Alrighty then! I’m screwed

Popularity × audience + accessibility to devs.

Popularity is a vague term for how well represented a pantheon already is in popular media; movies, books, tv, comics, gaming mostly, with maybe some music being a factor.

That’s amplified by the intended audience. If your audience is focused on one place in the world, chances are better that their pantheon, whatever it may be, will get picked. Otherwise, it’s likely to be a Western pop culture audience.

And it’s likely that developers are going to go with what they know best. It’s like how jrpgs pull more from Japanese mythology when they use mythology, and korean devs often pull from their history and legends first. It isn’t as heavily weighted as the intended audience, but it’s in there.

So, there’s typically going to be a bias towards mythologies that are easier to research, when the devs aren’t familiar with something, and it ends up with a lot of the published and easy to find info on pantheons in general is in English, and is heavily biased towards European and Mediterranean mythologies.

There’s also the factor that a lot of people default to what’s in Bullfinch’s mythology. So, Greek/Roman, Norse, and that’s about it lol. Even Celtic mythology gets shafted in that regard, the slavic gods get totally ignored, and you might as well just pretend that any deity that wasn’t also in Clash of the Titans doesn’t exist.

Egyptian mythology tends to be horribly misrepresented even compared to Greek. And pretty much any pop culture use of mythology ignores the fact that pantheons weren’t some kind of static group that never changed, and weren’t all worshipped the same everywhere. Hell, it wasn’t even always a pantheon that was worshipped at all, it could be single deities, where the others just got a nod occasionally.

I ran into some of the trouble when looking into mythology when doing world building. It’s fairly easy to find translation into English if you stick to those cultures. You can often find translation of original texts and later recordings of oral writ, not just stuff like Bullfinch’s.

Finding anything even remotely unfiltered for anything from the Asian regions is harder. You can usually find good translations of some of the more well known texts, but past that you’re relying on what some other person’s interpretation of what they read is, and that’s not the same as a translation.

So, it isn’t just a gaming industry thing. It’s everywhere.

No clue. But it seems to be most common among people that are most likely to believe that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want.

Yeah, lemmy using the ! for communities kinda screws it up across the board. Some apps can’t seem to make it be recognized as a community tag, and it makes the spoiler markdown annoying as hell.

I really wish they’d picked a less important marker for communities. ¢ is like, never used for anything and kinda looks like the c/ thing in a way lol.

On reddit, before they fucked the api, you could use third party tools to identify and tag users that were known trolls, and even have a good chance of identifying ban evaders.

Automod could filter out a lot of trolls and assholes just by fifteen minutes of typing, so users never had to see the worst stuff, even when the trolls weren’t identified.

Blocking after the jerks jerk is a slow whack-a-mole process

Well, that’s where moderation comes into play.

As much as people hate the idea, you need strict moderation to keep a given platform civil and on topic. To do that you need either robust tools (which lemmy does not have yet), or moderators able and willing to put in the time to keep things on track.

When a forum is run with a low tolerance for incivility, it will eventually become less of a target for jerks.

I catch hell any time I say that because people seem to believe (in spite of a millennium+ of evidence otherwise) that the default state of discourse is friendly and orderly. It simply isn’t. People are assholes. When they have the veil of quasi-anonymity, there are large amounts that won’t even pretend not to be.

I’ve seen it happen over and over again since the first html chat I was involved with in the nineties. Even before that, but when you were dealing with pre aol era internet, it was much less of a problem because of the barrier to entry.

You want friendly, chill communities, you have to pick between firm moderation with large and open numbers of users, or light moderation and limited access/numbers. The middle ground is just too open to bad actors.

On reddit, I saw strict moderation change a sub. I saw subs go from constant flame wars and nastiness into a fairly relaxed vibe in a matter of weeks just with active and mild moderation. With stronger moderation and clear community rules, you really can maintain a great community with only bare minimum randos stirring trouble.

Ask that mother and daughter that got arrested for an abortion after facebook ratted them out.

That’s why privacy matters. Not because something bad can happen now, but because that information can be weaponized down the road