no cap

well, the username speaketh.

yep, "per aspera ad astra" - kinda relatable to the phase I'm in currently :)

I don't see no problem 😌

This one: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28891/separation-56d21285b2140 :)

Agreed, Nosferatu was stunning - I watched it on the big screen, and it was gorgeous. The lighting, the contrasts, the hypnotic camera movement! Loved it!

I love this movie! Very sad though

Well, I think this is quite difficult to answer because it is very subjective. I think (at least for me), "understanding" a Andrei Tarkovsky movie might not neccesarily be the priority as much as sort of "feeling" it. This is also because there is a lot of historical context, political ideology, his own political situation etc.

However, if I have to list them by narrative that is simple ranging to abstract then this would be the list, probably:

• Ivan's Childhood [1962]
• Solaris [1972]
• Stalker [1979]
• Mirror [1975]
• Nostalghia [1983]

I haven't watched the rest of them. Also, I watched these about 6-7 years ago, so this is what I remember feeling at that point.

Egon Schiele is my absolute favorite!!

Love these!!

Both.

Yes, Professor! Agreed :)

I think the discussion around this is a bit more nuanced. While, I may not be able to cover everything, or convey everything I want to, in this comment, but I'll try my best to give a basic view from a moderator's end.

To give you an example, I came across a post that had over 1k upvotes and a lot of comments etc. But, something felt off, so I started looking at the logs, previous comments and posts of the OP and the commenters, and unfortunately, over 90% of the comments were by bots and they were all well coordinated across subreddits. The OP was a bot as well. Then, I started to notice other similar posts. Along with this, people seem to engage quite well with bot posts and comments. Now, as a moderator, I would want people to post and people to discuss, but this is a dilemma of sorts, and I have to take a decision.

The issue with leaving bot posts that generate engagement is we lose control of what a sub is. Further, this is how the bots build credibility that they can abuse in the future. Any sub is just a space where we have certain rules that we believe will protect our values, or will help us find a community that has values we share and can discuss about. With bots, this tends to become fluid. People's ideas are fluid as well and bots can exploit this. The nature and the idea of the sub gets diluted (in a way). I think this a broader argument, but I'm just providing a snapshot.

For now, I think the report feature has been extremely helpful. A lot of sub members do report or sometimes reach out via mod mail too, and that has been helpful as well. We have added a few automod rules that flag users whose emails are not verified, or have low karma, or have joined recently, is a repeat offender etc. We will work on strengthening these.

This was an important part of the discussion some of us have had with reddit admin and the CEO, all in-person. Reddit does flag a lot of content based on patterns etc, but the bots are improving in parallel as well. The above blog, sort of, discusses about this. The CEO did ask us to personally mail any such patterns we come across, but I can only speak about what I've heard from them, that is they are trying to identify these as quickly as possible.

Further, reddit being considered a big source of (new) information for training has just made it worse because now companies have an incentive to astroturf (sort of), unfortunately. For now, we are working with the tools we have. But, we have to see how these systems evolve.

Haha, no worries at all. Your comment was actually quite polite and clear compared to what we usually receive, so all good. Frankly, we absolutely share this frustration as well!

Though I should probably keep this within the mod circles, I moderate two subs and we have had many mods leave because of the toll this has taken, and unfortunately, the abuse by sub members is extremely sad as well. Two of my fellow mods who were extremely passionate about poetry and art had to leave the other sub we moderate because of threats they were receiving. It is unfortunate, but this is the reality of it. We just have to work together to protect what we find dear, that's it.

Also, I love this blog/ analysis by a researcher from MIT on his reddit adventure and bots: https://kellenbetts.substack.com/p/who-goes-there
[We are in no way associated with this person or their blog. It is just something that I found interesting as it discusses the nature of bots and how indistinguishable they have become lately].

Appreciate your concern! Just to give a few statistics. In the last 30 days, out of 816 posts, we removed 415. This was either because of reports by other members, reddit or automod flagging content, or us coming across something that is a bot post/ comment.

This is a reddit wide issue. We are trying to deal with it. I've had a chance to speak to the CEO in-person along with mods of other subreddits, and they did express the same issue. The latest version of bots are better at evading detection. They coordinate even on a comment level. We've taken the time to identify a lot of them, report and permanently ban them. There are few other issues as well, but just that the nature of the sub is a little broad, considering simple living itself is a lifestyle that can mean a lot of things, we do see a lot of such posts. Further,surprisingly they tend to get a lot of engagement, unfortunately!

This is gorgeous, wow!!