The apps don’t actually help disabled people, they just exploit and rip them off.

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It is low-class and to be a good president, you do in fact have to be better than that.

Rejecting McDonald’s isn’t elitist, it’s intelligent. It’s overpriced disgusting garbage. The only way to eat it affordably is through the app which is what they use to exploit low-class people and the extreme poor – two completely separate groups. Donald Trump is not one of the extreme poor so guess which group he’s actually in (spoiler: it’s the low-class one).

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Well, you could organize with your communities to force your county to switch to green power instead of running coal plants non-stop.

Being politically active is one of the best things you as an individual could do.

They’re a proto-government really.

All governments do horrific things because all a government is is the most powerful organized violent group in an area. That’s all government ever has been.

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Shameful. Absolutely shameful.

You’re probably not wrong

I hope they’re wise enough to beam the power down close to the wifi frequency so it can’t, in fact, be used as a James Bond superweapon. But evil people could in principle build their own arrays and antennae up there to have just that.

Sure, why not.

I’ve moderated several subs back on Reddit, and I run the Real LGBTQ community here, so I know the score.

It’s not actually a true representation of the community’s opinion of you though. And that’s kind of the problem. People and companies can and will rig those votes in their favor, distorting important political debates and wreaking all kinds of havoc.

Karma is an inherently destructive thing for many reasons. For people, it is a representation of other people’s approval of you, so they’ll do anything to boost that number as highly as possible, even going so far as to make fake karma farming accounts, create botnets to upvote themselves and downvote opponents in arguments, and post garbage content instead of engaging in meaningful conversation with other people. For corporations, it’s a marketing tool they can exploit to manipulate public opinion, by creating or buying high-karma accounts to convince people to buy shit, or to mass downvote people who point out flaws in their arguments or products, or figure out what they’re planning and try to call them on it. They can use karma to discredit opponents, astroturf, and even sway elections indirectly. It’s one of the reasons why civil and political discourse have completely collapsed in the USA.

That list is not exhaustive

Which I don’t understand. It literally would be cheaper for them to use stevia or monk fruit and call it a day than to quibble over something so trivial.

That’s the kind of toxic mindset that killed Reddit.

You literally can just download the Lemmy program and install it on any computer you want to use as a server. I used to run Mastodon servers a few years ago, and it’s not without its hurdles, but with some Linux knowledge and a little bit of server admin knowhow, you absolutely could.

You’d need a computer you’re gonna use as a server, put Linux on it, then install NginX or Apache on it, then Lemmy, then set everything up and get a domain name to attach to the computer’s IP. Question mark, profit. It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but with some research and work, it can be done.

We could self-host using our own computers and infrastructure, and secure them from hackers.

1. Discourage people from using karma. You actually can turn off scores in your settings.

2. If any instance decides to put advertising on itself, leave immediately and get everyone else to do the same.

It’s not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not – their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.

Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.

Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I’ll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is displaying karma scores when it really should not be.