Yeah, maybe just a good steward quality-testing the Bus Factors?

I agree. I suspect the internet will retrospectively eventually even be looked at as an "information revolution" on par with the industrial one. I know that sounds like an enormous claim but there is a long road yet, so I don't think it will turn out to sound so crazy. Each revolution (and its increase in power) comes along with responsibilities and potential dark sides, though. I think similarly to how the industrial revolution opened the door to industrial war, we are already seeing the pain brought by various (distributed, automated) information war techniques. I love how we live in an age now where a person with internet access and enough tenacity can eventually learn almost anything, and contribute back, but at the same time I worry deeply about the rolling waves of belligerence, disinformation & selective amnesia coercion, gatekeeping, and fraud that have come with it. I hope humanity can get those under some degree of control soon.

This is utterly heartbreaking. Only 11 years old.

Having been inspired by the Core Wars at an impressionable age, I just thought of a truly perverted version that could be enacted on a dedicated Lemmy "shitpost" community. The community would have a committee-designed list of moderation rules (including that nonsense, irrelevant or data-flooding posts/comments are ban-worthy), and teams would develop LLM-based agents as the Lemmy-bot equivalent of Core War "redcode". The two bots would be simultaneously unleashed on the channel as the only posters, commenters, and mods, armed with internet-access to find links for posting and commenting on. Every time a bot does a ban on the opposing bot the game is paused for the human adjudicators to decide if the ban is valid based on conversational context. A bot wins a round when it achieves 3 valid bans, or when the opposing bot reaches 3 invalid bans. A yearly tournament could be held. The winning team's bot would have to be exceptionally good at finding & posting links, and reading & commenting on them, and replying to opposition comments in ways that induce the opposing bot into footgunning in bannable ways. I think it would be critically important to not give the bots access to the Dark Web when finding links to post, otherwise things would get harrowingly nasty really fast.

The other option is to channel that hate into action.

This. The Dalai Lama is very quotable on this subject. One of my favourites is:

To be angry on behalf of those who are treated unjustly means that we have compassionate anger. This type of anger leads to right action, and leads to social change.

To be angry toward the people in power does not create change. It creates more anger, more resentment, more fighting.

There's more here:

https://www.alwayswellwithin.com/blog/dalai-lama-quotes-compassionate-anger

...and not just movies. My partner and I steadfastly try to do all "interacting with kid's school, extracurricular and social groups" stuff 50/50. We always strive to go to (and host) such important events together. We always indicate we should both be added to mailing lists, and give both our phone numbers as contacts, etc, etc. However, much (sometimes most) of the time people only ever call her about kids playdates, medical professionals default to discussing his issues with her exclusively even though I am sitting next to her and commenting too, when there is a parents' chat/mail group for his classes or other activities usually she gets added and then has to help me muscle my way in to the group (and the groups are often all women). Once at a preschool party a parent saw me interact with my kid, came and asked me to point out his mother, then went to her to invite our kid to a birthday party. It's never-ending for a father who strives to be a "caring father", and not just an infantile "toxically masculine, one-dimensional, emotionally stunted cliché" in terms of "role model". It is exhausting for both her and me, but is also extremely demoralising for me because trying to be what you believe to be the right kind of role-model is one of the most important yet virtually undocumented parts of parenting, and even more demoralising because it still happens even after I hugely reduced my external workload in order to be the primary "stay at home" parent. One small positive step is that the country we live in introduced "paternity leave at child-birth" legal requirements (much smaller than for maternity leave though, and only introduced after my kid was born [sigh]). In popular culture it has become a trope that women suffer endlessly trying to play the role of both parents to compensate for idiotic (or selfish prick) fathers, but it glosses over the fact that a man who actively tries to "be the change" (and any woman who tries to facilitate that change in solidarity) are so often tripped up at every step by this pervasive (and often subconscious) intellectual and emotional inflexibility. One other small positive is that I occasionally find another father who feels the same way (and who is often just as frustrated and burned out by the state of things) ...sometimes - just one or two. Having previously lived in many countries/continents I also know that the country I live in is far from the worst offender for this, which makes it even more pathetic globally.

Everything is based around violence. Like really, is that all boys are good for?

Oh yeah, you are so right. It feels at times like - when I'm not teaching him to play football (violently), and not egging him on to emulate (violent) action figures, and not buying him fake guns to play with (violently), and not telling him to "man up" instead of taking time to understand his feelings, etc - there seems to be a degree of subliminal judgmentalism directed at me for not "sticking to the job description". It seems many people will prefer to see the world burn in preference to accepting someone disregarding parts of the "normality" rulebook based on rational introspection, including those who would never admit it out loud, and even some who haven't yet consciously realised they are standing on that side of history - perhaps because it holds up a mirror to them not doing so (out of fear?, laziness?, bitterness-fueled pulling-up the ladder?).

In my case not so much "lagging behind" as "stopped caring, ignoring, life's too short for so much churn over nonessential filler".

Most of Facebook runs on Linux.

Yet, although this exhibits strong The Onion energy, strictly speaking this could be posted in Not The Onion. Names matter, and I would love to be a fly on the wall witnessing the momentary meltdowns when people read this there...

I've been scrolling the comments on this post for a while (longer than I should) and just want to say it is one of the most refreshing collective displays of thoughtfulness and empathy I have read online in far too long. Even the back-and-forwards where people disagree on details or semantics are still overwhelmingly positive, insightful, and respectable on all sides. Another comment here used a brilliant term "merciless insincerity", and personally I've been leaning in a dangerously cynical direction lately about its prevalence. Although I know I am old & resilient enough to not let it capsize me I despise when so much lowest-common-denominator thinking hardens my shell and wallpapers a layer of apathy over who I really am (the angry-yet-optimistic teenager from the 80s/90s who screamed into the void about the climate-emergency, the corrosion of democracy by short-term vote-winning & fundraising, and - more relevantly - the toxicifying impact men and women have had on society - at interpersonal, familial, regional, national, and international scales - by regurgitating thoughtless archetypes and flagwaving in lieu of questioning reality from a fearless standpoint of "open-minded but critical, optimistic but sceptical, confident but fallibilistic". Discussions like these are some of the very few bastions of antidote left for that cynicism and apathy. What blows my mind is that it is apparent a nontrivial proportion of you who are young (well, much younger than me) are introspecting and expressing yourselves about the subject better than I ever could. When I see the flood of toxic (and idiotically childish) nonsense almost everywhere else, discussions like these truly help bolster a dangerously scarce resource called "hope for the future", and reinforces for me why about 99.9℅ of my "social online reading" time is spent on Lemmy lately. Gandhi said "be the change you wish to see in the world", and it's worth considering that what you are all writing here is a good example of you doing exactly that (even if you hadn't realised or intended). It adds up, when groups of people give each other the chance to be truly unafraid (instead of "playing tough" - which merely broadcasts how truly afraid someone really is).

That term "merciless insincerity" is an amazingly concise yet thorough way to capture one of the pervasive things I get most frustrated by (across the many countries I've lived in, so it is not a georestricted behaviour). Whenever I try to describe it I get too wordy. I'm stealing that.

I never used Reddit other than the rare view via a search-engine when trying to find something. I now lurk Lemmy daily but barely ever post. I read so many enlightening things here. Not leaving.