It’s tempting to look for potential vocab exchange between Rapa Nui and (Quechua and Aymara). That could help dating the exchange with the Andes, as the lexicon stops following the lender’s sound changes to follow the borrower’s instead.

(Polynesian syllabic structure and small phonemic stock make this extra tricky though. For example, Classical Quechua /s ʂ h/ would probably end all merged into /h/, and you’d see multiple epenthetic vowels popping up.)

Even then I wouldn’t be surprised if they contacted the folks up south, like the Mapuche. Specially as I don’t expect the landing spot from a Rapa Nui → South America to be the best spot to start the opposite travel, due to sea currents.

Yup. Because a cultured Roman was all about something those chuds lack - temperance.

Alright. Sounds fair. Instead of taking dangerous actions, I’ll make it create a report instead.

Thank you! Frankly, if done this way I’d be excited to use it ASAP.

Automod is just a tool, indeed, but how a tool is designed dictates or at least encourages its usage.

Trying to automate things and decrease mod burden is great, so I don’t oppose OP’s idea on general grounds. My issues are with two specific points:

• Punish content authors or take action on content via word blacklist/regex
• Ban members of communities by their usernames/bios via word blacklist or regex

1. Automated systems don’t understand what people say within a context. As such, it’s unjust and abusive to use them to punish people based on what they say.
2. This sort of automated system is extra easy to circumvent for malicious actors, specially since they need to be tuned in a way that lowers the amount of false positives (unjust bans) and this leads to a higher amount of false negatives (crap going past the radar).
3. Something that I’ve seen over and over in Reddit, that mods here will likely do in a similar way, is to shift the blame to automod. “NOOOO, I’m not unjust. I didn’t ban you incorrectly! It was automod lol lmao”

Instead of those two I think that a better use of regex would be an automated reporting system, bringing potentially problematic users/pieces of content to the attention of human mods.

Pigs are the original artist’s muse.

Well… that seems accurate, in the light of Ancient Greek slang. Like using χοῖρος/khoîros “pig” to refer to the vagina.

[Sorry. I couldn’t resist being pedantic and vulgar at the same time.]

That’s some great read.

Those muppets (alt right talking about antiquity) are a dime a dozen. You see a lot of them in 4chan, too. They look at the past with a “the grass was greener” mindset, cherry picking stuff to justify their political bullshit, without a single iot of critical thinking.

And they usually suck at understanding the past, as their cherry picking doesn’t allow them to get a picture of how and why things happened. They obsess over the Roman Empire and Sparta, but when you talk about the Republic or Athens they go into “lalala I’m not listening lalala” mode - because both contradict their discourse of “we need a strong rule, like people in the past, to fight against degeneracy”.

They’ll also often screech if you mention why Octavius adopted the title of “imperator” (emperor) instead of “rex” (king). Because guess what, once they acknowledge why people in Republican Rome saw kings with disdain (kingdom = primitive system and breeding grounds for tyranny), all their political discourse goes down the drain, so Octavius had to “sell” his stupid idea under a different name.

Don’t tell them about the Aurelian Moors, by the way. Or Caracalla’s familiar background. Or do tell them, if you enjoy seeing them screech.

Besides the reasons already mentioned by others here: not all users are the same, and we’re better off if some of them remain in Reddit. And yet this sort of advertisement is bound to attract people who are at the very least completely clueless (otherwise they wouldn’t be seeing ads), if not worse.

Instead I think that a better approach is to simply use the platform. Create posts, insightful comments, use the voting buttons. Also, discourage people from derailing non-political threads with political content.

That immediately reminds me the Indo-European expansion across Europe. It happened almost yesterday, in comparison with the article’s timeframe; “just” a few millenniums ago. But it seems that it was the same overall direction - Caucasus to Ukraine to the rest.

I really like the explanation of the dating method, as people assume that carbon-14 is used for everything. (It’s a bad idea to use it for anything older than 60ky)

My [rather uninformed, I’m no Biologist nor Archaeologist] hypothesis is that the relevant bacterium clade is extremely old, probably older than the initial settlement of the Americas, and it was brought to the Americas by the native inhabitants. With then the current strains being mostly imported from Afro-Eurasia.

(I live some 400km to the north of the digging site. My gut reaction to the author calling SC’s coast “southeastern” was a bit funny.)

Yup - it is, partially, Popper’s paradox of tolerance.

However there’s a second risk that I mentioned there, that Popper doesn’t talk about: that the mechanisms and procedures used to get rid of the intolerant might be abused and misused, to hunt the others.

I call this “witch hunting”, after the mediaeval practice - because the ones being thrown into the fire were rarely actual witches, they were mostly common people. You see this all the time in social media; specially in environments that value “trust” (i.e. gullibleness) and orthodoxy over rationality. Such as Twitter (cue to “the main character of the day”), Reddit (pitchfork emporium), and even here in Lemmy.

[from your other comment] There is another solution. Make it so witches cannot cause harm, everyone gives a little bit to make everything work for everyone.

It is trickier than it looks like. We might simplify them as “witches”, but we’re dealing with multiple groups. Some partially overlap (e.g. incels/misogynists vs. homophobic people), but some have almost nothing to do with each other, besides “they cause someone else harm”. So it’s actually a lot of work to prevent them from causing harm, to the point that it’s inviable.

It happens before the label. When you start seeing a witch flying on your sky every night, you’re already leaving.

The main thing that made Lemmy succeed was structural: no matter how bad an admin team is, you can limit their impact on your experience, by picking another instance.

The main focus of the text is something else though. It’s what I call “the problem of the witches”.

Child-eating witches are bad, but so is witch hunting. People are bound to be falsely labelled as witches and create social paranoia, and somewhere down the road what should be considered witch behaviour will include silly things with barely anything to do with witchcraft - such as planting wheat:

• if you’re planting wheat you’ll harvest it.
• if you harvest wheat you get straw.
• if you get straw you can make a straw broom.
• if you make a straw broom you can fly on the sky
• conclusion: planting wheat is witchcraft activity.

However, once you say “we don’t burn witches here”, you aren’t just protecting the people falsely mislabelled as witches (a moral thing to do). You’re also protecting the actual witches - that’s immoral, and more importantly it’s bound to attract the witches, and make people who don’t want witches to go away.

In other words, no matter how much freedom of speech is important, once you advertise a site based on its freedom of speech you’ll get a handful of free speech idealists, and lots of people who want to use that freedom of speech to say things that shouldn’t be said for a good reason.

That harmed a lot of Reddit alternatives. Specially as Reddit was doing the right thing for the wrong reasons (getting rid of witches not due to moral reasons, or thinking about its userbase, but because the witches were bad rep). So you got a bunch of free witches eager to settle in whatever new platform you created.