YSK: this is clearly entirely jurisdiction-dependent and we don’t all live in the USA.

Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.

Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.

I’ll inconveniently only have it online when I’m at home

So this is like a dial-up website where you have to hope that the webmaster’s in?

Sure. But social media is becoming a nightmare. It’s literally destroying democracy. As things stand, I’m not even convinced the fediversal version is an improvement. And if it’s not, then personally I don’t care how many people are pushed away. In as far as technical fixes are possible to the myriad problems of social media, I believe these might be a couple of them. That’s all I’m saying.

Sure. But in theory, with (slightly) better resources, this would be my solution.

On posting, crawl the link and cache its content. Compare with quote on the basis of some generous threshold of similarity.

do I just want to shit on ai in the comments

Laudable honesty. The problem is that other people have to read the shit.

But to vote without engaging with the actual content is just to “sort” posts based on feelings. Who cares?

It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article

This is the root problem. Upvoting and downvoting headlines on the basis of vibes. It adds zero value. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not least the upvoters and (especially) downvoters themselves, who get nothing out of it but the tiniest of vacuous dopamine hits. It’s the original sin of social media.

My preferred solutions:

• no voting at all without a registered click on the linked article
• no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article

Deep-seated problems call for radical solutions. Both of these are technically feasible.

Some interesting thoughts - and questions - here. Seems you posted them in the wrong place, given the paltry response. Or possibly at the wrong time (i.e. 6 hours after the herd had moved on, a perennial problem with social media).

It isn’t based in XML, and modern devs don’t want to use XML. As I’m not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

XML is space-inefficient with lots of redundancy, and therefore considered to be ugly. Coders tend to have tidy minds so these things take on an importance that they don’t really merit. It’s also just fashion: markup, like XML and HTML, is a thing of the 90s, so using them is the coder equivalent of wearing MC Hammer pants.

This kind of purity policing is deeply offputting IMO. And certainly won’t help build federated social media.

This is a decent point. Ignore the inane downvotes you’re getting for simply expressing your opinion in a polite and good-faith manner.

Personally I share your take, but you’re not helping the cause by insulting people.

Between what the law says and what actually happens, there is a yawning gulf. It’s the same in basically all jurisdictions where there are animal-welfare laws. The meat industry is powerful and consumers are unrelenting in their clamor for cheap meat. With such incentives, the weakest link is always going to be animals, which by definition have no voice.

This is exactly my mental response to this kind of story. Total hypocrisy. Try to ignore the pushback, cognitive dissonance is a powerful thing.

There is no expectation that everyone has to agree with you, either offline or online.

Egregious straw man, obviously I don’t think that.

enormous misunderstanding what [downvotes] are

Says who? You? What if it were you “misunderstanding” this? I know your version is the majority one, but there are plenty of people who agree with me that downvoting is toxic, hence the existence of downvote-free instances.

A downvote is softer than a negative comment, and if you think a downvote is a slap in the face, how should I interpret your negative comment? A kick in the face?

The big difference, to bore you with what you must already know, is that a downvote affects in most default configs the visibility of the comment. So it’s effectively a mild form of censorship, which IMO is not “softer” than a negative reply. And it’s certainly not better than than a constructive negative reply, which, believe it or not, is possible to do.

The best argument I have seen for your case is that downvoting provides an off-ramp for potentially sterile conflict. I.e. people hit the downvote button instead of replying with rage. That’s a decent pragmatic argument. But whatever reason I personally manage to control my rage at other people’s “wrong” opinions, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask them to do the same.

on somewhat of a crusade against downvotes

It’s true. For me, to downvote an opinion (and this is what the vast majority of downvoting is) is the virtual equivalent of slapping someone in the face, or telling them to shut up. We don’t do it in person, we shouldn’t do it virtually.

Yeah that’s true but in this scenario it’s your fault, not theirs.

Every social-media platform strips EXIF metadata before publishing the photo.

So the issue is the trustworthiness of the social-media platform itself. Personally I always strip the metadata before sharing anything anywhere.

A nuanced take in response to casually lobbed accusations of Nazism? How come you haven’t been banned?