Since I think that the "definition game" is mostly a waste of time, I'm all for more objective measures, like mass. It's still useful to distinguish between planets in our system vs. elsewhere, so perhaps keep planet vs. exoplanet? The later is still shorter than "planet not orbiting Sol".

They ain't in Hell. They're just so hidden that not even Death finds them. (Death doesn't know the "shake the food bowl to make your cat resurface from wherever she was" trick.)

In addition to what other people said, I'll focus on the delicious fruits.

A lot of wild fruits are awful when raw. Crab apples are a good example - small, tough, excessively tart. But then you get humans picking the least awful of those fruits, and spreading their seeds (sometimes without a thought, sometimes on purpose), you're effectively selecting the best-tasting ones. And across multiple generations, the fruit goes from barely edible to passable to okay-ish to good-tasting.

In other words, plenty tasty fruits out there are not the result of trees "trying" to propagate themselves better. They're the result of weird monkeys doing artificial selection across millenniums. Or even through the centuries, as this Renaissance painting shows:

Check the bottom right - those are watermelons. Granted, watermelons aren't from trees, but the reasoning is the same - in just three centuries or so watermelons went from "90% styrofoam with some good bits" to big balls of juice. Why? Human intervention.

Update, since I added a new drawing and want to give the knight (Anarchy Chess) a bit more breathing room: https://canvas.fediverse.events/#x=425&y=552&zoom=1&tu=https%3A%2F%2Ffiles.catbox.moe%2F5n2ejd.png&tw=30&tx=135&ty=440&ts=ONE_TO_ONE

The place where you added it sounds great for me.

I'm probably sticking somewhere between the shark, South Island and the bottom left corner. I'm a faction of one though, I just want to draw some simple 30x30 stuff.

Probably closer to the shark because they'll likely want to use the rainbow output of one of my drawings:

It would be also useful to detect when you say something that needs to be clarified further. Often things are extra clear in your mind, but when you write them down people get confused, assumers put words on the gaps, this sort of stuff.

It would be useful for the downvoter, too. A lot of people downvote stuff automatically; perhaps if they were required to think "why am I downvoting this?", they wouldn't.

I think that 5~8 wider categories would work the best. For example "unfunny", "factually incorrect", "rude", so goes on. And then a catch-all "no clarification / other / I simply dislike it".

simple ground rule

The problem is enforcing it. Like @AFKBRBChocolate@lemmy.world, people will misuse it as like/dislike buttons. So perhaps giving a way to express it that is clearly labelled as such would be an improvement.

(I'm brainstorming too, mind you. Nothing too serious.)

I think that I started using Reddit around 2014~5 or so. For me the cultural shift shows two things:

1. Any online community financed by adbux will eventually prioritise advertisers over its own participants.
2. Unless you have tools ensuring transparency of the process, people with power over the others' speech will misuse it to defend their individual interests, instead of the community's.

The vote lottery does happen here, but the lack of karma makes it less impactful. I feel like it's a good balance.

(I just wish that the downvote here gave you more feedback on why you're being downvoted, while still being somewhat anonymous. Multiple types of downvote would solve this, I think.)

A global score (karma) is one of those ideas that sound great on paper: you're encouraging people to post better stuff by associating it with some score.

In practice though OP shows why it's a bad idea, on multiple levels. And why I'm glad that Lemmy doesn't have karma.

On some subreddits, we ask to have a Karma in comments good enough [...] (it happened to me on /r/iOSBeta).

Issue #1: enabling shitty moderative practices. Some assumptive = braindead mods think that karma is a viable heuristic to keep trolls and morons at bay. It is not.

Contrast OP's user experience with mine: when still using Reddit I often had a shitposting account, that was never locked out any subreddit due to karma. Why? Because I was willing to game the system and farm karma before shitposting.

And that leads to issue #2: gamified systems are made to be gamed. It's actually easier to farm karma without contributing than to post shit that contributes with Reddit. Repost old stuff, replying comments with shitty one-line jokes (nowadays I'd probably use ChatGPT for that), sticking to high-activity subs (i.e. the worst of Reddit)... you get the idea.

Another problem is users who feel superior to others because they have a better Karma. [...] « You’re a fresh 0-Karma account, you bring proof ».

Issue #3: karma is yet another thing that distracts users from what is said, towards who says it. A user with more karma... has more karma, that's it - anything else is assumption.

In short, I stay on Lemmy.

Welcome back. Lemmy isn't perfect but it's less worse than the options.

Regarding Latin malum: people often have the impression that the word specifically means "apple" due to a bunch of crappy Latin textbooks. It's messier though, and the video is correct - it could be used to refer to any type of fruit, although in the absence of context you'd "default" to apples. This can be shown through synchronic evidence, like Apicius 4.3.4:

4. MINUTAL MATIANUM. [...] Media coctura mala matiana purgata intrinsecs concisa tessellatim mittes. [...]
4. Matian Mince. [...] While cooking, add [to the pot] Matian fruits (=apples) that had their cores removed and cut into pieces.

If "mala" was enough to refer to apples, why is the author specifying that those need to be "mala matiana"?

Diachronic evidence shows the same. Using Portuguese for the examples:

• mala matiana "Mattius' fruit(s)" → maçã "apple"
• mala romana "Roman fruit(s)" → romã "pomegranate"

If "mala" was used exclusively for apples the first one wouldn't get an adjective, just like in Apicius' recipe book; and the later would've never popped up.

This reminds me an experiment made with capuchin monkeys, where the researchers were using small discs as some sort of currency. They could use it to buy stuff like pieces of cucumber (they eat it, but it's meh), jell-o (they like it), grapes (they love it)...

One of the things that they reported is that a female exchanged sex for a disc. Then used said disc to buy a grape.

Conclusion: sex for goods is likely a human behaviour that predates humankind itself.