If most voters keep picking one guy, these three parties will become two parties, or the two more-similar parties are fucked. That is what Duverger’s law is about. It doesn’t mean third parties can never win - it means a three-party system cannot last.

If Sri Lankan voters remember how they own goddamn electoral system works, they can have a four-party system, no problem. But as you point out, they’re acting like they have America’s elections, where this schmuck who got 17% is now a massive liability to the runner-up who got 33%. If those two presumably-liberal blocs got together, they could handily oppose the leftist bloc. But if they’re competing for the same exclusive votes then they’ll both become irrelevant.

Sri Lanka already fixed the thing that breaks Plurality. Their voters just aren’t using it, for some goddamn reason.

Or they were the people who made this year’s result possible.

Objectively not. Every single person who wanted him, last time, could have listed him… also. They sure didn’t. His support was three percent. That’s not a viable path to power, that’s a punchline.

He’s done stuff since then. Right? Campaigned, presumably? Been in the news? Built up the expectation that a meaningful number of people would prefer him over other major candidates? That is what made this result possible. Losing a prior election is not a prerequisite.

Frankie Boyle: “Humans actually make quite poor shields. That’s why we invented… the shield.”

Dude had 3% support despite everyone being able to toss him a vote just-in-case. Anyone who voted for only him, “last election,” was a fool. That negligible support is not what made him a viable candidate in the separate election they “just did.”

No kidding your choices depend on how other people vote, that’s what democracy is. If you can’t rally a shitload of people behind your guy… you lose. That part is not the failure of Plurality. Plurality blows because two similar groups can be wildly popular and still get destroyed by a minority of schmucks.

The winner of this election was not decided by everyone seeing through The Matrix or whatever and deciding to defeat a broken electoral system. It sounds like 95% of them are functionally unaware of which electoral system they have.

It causes massive damage with ramming attacks.

Did it, though? The iceberg kept floating.

What you want is Blizzaga, but wetter.

Quest 3 spinoff game! Comes with free bucket.

Don’t phrase it like they fucked up. Their publisher made them stop doing the subgenre they pioneered, to chase the latest “it always makes a billion dollars!” trend, and now they’re resuming things they actually wanted to do.

People acting in their best interests is how it happens. It’s an electorate avoiding splits. Given the system you’re voting under - you should vote for someone who has a chance of winning. Otherwise you might write-in some special favorite candidate that no other human being cares about, and accomplish literally nothing. Voting for a third party with single-digit support is not much better.

People voting against their own interests would be… not bothering to write in a second preference. It is the same fuckup: someone who cannot imagine their very favorite guy losing.

By the sound of things it’s more like nobody wanted anything to do with the major-party incumbent. Duverger’s law is about how there tend to be two parties. Three and one are equally unstable. When a race becomes a total rout, like a 30-point spread, that dominance can be seen as a power vacuum.

… also, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots. It’s not a Plurality voting system. They have an automatic runoff. That’s one of the more obvious fixes that allows people to even consider supporting a third party, without playing Russian roulette against their own foot.

… wait, Sri Lanka has ranked ballots! What the fuck? They’re not even using Plurality, they’re doing RCV!

Ranked Choice is a hot mess on its own, but-- oh for fuck’s sake I’ll just use the example I always use. Say an election goes like this:

40% vote A > B > C.
35% vote C > B > A.
25% vote B > C > A.

Plurality says A wins, because Plurality sucks. You don’t even need a bare majority. You just need everybody else to split up.

RCV says C wins: B has the fewest top votes, so they’re eliminated. The race becomes 40% A > C versus 60% C > A. Better… but still wrong, because 65% of people would prefer B > C.

Condorcet methods like Ranked Pairs get that right. They model every runoff: A vs B is 40-60, A vs C is 40-60, B vs C is 65-35. B wins every 1v1 and is obviously the best candidate according to these voters. The supermajority prefers B.

And of course Approval Voting is just letting people check multiple names, and it somehow matches Condorcet results when enough people vote, because you are unique, just like everybody else. Genuinely there is no good reason we’re not doing Approval by default.

And what do you think happens next?

Those two parties won’t keep slapfighting for an uneven split of 60% of the vote, while this third party takes power with 40% of the vote. They will merge. Or the smaller one will simply vanish, if its voters prefer the bigger loser to the plurality winner.

Even in the US, where plurality has a hideous repeated bottleneck on which two parties can meaningfully exist, we did not always have these two parties.

It is buck wild that these networks can generate shitty English by sight alone. These aren’t the robots that scanned all the books in the library. This is purely visual.

Nonprofit gacha. That’s a new one.

Still no.

Most soaps wish they could be as melodramatic as the rugby baby scene.

“Because otherwise there wouldn’t be a mooovie.”

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

The difference between this abusive horseshit and any cheaper example is quantitative - not qualitative.

I’d argue Unity’s implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we’ll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.

Oracle only gets away with that shit because they’re an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.

Cutie.

Because that’s how it’s fucking spelled.

“Why does YAML suck?” is a question. “Why YAML sucks” is an explanation.

Qt? They insist it’s “cute,” which, no.

Godot? Don’t care.

No amount of precedent will get me to stop pronouncing it G’doh.

This isn’t a Qt situation where the people who named it are objectively wrong about how those letters should get said. I just do not like any of the other options.