I mean they deter comments from the people leaving the downvotes. Anyone wanting not to be deterred by downvotes can adjust settings to not see them.

But what I’m saying is, they are good because they likely deter toxic thoughtless comments.

I’m fine with seeing things I don’t like or agree with if it is a fully formed thought, but I still think downvotes are a nice trap for lazy inarticulate people to feel like they are doing the equivalent of dropping a low effort flame comment while actually doing basically nothing. I have display of vote scores disabled and don’t have to know or think about the approval of people who are only voting, which is nice. If they had something to say that isn’t already fully communicated by the downvote button, maybe they would say it instead despite downvoting being an option.

upvotes with hostile intent

It’s not great, but at least downvotes barely affect anything other than visibility of top level comments on popular posts, and are easy to hide. Better that than people disagreeing using lazy insults and tired truisms.

It’s nice to fantasize about but realistically we’re never getting back to a world without a working global internet of computers.

They have a point, but ultimately it’s still a biased rationalization. The idea that life is impermanent and you can’t defer doing what you care about with it is true, but it does bug me when this is posted that it’s also an imagined, hostile caricature from the perspective of a character who sees people (in particular people who have found themselves in debt slavery to his organized crime group) as just worthless losers. That’s its focus, as a putdown from that perspective; portraying a man who works a low paying job, can’t get women, commits the sins of gambling and drinking. Unstated but implied is that this is about a failure of achievement that is at its core financial, that positions himself above them both by being rich and doing fucked up things that are by his logic “meaningful”.

The OP comic is kind of an interesting contrast to that, making a similar point, but about a woman with a successful career, where that success might not hold much meaning.

Wasn’t this a villain speech? I don’t fully remember it but I feel like it might mean something different with the context

does that ever actually happen

Woah, this one is a little different

If other people are also immortal, the awkwardness of all of them eventually becoming your exes

a few dozen, mostly hexbear users. Though that was mostly from when I started using Lemmy, I haven’t felt the need to block anyone in a long time. My list of blocked communities is much larger.

I guess there are probably a lot of people trading that stuff dumb enough to be networking on facebook and instagram with their real identities

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that’s the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

Sadly, Porn

I don’t know how to describe it, expect to be confused and offended and gaslit.

IIRC it spammed websites with traffic, didn’t conceal your IP at all, and some people got arrested for using it to make some websites go down for a very brief period. Basically a way to use people who didn’t know what they were doing as cannon fodder

Could you elaborate? Does HOA mean something different in other countries?

Home owner’s association; when you buy a house and it is part of a HOA, you have to sign a contract to join the HOA as a requirement of buying, which means you have to pay dues and abide by the rules of the organization, and you have to require the next buyer to also join in order to sell your house.

IMO for some people arguing is a form of intimacy

it may be moral in some extreme examples

Are they extreme? Is bad censorship genuinely rare?

but there are means of doing that completely removed from the scope of microblogging on a corporate behemoth’s web platform. For example, there is an international organization who’s sole purpose is perusing human rights violations.

I think it’s relevant that tech platforms, and software more generally, has a sort of reach and influence that international organizations do not, especially when it comes to the flow of information. What is the limit you’re suggesting here on what may be done to oppose harmful censorship? That it be legitimized by some official consensus? That a “right to censor” exist and be enforced but be subject to some form of formalized regulation? That would exempt any tyranny of the most influential states.