Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn’t exist makes me feel stupid.

PEBKAC

Every time that I see this acronym I’m tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember “ah, it isn’t Cyrillic”.

In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It’s a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

“I’m a meowsician now”.

9:45, on the “universal social network”: this can’t be stressed enough.

No matter how much Musk babbles about “I wanr an errything app! lol lmao”, Twitter won’t become one. The Fediverse however has the potential to become an all-encompassing social network, with different aspects of online interaction being integrated organically.

There’s a future not too far away where you can share a picture, from an account that you made for video sharing, that’ll get a lot of microblogging toots and spark a discussion in a forum. This would be impossible using Instagram, Youtube, Twitter or Reddit; but once the interfaces get ironed out, it will become reality for PixelFed, Piped, Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin.

Dough, freshly kneaded, still unshaped:

Loaf, after baking:

Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.

Sorry for the wall of text.

I honestly do not think that your judgment was accurate in this situation, and I think that you jumped the gun; the poster sounds genuinely clueless. However I’m fully aware that I don’t have full access to all the info necessary to conclude shite here.

Large bans don’t decrease your workload, they increase it.

Trolls and bad faith agents might wait for a short ban to expire, but they won’t wait for a large ban - they’ll evade it with an alt account and call it a day, and now you’re playing whack-a-mole with them. With a permaban at least you’re telling them to fuck off, even if they won’t listen.

For more sensible users, the large ban is unfair, and conveys “we still want you here… but we’re too lazy to deal with you thing right now, so shoo”. Other users are not blind, they will notice that the mods overreact to rule infractions and they will avoid reporting things, except for petty reasons. Now you’re bound to fine-comb threads manually to enforce the rules because nobody is reporting shite.

Either way, you’re doing more work than you would otherwise.

A better approach here would be to contain content prone to trigger rule-breaking comments. Megathreads work like a charm for that; they allow you to fine-comb a single thread instead of the whole community. It also helps to bring up the content diversity of the community.

Another thing. I do agree with you that automatically tying that chant to Antisemitism is itself Antisemitic; however you’re taking for granted that all users are on the same page when it comes to that, and both of us know that the media is spamming them with misinformation that conflates Israel with Jewish people. In those situations it’s better to issue an official statement, explaining what will be considered Antisemitism for the sake of rule enforcement. (It helps to inform other users too.)

Let’s roll with your interpretation that the slogan is solely Antizionist. That would make the poster misinformed and incorrect; in this situation, the right thing to do is to talk with the poster, informing them, while checking their profile for potential Antisemitic activity. This also works great when the user is not rational (i.e. a bad faith agent) because it gives you better grounds for a ban.

Another issue that I see is ban length. A short ban is great as a warning, or to tell the user to cool their head; while permaban is great when you want to convey “we the mod team do not you here, fuck off”. A two months ban is the worst of both worlds.

Based on the original post of this thread, this comment, the modlog, and an “innocent until proved guilty” approach, I have no reason to distrust the OP.

As such, what I’m going to say might be wrong, and I’m ready to apologise if it is; but I do not think that it is wrong.

What the fuck, !worldnews@lemmy.ml mod team? If OP is being accurate, at least one of you is bloody irrational, to the point that the mod is unable to understand the difference between “here’s why this discourse is bad” and support to said bad discourse.

I get that it’s hard to recruit new mods in Lemmy, but remember - a bad mod is worse than no mod. In other words, IMO you guys should seriously consider to review each others’ mod actions and perhaps expurging a mod or two.

OP: your mileage will vary when it comes to Lemmy moderation. Some communities are moderated by sensible people; some, well… you know. Sadly there’s not much that you can do against this, except perhaps avoiding those comms. (inb4 Reddit is not an option in this regard; here, shitty mods are like stepping on shit, but there it’s like drowning in it.)

I also think that mod actions need more transparency. I’m thankful to the developers for the modlog, but I do not think that it is enough. IMO the content being removed should be still visible, when not illegal, with a big (USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST/COMMENT) in it.

Also, the current modlog should at least clarify which team was responsible for a mod action - the comm mods, the comm’s instance admins, or the user’s instance admins. And there should be a way for mods to report users upstream to the instance’s admins.

So were there many Roman citizens in Britannia, or was it a pretty small ratio of Romans to locals?

Relevant detail: this changed a lot in 212.

Before that date, Roman citizenship basically implied Roman culture, language and lifestyle; but in that year Caracalla passed an edict granting citizenship to all free men in the Empire, so a lot of non-Latin-speaking locals were to be considered Roman citizens. (And taxed as such).

That said, I’d estimate the ratio of Latin speakers in the province to be 3~6% in the 4th century, based on a few Wikipedia numbers:

• Roman army, family, dependents: 125k people. Likely 100% Latin speakers. You also get a few bureaucrats but they’re numerically insignificant.
• Urban population: 240k people, including the above. The others were likely a mix of Brittonic and Latin speakers.
• Total population: 3.6 million people. Unless urban, likely to be Brittonic speakers.

Did the Roman soldiers give commands to the local elites, who would then tell the locals what to do?

Not quite. The army was responsible for the enforcement of the rules, but the ones commanding the local elites and the army were former consuls appointed as governors.

And would you say that life changed much for the locals under the new rule?

I’m not sure at all. But I guess that, for both the slaves and the general working class, there was barely a difference. You still work to the bone, and die an ungrateful death, no matter if you’re doing it for the sake of a local tribal chief or for some “imperator” in the middle of nowhere.

As @GreyShuck@feddit.uk correctly highlighted, it wasn’t even Latin that displaced so much of the local language. It was the Germanic tribals invading the islands later on. So I’ll focus specifically on the Roman role.

The Roman process of Latinisation was rather slow. For reference: Gallia was conquered in 58-50 BCE, but odds are that Gaulish survived until the ~sixth? century of the common era, 600 years later. That’s because the Romans didn’t really give much of a fuck about what rural local folks spoke - if they rebel you kill them and done, problem solved.

Instead they were actively placing colonies in the conquered regions (to give land to Roman citizens) and converting the local elites to Roman habits and customs, because unlike the farmers the elites could be actually dangerous if rebellious.

The same applies to Britannia. Except that it was conquered ~a century after Gallia, it’s a fucking island in the middle of nowhere with harder access, it doesn’t grow grapes or olives, grain production in the Empire was mostly in Africa and Egypt so odds are that they couldn’t reliably grow their wheat variety there either… really, the island was mostly a tin mining outpost.

Another factor to consider is the distribution of the Roman settlements in the area:

Are you noticing a pattern? Most settlements were in the Southeast, specially the larger ones (in yellow, full of Roman citizens). Perhaps not surprisingly the extant Brittonic languages are spoken further West, when you couple this with the tribal invasions. (That’s simply because of the Fretum Oceani aka Strait of Dover. It was easier to reach the island by there.)

In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can’t hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.

I’ve ditched TV when I was 14. (I don’t regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.

Unless I recognise the number, I’m not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I’m probably not the only one doing it.

Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it’s everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers (“how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?”).

For the morons downvoting the post: STOP SHOOTING THE MESSENGER DAMMIT. Problems don’t go away if you hide them, OP is morally right on highlighting the issue.

In addition to what OP said: check the admin and creator of the instance, outright claiming to be a MAP. That’s just a paedophile under another name.

Yeah, he isn’t multiplying booze like the OG Jesus was.

He’s the modern Jesus.

This post assumes that a meaningful amount of defed instances are caused by simple lack of agreement. Often, it’s an orthogonal matter - it boils down to instance A actually understanding something about the userbase of instance B and saying “I’m not dealing with this shit, it’ll make the instance worse for its own users”. For example: the typical user of B might be disingenuous, or preach immoral prescriptions, behave like a chimp, or be a bloody stupid piece of trash that should’ve stayed in Reddit to avoid smearing its stupidity everywhere here.

Are instance admins too eager to pull the trigger for defed? Perhaps, in some cases; specially because it handles groups of users instead of individuals. But those cases are better addressed through actual examples, not through a meme talking on generic grounds.

I half-agree with this. I think that this depends a lot on the topic and, while the smaller amount of comments does hurt discussion depth, the individual comments themselves partially offset this by being more thoughtful.

And, while anecdotal, I think that there’s a considerably lower ratio of comments with negative discussion value here in Lemmy than in Reddit. I’m not even talking about the out-of-place jokes (although they add noise), but shit like this:

• “waaah, TL;DR!!” discouraging in-depth explainations
• feigned lack of understanding as ad nauseam tactic
• context illiteracy
• unchecked assumptions towards other users, for the sake of ad hominem
• “trust me”

Don’t get me wrong; you do find this crap here, but IMO it’s way less than in Reddit. And they hurt discussion because they either waste the time of the more thoughtful and knowledgeable users, or outright disengage them.

Let’s see if Lemmy has that too.

I’m aremovedatty today, so why not? :^) [EDIT: yes, it has. I wrote “a bit chatty” without spaces.]

The Scunthorpe problem is an additional issue, caused by failure to identify unit (“word”) boundaries correctly. It can be solved with the current means, or at least tweaked for false negatives (e.g. don’t identify “fuckingcunt”) instead of false positives (e.g. identify “Scunthorpe”).

The problem that I’m highlighting is on another level, that even LLMs have a really hard time with: that each unit can be used to convey [at least in theory] an infinite amount of concepts. They usually come “bundled” with a few of them, but as we humans use them, we either add or remove some. For slurs this has the following two effects:

• it’s possible to pick a word often used as a slur and cancel its slur value in a certain context, or even make it stop being taken as a slur by default.
• it’s possible to pick any common word and use it as a slur.

I’ll post the example that I was thinking about. It doesn’t use a slur but it’s the same mechanism.

My cat is odd. He whimpers for food when we’re dining, chases and fetches toys, and when the doorbell rings he runs to the door, meowing nonstop. It’s like I got a really weird, meowing dog instead. My sister even walks this weird dog on a leash once in a while.

In that utterance the word “dog” is not being associated with 🐶, but to an odd example of 🐱, as the meaning of the word has been negotiated through the utterance. It’s the same deal with slurs: it’s possible to cancel their value as a slur in a certain utterance, depending on the rest of the utterance and external context. Black English speakers often do this with the “n” word* (used to convey “mate, bro, kin” among them), and slur reclamation is basically this on a higher level.

*another IMO legitimate situation is metalinguistic - using the word to refer to the word itself. I’m not using it here but I don’t see a problem with it.