Are you talking about people breaking in and stealing them? While I agree that was a stupid problem, it’s quite a bit different than a remote hacker taking over your brakes while you drive.

Someone figured out how to remotely take control of Chrysler vehicles with the Uconnect 8.4 systems a while back. So people are out there working on these things. Also, the more popular the car, the more likely someone is working on it.

To FCA’s credit in that case, they listened to the researchers and implemented several fixes very quickly to address the problem. I wouldn’t put it past many manufacturers to do the hands-over-the-ears “la la la” thing when faced with the same situation.

My “dream” car is a V6 Accord from the last year they made them, which I think is 2016. I’d buy one of those right now and just keep repairing it, and hope no one t-bones me. Unfortunately I think my wife is still in the mindset of “we should buy a new car and keep it forever”, which used to be my mindset, too. But she’s not seeing the news on this stuff like I am, either. I suspect if I explained “heated seat subscription” to her (a feature she will not buy a car without) she would object strenuously.

But I don’t like where new cars are going, at all. I don’t like subscriptions, I don’t like the backseat driver nanny features that blare out false alarms, and on the whole I’d rather not have adaptive cruise control (there are times when adaptive cruise is nice, but overall I prefer the old-style cruise control).

We have a 2020 Mazda that I absolutely hate driving; if that is the future of cars, I’m not interested.

I’m hoping my car and our pickup last forever. The other day we took the Mazda for an errand in poor weather because, as I said, “It’s the most expendable car.”

Yeah for connected features, there are those costs. A vehicle we own would let me remote start it and lock and unlock doors from the app…if I paid $15/month. It’s not worth it to me, so I’ve never paid for that service, and the vehicle works fine without it. I mostly even forget it exists. I might be more interested if it would report things like fuel level, oil and fuel filter replacement time, and so on, but it doesn’t (but even then I’m not sure it’d be worth $15/month).

A subscription for heated seats, though? No. I don’t want a subscription service for something that doesn’t have an ongoing cost to the manufacturer. For us in particular, we buy our cars with the intention of keeping them a long time, and I’m not paying that fee for the life of the car. I like cars that are paid off.

If I’m on a heated seat subscription and they break for some reason, who pays for them to be fixed?

Comparison on the heated seats repair question: I rent the water softener at my house for $29/month. (The previous owner set it up, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it…it’s a “it’s working, and I have bigger issues” situation.) At this point I’ve paid for two of the highest-end home water softeners available, and I haven’t had a single issue with the one I have, so it’s definitely not the best setup financially. But, if my water softener dies today, I can call them, and they’ll come right out and fix it or replace it, no charge. So there is a benefit to that monthly subscription price; they take the risk of it failing, not me.

I’ve moderated many online forums going waaaay back (farther than I’d like to admit actually). I agree with you, and I want to explain decisions to the users too, so I’ll generally try to talk them as well. And sometimes we get a connection, and sometimes I realize I made a mistake. But in my experience, when they start playing lawyer, you’re not going to please them.

I never thought about the four categories of mods before, but what you wrote feels pretty accurate. I think I’m in that first group, and I try to avoid issues by moderating as lightly as possible.

When I’m in other groups or communities, sometimes I think, “If someone did that in my group, they’d get one warning, then I’d just ban them the second time it happened. Boom. End of discussion.” But I know that’s likely not how it would go in reality. LOL

The “legal eagles” are best ignored. Just ignore them. Most of the time they’ll just stop if you ignore them, because they want you to argue with them.

Yeah, sometimes it got a little nasty about other people on reddit, which I was never a fan of. It was supposed to be in good fun, but sometimes people got carried away OR people would start posting every single question that was asked. (For example, I can poke fun at the people who just started riding a bike in their 20s and are now wondering about getting into a professional racing career, but sometimes people would repost what I thought were completely valid questions - no one knows everything, especially when they’re new to something. Fortunately those latter posts rarely got many upvotes or comments.)

Overall though it was generally a lot of fun. And honestly they were probably the most knowledgeable, helpful group if you had a detailed cycling question.

No, I didn’t, thanks for the tip. Subbed! I might drop the other one now.

I do miss /r/bicyclingcirclejerk. I loved the absurdly fake bragging and having fun with the stereotypes. Then one day we realized quite a few of us actually ride Cannondales, and that made it even funnier.

I can’t believe two people downvoted your comment.

You’re right about contributing.

As for the filtering, I’m not sure how I feel about that - I use the web interface on my computer and an app on my phone and tablet. I’d prefer them to have similar results. But I see the point you’re making; it could be curated by user instead of a massive algorithm for everyone.

I follow a sub that’s all reposts from reddit. Occasionally I think about replying to something, but then I just go, “What’s the point? OP isn’t here.” I don’t recall ever seeing anyone else respond to any of the crossposts, either. The community is c/bicycletouring@lemmit.online if anyone is curious, which is a pretty niche topic to start with.

I’m not convinced it’s adding anything to the Lemmy experience, but at least those are clearly marked as crossposts and are all posted by one account, so it’s easy enough to ignore if I wanted.

On the “all” thing - remember that reddit has a mode, which is the default, that’s between Lemmy’s “truly, everything all” and “subscribed”. In this mode, you’d get popular posts on subs that had opted in to allowing them to hit that page (or didn’t opt out, I don’t remember).

/r/hockey is a good example - their posts usually generally stayed in the sub, but their Super Bowl post (and occasionally others) would usually hit reddit’s front page and bring in a ton of people who weren’t subbed to /r/hockey.

This was a good feature of reddit, I hope Lemmy eventually gains something similar.

It’s possible I misunderstood your last goal, but if you’re planning to have Lemmy comments posted back to reddit, I suspect that wouldn’t go over well with reddit’s admins after they figure it out.

Of course it’s just my view, I don’t know what people are actually doing. But I’ve seen comments that I thought were good discussions of the topic at hand downvoted for describing the other side of an issue, even if the commenter doesn’t agree with it. To me the only reasons to downvote are things like trolls, off topic, personal attacks, racism, homophonic, and the like.

There’s definitely a “downvote if you disagree” ethos here. There’s not even a pretense of “this contributes to the conversation, even if I disagree” reason for upvoting.

I know this is how it worked in practice on reddit, but at least the rule was that you were supposed to upvote contributions and downvote things that didn’t contribute, and at least a few people followed that rule (or maybe only me).

I wouldn’t be surprised if that drives some people away - they see a bunch of downvotes on their comments and think people don’t want to hear from them (even if there are more upvotes than downvotes).

This image, or one very much like it (different hair color), is now posted at least four times in this thread that I saw. Interesting that it keeps doing that.

#2 and #3 (#3 is a response to the linked comment)

#4