I'm not sure I see how that would affect the developer. The charge back would be only to the reseller, wouldn't it?
Moderators of large subs are some of the the most addicted people to Reddit.
But that said, I can understand it. We have to remember that where features are concerned, we're not even close to Reddit. The reason to migrate here is mostly an ideological one (from disagreement with the Reddit admins' actions) and perhaps some future potential.
Reddit still has far more functionality, including vastly better modding tools (which are extremely lacking here -- beehaw defederated from some of the biggest instances because they lacked any other tools for dealing with users), better uptime, vastly better UX (there's soooo many meta posts every day from people confused by the poor UX), support for videos, larger communities, more developed apps (we only have early stage alphas here), etc. All these things are barriers that will make some users write off Reddit alternatives as simply not good enough (yet).
There's lots of useful bots besides just summarizers. Reminder bots can be great. Some linkifying bots are also useful (like Marv in r/SCP). Bots can detect malicious spam bots. Subs like AITA use bots to tally up user votes. There's bots for moderation actions, too.
But we really could use a way to get rid of the absolutely useless bots. We don't need terrible spelling correcting bots, a bot whose sole purpose is to tell people not to put "the" in front of "Ukraine", or a bot that lectures people on AMP links.
Starbucks leadership are both cowards and assholes. This is just another thing in a long line of offenses (particularly union busting).
While you're right that that's a downside of downvotes, I think that it's far better than the alternative.
Downvotes means we have a way to discourage really bad behavior and lets others see that it's discouraged. For example, suppose someone posts something bigoted. It sucks to see those kinda comments (especially when they affect you personally). When those comments are heavily downvoted, it feels better, since it tells you that the views expressed in the comment are not acceptable. It's extremely discouraging when I see bigoted posts with a positive score. Without downvoting, they all have positive scores and it's just "less positive".
It'd be nice if reporting was able to remove such comments before anyone sees them, but that will never be the case. Too many communities don't remove comments fast enough and many more simply won't remove comments unless they're really bad, if at all. Some moderators are bigots themselves and others simply don't have the ability to recognize dog whistles that may be in comments. Or they're not personally affected by the malicious comment, so they can be more easily convinced that if the comment was politely worded, it's acceptable even if it's blatantly bigoted.
To be clear, it does suck that users will use it as a disagree button for comments that are otherwise good, but that is far, far worth it. The presence of downvotes were a major reason why I used Reddit (and now this) while disliking the likes of twitter.
The way reputation works on Kbin isn't great anyway.
That's because it has a bug. They changed upvotes from boost -> like to be compatible with Lemmy. The reputation calculation hasn't been updated yet. It probably will be soon. Might even have a PR already.
I suspect it's similar on kbin? Cause you can follow people on kbin and also see "microblogs" (Mastodon style comments). Though I'm not really sure where exactly it displays and if it is different for boosting a thread vs a comment. It's not a feature that personally interests me much. I mostly just hit it by accident sometimes lol.
needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation
Gosh, I can't imagine something as minor as passenger safety being important... Seriously, is this guy real or is it three psychopaths in a trenchcoat?
Recordings from the home’s smart doorbell appeared to show the delivery driver, whom Mr Jackson said was the same race as him, misheard an automated response from the device asking: “excuse me, can I help you?”
Seriously, that's what it was? They'll ban him for that?
Barriers are relative. Everything that makes it slightly harder will stop a large chunk of bots, since bots aren't able to easily adapt like humans can. Plenty of very basic bots are in fact stopped by lack of emails.
But yeah, email verification is heavily more so that you can verify they have access to the email, and thus the email is safe to use for things like password resetting. Without it, webmasters can get swamped with complaints about people getting locked out of accounts or the likes because they signed up with the wrong email.
In theory, you can also go further by only allowing email providers that have anti bot mechanisms, but it's difficult to maintain that and it will always exclude some legitimate users.
It's true. I've reported so many to the secret poop police. They're always laughing at first like it's not serious, up until they break down the bathroom door. Not so funny in a Montana gulag, is it?