People focus on mortality too while failing to account for the sorts of lifelong disabilities viruses like these cause when you do survive them. Absolutely sickening.

“Assimilationist state policy” is a funny euphemism for “cultural genocide”.

After Epstein, the pool ran a bit dry, didn’t it?

ifunny.c🙂

100% accurate username

OP, your link is malformed. Here you go: https://kyivindependent.com/trump-signs-decree-extending-sanctions-on-russia-emergency-status/

Edit: they edited their comment to add the 6 billion link, and it’s super weird that VLC’s website then lists 400 million. Nonetheless, that’s not the actual point. They also edited their comment to spitball estimate the number of Linux servers. What they’re plainly failing to account for is that 1) Android and an unfathomable amount of embedded devices are Linux, and much more importantly 2) those servers aren’t just sitting there doing nothing. They’re doing their job of serving to billions of people. Literally everyone directly uses Linux in some capacity unless you’re part of some remote tribe. This isn’t a debate; it’s just a fact that Linux is 1) much more used (see below examples that are critical to modern society that don’t even all represent servers), 2) used by more people, 3) more useful, and 4) much more irreplaceable. You have to genuinely have no idea how any modern technological infrastructure works on even the most basic level to think that VLC wins out in usage because of 6 billion downloads. Google alone received 3.5 billion search queries per day in 2024. Linux absolutely trounces VLC’s usage by several orders of magnitude, and its usage is absolutely critical to modern society. If you’re thinking exclusively of the Linux desktop and excluding things like embedded systems, servers, Android, etc., you don’t know what Linux is.

• Their own website’s count shows 400 million downloads if this were even a meaningful metric for anything (it isn’t).
• Even accounting for duplicates (e.g. I have VLC on my Windows partition which hasn’t ever been used even a single time; it exists solely “just in case”), downloads as a metric doesn’t even remotely correspond to how much use has been gotten out of it. That is, treating “user” as a binary thing for the importance of a piece of software is ridiculous unto itself. One clearly sees much, much more usage than the other by orders of magnitude. Maybe every week I’ll use VLC (and that’s clearly above average), but almost every computerized aspect of my life and yours is attached to Linux in some way.
• If VLC disappeared out of existence today, that would really suck, but functionally it isn’t crucial, and the gaps would quickly be filled with other products (some worse like Windows’ built-in; some like mpv which actually has higher compatibility).
• If Linux disappeared out of existence today, the global economy would collapse, billions would lose access to their computers (Android, Linux desktop, and ChromeOS), the Internet and telecomms in general would practically vanish (and even if it didn’t, your router wouldn’t work to access the Internet anyway), almost any “smart device” in your home like TVs and appliances would stop working, modern cars, planes, traffic control, and much of public transit would stop working, the energy grid would probably go offline, tons of kiosks and signs would stop working, I guess game consoles would be fine since PS and Switch run BSD while Xbox’s is MinWin-based, a lot of people with pacemakers would drop dead, critical military systems would stop working, and generally the world would be plunged into absolute chaos.

I’m sorry, your argument is just patently nonsense. Linux is clearly vastly more important and vastly more used than VLC. In terms of the “greatest piece of FOSS software” as the prior comment discussed, Linux wins on amount of usage, importance of usage, number of users, irreplaceability, and technical complexity – hands-down in every category.

The fact that Linux runs on so, so many servers (let alone Android and embedded systems) means that Linux has orders of magnitude more users than VLC. That’s not “getting weird with what you quantify as Linux”; both of those things are definitely Linux.

A comment that says “I know not the first thing about how machine learning works but I want to make an indignant statement about it anyway.”

EDIT: @PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat is right that Monk substantially ramped up their post count in the month of October, being typically 6+ per day. I was mistaken about point 1 for that month, although I stand by that other months like September, they were about 3 per day.

I’ll note that I consistently called out Monk to the point that multiple comments of mine lambasting them got deleted (the mods were just being fair and enforcing the rules consistently; hats off).

However, there are some points you’ve failed to take into account:

1. (Most important) Monk posted to /c/politics at most about three times per day. This is realistically the bare minimum amount you’d want as a cap on posts per day. You can go back and check this for yourself; the overwhelming majority of their posts were on communities they created and moderated. Checking the month of September, the exception I saw to this was September 8th, where they posted four. This rule would have done absolutely nothing to deter their propaganda campaign.

2. As your own comment notes, making alts is a trivial matter, especially assuming you’re more subtle about the angle you’re pushing than Monk was. That I was aware of Monk for months but knew and heard nothing about these purported alts is, to me, evidence of that.

3. Every single post by Monk was heavily downvoted because everyone knew what they were doing.

4. The main problem with Monk was their comments, wherein they would engage in essentially copy-pasting Gish gallop responses. The moderators knew banning Monk would’ve made the community healthier because of this exact behavior but refused to take action.

5. Even if the problem had been the quantity of the posts to /c/politics (it wasn’t), the moderators would’ve been able to use their discretion to ban Monk instead of a blanket ban on frequent posts.

TL;DR: Monk’s problem on /c/politics had nothing to do with and could not have been stopped by such a rule proposed in the OP.

I have yet to see any frequent posters pushing misinformation.

I have yet to see any frequent posters discouraging participation.

I have yet to see any frequent posters pushing quantity over quality.

To me, it seems like this post is addressing what’s currently a non-issue. That is, this feels like someone’s pet peeve about frequent posters dressed up as something beneficial using a list of non-applicable pros.

Meanwhile, news communities are posted to so infrequently on Lemmy that literal bots exist to fill the gaps. I would much prefer a human than a bot indiscriminately hammering the community with news (absent any evidence whatsoever that this would improve human engagement, when realistically, any humans who’d want to participate could do so at any time but haven’t).