Don’t be coy, tell us what you think we should be using it for.

I think more broadly, it happens whenever there is the mentality of “more X, no matter what”. Usually that’s profit, but I don’t think it’s mandatory.

The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

After reading your exciting new definition of the placebo effect and being asked to “name some advantages” that have been in every comment I’ve made, I think I know everything I need to about the quality of your opinions.

Also, never said unranked… I meant simply hide the rankings

Sounds trash to me. Fortunately it would be trivial for me to add them back in because again, all you’re doing is making the information inconvenient.

It also means that people don’t mindlessly upvote posts simply because there were a lot of upvotes

Is that how your mind works? I’ve never once done this and I’m extremely skeptical that anyone does. Sounds to me like you don’t like the content and have decided that nobody really does, they’re just upvoting it because it was upvoted.

Showing Upvotes/downvotes doesn’t show whether they are bots are not. It just means they’ll upvote/downvote more random shit and mess around wit the rest of the posts, so more crap rises to the top because they’re interfering with the rankings.

A log of votes is the data you need to discover bots. It doesn’t magically reveal them, nor did I claim it would.

Voting on random shit might make a slightly more plausible voting log for a bot but that’s going to be far more obvious than you think, won’t actually interfere with the rankings if it’s truly random and once again, not having rankings shown doesn’t address this problem either.

Votes and rankings are always knowable, even if you hide them from the UI. If there is a pressure to make bots plausible through random voting, that pressure exists regardless of it being shown on the default UI. All you’re doing is misleading users about what information they’re exposing.

There are easier ways to identify bots

Describe them.

And, it just aids abusive people

You’ve already claimed to be a victim of them and your solution does nothing to address it. You’re just adding another value to the list of poorly obscured information, because it’s what you personally want.

Thanks.

Problem is, it actually encourages a hive mind. I’ve already had 2 people try to bully me.

Then tell those people to get fucked.

I’d go one step further. Upvotes down votes and totals should be hidden entirely.

Unless you have an actual implementation of how that would work, telling us “what you’d do” is just a fantasy. You can’t “hide” things from federation – they’re either included, removed or made inconvenient to access.

Does “posting without external influence” even have any value besides sounding cool? The entire concept of Lemmy and Reddit is that external influence floats and sinks content. If you want unranked, anonymous content, you want 4chan (which is of course riddled with extremists and good content is almost entirely drowned out with worthless shitposts).

Personally, I’d rather that “external influence” was as fair and open and accountable as possible, rather than “I wonder if 500 of those votes are just Russian bots”.

It’s not technically possible with any model. Votes on Reddit are only kept private from other users – staff could look them up or reveal them to someone any time they wanted and you’d never know.

Even if you allowed voting without an account (which would be so easily manipulated that it would be worthless), you’d still be identifiable from your IP.

Yes, and there’s no genuine argument otherwise.

If you want Lemmy to grow and not be completely overrun with bots posting propaganda and signal boosting extremism, showing votes is the only way forward. It’s the only mechanism by which independent parties can discover and expose things like “every post and comment by this account is upvoted by these 20 other accounts that have never posted and whose names follow the same formula”.

The privacy you’re mourning never existed in the first place and it can’t exist on any platform. For Lemmy, it’s required for federation. On sites like Reddit, you have privacy from other users, but not from the company or anyone they sell that data to.

Since true privacy isn’t an option, it would be far better to be open about that lack of privacy. This thread is already riddled with people who thought their votes were private, rather than just inconvient to look up. That’s far more dangerous and deceptive.

This needs to happen, regardless of the ill-informed tantrums it may cause. If you want to upvote pornography without it being used against you, create accounts that are strictly for pornography and properly compartmentalize your accounts.

I’m growing increasingly skeptical of “people are complicated” being anything more than a method of shaming people for discussing certain subjects.

We need to discuss groups of people and that inherently involves generalising their beliefs. Nobody is going to track down every single person in that photo and confirm the nuances of their racism just in case they thought it was the line for hot doughnuts, so the conversation people are having here becomes impossible.

Your mother’s specific views on black people don’t matter to any conversation people are having in academic or social media circles. We’re all perfectly aware that individuals have more complex opinions but we’re not talking about individuals.

But even more bizarrely, why do you think your mother’s views are some kind of “gotcha”? She was racist when it came to you dating a black person, which she inherently attempted to hand down to you. For the purposes of this conversation, we absolutely know what group she belongs to. She’s doesn’t get a free pass just because she didn’t have the whole set.

Because it’s made by volunteers, in their free time, who either don’t have the time or skill or goal to make it competitive

Didn’t stop Blender. Didn’t stop Firefox. Didn’t stop Linux itself.

If someone is not able or willing to learn their way around something new, that’s literally their problem

I’ve already covered in this comment chain. Krita and Affinity Photo do things differently and nobody complains because they can see actual value in the change. Being “different” isn’t the source of GIMPs reputation, being shit is.

Why would it need to be similar? If you want Photoshop, well then use Photoshop.

I moved to Affinity Photo over a year ago, despite it being different. I don’t even keep a token pirated version of Photoshop around for compatibility anymore.

Sometimes doing something different might also end up being the better idea. Won’t know until you tried.

I tried multiple times and it simply isn’t. That’s been their most common feedback for 20 years but people like you still refuse to acknowledge that people might have a point.

And yes, good software is good code. That’s just a fact.

Yet somehow, no matter how good the code might be, ugly software with shit UX just never seems to gain widespread popularity. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s not because “good software” is holistic, it’s because the entire world is wrong about GIMP except for you.

It is the next best completely free alternative.

And if that was how people actually presented it, I wouldn’t be objecting. Instead, people pretend it’s as good as Photoshop and anyone who disagrees is blamed for not programming it themselves and attacked for suggesting that commercial tools are far better.

How is that an argument? How do you get the idea that GIMP is basically required to be competitive, just because it’s old?

Looks like you’re more interested in defending Linux software than actually seeing my point.

So why isn’t it competitive? It’s not because it’s new and hasn’t had time to mature. It’s not because developers haven’t put time into it (despite the ridiculous “fix it yourself” bullshit that people keep pushing). It’s not because the problem it aimed to solve has been solved.

It’s because the people involved with GIMP have the usual Linux community resentment about what “good software” actually is. It’s fuck ugly, but they don’t think that should matter, so it doesn’t get addressed. It doesn’t follow patterns that similar software follows, because they’re used to it, so everyone else should be too.

It’s the same pervasive “good software is good code and nothing else” mentality the plagues the OSS community.

But who cares? Use your shit software. Defend it to your dying breath. It’s not going to fix systemic problems with the project nor fool anyone who actually tries it.

Nobody is acting shocked. Least the people who learned to use GIMP.

So the people who learn GIMP are fully aware why it gets zero industry use? Thanks, that was my point.

The problem is people like you who are outraged, when asking for a free Photoshop alternative, that the next best thing is not to their likening.

I’m not outraged in the slightest, nor am I asking for a free Photoshop alternative. But I’ve seen people claiming GIMP is a viable alternative to Photoshop for 20 years and for anything past the most basic use cases, it isn’t. You may as well be telling people to use Nano instead of Visual Studio and when they complain about the experience, tell them to code the features themselves.

GIMP has had literally decades of development and even with Photoshop in the worst state it’s ever been in, it isn’t competitive. There are clearly systemic issues with the project and I’m certain this “head in the sand” mentality is at least partly to blame.

No, but “fix it yourself” is apparently a completely acceptable response if someone criticizes GIMP.

Anyway, I don’t care how bad the tools you use are, but it’s time to stop acting shocked when industry professionals have no interest in GIMP and don’t take anyone who advocates it as a Photoshop alternative seriously.

To add to this, it’s not like other apps have just blindly copied Photoshop. Affinity Photo has shape tools that are far less convoluted than Photoshop but they still feel instantly familiar.

Even when they couldn’t stick to common patterns (such as the eyedropper tool) they still manage to communicate how the feature works just by designing intelligently, no Googling required.

But every time I’ve used gimp, common tasks feels like a collection of workarounds for missing features. Someone elsewhere in this thread asked how to place an ellipse and got told that wasn’t something commonly needed but to make a selection and fill it using the paint bucket tool (and a modifier key).

That solution is jankier than MS Paint, which at least offers you an actual tool and a short period where you can make non-destructive modifications to the stroke, fill, size and position.

But since you’ve technically got the circle you asked for, it’s treated as “people who don’t like GIMP are just haters” rather than “people don’t want to use bad tools for their job”

Have you thought about applying for a job at Adobe and fixing it?

GIMP is bad. If the problem was simply that it was “different to PS” then other apps like Krita and Affinity Photo would have the same reputation.

If a user goes looking for a tool or feature and it’s not in the first place they look, that’s a problem of “didn’t really practice that much”. If experienced people need to look up how to do basic operations and their reaction is “that’s fucking stupid”, then the software is bad.

To then say “well why don’t you help the Dev team then” is insane. I’m not spending hundreds of hours digging GIMP out of bad design decisions when I could just use better software and I haven’t seen any evidence that my PR would even be accepted.

Nobody needs excuses and apologism, they need Blender for image editing and GIMP just isn’t that.

Or they’re just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about “open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos” were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.

If you want to see far-right content and spam, join a far-right server or run your own, rather than trying to shame server owners into doing what you want.

Admins are entitled to decide what they platform and what they don’t. On top of that, the user experience of “just block 100 servers of Nazis and incels to get to the content you want to see” is complete dogshit.

This “it should all be user level” is just apologist bullshit.

The software in the screenshot doesn’t require you to use Discord, but that’s not good enough there.