whelk

Boy, the trees are really sneezing today.

I can see where you're coming from. I think you might be conflating the idea of what I consider worth taking the effort to block a Lemmy user over with what I might personally consider good ideas or opinions of inherent value. If I see a single post spewing genocidal rhetoric I'm not going to block the user and think that my blocking them is somehow going to make a difference in the underlying issue. I might want to see future the responses to their post (hopefully arguing against it), or I'll just scroll past it.

Now if I'm seeing that user consistently posting that same kind of thing as I browse around Lemmy, sure, I'll block them even if their posts are written in the most tactful and respectful way possible, because at that point it's become repetitive clutter that I don't want to constantly see while browsing Lemmy. The user blocking part comes in when something has become a consistent annoyance or frustration, because I find it's not worth the effort to block every user who posts something awful the first time I see it rather than just moving on.

Because you have primed yourself to ignore anyone who disagrees with you with any degree of vigour.

We might be experiencing some semantics issues. I don't equate angry or frustrated posts to inflammatory and trollish posts. I'm talking about when people are smugly trying to "own" or "dunk on" someone, or being excessively rude and accusatory (I can imagine some situations where this might sometimes be considered justified), or baiting a reaction trap. And I'm generalizing, not arguing a hard unbreakable rule. I agree there's nothing wrong with getting angry or frustrated about important issues that are a real problem, and I admit some of my most frustrating interactions have been with people who use the approach of "I'm being civil (in my argument for something awful, like genocidal rhetoric) and your angry response means I win the argument by default because I am being 'reasonable' while you are not." I really do get frustrated by that rhetoric playbook tactic. So I do think I see where you're coming from.

I do agree we've had different experiences, and that none are universal. I was caught in an "echo chamber" that almost had me voting in support of California's Proposition 8 (ban of same-sex marriage) back in the day and had I not been willing to listen to opposing views going against what I had been raised to believe in, I might still be trapped in that environment that I still see some of my old friends and family stuck in.

(TL;DR: I'm blocking users I feel are significantly cluttering Lemmy with trolling or annoying posts of no substance, not ones that have different ideas than my own. Acknowledging different ideas and perspectives is good.)

I feel like we're already being hurt by algorithms and whatnot only sending us what we want to hear and filtering out opposing views or ideas. If someone disagrees with me or has an idea different from how I already think, I should know that someone is out there who thinks differently than I do. Maybe I'll even learn something or come to appreciate a perspective I hadn't considered before. It can be interesting and even enlightening to see differing viewpoints, and that's part of what's so fun to me about the Internet. We can easily see there are all sorts of people out there with different thoughts and ideas.

We're all bound to lose our cool sometimes, but if I see a poster consistently being inflammatory or trollish, I don't find value in trying to digest that kind of exchange. Some people may enjoy watching the setting of the bait and seeing others walk into the trap of engaging. It's just not the type of content I'm into and I found it was becoming increasingly common so I started blocking users that I felt were consistently producing these kinds of situations.

Yesterday evening I was feeling the same way, so I started blocking users that are clearly posting inflammatory or aggressively brigadey content (note: not to be confused with things I don't agree with. It's about tone and tact, not content), or things that I find annoying to see over and over like the same trollish meme and emoji images. After only an evening of doing that, my Lemmy experience has been worlds better. I did notice a particular instance being the trend which makes me look forward to instance blocking, though at the moment I'd prefer to still do so on an individual user basis.

Coming out of lurker mode just to sigh at you for this.

I'm always glad when I see someone recommend Night in the Woods. It took me to a place no other game has.

I was going to say Vagrant Story but only update the menu system and add a way to quick switch weapons without going into menus. I love the graphics as they are. Every time I see a remaster of some older game where they give it ultra smoothed graphics or completely redone graphics it just doesn't feel like the same game anymore. If the graphics are jagged and pixely it just means my imagination is doing more of the heavy lifting which can be really cool.

I read this earlier today and I can't recall how I got to it (I don't think it was this post, but may have been). I've been flip flopping between using a flat CMS or just writing a script to generate the html files so they can fit nicely into the rest of my minimalist personal website.

I've been working on my Neocities site today. I need to see if there's a suitable webring I could get in on, that'd be amazing.

Highfive! It is, and part of the reason I use it so often is because I just enjoy programming in it. I feel like enjoying the process is important even if the result is a fraction of a second slower than if I had used another language, because enjoying the process means I'm actually going to get the thing done.

"Why are you trying to measure the contents of the glass?"

This is literally any other programmer when I use Python for a project, telling me to switch to their preferred language instead because "Python is just for scripting."