The Dangers of Microsoft Pluton

Simple solution: don't care about up or down -votes. Believe me, Internet points are a sham and waste of time. Focus on interesting conversations and connections instead.

It is much worse than he thinks. If I was to write out the worse case scenario the MS employee would have no choice but to consider it.

Therefore win 13 will be a theme for ubuntu packaged with a FOSS version of office. MS will award large weekly prizes for the most useful FOSS app extending the eco system. It will be sold on multi TB external drives that work like live USB only daisy chained. Weekly new releases cramped with so much free stuff every neck beard around the world must own all of them. A few movies, some music, a game or 2. Each comes with a poster, a t shirt and a book. Prices go up and down using RNG making some releases rare and hard to get.

Reminds me of computer magazines bundled first with cassettes, then floppy disks then CDROMS, 80s to 90s. Occasionally some other gadgets too. Everybody like us was buying them.

I'm so confused... What are you two getting on about?

Is it just me or is it like two GPT-3 bots having a conversation?

Quite scary isn’t it? What a time to be alive. I’d never have believed that I am seriously questioning whether a conversation on the internet is real. Even after all the gpt3 quiz sites, like the one where you have to guess if the code is generated or real.

This is word soup.

you can't have an interesting conversations if it takes 3 or so powerusers to gag you

I see tons of interesting comments flagged/dead within minutes. there are rarely controversial, or low-quality, or rule-breaking

there are plenty of topics you are only allowed to express a pre-approved opinion about, and I can't even give you examples without getting muted

Indeed - I'm pretty sure a small cabal of people with low self-esteem is responsible.

Speculation, Zuckerberg, Musk read new-sites like this, can't bear their egos to be deflated. I don't think that's necessarily realistic, but I would suspect someone like that, personally.

Agreed.

However, interesting conversations are missed because of noise (e.g. down-votes) - I'm less likely to interact with a down-voted post, they usually are not as informative or interesting.

Proposed solution - abolish negative points entirely, points should be per-thread, not per user. If a user is causing frequent problems (frequently downvoted), per admin review then issue ban/rate limits, etc.

I view the positive/negative points mostly as a sentiment rating - if I receive downvotes I can tell my point is unpopular/uncontroversial, if not I know someone found it interesting. That does affect how I post in two ways:

I make more effort to expose common context for posts which are down-voted, people who are lazy and don't care won't read the expanded post, people who are more open-minded (the ones I want to attract and start conversations with) are more likely to come around to my viewpoint, or at least offer more interesting conversation (disagreement is necessary to have a discussion).

So I find both positive and negative votes to be useful, even on my own posts. Even the manner in which I've been down-voted recently tells me something, and it tells me valuable data about who has which opinions.