So you would censor this comment you’ve linked

You’ve misunderstood. You need to re-read that entry.

I have many accounts. No issues on db0 as far as I recall.

I’ve seen removals without rationale. The software allows it and mods tend to only give a reason in the most justifiable cases (spam). I’ve also seen robotic removals, where nothing appears in the modlog. These are entirely untraceable. It happens when a removal is systemwide and not by a local moderator.

Of course these features can be designed to spec. A msg folding action could (and should) force a rationale, which would then be more transparent than removals (which users have to go to the modlog for – only to potentially find nothing). Burying rationale in the modlog is not good for accountability because that’s less visited than the thread, which is where the folding rationale would appear.

And worse, removals are unnoticeable to the author. Authors see their own removed comments just fine. The status quo is very sneaky. I’ve discovered my comments were quietly removed /months/ after the removal, incidentally, because of the subtle way they are implemented. In one case it was because I was searching for my own comment using a different account than what I authored it with, and that was the only reason I could then realize it was removed. If you generally want to know if you have been censored, you need to periodically search for your own posts in the sitewide modlog. It does not get any more subtle than that.

Their job should be removing blatant spam/offensive content.

When removal is the only tool you give them, they use it to remove outright content that is on-topic and civil. Limiting them to heavy tools encourages abuses of power.

No downvotes on hexbear. So no, it’s not the status quo here.

I said “status quo with Lemmy”, thus talking about the software, not the configuration. Note this is a cross-post. The original post was on Sopuli.

The software is designed to use the down votes to arrange the better quality content on top of the thread (to some extent¹). Of course if you disable the functionality on an instance then that particular instance does not use it, which is orthogonal to a discussion of how to improve the software. It would be bad quality engineering to design the software for a specific configuration of a particular instance.

¹ though not entirely because age is a factor AFAICT.

You’re getting pushback because we don’t put a lot of value in civility here and the best way to disagree or criticize someone is to post about it.

You can’t disagree when the post is censored. What do you reply to? I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned an alternative way to discourage a moderator from abusing their power to remove msgs they don’t agree with, which is the most rampant problem with moderation in the threadiverse (not just talking about hexbear but wherever Lemmy runs). The hexbear status quo encourages the abuses of power they think they are discouraging by having blunt tools. Which is not to say I’ve seen any such abuses of power on hexbear… not visited it much.

Folding is not an obligation, so no time is wasted.

There is already some obligation for mods to decide whether each comment should be removed or not (as content can be illegal). But luckily there are mechanisms in place so mods do not have to read every comment. If you are worried that users would use the /alert/ mechanism to ask a mod to fold something, that’s already a risk and a problem. Adding the fold capability does not add to that burden.

folding would be useless

Bizarre that you think that. Bizarre that people are agreeing. Can you elaborate? Why would it be useful to have low-quality content fully expanded by default? Isn’t the status quo with Lemmy to use voting to sink and fold low quality posts?

I personally do not have time to read every single comment when I step into a thread. I want to see the best commentary first and only the less interesting stuff if choose to keep reading, if I have time. The nature of a tree of threads results in some garbage responses to quality comments that rise to the top. If you do not fold anything, you are then forced to see junk before quality, because the 2nd best comment in the tree is still below a low quality reply to the best quality comment.

Bit early for that. I think that approach of implementation without design or discussion is largely why tech has become so enshitified in recent decades. Better quality software emerges from a meticulous series of phases starting with analysis (discussion) and design. It seems kids are being taught to run off and code without thinking which is what leads to bad quality s/w.

To say /subtle/ is to overlook the expressed transparency of mod votes being distinguished from user votes. Anything you understood to undermine transparency is a misunderstanding. Transparency is important. None of the mechanisms mentioned are necessarily opaque if competently designed.

A brainstorm is not meant as a deeply detailed specification. You have to be able to imagine how transparency can be built into the designs.

To say “petty ego tripping” is to misunderstand the purpose of voting. Voting is a means to an ends, not the ends. I doubt anyone gives a shit what the total is (except of course ego trippers). Voting has a utilitarian purpose: to influence a quality score that sinks poor quality content and/or folds it, while raising high quality posts to the top. To have contempt for accurate scoring is to have contempt for quality control and curation.

To worry about voting losing its role of displaying an integer discrete vote count is actually to promote ego tripping. Using the votes for utilitarian purpose diminishes the use case as an ego tripper’s status symbol. So if you oppose ego tripping, you’re actually on the wrong side of this.

Votes could in fact remain as integers, 1 per vote, if you want to preserve the ego tripping function. While the quality score could be a separate number with a composition and calculation that need not be hidden from view.

(update) Consider how SpamAssassin works. It computes a score then it also gives detail on how the score was calculated:

X-Spam-Flag: YES
X-Spam-Score: 7.2
X-Spam-Level: ******
X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=7.2 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE,
 RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_NONE,URIBL_BLOCKED
    autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4

Rough example but a post quality score could be more or less similarly refined using smarter criteria than just equal weighted votes per account, particularly if people get multiple categories to vote on.

After describing in detail how a sledge hammer lacks precision for the job at hand, you propose a battering ram. Not only is it a more blunt instrument, it’s also less conducive to quality control. If that tool works for you, why even have moderators?

Hopefully he asks you to audit a tool you might enjoy using or contributing to.

Sounds good… will be interesting to see if @scratchandgame@lemmy.ml takes you up on the offer!

The biggest problem is self-contradiction. These two statements are incompatible:

• “This [auditing] is NOT the most important benefit.”
• “‘open source’ is good, firstly, because it permits auditing the source code”

@loudWaterHombre@lemmy.dbzer0.com or @loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com can audit for you.

Seriously, that’s what you’re missing. Bob the non-coder can trust Microsoft not to plant spyware in MS products, or Bob can trust some portion of the public (limited to ~8 billion people) to audit the code. It’s easier to trust the public than it is to trust a corporation. It’s not just about quantity of eyes, but having eyes that are more aligned with your interests.

Any idea what the heat exchanger is made of?

I might guess the exterior is stainless steel but I’m not a chemist. Magnets do not stick to it.

What needs to be cleaned off?

The previous one (removed in 2019) is clearly ram-packed with the kind of yellowish-white limescale flakes which resemble what builds up inside water kettles.

I typically clean water kettles using white distilled vinegar to lift the flakes and pour them out. But I suspect that might not do well in the heat exchanger because the flakes seem to be packed in there. To clean a hot water dispenser (which is for tea but very similar to a coffee maker), I use a proprietary descaling solution which seems to actually dissolve the scaling. No flakes are expelled in that process. So I am tempted to use that stuff, but I don’t really know if the coffee machine cleaner reacts with stainless steel or if stainless steel is what i am dealing with.

I’m guessing the currently installed heat exchanger might be clogged with something different. I think after just a few years the tap water side of it would not be clogged yet. But in the summer I flushed a few radiators and ran radiator cleaner through the system. Drained that out, refilled, then added “inhibitor” which prevents corrosion in the radiators. I lost hot tap water service after increasing the pressure in the radiator circuit. So I wonder if the cleaning solution caused debris to circulate and get trapped in the exchanger. There might be a mixed bag of sludge clogging the current heat exchanger.

All law compliance is voluntary on the threat of consequences, that is a bad point, because since all compliance is voluntary, then you are saying that all laws are largely useless.

Yes, but this only muddies the waters to mention. You’ve forgotten what I said previously. I’m not saying it’s voluntary on the trivial basis that all actions are voluntary. I’m saying compliance is voluntary because (as I have established and you failed to counter) the GDPR is not being enforced for the most part. You have ONE fine every THREE WEEKS by each DPA. How is your math not sorting that out? I will lay it out here:

52 weeks/yr ÷ 3 weeks × 23 DPAs × 5 years = 1993 + ⅓

That’s absurdly deadbeat on the DPA’s part. As one individual I am personally encountering violations at nearly that rate just on my own as one person. On average the DPA in one country is doing enough workload for one single victim. Scale that to a nation of people and the result is they’re doing fuck all.

My anecdotal experience reflects that of others and in fact mirrors the big picture. But you need not take my word for it. Read about it (“Fines are few and far between…Enforcement is, at best, patchy and inconsistent.”). Though I must say your lack of awareness makes your background questionable. You should know about the lack of enforcement problem if your career is tied to it. After all, your own numbers reflects this you’re just neglecting to do the math.

You’ve tried shifting the focus onto the revenue from the fines, which is irrelevant to the probability of getting a fine. The absurdity of that attempt is that “Meta…. accounted for 80% [of last year’s total fines], with its largest fine reaching €405 million.”

Outliers don’t make the law moot,

They do when the statistical outliers actually reflect cases of fines, as opposed to the cases of inaction. Again, 1 fine every 3 weeks for a whole country. That’s what makes the law moot from an enforcement perspective. You throw out the outliers and you’re left with no enforcement in the remaining dataset.

What you are saying is that due to the fact that corruption exists, your govs are not taking the law seriously.

I didn’t exactly assert corruption. That’d be slightly overstated. There is certainly a conflict of interest when gov agencies are accountable to DPAs of the same country. You can use your own judgement as to whether to outright assert “corruption”. Either way, that’s only a factor when the GDPR offender is a gov agency. Lack of enforcement is bigger than that. As I said, the law itself is the problem because it’s not motivational. Again, there is no enforcement clause to force DPAs to honor article 77 reports. That’s the problem which you continue to ignore. It also doesn’t help that “DPAs complain about a lack of budget and personnel. While German DPAs employ around 1200 staff, Belgian, Croatian, and Romanian DPAs average only 50.” (from the same article) So the other problem is that the GDPR does not require member states to allocate sufficient resources for the workload – though that problem would take care of itself if there were a penalty for member states who fail to uphold art.77.

You’re still talking about voluntary compliance. The GDPR is not entirely useless for this reason - some orgs will comply despite the unlikeliness that any action results. Great! My long history of art.77 reports show GDPR-hostile orgs getting away with it.

Here’s how the math works: your expectation of a fine (cost of noncompliance) is compared to the cost of compliance (e.g. hiring subject matter experts for consultation and making adaptations as needed). The expectation of a fine is the fine amount multiplied by the probability. The fine amount is negligible (if anything) for gov agencies and the probability a fine is levied by a state against itself is even much smaller than the probability of a fine against a commercial corp. So gov offices laugh at the GDPR. Commercial orgs can get a huge fine but they tend to get warnings, not to mention the chance a DPA even bothers to engage the offender is infintesmal as it is. The cost of compliance is generally higher, which is why they don’t bother. Hence why I’m up to my neck in violations. Luckily the good samaritans orgs that comply are the ones who haven’t done the math.

The GDPR would only become an effective force if they were to amend it so that article 77 were itself enforceable against the deadbeat DPAs.

You are quite confused. The places you list are places that do not have privacy protections for non-criminals. Europe is where a law-abiding person is least likely to be unreasonably searched or interrogated.

over 1900 fines so far

My point exactly. That’s nothing. That covers the past 5 years in 23 countries. They enforce just a enough cases to be able to suggest to the public that they are not doing absolutely nothing (because they want the public to accept the forced #digitalTransformation without resisting). GDPR violations are rampant and getting actual GDPR protection is like winning the lottery.

Adherence is taken seriously.

Bullshit. I have filed reports on well over 20 #GDPR violations citing law and evidence going ~4 years back in some cases. One of the reports was refused instantly by an incompetent desk clerk who gave a bogus rationale. The rest were accepted into litigation. Then every single one of them was silently and non-transparently mothballed. Not a single enforcement action resulted. Why? Because the GDPR does not have any teeth to force article 77 protection. If you think otherwise, please cite the text you think makes article 77 enforceable.

I’ve got 3 more art.77 reports to write as as we speak, and I struggle to get the motivation because I know they will just be mothballed as well.

clients are quite interested in learning how to keep their sites compliant.

That’s how the GDPR works. It’s voluntary, effectively. Some orgs opt to comply for optics and a bit of risk aversion (not wanting to be one of the few selected for enforcement like an inverse lottery). Orgs know enforcement is sparse and they abuse it. And when they abuse it, victims cannot get a remedy.

Also worth noting that gov agencies violate the GDPR with reckless disregard because the cognizant DPA represents the same country. There is no profit to speak of, so a fine would be moot.

Can’t the police, if need be, seize a server as easily as it would in any other country on Earth?

Yes. No privacy protections anywhere in the world protect criminal suspects from warranted surveillance. Privacy laws are only intended to protect non-suspects from unreasonable unwarranted searches.