As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their weekend. Did you make any plans? Take a trip? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Hi Tildes. Hopefully this thread will be both a good discussion and helpful to some of you, and hopefully me.

As I'm guessing most of you know, data backups are quite important and it is best to have at least one copy locally and another copy somewhere else. At the moment, I store photos on an external hard drive and Google Drive, photos from my phone on Google Photos with copies of important original quality files saved locally, and everything else on drives in my PC and a network drive on my Raspberry Pi. It's far from ideal, I've only got one copy of some files and three or four of some others so I've been looking for something better to keep everything organised, safe and in one place.

I've tried the free trial of Backblaze, which seemed the obvious choice, but it had a few problems. I couldn't backup my Pi's network share, and in general it's a bit clunky and difficult to use. It is marketed as an easy solution to backing up data, but in doing this it just makes everything more difficult, at least for me - I know what I want backed up, and I would prefer to select it manually, but by opting in everything for backup by default you have to spend ages excluding the folders you don't want saved, one-by-one, in a UI that is difficult to use and often unclear. Sometimes the exclusions list just doesn't work - the Program Files folders are meant to be excluded by default and they were listed under exclusions but were backing up anyway. For me it found over 200,000 files, and because they were all so small it barely managed to backup 100MB in three hours. (Not that I know where the files come from because they aren't listed in the Windows app in any vaguely comprehensible way.)

So I need to find something else, and I was hoping someone here would have some recommendations. Personally I need it to:

• Be affordable and easy to setup and use
• Backup external and network drives to the cloud (physically keeping another drive somewhere else isn't an option for me)
• Be trustworthy and have strong commitments to security and privacy
• Work well for my use case: preferably automatic from Windows

Looking forward to any comments or recommendations. Thanks!

So currently I get most of my music from soundtracks ripped from games and from Bandicamp. However, quite a few artists that go through traditional publishers are not on Bandicamp.

Now, while I could go through the hassle of installing iTunes on Linux through WINE, I dont want to because:

• WINE can be a hassle, especially if the app does some strange things.
• Id rather not support apple in any way if I can

So, are there any major platforms that allow downloading .mp3 or better yet, .flac files, especially for artists going through bigger publishers?

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

Pretty simple bug, documented as per title. The /groups page incorrectly indicates that I am subscribed to ~anime (I shouldn't be), whilst the ~anime group itself, and the subscriptions list on the homepage (along with the topics I see), correctly show me as unsubscribed from ~anime.

I could try toggling this? Which might fix the bug, but would also potentially erase the state of my subscriptions in the database and prevent debugging.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

I've got a crappy Chromebook running GalliumOS (Xubuntu) and Chromium is slow as molasses. I tried a few other browsers like Otter and Falkon. They're alright for most sites -- not Tildes, but this seems consistent with QT5 browsers.

Anyway, outside of text browsers, anybody have any light weight browser suggestions?

I know we have talked about it to death, and even run experiments on the mechanism, but I think it's worth re-evaluating the idea of voting on comments.

I know that voting provides value to Tildes as a social platform; it acts almost like a social currency; you know that if you have a lot of votes, people appreciate what you have to say. That provides incentive for people to write more comments and participate with the community.

What I and others have come to realize is that votes also have negative effects on our community. Here's a short list of negative effects:

1. Voting is addictive. I'm sure most of us are familiar with the process of clicking on our usernames to see how many votes our last few comments have gathered. We do this because it's a dopamine hit; they act like tiny digital love letters telling us how awesome we are.

2. Voting is a measurement of popularity. Those love letters aren't actually how good you are, they measure how popular your ideas are. In other words, votes encourage group-think and creates an echo chamber that will prevent you from taking competing ideas seriously.

3. Because of number 2, we alienate people with other ideas and reduce the richness and quality of discussion on this platform.

4. Also as a result of number 2, the information that gets put into those popular threads becomes the de facto truth - weather or not it's actually true. This can prevent us from seeing the "bigger picture" or from understanding problems others might have with how we think.

5. The end result of all of these effects is that we will slowly become more and more extreme and insular as time progresses. We essentially become the same as the people stuck in conservative media prisons that we tend to look down on.

Personally speaking, I think that we would be a much more robust community if we had more conservative voices speaking up. After all, the left does not have a monopoly on the objective truth. I know we probably have a few conservatives that are lurking around, but I think that they are largely disincentivized to contribute because they don't get the same kind of votes left-leaning comments do.

With that being said, I would like to hear back from everyone what they think we should do about voting. Should we go back to hiding vote totals again? Should we get rid of them entirely? Or maybe you think things are good as they are? Please let us know your reasoning.

This thread is posted daily - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.