Yeah. Rather a decent number of communities have actually moved to Discord, or are trying to, including a decent sampling of larger communities like MFA.
There's been some kind of wonky takes in Fediverse about some of those moves that seem to reject the validity of migrations that aren't coming to our spaces. Mods will post "going to Discord, fuck this place" and they're like "it's temporary, Discord isn't a forum".
Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.
Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.
Reading history ... that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it's ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism's gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the 'common' population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.
The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it's very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers' seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.
So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.
Sure; it's just so good at being a chat app that it makes a terrible forum.
My understanding is that it can be done and with a whole host of third party tools and bots and a little legion of mods - but that's a ton of work both setup and ongoing, just to reshape Discord into the sort of format that Reddit or Kbin/Lemmy offer pretty much right out the box.
For sure - bad people can do good things for bad reasons. Hell, bad people can do good things for bad reasons and still be popular and viewed as positive or even "good" by some or even most people affected.
A king being possessive of their crown is a great example - Machiavelli's prince placed a great deal of emphasis on arguing that a ruler who solely wants to retain power for the sake of holding power must still use their power in a way that is positive and is perceived as positive. The most effective way to keep power for selfish reasons are to keep the economy and the judiciary stable and to keep the common folk happy and pacified. The happier "everyone" is with the King's rule, the more power can be abused against individuals without leading to revolt.
Just like any party, you need a motivation that’s compatible with cooperation and the narrative in some capacity. The only difference is that in stereotypical ‘good’ parties, players can just default to ‘save the kingdom because it is Right’ rather than having to think about it.
This is kind of what I was getting at there - that good for goodness' sake is not an inherent motivation for evil parties, so a party lacking the motivation of a moral compass needs alternative motives to replace it, otherwise they wind up directionless. That can still be a self-imposed moral code, like "no women or children" or "slavery crosses a line even for me" - and that can have good or bad or neutral moral outcomes regardless of its motivations.
Just that, above-table, the players and the DM need to acknowledge that need and contribute to addressing it, or evil campaigns very easily degenerate into un-fun gameplay experiences due to aimless normlessness.
The issue there is that it's kind of like saying "the only way to fix society is if everyone followed the law" - it places all assessments of success behind a nearly impossible standard. It also places all responsibility for that success solely onto mods putting their own interests ahead of their communities and/or the interest that brought them to volunteer as mods.
I participated in the protest, I'm here because of them, I facilitated protest actions within 'my' communities that wanted to protest - but I don't think there was a world where mods alone could bring the site to its knees and force Reddit to backpedal. If anything - I think that any hope of dramatic action causing change died on the spot the moment the protest became "about mods" and users experienced the protest as something mods were doing to communities in order to reach Reddit.
So many mods acted unilaterally to shutter communities and the impact of that approach cultivated reddit's existing anti-mod sentiments to fuel opposition to the protests and the cause. The vast bulk of people I saw trolling in protest subs, or arguing against protest in my own subs, were users who already had a history of disliking "reddit mods" as a significant theme in their account history.
But to average users, their shit and their communities and the things they like about reddit were being "taken away" by mods in a dispute between mods and Reddit. The hijack of messaging around the API to be about modding and about how much harder it'd be and how the API changes would affect mods - meant that users were also indirectly being told this was an issue that didn't affect them if they didn't use the apps affected.
The only dramatic impact that would have swayed Reddit Inc and won the matter was a fairly unanimous buy-in from the average user, a clear unified front, and a dramatic drop in user engagement. As long as they have the data showing that people are showing up and are using the site and are interested in using the site, they can deal with the interruptions to major communities and pull more compliant volunteers from the users that remain.
One key problem is that a "villain" is generally more powerful than players are for most of the campaign - using that as a starting point can wind up introducing serious issues with normlessness. Becoming a villain should be the aspiration and the apex accomplishment of the campaign, rather than the starting point for it.
It's more necessary than in other campaigns to model a world where there's an in-world reason why other parties of higher level aren't straight-up murderhoboing their way to ruling the kingdom. Or even that they did - but how would those guys respond to your players doing that in "their" kingdom? Worlds need a reason for players to follow the rules - not that they are challenging you as DM and you need to punish them for playing 'wrong' - but that the world exists in a state where murderhobo isn't optimal play, even if you're evil - that no matter how strong a party of five get, there are still other forces that can put them in check somehow, and when they finally break that rule ... the campaign ends. They won.
As a DM, often you need to make sure the game contains bigger and stronger rails in the early stages of the campaign. Maybe that's some goal that the party agreed to above-table, maybe it's some context of the party like working for someone bigger, meaner, and eviller - but the call to adventure is much more tenuous with evil characters. For good parties, they stumble through fetchquests and ratting until they stumble across an evil scheme that needs foiling - but for evil characters, there's not really the same "diabolically good conspiracy" that they need to foil before the timer runs out. They need to initiate, rather than react. Or you need to provide that initiation for them, as DM.
It's very easy for a directionless evil party to just wander the countryside robbing shops and killing people, if you're not giving them something more concrete to do and they're not creating it themselves.
I keep mine next to my tiger-repellent rock!
Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch ...
"Just be yourself!"
No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.
This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they're right - you can't fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you're not isn't going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it's never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.
None of those grown-ups were like "Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don't spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game."
That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just ... didn't occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being 'fake' in order to build an equally-fake relationship.
It took a friend's brother taking me aside to make it 'click' - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like "So the whole object is all 'real you' yeah? But any time you're talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that's facing you. It's all you, it's all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don't sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that's what's on your mind that day."
I'm no GPT booster, but I think that the real problem with detectability here
It will almost always be detectable if you just read what is written. Especially for academic work.
is that it requires you to know the subject and content already, and to be giving the paper a relatively detailed reading. For a rube reading the paper, trying to learn from it - a lot of GPT content is easily mistaken as legitimate. And it's getting better. We're not safe simply assuming that AI today is as good as it will ever get and the clear errors we can detect cannot ever be addressed.
Penetrating academic writing, for academics, is probably one of the highest barriers of any writing task, AI or not.
But being dismissive of the threat of AI content because it's not able to convincingly fake some of the hardest writing that real people do is maybe sidestepping a lot of much more casual writing - that still carries significance and consequence.
Worth noting they're not just 'discontinuing' coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.
This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it's not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.
No, it’s mainly called Creme caramel, Panna cotta or Crema Catalan.
All three of these are actually different dishes.
The dish in the photo is called "creme caramel" to the French - but throughout Spain, the Latin Americas, and southeast asia, it is "flan". The version of flan here has direct pedigree linking it to the cake also going by the same name - it was at some point merged. The custard was baked in or on the cake/pastry base. Over time, the two portions were made separately, and which portion got to keep the name has primarily been split along language/culture lines - those from French tradition use 'flan' for the cake, while those from Spanish tradition use 'flan' for the custard.
Flan or creme caramel is effectively a soft custard of milk and eggs, cooked in a special mold with a thin caramel in the bottom, then inverted to serve.
Panna Cotta is "cooked cream" and is made from cream thickened with gelatin. It is a thicker and heavier dessert, and is generally not served with caramel.
Creme Catalan is "almost identical" to Creme brulee, which is a custard - no caramel - that is then topped with a layer of toasted or broiled sugar, forming a hard crust. The only formal difference between Catalan and Brulee is that going by 'official recipes' the former uses milk, while the latter uses cream.
I think that this is like wrapping a kid in bubble-wrap, though. And like, not in that "over-coddling" metaphorical sense, but much more literal - sure, the kid can't get scrapes if they fall off their bike, but the other kids are going to make fun of the kid wearing bubble wrap.
You don't necessarily want to give them an unrestricted mainline to the worst of the internet, but you don't want to overcorrect so hard that you're causing other problems.
As toxic as it is, as much as there's space for harms and bullying, or that the internet holds porn and violent content ... the internet and social media spaces are where a huge portion of kids social lives live, and barring them from participating in that will do one of two things - teach them to get sneaky in order to bypass the restriction, or force them into an 'outsider' role in their peer group. In the first, it's a lost cause and all you're doing is making it inconvenient without addressing the harms - and ensuring they can't talk to you about what comes from that space. In the latter, there are strong social and self-esteem costs associated with excluding your child from having a social life with other children - is it "better" for the parent to do the harm instead of the other children? Is it better for your relationship with that child, long-term, their trust in you, or your ability to support them?
The kid restricted to "dumb phone only, no internet, no apps" is the current generations' equivalent of that one kid that wasn't allowed to go to the park, or the mall, or hang out on the street - whatever any given past generation used as their youthful Third Place, where they could socialize and hang out separate from school and without adults actively supervising them. And it's never been great for the kid whose parents won't let them participate in the common social life that their peers have.
It's far more fruitful to give them age-appropriate education related to their use of and relationship with the internet and provide a controlled and supported introduction than it is to simply bar their access for several years. You're either stunting their social development in order to avoid harms to their social development (?!?!) or you're simply winding the proverbial rubber band tighter and tighter against an inevitable rebellion - at which point they're jumping in headlong without ever developing any sort of media literacy or social media savvy and never had a chance to build coping and resilience for whatever rabbit holes they're likely to fall into .