It’s a bad deal that only policy could really fix at this point.

If you’re the only store with real menu prices then customers just get price shocked at what they’re actually going to be paying when they can go next door to another restaurant that doesn’t tell you the full price up front. Customers would be upset at a mid $18 burger, but are fine with a mid $16 burger + $2 tip.

Imo, the problems stem from the forced rat race of no one having enough money excluding the rich. Prices being high wouldn’t matter if people got paid more, but cause we’re not getting paid more, the companies that target the general population just make everything into cheap knockoff crap to still turn the same or better profit margins.

The only thing that exists here is user level upvotes/downvotes.

Lemmy lets you see how many times you’ve liked another person’s previous comments/posts. So your personal score appears next to people for you to see only. I like this more this a karma system since it makes Lemmy a bit more tight knit.

I’ve been surprised a few times now though with users I’ve liked in the past making comments that were not so great down the line, but it makes me have to accept the reverse as well. Some people I must have really disagreed with in previous conversations have almost made great points and I ended up agreeing with them in those instances.

TL;DR: Not everyone’s perfect but people can grow and it’s good to give them room to do so was my takeaway.

I hate to say it but I think that’s the point of why some people, mostly bots, brigade.

Imo, it’s a 4chan/discord/twitter style of attack to foster cult-like behaviors. It’s often purposeful done to drive out dissenters and it simultaneously makes it appear like your opinion is widely shared, while in reality it could be a very vocal minority, alt-accounts chiming in, or bots doing the brigading.

Many Lemmy communities have done a decent job so far at keeping bots out imo, which is something other social media platforms like Reddit don’t even attempt at doing at scale since it inflates active account numbers.

I’ve been off Reddit for awhile; when I looked over the past week it seems much deader.

Posts are getting much less engagement there than they were for the past few years, imo. Take my opinion with a grain of salt though cause that’s just for the most front page communities I happened to visit.

I think the leadership is less socially conservative compared to the past, but they represent some very conservative bases so they more or less are having to crawl progress forward or they risk a schism.

The previous pope, Pope Francis, stacked the Vatican with more progressive leaning cardinals. I believe Pope Leo will be following in Pope Francis’ footsteps in terms of appointments.

Both likes and dislikes, imo. Bad actors and their bots can make it appear as though their stance is a widely held belief, they can dog pile dissidents, they often attack a straw-person for a point you never made to pull others against you and derail the conversation, etc.

With user level tools at your disposal, such as on BlueSky, you can at least coordinate a response to flag potential bad actors and even have the options to mute/block them by default. If your account were to be hacked and publishing disruptive content which was not something you would post, then your account could end up on these mute/block lists and you’d need to communicate the issue with the individuals that maintain these mute/block lists.