That was never a "serious" question in that sense. It's just a philosophical paradox.

The real answer is that you need to look at the ancestry tree. There wasn't a moment that a chicken popped up, it was a gradual evolution between an ancestor and until a point that we decided "yup, that's a chicken".

CARALHO!!!!

Translation: Install Nyarch Linux

Kind of, I could think of a few examples in english:

outlook : look out

Overlook : look over

Overtake : Takeover

Upkeep : Keep up

There might be others that I can’t remember right now. I don’t know if for you most of these are cheating since they become two words instead of just being one.

In Portuguese, I really can’t remember any examples

Yeah that was a weird chapter in the bible

Sometimes it even triggers an honest discussion.

In my experience, that’s what tends to happen in more traditional forums.

Voting systems are great for threads where the discussions is about problem with an objective solution, but for more subjective topics it just kills discussions.

I recommend anyone that used to be a lot on Reddit, here on Lemmy and/or other forums with karma systems to try out forums without them. Trust me you’ll notice the difference.

Niche forums with small communities tend to be best, and a lot less toxic.

Insert here the meme “some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”

Copy pasting a comment that I saw on Reddit

——

Link to the original study (with a less sensationalized title):

https://zkae.io

A few important notes:

• the study is about Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane and 1Password. Proton Pass isn't mentioned.

• the study presumes that they're working with a malicious server (read this as compromised server, controlled by an attacker). The attacks they talk about in the article would not work on a normal server. Here's their quote:

No need to panic: all of our attacks presume a malicious server. We have no reason to believe that the password manager vendors are currently malicious or compromised, and as long as things stay that way, your passwords are safe. That said, password managers are high-value targets, and breaches do happen.

• Here's another quote, about other password managers:

You can ask your provider the following questions:

1. ⁠Do you offer end-to-end encryption? What security do you provide in case your server infrastructure were to be compromised?

2. How do you check that public keys and public-key ciphertexts are authentic?

3. How do you authenticate security-critical settings, such as the KDF type and the iteration count?

4. Do you provide integrity guarantees for a user's vault as a whole? Can a malicious server add items to your vault?

You can also ask your favourite password manager to commission an audit checking for our attacks in their products.

• If you still feel unsure/unsafe, then adopt an offline password manager (I highly recommend keepassXC).

I don't have much experience with that community, but from the little I've seen, agreed. It's not good.

A good forum design will only get you so far, the rest is up to the moderators. If you let bad actors in, it doesn't matter how you designed your forum, they will poison the well and drive other people out.

The best communities I've been in are in independent old-style forums. One of them is Tildes. Most of these don't feature downvotes (or upvotes for that matter) and are honestly the better places to have discussions IMO.

Dogpile on them

It basically just turns a discussion forum into Disneyland, where everyone is happy all the time, because there’s no other option

In my experience, that's not what happens

I will basically always happily downvote people whining about downvotes. Especially if the whining is preemptive.

Considering the point of the comment - and the post being about downvotes - my edit was meant to illustrate the point, not to whine.

Regardless, about another thing that I feel is more relevant:

If I were going to turn every downvote into a conversation I’d be at this all day. And it would further encourage bad behavior because any engagement is good engagement right?: If you can pull someone into a quagmire of discussion then ragebait comments and posts would be the order of the day.

To me this is not... A healthy way to interact with forums. You don't have to engage with every post or comment you come across, be it with commenting or voting. You're "allowed" to be neutral, to not know, to not have an opinion, or to simply not want to engage.

And if you feel that someone is pulling you into a pointless argument, you can just walk away. Having the last word != being right, as a lot of people misunderstand.

And if people posting ragebaits becomes an issue, downvoting or replying to them won't solve anything. The problem would need to be fixed on a more fundamental level, but that's another can of worms that mods need to figure out on their own communities. As for me, I simply walked away, as I did with Reddit and others

Not really. Censorship is not only about political opinions. Banning child pornography is a form of censorship, but I doubt anyone sane would dare to argue that that's a bad thing. (if anyone reading thinks otherwise, please do me a favour and go jump off a bridge, the world would be better place without you)

But even if we focus on political discourse, consider the paradox of tolerance. If we lived in an ideal society, censorship would not be necessary. But we don't, there are people that are more than happy to take away other's rights and freedom of opinion. A functional society must be intolerant of the intolerant and not give them a platform.

Edit: I'm not going to pretend that I know exactly where tolerant opinions end and intolerant opinions begin, but I know that both exist, and I believe we must censor the intolerant ones