recipient fails to acknowledge it, it’s gone forever. A notification is like an /events endpoint: the recipient can catch up on events at their own pace, and be reminded of and see events they haven’t processed.

Reference

Half-jokes aside though, I think what we want here is a reminder, i.e. a todo with a timed alert. Beeps can be missed and timers can be stopped (e.g. when you’re occupied), so they aren’t the most fool-proof solution here. Reminders will at least sit in the notifications list until dismissed.

Information is power. Telecommunication have changed the landscape of business, warfare, and how we live. It allows us to make “better” decisions for what we set out to do. Whoever holds more information, and has the chops to analyze it, controls the board. The closer that information is to individual people, the sharper it is as a weapon.

Having power too concentrated in one place or a few has led to disastrous consequences in human history. Privacy is simply a way to hold that power back, so that the most sensitive information are kept away from unknown hands.

Privacy also allows us to be ourselves, in the sense that we have different fronts of ourselves. We have sides we don’t necessarily want to show to our parents, but we show it to our friends or spouse. Not everyone has the best of relationships with everyone around them, and so there are sides we don’t want everyone to know, lest they get used as a weapon against us, either for others to exploit, or hold us ransom. If you’d like an example, imagine having an overly possessive religious parent, and you’re an atheist, but you don’t want to confront your parent because you’d like to avoid trouble. When thought in that way, privacy is a right that humans should have, and it is each person’s right to release what information they have about themselves to whoever they wish.