Hehe, right! (technically). Context matters! When talking about fruit, people usually don’t include stellar objects when weighing their options. Still true when taking in consideration that “apples to oranges” is usually metaphorical and not really about fruit.
I like that, especially this insight:
when two things have very few attributes in common or the attributes they can be compared on are very broad, general or abstract, it is harder to compare them.
A melon and a pogo stick are harder to compare, for their defining attributes hardly overlap except on a very abstract way.
Good on you to say “harder to compare” :D
it’s all semantic subjectivity. Poetry compares dissimilar things and equates unequal concepts all the time.
Another thing worthwhile to point out; subjectivity. I guess that part bothered me too. “cannot be compared” attempts to establish some kind of objective truth, whereas it only can be a subjective opinion.
The reference to poetry was nice, too.
My point works just as well with an arbitrary amount of options. Someone could say “These quintillion things cannot be compared”.
The number of options is irrelevant to what I tried to address. Though my examples were only pairs, so sorry for causing confusion.
Thanks for taking the time to write this detailed reply. I guess you’re right about the equivocation and I can see the irony :D
Though I have not fully understood yet. Following your example, the two different concepts are …
What blocks me from fully agreeing is that still, both are comparisons. And they don’t feel so different to me that I would call them different concepts. When I look up examples for equivocations, those do feel very different to me.
I still guess you’re right. If you (or someone else) could help me see the fallacy, I’d appreciate.
Agreed, yeah. Guess I was taking the word too literally.
An (intuitively) working search would be a great step ahead. It should find and show things if they exist, and only show no results if they do not. That a plethora of external tools exist to meet these basic needs shows both how much this is needed, and how much it is broken.
I also feel I have more luck finding communities if searching for ‘all’, instead of ‘communities’. Don’t make me add cryptic chars to my search to make it work. Do that for me in the background if necessary.
It’s been long since I’ve been using it, but iirc, it’s impossible or painful to search for a specific community in your subscribed list.
That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.
I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.
Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
If it has the information, why not?
Naive altruistic reply: To prevent harm.
Cynic reply: To prevent liabilities.
If the restaurant refuses to put your fries into your coffee, because that’s not on the menu, then that’s their call. Can be for many reasons, but it’s literally their business, not yours.
If we replace fries with fuse, and coffee with gun powder, I hope there are more regulations in place. What they sell and to whom and in which form affects more people than just buyer and seller.
Although I find it pretty surprising corporations self-regulate faster than lawmakers can say ‘AI’ in this case. That’s odd.
Offering a slight damper / correction:
This is about two things (design and ownership), which are correlated, but not identical.
Malicious design can be things like:
Obviously, these patterns and practices can also be applied to a FOSS instance you own. There is less incentive to do so if the profit motive is removed - which makes a huge difference.
These design patterns are fundamentally about making user numbers go up. Attract more users, keep them on your platform longer, make them leave less. And a portion of user guidance mixed in. None of that is inherently evil, to some degree even desireable, and to some extent unavoidable to offer a functional service.
Some users may expect a feed like lemmy to browse indefinitely, since they find it inconvenient to have to click to go to the ‘next page’. And because they got used to this feature elsewhere. Others already see this as a dark pattern.
I just wanted to highlight how some of the malicious stuff may still be present in the fediverse, without any company involved. Here, we’re kind of in charge on both sides: Each is responsible for their own user agency (like controlling your online hours, or what sites you visit), and collectively to decide what user experience we want to shape (which might include controverse patterns).
I spent way too many words on this. Mostly I agree with you! And overall, users will encounter far less malicious patterns on FOSS.
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