OpenStars

Eventually it will wrap back around to being edgy and cool in an ironic manner:-).

Didn't we do this already, last week, or is this another one like it?

Not always, sometimes it's chemical:-D.

True, though haven't studies shown that it is the major one, currently? So if the goal were to reduce even if not eliminate all crime, it might be a great place to start.

Counterpoint: is it better to put the TB-grade taco into the car than into a human body? Nvm, that seems to get into a whole "exactly what type of emissions are we talking about here?" side-track:-).

I mean... at a certain point though, can you blame them? The system is so heavily corrupt that even criminals walk free, so ofc a high-ranking police officer will too. Like if the governor, mayor, and chief of police are all active members of the actual KKK, is a noobie's job to overturn all of society to make it more just, or can they do at least some good if they keep their heads down and focus on what they can affect?

Most Americans (I am one) are lazy AF, always wanting others to do work for us. Trash collectors: "just make my garbage go away" (rather than work towards a more sustainable lifestyle). Doctors: "make a pill for that" (rather than eat healthy and exercise, but accepting that death eventually comes for us all). Police: "just make crime go away" (rather than work to address the systemic imbalances in the system that cause it.

Ultimately it is not only the job of police to police the police, but also the Mayor and thus the voters to choose what we want done. And if one side refuses to function - which sometimes but isn't always the police - then it is lazy to place all the blame onto them.

Also, since when did the job of police ever include "changing" anything? Their whole thing is to "maintain the status quo", which is like the polar opposite of change? Oh... now I get it:-P.

Please deposit [ one taco ] to continue driving. Thank you and have a nice day!

This is the model that Wikipedia uses and, while there are most definitely detractions, there are also significant benefits as well. Email spam filters too.

In one sense, it is a lot like irl democracy - with all the perks and pitfalls therein. For one it could lead to echo chamber reinforcement, though I don't think this one is a huge deal b/c so too can our current moderator setup, and if anything a trust system may be less susceptible, by virtue of spreading out the number of available "moderators" for each category of action?

The single greatest challenge I can think of to this working is that like democracy, it is vulnerable to outsider attack, wherein e.g. if someone could fake 100k bots to upvote a particular person's posts, they could in a fairly short time period elevate them to high status artificially. Perhaps this issue could be dealt with by performing a weighted voting scheme so that not all upvotes are equal, and e.g. an upvote from a higher-status account would count significantly more than an upvote from an account that is only a few hours old. Note that ofc this only reinforces the echo chamber issue all the more, b/c if you just join, how could you possibly hope to argue against a couple of people who have been on the platform for many years? The answer, ofc, is that you go elsewhere to start your own place, as is tradition. Which exasperates still further the issue of finding "good" places but... that is somewhat a separate matter, needing a separate solution in place for it (or maybe that is too naive of me to say?).

Btw the word "politics" essentially means "how we agree", and just as irl we are all going to have different ideas about how to achieve our enormous variety of goals, so too would that affect our preferences for social media. And at least at first, I would expect that many people may hate it, so I would hope that this would be made an opt-in feature by default.

Also, and for some reason I expect this next point to be quite unpopular, especially among some of the current moderators: we already have a system in place for distinguishing b/t good vs. bad content, or at least popular vs. unpopular - it is called "voting". I have seen some fairly innocuous replies get removed, citing "trolling" or some such, when someone dares to, get this, innocently ask a question, or perhaps state a known fact out-of-context (I know, sea-lioning exists too, I don't mean that). Irl someone might patiently explain why the other person was wrong or insensitive, or just ignore and move past it, but a mod feels a burden to clean up their safe spaces. So now I wonder, will this effect be exaggerated far further, and worse become capricious as a result? Personally I have had several posts that got perhaps 5 downvotes in the first few minutes, but then in the next few hours got >10-100x greater upvotes. So are the people looking at something RIGHT NOW more important than the 100 people that would look at it an hour from then? Even more tricky, what about the order that the votes are delivered in - would a post survive if the up- and down-voting were delivered more evenly, or like a person playing their hands at gambling, would their post get removed if it ever got too many losses in a row, thus preventing it from ever achieving whatever its true weight would have meant? If so, then people will aim to always talk in a "safe" manner, b/c nothing else would ever be allowed to be discussed, on the off-chance that someone (or 5 someones) could be offended by it (even if a hundred more studious people would have loved to have seen it, if they had been offered the chance - but being busier irl, were not offered the chance by the "winner take all" nature of social media posts, where they are either removed or they are not removed, there really is no middle ground... so far).

So to summarize that last point: mods can be fairly untrustworthy (I say this as a former one myself:-P), but so too can regular people, and since HARD removal takes away people's options to make up their own minds, why not leave most posts in and let voting do its work? Perhaps a label could be added, which users could select in their settings not to show "potentially controversial" material.

These are difficult and weighty matters to try to solve.

No! I mean yes. I mean... "jes", I guess? :-P

He's Jawt. :-p

It was the way she (planet Earth) was dressed - you know she was just asking for it!

\s 🤮

I wouldn't mind if like I told my phone to send out a signal "I am a man, but I like cold tea". Partnering together with the machine to help me buy something I will enjoy is truly helpful.

Consent makes all the difference in the world.