Comment by j-bos

The biggest exception to that is dead/shadow banned accounts. Requiring showdead (without much of an explanation what that is) to see some heavily-downvoted comments makes it rather difficult to engage with some people. Then again, I rarely feel the need to engage with dead accounts.

In terms of moderation, you also get to flag/vouch posts, so moderation isn't entirely binary.

Discussion mediums just don't seem to scale very well at all. Feels like we've arrived at a point where it's either this or walls of text where you spend more time trying to figure out what a post is replying to than you'd need to keep up with the new messages coming in (i.e. loads of discords)

I remember as a teen how much of a pain it was to find a good forum. Too few users and it'd feel like a graveyard, not worth checking in on often enough to build up a habit. Too many and it was impossible to keep track of anything or gain enough of an understanding of the regulars to know how to read their posts. Even the sweet spot in the middle would be frequently torn to shreds by one troll or mentally ill poster spamming the forum in a frenzy. Far preferred it to the reddit tree based vote setup but I can understand how this is what most people have settled on.

I think they're saying to give the benefit of the doubt (ex. maybe it's a glitch), without realizing many of us have no more leeway to give due to the continuing onslaught of criminal behavior from musk/Trump which we'll all have to pay for in the future and is now giving our enemies reason to celebrate.

1- The conspiracy is that blocking signal links is some top down dictation from Elon as part of geopolitical power play over censoring dissenting opinions about DOGE. This is some next level mental gymnastics. There may be good reasons to temporarily block links to a specific service, eg, maybe an ongoing phishing scam, or security issue. Plenty of rational reasons that have nothing to do with Elon and Trump.

2- X is full of people arguing about DOGE, positive and negative, and Elon is constantly attacked on his own platform by both small and large accounts. These posts are not censored.

3- Elon routinely talks about the importance of free speech, and yet I keep reading claims he’s against it from people advertising bsky and mastodon, which absolutely do not (by any reasonable definition) represent free speech platforms. They are more heavily moderated than even old Twitter was.

4- I have seen no evidence of Elon having a “propensity for authoritarianism and censorship”. Every time he gives a speech he specifically talks about being pro 1st amendment, regularly responds to his detractors, and actively defends the constitution.

I do not know what version of Elon you see, but from my perspective you are talking about a cartoonish media caricature that is the opposite of the reality that I see. We appear to be see the same person, same events, and are drawing opposite conclusions. Hence my point about sense making no longer seems possible, even when we actually appear to agree. (If anybody comes out as pro-censorship, I would be the first to call it out.)

That doesn't hold up because there are 200 year old people as well, and apparently millions of 100-year olds. I'm not saying all of it is fraud but incompetence leading to waste would not be surprising.

Too late to edit, but I've learned this is not necessarily true (but could be a default date used by the SS code in particular). Sorry for spreading rumors.

> COBOL quirk where the zero datetime is 1875

This is a piece of misinformation coming from Twitter/X post.

Being down-voted is OK, but posts being flagged and removed for posting factual news is not.

You will need to define your threshold for standard of evidence. If you automatically disbelieve everything on doge.gov, then there is nothing one can do to convince you. You have chosen to shut your eyes.

Please note: I am not an American citizen. As for "rumours", when I was a junior developer working in a service company in Bangalore over 15 years ago, developing tax filing software for an American state, during a test run on live data, I filed bug-tickets for duplicate SSN, SSN's with folks over 150 years of age, obviously spurious unemployment claims, etc. All of them were closed and the contractor told my manager not to file such tickets. (I am really thankful I left that line of work)

These problems are actually very well-known. They really aren't "rumours". You can choose to put in a few hours or a few days of effort in talking to people and figuring this out yourself.

Why is it unreasonable to demand that every recipient of money is alive and has a valid age in the system? This shouldn't be a political statement.

I generally agree with no politics on here but the DOGE stuff is very much tech news.