Go ask the magic productivity fairy to magic you up some free productivity. Come on. All the business magazines swear the magic productivity fairy just hands out free productivity, so you must be doing something wrong.

Did you remember to add a drop of your blood to the milk saucer so you could bind it to your will? What about making a salt circle so it couldn’t run away? Did you do your chant in transliterated fae or in enochian?

How about “it’s entirely possible to automatically delay updates by a month and have the computer give you a one week warning before they install where you can push things back by up to a week every time it pops up indefinitely, so you have the time to set whatever settings you need to not get the suck?”

It’s not ideal, but the reality of a properly configured Windows system is significantly less harrowing than everyone online would have you believe.

Come on, you know the big businesses wouldn’t put up with this shit, so just look up how Windows and these things are managed in Enterprise environments.

Windows sucks. It’s a corporate product made by people with incentives to make it suck. But they also have incentives to give businesses ways around the suck so they don’t lose their market position. So use those tools. If you can manage Linux you absolutely can manage Group Policy and a few lines of PowerShell.

Then use Pro or Enterprise edition and GPO to disable those features, like every business environment should be doing.

If you can navigate Linux you can handle Group Policy, I promise.

Hey, this doesn’t fit this comm. It’s meant to be for people intentionally making bad uis for shits and giggles, not for complaints about dark patterns actually out there.

Depends where you’re talking about. Unfortunately most of the US states haven’t figured out how to make going to the DMV (department of motor vehicles) not suck tremendously and how to keep it from taking up most of a day, so many places only do those checks whenever you have to renew the license plate tag/registration, and it’s done at the DMV itself. Usually once every couple of years.

Some states allow those inspections to be done by other approved locations. Different states have different timings on how often it’s required, and they all have differences as to what is actually tested and what is passing and failing.

I have a hard time believing this isn’t a shitpost project.

Don’t read/clear your replies and you too can achieve this glory:

There’s no need for them to go fishing when they’ve got more incriminating shit from lemmy data for free. Community subscriptions and even up and downvotes on lemmy aren’t private.

It is currently a hidden setting in Firefox’s about:config. They are removing it from there and no longer controlling it within Firefox itself so it will follow the setting set in you window manager (probably have the wrong term here, haven’t had my coffee yet), which is (generally) not hidden and available through a settings GUI. So you won’t have a web browser having different functionality than elsewhere on your machine.

If it’s hidden at that point, blame the window manager/desktop environment/whatever it’s called.

They are setting this as an optional feature. They are not just disabling it.

Ok, all of truth social has decided your community about books is now about Trump. A large group of dedicated fans decides that your “anything goes” forum is only for discussion of My Little Pony and spams MLP images on every other thread, preventing any other coversation.

Your idea about how things should work hinges on the presumption that all users are acting in good faith, which is not a given.

No one’s telling you that you can’t have the conversation. They’re telling you that you can’t have it in the space you want to.

And who gets to decide the difference between spam/trolling/advertising and off topic?

There’s a pretty big gap between should and inherently does.

And lemmy was designed with that sort of governance model at its core.

No reason you can’t exchange contact info with the others to continue it elsewhere in this hypothetical.

Welcome to ”How online discussion spaces work 101". Generally you have to coalesce power into the hands of a trusted few, lest all the thousands of knitters in the world decide that your gaming forum is their personal space for knitting. The general “ideal state” is benevolent dictatorship. If you’re lucky, you can get additional guardrails on top, but it’s ultimately a dictatorship under the hood (more on this later).

If you want a decent example of what social media with minimal rules looks like (what a lot of people seem to confuse as “democracy” or “free speech”), check out 4chan. It’s been a constant downward spiral for each fucking board on that site since their inception, which made even worse because they nearly unanomously didn’t even start off as good. Hope you enjoy people talking about premeditated SA, that only gets taken down sometimes if they mention it’s aimed at the underage!

Anyway, I can tell that you probably weren’t around for the “raids” that used to happen on the earlier internet. When your anime mmo forum gets targeted by 4chan’s /b/ users spamming whatever shock images they can get their hands on (I distinctly remember one with a whole fish half shoved up a hairy man asshole), you don’t want democracy. You don’t want those 200 people spamming ass-fish to turn the place into ass-fish central. You don’t want to take the time to take a vote, establish criteria, establish who is and isn’t allowed to vote in an attempt to keep new accounts made by spammers out, to make sure enough people all agree to the course of action, etc. The ass-fishers may legitimately outnumber the normal users. Would telling the normal users to suck it up and go elsewhere because they’re outnumbered by people acting in bad faith be fair? No. You want some people who are trusted by the community to come in and get rid of the ass-fish and ass-fishers. The members of the community could easily move on in the time it would take to do things in a different fashion.

There’s also arguments to be made for keeping spaces very strictly on topic to attempt to maintain a certain quality of conversation, like how reddit has many subs that don’t allow memes and push them to another sub, so deeper discussion isn’t drowned out by the more popular “junk food” content. It’s a central rule to how the internet works that the more popular a topic becomes, the more the discussions trend towards the more easily digestible stuff like memes. Sometimes it’s important to keep a place where people do stuff like share information on circuitboard level console repair from being overrun by people wanting to engage in the console wars, arguing about whether Sony or MS is better.

There are plenty of different online spaces that have tried many different ways to solve these problems “democratically” using tech. I believe slashdot restricted new users from downvoting until they had reached a certain threshold of that site’s karma equivalent. I believe Stack Overflow allowed users to automatically work their way up into minor moderation powers based off their contributions to the site community. But there are always loopholes and issues with any of those systems, and an infinite amount of details to argue over about implementation. There is endless drama surrounding Wikipedia and its various editors and mods because of this sort of thing. You can’t design a failproof system to enforce democracy that handles all the different needs of even the relatively limited scope of different articles and topics on a digital encyclopedia. There will always be gaps that simply must come down to the decision of some trusted person or persons.

So we come to lemmy/the fediverse. Standard setup of mods and admins being able to rule their slice of things with an iron fist. But it is highly resistant. If you don’t like how some mods handle their comm, you can switch comms or make your own. If you don’t like how some admins handle their instance, you can switch instances or make your own.

If you join an instance like lemmy.dbzer0.com or anarchist.nexus, you can find that they have codified rules to help hold their admins and mods accountable (part of which is this very comm). Users can start votes to oust pretty much anyone in a position of power.

But at the end of the day, some individual is responsible for the server bills. Best to make peace with it.

Personally, for your vague non-specific example, my response would be: it depends.

I’d like to interject for a moment…

Everyone can, technically. Votes are not private in any way and can’t be for federation to function properly.

Check out lemvotes.org to check votes by account, by post, or by comment.

Also, piefed stopped doing the vote obsfucation thing a while back anyway. So just make a nsfw alt account.

Tell me again how you’ve never become the subject matter expert on something simply because you were around when it was built.

Or had to overhaul a project due to a “post-live” requirements change a year later.

I write “good enough” code for me, so I don’t want to take a can opener to my head when I inevitably get asked to change things later.

It also lets me be lazier, as 9 times out of 10 I can get most of my code from a previous project and I already know it front to back. I get to fuck about and still get complex stuff out fast enough to argue for a raise.

Parallel Killers would make a sick band name.