That sounds like there’s something else amiss because that definitely should not happen. For example, I was working on a family member’s Win 11 laptop (a budget 2018 HP laptop upgraded from Win10) that was absurdly slow. It would take 5 minutes to power on and open a web browser and even that was extremely sluggish. The specs were decent except for one thing—the local storage was a crappy 1TB 5200 RPM HDD. The drive was functionally ok, but I couldn’t find a way to get it out of 100% disk I/O. I ended up just cloning the drive to an old spare SATA SSD that was laying around and that immediately solved the issue. Windows was zippy and very usable again. I couldn’t believe they put up with this nonsense for years. Not sure if the HDD was just a lemon or something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This actually started With Windows 10 2019 if I remember correctly. They started using the storage for more things. Hard disk drives were no longer recommend. I say it's a good thing.
It didn't used to be so bad. It was really not that long ago that Windows really ramped up spending most of the users' resources on things which work against the user. While still getting not much new accomplished that most users were asking for.
>something changed in Windows that rendered low RPM hard drives useless.
This is exactly it.
More than one thing changed in "unison", and not for the better.
Just fixed one of the 2019 HP's for my family which came with W10 1809 version on the same (actually decent) HDD. This was a pretty nice laptop and not the budget model.
It was not too bad when he got it but he had gotten some useless performance-hogging downloads and it was W10 Home to be taken off the internet anyway.
While waiting for the NVMe and some more memory, his partitions were then backed up to external media before experimenting with the built-in HP factory recovery method. Which wiped the HDD and started Windows 10 Home fresh like it was 2019, including of course the HP-specific software. If it was my PC I would have curtailed or uninstalled a selected good bit of the HP stuff, along with things like OneDrive from Windows, and limited the Windows settings to only those I particularly need. So that's what I did. It takes a little time but then it feels about as satisfyingly like a new PC has been doing for decades. Boots fast and everything is pretty responsive, especially without going on the internet. And that's with the HDD set up like it was originally.
When W11 first came out I had already shrunken his main partition by some decent space and installed W11 there for a regular plain Microsoft dual-boot system (but he never liked w11), so did that again too using the newest W11 Pro 25H2. This was a clean install without any HP bloatware, but I did properly manually download then install all the device drivers to current versions which some of them need to come from HP. Without going on the internet, and with equivalent Windows settings it's a real dog by comparison.
It naturally takes twice as much effort to set up one PC to dual-boot as if it was two different PC's, but after that the A/B testing back-to-back on identical hardware is as easy as it gets.
When you look into it Windows 11 is just hammering the C: volume like it's never done before, almost constantly, needing simultaneous reads & writes so much it would have been way more widespread ridicule if most people had not already been on SSD's before W11 "accelerated" the march of sluggishness.
W11 is a huge difference in what you see from older W10, back when loads of these laptops for a few years had W10 on 5400rpm HDDs and very few users could intuitively point to that one factor being worse than any other Windows performance degradation that came along in years before.
Now anybody could tell the difference if they tested on a more level playing field like this.
Once the NVMe was in he's now got the W11 Pro 25H2 and the W10 LTSC 2021 which does look like peak Windows. Neither one is nearly as frustrating as on HDD, but you can tell there is something very unfortunately wrong with W11 by direct comparison still.
Once you get on the internet it does get worse and stays worse. In addition to the very frequent simultaneous read/writes of the storage drive, then you've got all kinds of simultaneous send/receive actions to your network on top of that. And W11 is now up to 4GB of Windows Update per month, where W10 only took about 1GB to update all the way from the 2021 ISO.
Dwarfing W10 with a bunch of things that weren't needed at all for Windows 10 to do fine, so why can't it get better instead of worse?
As someone who back in the day worked on plenty of Dell ultralights running 4200 RPM drives and 5400 RPM drives at best, yes, yes it was "so bad". [And these devices were on the REDMOND domain!]
Anything else is rose-colored glasses, the same glasses people wear when they reminisce about the glory days of Windows 2000 or XP, absolutely forgetting what a security nightmare they were, or the boot times of Windows 2000 (when we used to regularly shutdown rather than suspend), or the not-so-uncommon BSODs, either from native Windows components or 3rd party drivers, etc.
If you're really curious, something more effective and productive than hypothesizing into the void is emailing hn@ycombinator.com. Dang et. al. have always replied and been helpful and forthcoming in answering my questions and concerns.
I have sent an email linking to this discussion, but I think it would be more constructive if the helpful and forthcoming answers happened in public rather than in sent in private email threads to everyone wondering.
Calling discussing something on HN "hypothesizing into the void" is a strange choice of words, either meant to be patronizing toward me specifically or toward all HN users.
Whether they are helpful or forthcoming you'll have to decide. They are repetitive (and are even more tedious to write than they are to read) but here are some places to start:
If you take a look at some of those answers and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But it would be good to familiarize yourself with the standard explanations, because they're nearly always adequate to explain what you're seeing, although they will probably leave you frustrated if you feel strongly about the politics of a story.
FWIW, here's a short version: users flag things for various reasons; we turn off flags on a few such stories, but not more; that's because HN isn't a political or current affairs site; which stories get flags turned off is never going to satisfy anyone's political priorities, because the community is in deep disagreement with itself and because moderation consistency is impossible.
People dislike it when a story whose politics they agree with doesn't get to stay on the frontpage, but since it's impossible for all such stories to be on HN's frontpage, this frustration is unavoidable.
> FWIW, here's a short version: users flag things for various reasons; we turn off flags on a few such stories, but not more; that's because HN isn't a political or current affairs site;
I think you have misunderstood the request. The request was not to clarify the general moderation policy, but rather clarify the reasoning why this specific story was not considered as one of the few stories where such action was taken.
People are curious to hear the reasoning for keeping the flag on this specific post, since thought has obviously been put to it and a decision to keep it was made after thoughtful consideration. I.e. which of the several different policies you highlighted had the most weight in this decision, and which mitigating circumstances were considered as reasons for bypassing this policy and removing the flag (even if they were discarded in the end).
It is precisely because consistent moderation is not possible that this is needed (otherwise it would be easy to just refer to the consistent guidelines). The quality of the moderation depends on the judgement and reasoning of the moderators, and the only way for the users to form their own picture (good or bad) of this judgement is to ask to hear how it is applied to specific scenarios where it is ambiguous.
I am very sympathetic to the fact that it must be tedious and sometimes repetitive, but if the decision is controversial I think it is an important part of moderation and important for the community as a whole.
> but rather clarify the reasoning why this specific story was not considered as one of the few stories where such action was taken.
i think if you read more past discussions around moderation (including one dang directly linked) the reason for this would be obvious. read the search results for flags being turned off.
moderators try, as they said, to let the community moderate itself. they try to impress very little bias into the system. but they do try to promote constructive and interesting conversation, and the more things deviate from that mission, the less likely it is to be actively encouraged to be on HN
the likelihood of the conversation around this news post is very unlikely to be interesting and constructive. people have very entrenched beliefs and no one's mind is going to get changed from emotionally loaded comments on this post
additionally, this is now also the third post of this nature to be on HN in the past weeks, and there's unlikely to be anything new to the conversation added this time that wasn't covered by the previous thousands of comments on previous submissions
they are not actively reducing the visibility of this post. they're just declining to artificially inflate its visibility above the same criteria 99% of submissions also have
My post contains all the information you need to answer that question. The current story is obviously a flamewar topic, a political battle topic, and a repetitive topic. I'm not saying it isn't important—of course it's important, far more important than most things on HN's front page*. The issue is that HN's frontpage is not optimized for importance but for something else (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Optimizing for importance would make this a current affairs site, which is not its mandate. Actually we have to expend a lot of energy preventing that outcome, because the default pressures point in that direction, and are quite strong. One can really see that at moments when passions are heated, as they are in this thread.
* If you look at some of the old links I dug up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747388, you'll find that this point has also been around a long time. Specifically these:
I think the unease many people feel here is that this strict bureaucracy taken to its extreme conclusion would become something akin to a tragicomical farce: "No posts about the controversial nukes raining over Europe allowed, such flamewars would destroy our valuable forum for discussing the really interesting and
intellectual political topics".
Clearly there must be a line somewhere. It was not here and today, but when and where is it? Trying desperately to cling onto normality at every cost when the actual reality is far from normal becomes a destructive endeavour in the end.
I have been a regular visitor on this site for 14 years, and have have never spoken up about this before. In fact I have always stood by the moderation policy and appreciated it. But I have a line where avoiding "inflammatory discussions" simply becomes obstinate and clueless, and harmful in the way that it gives convenient cover for the actors committing the real inflammatory acts, counting on people not caring enough to give them grief for it. And for me, that line has been crossed.
I'm curious: Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds of people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase to you?
> a repetitive topic
Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.
Yes, when you bring up extreme scenarios such as nuclear war (or civil war, as slg did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746817), that's a way of saying that we're fiddling-while-rome-burns, burying-head-in-sand, etc. The problem is that you're assuming your conclusion by invoking those scenarios. That doesn't make the argument stronger.
I agree that the probability of such scenarios is not zero, and no I would not like to end up in the same bucket as the schmucks in Dr Strangelove or (more tragically) the last person in the "first they came for" meme. But none of us knows the future, and there's another scenario with nonzero probability as well. That is the scenario in which HN goes through swings and fluctuations (conditioned by macro trends), sticks to its mandate, and emerges intact.
As far as probability goes, that second scenario has the advantage of having happened many times already. Each time it's happened, I've ended up feeling that we made the right call. Does that prove it's the right call this time? Nope—we don't know the future, like I said. But at least there are close historical precedents supporting it, as well as the core principles of HN supporting it.
There's another argument too, although I quake a bit at bringing it up. Suppose the truly extreme, end-of-world scenario really is coming to pass. What contribution do we make by jettisoning HN's mandate, going to war and turning the site into a battlefield, sooner rather than later? How do more posts of angry denunciations and screaming at each other move the needle on the end of the world? That is the step in the argument, like the ??? of the underpants gnomes or the "then a miracle occurs" in that physics cartoon, which no one ever spells out.
I don't think anyone who has been inhaling the profoundly pointless triviality of the internet message board genre for as long as we have really believes that there's some unrealized potential to help society via shriller and more sarcastic flamewars. I assume also that anyone who genuinely believes that we're already in an extreme scenario has more important things to do than post angry comments on the internet. It seems clear that this is not about effecting change or effective opposition—it's about expressing feelings. I'm all in favor of feelings, but that's not the conversation that people say they're having when they have these conversations. (I'm not talking about you here! just so that's clear.)
> Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds for people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase
I don't think it's all the same people (though some!) but to me it's the same dynamic. But I hear you, and yes I might be wrong and live to regret it. I'm not speaking from a place of certainty.
> Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.
Well, I was thinking of this thread: Minneapolis driver shot and killed by ICE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531702 - Jan 2026 (351 comments), although you're right that that one wasn't on the front page (I thought it had been, because we turned off the flags on it, but apparently not.) But there have been major threads on this topic (or topic cluster): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu..., some have been on the frontpage, and that's of course only a slice of the political stories that appear here.
First of all I want to thank you for the thoughtful and candid reply. It has increased my faith in the moderation some, not because you have convinced me or I agree with you, but because it shows you are thinking in nuanced ways about this and engaging with the actual issues (and not just adhering without question to some written mandate).
I actually also agree fully with your analysis of the fundamentals here, just not your wider perspective.
Yes, I fully agree there is a risk of changing HN to the worse for no reason. But doing the right thing in uncertain times always carries a risk. As seen in this very story we are discussing: Alex Pretti risked his life filming the violent ICE agents, for very uncertain gain, and ultimately paid the price. I still think he did the right thing. Compared to the price Alex paid, "a worse HN" seems like a risk worth taking.
And no, I don't think allowing more controversial topics on HN will make a major difference in the context of world politics (or prevent the apocalypse). But when it comes to things like these everyone will always feel too "small" to matter, and the end result if we listen to that feeling will be that no one does anything instead of everyone doing something to improve the situation.
I'm not spending my time arguing here because I think it will change the course of history, that my posts will actually change the moderation policies of HN, or because I think that by doing so I would save the world. I'm doing it because it's a minor line in the sand I could draw in a community I am active in, and it's better to try to do what we can (however minor) than just giving up. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something, etc etc.
I don't think we will reach any agreement regarding the wider perspective today, but I do feel like I have gotten the nuanced answer I requested regarding the moderation policy of HN in the context of the current mayhem going on (beyond just avoiding flamewars). So, again, thank you for that.
>There's another argument too, although I quake a bit at bringing it up. Suppose the truly extreme, end-of-world scenario really is coming to pass. What contribution do we make by jettisoning HN's mandate, going to war and turning the site into a battlefield, sooner rather than later? How do more posts of angry denunciations and screaming at each other move the needle on the end of the world?
This is spoken like a mere observer. The benefit of "jettisoning HN's mandate" is to prevent the worst case scenario that you depict. You and HN have power. Some of the richest and most powerful people in this country and on this planet look at this website. These stories being on the front page and people reading the comments can actually lead to change which could decrease the odds of true disaster.
People need to stop pretending that the internet isn't real. This ordeal in Minnesota is in large part because a Youtuber showed up at preschools demanding to see children because he believed some conspiracy he saw on the internet. The stuff said on the internet does have real world ramifications and I'm frankly shocked how someone in your position that has seen the world change to the degree that is has in your time as the moderator here is still falling back to the "profoundly pointless triviality of the internet message board".
That's helpful in that it clarifies a difference in assumptions. I don't believe that HN, or its admins, have anything like the power you're attributing to it/us. We're basically janitors.
That's not a criticism. I understand how a perception like what you're expressing can arise, but it can only arise from afar.
Alex Pretti was a nurse. What power did he have? I'm not attributing ultimate power over the fate of the nation to you or HN. You are a tiny cog in a huge machine, but you're still a bigger cog than me. So I'm asking you to consider when you will use the power you do have. Current events should have us all considering that question
It's a mistake to think that deep pocket YC investors will suddenly become aware of current events that otherwise escaped their notice if only current event stories made it to "the front page of HN".
Another mistake would be to think that [flagged] and down weighted submissions do not get many many eyeballs and that C-suits of large SV and other tech companies don't take part.
Every reminder that powerful people see that the status quo is unacceptable has value. It's also obvious that a post being flagged reduces the number of people who will see that post, that's the whole purpose of flagging.
If it's really true that "some of the richest and most powerful people in this country and on this planet look at this website", what do we want them to see here? Do we want them to see enraged people saying the same things that they keep hearing over and over and thus dismiss as background noise? Or do we want them to see intelligent, thoughtful people having sophisticated discussions and making new points that might give them pause and provoke them to think about things in a different way?
We were discussing post level moderation and not comment level moderation. I'm suggesting the site allow more politics, I'm not condoning abandoning all the site’s rules. I don't think the level of discourse in the comments is being improved by the current level of post level moderation. The most noticeable impact is simply prompting tangents into the post level moderation itself like it did here which arguably lowers the level of discourse.
Let's be honest: you're doing much more than "suggesting".
The whole reason we can't have these posts on the front page is that the comments in the threads so frequently break the guidelines and turn the site into a place that repels people who want to have thoughtful discussions. So there is no yet-known way to have our cake and eat it; the presence of these stories on the front page means abandoning the site's rules, because so many commenters are unable discuss them in a way that respects the site's rules. And the outcome of this is that it pushes HN towards being irrelevant, precisely because these discussions offer so little that powerful people would find persuasive.
I would love it if HN could be the very best place for discussing difficult topics and be a place where we really could push politics in the right direction. That can't happen if the discussions about the most important topics rapidly devolve into easily-ignored background noise.
>Let's be honest: you're doing much more than "suggesting".
Lol, I don't know what that is supposed to mean. I'll admit to including an undercurrent of shaming with that suggestion to hopefully cause some introspection, but it's still just a suggestion.
Beyond that, I just fundamentally disagree with the point you seem to be making People can't be trusted to talk nicely so they won't get any place to talk at all just doesn't feel like the right principle for the moment.
Regardless, my original point stands. Everyone's unique role in life grants them a certain amount of power. Now is the time to consider what it will take before you use your power to exert whatever positive influence you can.
The discussion on this thread has actually been fine, apart from one account that has been all over the place repeating absolute nonsense (consistent with their overall recent post history on political topics). Most of their posts have already been flagged, and much of the resulting noise could have been avoided by rate limiting them. So I’m not sure that this particular discussion really proves your point (though it is only one example). You could easily find more contentious discussions about Rust or Apple.
Provocative political articles about the UK seem more likely to escape flagging, which has the strange consequence that HN sometimes seems to spend more energy decrying the current state of the UK than that of the US, despite the relative imbalance in user numbers.
> HN sometimes seems to spend more energy decrying the current state of the UK than that of the US, despite the relative imbalance in user numbers.
I have to assume this perception has mostly to do with the time of day you're normally looking at HN. As someone who is looking at the threads for hours each day, there's certainly far more politics-related discussion about the U.S. than any other country.
There's more overall discussion of US politics for sure, but it tends to occur tangentially (as articles about US politics are pretty reliably flagged). To give a concrete example, the following article was not flagged and got quite a lot of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46600194 I do not think an article on an obscure website with a similarly 'provocative' headline relating to current US politics would escape flagging.
Single instances and hypotheticals don't tell us much. That particular topic spent only four hours on the front page, and it was times that are peak for the U.K. and off-peak for the U.S. Plenty of stories related to U.S. politics spend at least that amount of time on the front page. People often remember the stories that are flagged that they strongly felt should have been given front page time, but forget about the stories that did get plenty of exposure.
I doubt you can point me to a recent story about US politics that spent four hours on the front page and had a similarly inflammatory headline. It would be as if this discussion were occurring under the headline "ICE thugs murder second US citizen" and linked to the website of a left-wing political organisation with an anonymous byline.
Unless peak US times are very late in the day, I'm pretty sure I do look at HN quite often during peak US hours. I'm only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast here. Gemini (ha!) tells me that
>...peak engagement hours generally align with US workday hours, particularly in Pacific (PT) and Eastern Time (ET). The highest activity typically occurs between 11 AM – 4 PM UTC (roughly 6 AM – 11 AM ET / 3 AM – 8 AM PT).
The story you're talking about was on the front page mostly between about 1pm and 3pm U.K. time, then hovered around the bottom of the front page and dropped off as most of the U.S. came online. And you're talking about one article but asserting a trend or pattern.
Here are recent stories about U.S. politics with inflammatory titles that spent multiple hours (over 22, in one case) on the front page.
When your door is kicked down, your partner is dragged away and citizens are executed on your street, will you feel proud about how you have helped suppress these discussions?
It’s starting to feel like you’re part of the problem, actively making it worse.
I feel fairly confident that the bulk of this community would not want us to operate HN based on feelings like this, regardless of how right you are, or feel you are, on the issues.
In much of what I’ve read about the fall of rule of law and dictators rising to power in other countries, people very often talk about one of two things - how they wish they had done more to stop it, or how they’re proud of what they did and they feel they made a difference - even if small.
Even the parents of Alex Pretti who was killed yesterday said in a statement they’re very proud that Alex was protecting a women at the time he was killed, helping others like he always did.
Given what you just said above, I can only think you either don’t really understand how much power you have to enable or curtail discussions or you know exactly and last night when you closed your eyes and thought about it you realized you aren’t / won’t be proud if it gets real bad.
I’m sure you’ve read a lot of history Dan.
Has there ever been a case where stopping citizens talking about what their government is doing has worked out well for the people? I’m not aware of one.
I know these discussions are “off topic” for HN Dan, but I’m shocked you don’t see that literally nothing else will be important for a decade or more if the dictator takes full control or starts a civil or world war.
The lives of a vast number of people will change drastically for the worse, and you’ll have to live knowing you stopped people talking about it when there was still something to be done.
I hope on the life of my little girl none of this happens, but man you’re going to have a hard time looking in the mirror if it does.
I don’t envy you, and I understand you’re between a rock and a hard place.
Doing the right thing is often the hardest path.
Do you genuinely feel you are doing the right thing?
I appreciate that there's a gap between what people intend to say and what they actually say, but I'm not sure I've ever seen the gap as large as what you posted above vs. what you posted here.
In case it helps at all, "When your door is kicked down, your partner is dragged away and citizens are executed on your street, will you feel proud about how you have helped suppress these discussions?" struck me as grammatically, rhetorically, and emotionally more aggressive than even "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" as an incriminating cross-examination.
With the direction we're headed, there's a non-zero chance that some day soon I'll click on over to https://news.ycombinator.com/active and see "[flagged][dead] US Erupts in Civil War" and I'll click on the comments to see a copied and pasted comment from dang with a link to a dozen other comments explaining why this political story doesn't belong on HN.
"Politics" doesn't care about your apolitical spaces. It's coming for everything and you'll have to draw the line somewhere.
People have been making a version of this argument for as long as I've been doing this job. There is always a feeling of this-time-is-different, how-can-you-not urgency. I'm not saying that's wrong, but there's a counterargument. The counterargument is that political flames have a way of consuming everything they touch and that if we had listened to this argument in the past, HN would have ceased to exist years ago.
I believe that the bulk of this community favors the counterargument, and that it would be a big mistake to let political passions dominate how the site is operated, since that would be the end of HN qua HN. We think a website that's not overwhelmed by politics and political battle—that clears space for other things that gratify curiosity—has a right to exist. I believe most HN readers agree with that and are grateful that we haven't pulled the plug at moments of pressure.
I'm not saying anything radical here - this is the standard way that HN has always operated, and I'm repeating what I've always said:
You seem to be a little sidetracked from my original point so let me reiterate it, "It's coming for everything and you'll have to draw the line somewhere."
I understand you can dismiss that with "There is always a feeling of this-time-is-different", but what happens when it's truly different? Have you set a line for yourself of when it will be different or are you the frog telling everyone else that the water's not that hot? Or are you claiming there is no line and even if there is an all out civil war you won’t want any discussion of it on this site?
Asking people where the final line is with a nuclear option is a classic question with no satisfying answer, and the classical answer is that there is no line for when the button will be pressed.
I didn't ask where the line was, I asked if it existed. "The line" is a rhetorical device meant to encourage the reader to consider whether their previously held opinions should be held in perpetuity or whether they need to be reevaluated.
I don't see any sidetrack. That's the same argument, and I can only repeat the same counterargument.
I'm not saying that your argument is wrong—I would have to know the future in order to say that, which I don't. All I can do is give the reasons why the counterargument holds more sway from an HN-admin point of view. (Which, btw, is not some sort of disagreement about the politics of this story or other stories.)
Yes, it's what many hackers would do, and have done, and HN has had, and does have, many threads about that kind of thing.
I realize these distinctions get lost when people are feeling heated, but HN has never been an apolitical site and we don't describe it that way. There are more options than just (1) being apolitical and (2) being completely aflame. Not that they're easy squares to occupy.
Hacker News is from YC, which is a US organization with some power. As a US organization, it must limit discussion to things that are legal in the US. If you want to plan terrorism, you need to go elsewhere.
But reading all those old threads, I got three interpretations of "on topic":
1. Trivial intellectual trinkets,
2. Important topics that happen to overlap with intellectual interest,
3. Important topics that we somehow manage to have a thoughtful discussion about.
Is "off-topic" really about the standard of discussion and not about the topic?
There's a lot of mysterious influences in the dynamics between topic type, community culture, and standard of discussion. I mean to say that allowing thoughtful discussions of controversial topics is not a pipe dream, but it only happens occasionally and we're not really capable of sustained flight, so to speak. It seems like the interesting (worthy, important) adventures into inflammatory topics are parasitic on the comfortable trivial intellectual fluff, which keeps the forum-wide inflammation level down.
There is always a feeling of this-time-is-different
I don't know, Dan. This does feel different. Innocent people are being killed on the street, under color of law and sanctioned at the very highest levels of government.
When's the last time something like this happened? Kent State? This incident and the Renee Good killing seem worse than Kent State, somehow. Maybe because they were so up-close-and-personal, because they were recorded in real time, and because of the executive branch's overt, sustained gaslighting about what happened. Lies easily debunked by the recordings, yet still accepted as truth by a terrifying, unreachable chunk of our population.
My fear is that the flames being lit now will consume everything they touch. That seems to be Trump's intention, and he almost always gets what he wants somehow, doesn't he?
I think that's what sig was suggesting. There will be no refuge in neutrality. We will all be forced to stand on one side of the line or the other, and use whatever resources are at our disposal to hold that line.
Heads up: I actually started vouching a few but then looked more closely and all these accounts have 1 karma, were created recently (< 60 days old), and the linked sites smell suspiciously of AI slop. I also didn't find any prior comments, favorited content, no signs of life. Why would someone never comment only to do so now? I'm hesitant to vouch potential bot accounts.
{Insert Post-LLM Internet sadness for good intentions here}
Unfortunately it looks like someone went ahead and blindly vouched everything, there are almost no dead comments now. Bummer, but perhaps an inevitable eventuality if not this time.
EV charging inefficiency typically loses 10-25% of the input energy, depending on temperature and battery level (low temps are bad, very low or high battery level also bad for efficient transfer).
More people in my social circle are using CL again after AI moderation/anti-fraud issues at Facebook. A few examples:
A colleague listed his son’s high school archery equipment. Facebook banned him from marketplace for life for violating weapons policy. He still has social network access.
I helped an elderly widow create her first FB account from an Apple device, registering from her home cable modem IP, giving FB her cellphone number and ISP issued email address — all strong signals of authenticity. But after she added five relatives within half an hour, her account was locked, and Facebook closed it permanently on appeal.
Another acquaintance was brigaded by people reporting his comments. Troll or not, he lost access to Facebook/Marketplace and has to satiate his used electronics habit elsewhere.
You can lose access to FBm suddenly and with no recourse. And when that happens, Craigslist is still there to help you sell stuff you can’t eBay, like your old lawnmower, or find a CRT television for your Super Nintendo.
I just looooove (read: hate) the ratings system on FB Marketplace. We bought a house semi-recently and it conveyed a front-loader washer dryer set. Wife wanted to get rid of it after about 6 months. I list it for an incredibly reasonable rate based on local past sales, eg a standalone washer routinely sells for $200 so I sold a set for $200.
Then come the low-ballers, they want to offer only $50 or $100 for my set. I click through into their profiles and see that they are resellers of washers and dryers in bulk so they want to buy and flip my set. I decline.
Well, after only 3 messages a “buyer” can rate you as a seller so I have a stack of 1-star reviews from resellers angry that I politely declined to sell to them when I had a queue of asking-price buyers lined up to buy same-day.
CL right now is like the best and worst place. Theres some good deals, from honest people; unfortunately, you have to wade through the scams sometimes though. Itd be great if there was better moderation, and we could find ways to bring it back to life that dont involve the awful things other companies do to survive
It's always been that way, and Markeplace is the same too. At least you can actually use search filters on CL, and it doesn't just show you whatever it thinks you want to see.
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