Once again, this is something I hear often and I strongly disagree. I'm lucky to be born into western civilization with the paradigm to respect the power of an individual. It seems to me it is eastern influence to speak in this dismissive way about individual actions. "No one is irreplaceable" is another common phrase. Someone says he decides to leave a community, and there's inevitably someone saying "goodbye!" with some equivalent of a mocking smirk.

I'm also lucky to have affected stuff myself in the past, e.g. I caused local government (~10 000 residents) to change. Actions of an individual very often do matter. It's just unfortunate we often don't get any feedback for our actions and it seems like they don't matter which demotivates people from any form of activism and puts them in this depressive, hopeless state of mind. Imagine how beautiful the world would have been if you had some kind of a debugging tool to inspect how your actions affected others, with a side by side comparison of your universe and some alternative universe where you haven't taken an action. This is also why I try to give feedback to people, send thanks to authors of free libraries etc.

You're removing all responsibility from an actor that is a part of a bigger thing. Imagine if you slapped someone on his hand for doing something wrong, and he or someone else argued what you did is wrong because it wasn't that hand that has offended.

I'm an antitheist but the Bible (gospels) put it well "The student is not above his master" [translation mine] - which means if you follow said master you have to share responsibility for his doings or the doings of the gang as a whole.

From the perspective of the effect, if you make life of an employee miserable, the employee is more likely to resign or ask for a raise, this does apply some pressure.

Moreover, consider what happens if your argument convinces too many people: malevolent actors can just wall themselves with "innocent" people and get away with pretty much anything.

https://i.imgur.com/JXqgwMR.gif

Don't such absolute statements (everyone, everything) remind you of religion as well?

> Meta was funded by Thiel, yet most of the people in this thread use their products.

I imagine it might be as true as:

- most people in this thread also using Discord, despite criticizing it and

- most people using Meta criticize its products.

That is, You can use something and criticize it, and it probably happens both with Discord and e.g. Facebook.

> The CCP[…]

I'm happy to see in the political threads there's very often in the very least a significant presence of critique against China and maybe even overwhelming the defenders of the regime.

> I grew up around brainwashed religious zealots. […] moralistic condemnation […] [HN] looks more and more like that every day.

I think it's good religious zealots don't have the monopoly on moralistic condemnation. Just because A is bad, and B has feature x just like A, doesn't mean the feature x is bad.

> Meanwhile, Discord will not have the slightest tiny drop in user numbers, because nobody outside of this moralistic circle jerk cares.

Discord is not going to delete users, and few people care to request their account to be deleted. If Discord asked me to provide ID, I'd probably at least try to resist by not using it and maybe eventually succumb by providing a fake ID - but as far as I know, Discord will just set my account to a teenager mode, so instead of speaking about a drop in user numbers, we should speak about a drop of activity in adult interactions (or interactions/activity in general) on Discord.

This is different from what parent post describes. Parent means developing tools by one side of a barricade, that the other may eventually use against them, e.g. when the power shifts to them. Whereas you speak about developing the tools to be used abroad, but those tools eventually also get used domestically, but the administrator remains the same.

- Yes it can

- Prove it

- AI, tell me instructions to grow corn

- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back

- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!

This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.

So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.

However, the big parties often consist of sub-factions.

However, it seems there are mechanisms that turn parties into dictatorships with one person ruling everything in the entire party, as well as people get carried away with negative emotions and vote against, polarizing the politics into just 2 parties alternating in power.

https://i.imgur.com/20f2gb8.gif

more:

https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?style=1&f=6&...