See my comment

Version 5 of a software, device, vehicle or such isn’t necessarily better than version 4

Yep, I can attest to that! I used to play Minesweeper Adventure version. Then Microsoft decided to do a complete rewrite and literally ruined the game. It was way slower and way buggier, and on top of that they also lost all my progress. So, well done Microsoft - now instead of seeing more ads (which was undoubtedly why they did the rewrite) I now don't see ANY ads (because the game is just horrible now and not worth playing anymore, even if it didn't have any ads!).

I had someone say that to me, a Maths teacher, when I was trying to tell them where they were going wrong with their Maths! 😂And they were a programmer - no wonder all the e-calcs are wrong... (sigh)

It is just that here, in this situation, I didn’t get it

I scrolled back to see, and I think that initial one was just someone who disagreed with your suggestion, for whatever reason (like I downvote incorrect responses to order of operations questions. i.e. hearsay which contradicts what's actually in textbooks and taught), but then yeah, there was some piling on when you asked for an explanation, and I just write them off as "I don't want to see this" types. At first it bothered me, but in the end I just take out of it that I got more upvotes than downvotes, so just proceed with business as usual then. :-)

Remember the human, and all of that

Yeah, there's some keyboard-warriors who forget that. You learn to just ignore the downvoters unless, like in your situation, you'd like an explanation as to why your particular suggestion was downvoted by someone. e.g. maybe they know something that you don't. There was a whole side-discussion about Kagi like that (someone had seen something on a blog, and someone else pointed out the CEO's response to the blog, etc. - I didn't read the whole thing... but I didn't downvote it either ;-) ).

I can’t even recall the last time I downvoted something

I've downvoted things which I know are wrong (people love expressing opinions on things they have no expertise on - just check out the threads on order of operations! 😂), and upvote correct things (the whole point to up/downvote is to push relevant things to the top), otherwise neither usually. Sometimes I use upvote to indicate I liked something someone said.

just seems so… lazy

Yep.

And now I am getting downvoted for asking an honest question

Welcome to programming.dev! 😂I've had the same happen (technical issue, looking for a solution or workaround, get downvoted). I take it as "I'm not interested in this - don't ever show me anything about this again" - well, just scroll on by then, not hard. 🙄

Oh, I nearly forgot! I had to learn Python too... because I had to teach it. Did try to argue for C#, which is allowed under the curriculum (and would be a more suitable language to teach), but then found it's hard to get that agreed on because so many schools just run Python because it's easier for them from an administrative point of view - I found I wasn't alone in this predicament. Thanks school admins...

Not that anyone knows what RSS is

Actually there was quite a bit of discussion about it not long ago in my feed. I'm following at least one bot which is just boosting from an RSS feed.

Indeed it just so happens that Maho is someone who not only investigated ActivityPub, but made his own implementation of it for his own blog(!), rather than using the Wordpress plug-in (but for the DevBlogs account he just used the Wordpress plug-in). And yes, you need a bot to propagate the content of a non-human account - the posts from the Communities here are propagated out to Mastodon and where-ever via a bot.

But yeah, in this context I was talking about you can now follow the blog from Mastodon or Pixelfed or where-ever - one less separate website to check for my tech news, gets brought straight to my feed :-)

P.S. not sure if you're aware (I wasn't until I became a mod) but more than a dozen (don't remember the exact number) of the "subscribers" to each Community are actually the bots which propagate the content out to other servers.

It’s a bot account that shares links

In other words, does the exact same thing as the bot for this Community does when a new post is made.

Didn't you get the memo? We're doing away with privately-owned platforms and starting fresh in the Fediverse :-)