Ugh. So much to unpack here.

First off, you have to act like a massive shit-loaf to get perma'ed from Reddit in the first place. Now you're declaring your love for this community because you can't get back into Reddit.

Welcome, I guess.

When I was 18 and my buddy was 17, we went to the beach. He wouldn't let me put sunscreen on his back because that would make him gay. What if a woman saw?

He ended up with a severly blistered back, horrible, serious burns.

Me, I went up to the cute girls and just said excuse me hehehe.... I can't reach my own back.

He was also too chickenshit to do that.

I live in central Canada.

I am reading the comments, and I am noticing that other people's experiences are very different than mine.

For me, Google Search has reached the point where it will not even give me results for my search terms. I say this without an iota of hyperbole.

It's so coincidental that this conversation comes up, but I actually sat there yesterday agog, looking at my desktop Firefox browser window... Scrolling through the entire search results page and realizing that not a single thing was even close to what I searched

It is noteworthy because I have been observing a steady decline, but it was the very first time I could make use of literally nothing that they gave back. In an unsettling way, the gravity of it hit me emotionally right there.

Looking at what reddit was and what Reddit is now, I genuinely can't imagine why anybody goes there anymore. The odd time I do some nice doomscrolling, I find that >99% of the content is re-heated and re-served. Nothing there informs me anymore. Nothing there inspires me. Nothing makes me think in a new way.

Every day the same thing ad nausea. Fascism bad. Sexism bad. Phobia bad. Musk bad. Orange man bad. Inflation bad. Boomers bad. Cats good. Name my rescue dog. Celebrity good. Celebrity dead.

That site should be renamed Reggurgitatit.

I wouldn't say nobody, but I would say the people that dominate the area I'm trying to volunteer and work in.

I work in a healing center where there are 29 women on staff and 1 man.

I cannot get these people to understand that as much as they want to push forward social movements, which I very much agree with, this must not come at the expense of men who are trying to heal.

I will literally have counselors co-facilitating with me, who want to make every point about how women are oppressed, pushed down in the workforce, face issues.

I'm not in denial of those, but no man coming into a healing environment to work on themselves, be vulnerable, and explore their own journey, needs to hear how much men are shitty.

Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.

I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol...

Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.

And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I'm an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.

So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.

AI told me 75C/170F is ideal for hot tub water temperature.

Sure no problem. Once I get used to that I'll work my way up to boiling peanut oil.

At one time it was discovered that there was no nesting limit.

And of course that caused people to start the "bottles of beer thread".

We got something like 2,000 or 3,000 1,300 into it before literal devs came into the thread and begged us to stop "you are breaking Reddit".

That resulted in the thread being shut down and nesting limits implemented. What those limits are, I do not know. I just know at one time they didn't exist.

Edit https://www.reddit.com/r/bottlesofbeer/comments/dfpwp/the_count_is_done/

So many people attacking OP and perhaps not remembering there was a time when nearly all flat panel TVs came on a pedestal mount. The designs were largely changed to mitigate claims and liability.

What you are describing is the equivalent of somebody breaking into your house so they can steal your house key.

These are television shows that exploit people who have the mental illnesses which result in obesity.

You wouldn't take a bunch of people with clinical depression and make a show called "smile, ya dipshit" about them.

Biggest loser is centered around the idea that losing weight is the answer to people's problems when it's not.

The one where they have these severely ill people living their lives is just so others can watch, leer, and feel quietly superior that "at least I'm not those people".

They are just exploitative, harmful garbage.

The most sinister is an almost inescapable one, where companies intentionally build things (larger appliances are a huge offender) to fail within 3 to 5 years.

It's the "a poor man can't afford cheap shoes" thing.

They love to "sell" this concept that making items cheaper means consumers can more frequently replace as their styles change. Fuck you, give me a white fridge that never breaks, I don't care if I have to pay double up front.

I just would like to show something about Reddit. Below is a post I made about how Reddit was literally harassing and specifically targeting me, after I let slip in a comment one day that I was sober - I had previously never made such a comment because my sobriety journey was personal, and I never wanted to define myself or pigeonhole myself as a "recovering person".

I reported the recommended subs and ads to Reddit Admins multiple times and was told there was nothing they could do about it.

I posted a screenshot to DangerousDesign and it flew up to like 5K+ votes in like 30 minutes before admins removed it. I later reposted it to AssholeDesign where it nestled into 2K+ votes before shadow-vanishing.

Yes, Reddit and similar are definitely responsible for a lot of suffering and pain at the expense of humans in the pursuit of profit. After it blew up and front-paged, "magically" my home page didn't have booze related ads/subs/recs any more! What a totally mystery how that happened /s

The post in question, and a perfect "outing" of how Reddit continually tracks and tailors the User Experience specifically to exploit human frailty for their own gains.

Edit: Oh and the hilarious part that many people won't let go (when shown this) is that it says it's based on my activity in the Drunk reddit which I had never once been to, commented in, posted in, or was even aware of. So that just makes it worse.

Protectors & providers

It's one of the worst kind of inequality which women don't (or rarely) ever examine and question if it's compatible with modern ideas

It's like the entire Web went to shit in 6 months.

Last week I was researching hot tubs and saunas and so forth, as I was gifted a 10 visit spa pass.

Top result was rambling and obviously AI generated, packed with keywords and very little information presented in haphazard way, that was telling me that the ideal water temperature for maximum therapeutic benefit in a hot tub is 130-140F.

Yeah no problem. Once I get used to 140F water I'll work my way towards something hotter, perhaps boiling peanut oil.

Oh shit, you just reminded me of the time that I had to PHONE Macromedia to manually activate software because of the firewalling. This was after waiting days to get administrative permission to install it in the first place.

"Thank you" for helping resurface those horrible memories!

I don't miss those days.

For me it's entirely self-centered and I'm dispensing with all the aspirational and political feelings that people have about the way businesses operate.

Quite simply I recommend Steam because it is a product with so many killer features, it's really hard to take anybody else seriously.

It's just shy of 2024, and Epic is still a non-realized alpha product. Their website, store, and launcher/library is a perfunctory effort at best. The most recent feature they added that I even consider to be an improvement would be the ability to look at my own games library - that should sound like a pretty funny joke but it's said deadpan. They don't even have proper controller support for PC, whereas Steam for example recognizes that PC gamers come with a variety of input hardware.

I mean it's so simply that steam is such a mature product that offers so much to the gamer, and epic just wants money and they're not really doing anything to compel me to want to use that platform.

GOG is great, it's a simple system that gives you the power to own your own games and I very much appreciate that. Personally I don't like to splinter my collection across different services so I'm mostly avoid them but I can't say anything really negative.

Anyways this is just my opinion, I feel like steam has tons of killer features, the otherS simply don't. There's lots of valid discussion in other areas about ethics and things like that but really I'm just looking at it from the perspective of what do I want from my money. Steam gives me the most, and the others don't even hold a candle.

My launcher shows that I have 379 games from Epic. Not DLC, not demos. Full games.

I have never given Epic a single cent and I never will. (That is to say, until they offer me something that makes me want to use their platform). They have no killer features - AT ALL.

I think the other side that doesn't get explored very often is how convenience food makers have gotten everybody hooked and unable to cook anymore.

Now that that is generally locked-in behavior in our society, the price goes through the roof.

I know people that literally do not know how to make rice because it's "too hard".

We should acknowledge that grocery prices have gone up in that price-gouging is rampant. We should also acknowledge that most of people's money spent at the grocery store is to exchange hundreds of dollars of extra money, for minutes less preparation.

In this picture of this person paid $10 for a pound of "burger". A pound of ground beef or tofu is a third that price. It takes a minute to slap a couple patties together or to slice off a few slabs, dry them and fry them.

I really feel like we need to enhance this conversation. I think a lot of people don't want to have it because they want to have the convenience but not the price and it's just not sustainable anymore. I think people need to look at their own dietary lifestyle, and consider what they're trading for that convenience.

After modding for over 15 years at the other place, it has strongly solidified my opinion that the only people that want to be mods are broken people that love the surge of power they get from being a water-cooler dictator. Modding should be a job nobody actively wants, and when they do it they do it with reservations, reluctance and a tinge of resentment.

This guy has the attention span of a circus flea, doesn't he?

I'm high af and buying Twitter. Hate speech is lol because I feel unloved. Advertisers you go now, you damned J's. We don't need qualified staff for 2.0 I know how to paste code. Ok now we're gonna make hella $ with "verified". Shit. Ok I gotta unplug some servers and refactor. I know PHP. A child looked me in the eyes but he couldn't see into me like I know the others do. Now we're X for some reason. Now we're revenue sharing. I like to lie. Now we're subscriptions, babby. No we're gonna facilitate financial transactions in a challenge to the banking sector now cuz they got my nuts in a fukkin' vice here Linda!

I don't even understand the question, really.

Don't associate ME with those banjo-pickin' inbreds.

edit: I had referred to the people of Saskatchewan as a bunch of banjo-pickin’ inbreds. I was wrong to make such a statement, and I’d like to apologize. The vast majority of the people in Saskatchewan have no idea how to play the banjo.

Hell no.

In 1980s I used to have to go to Adventure Games in downtown Winnipeg to pay $50 for a mediocre (at best) game on two floppies.

In today's money, it would be about the equivalent of $150 plus tax.

When you consider how much pleasure and value we get from a modern game, we're actually paying the less thana 1/10th what we used to, per hour played.

Who can say, right? The gears of Reddit are inscrutable.

That said, when you engage with an extremist, there's always 20 other extremists looking at your replies and just waiting to report you if you say the slightest mean thing. They are mucilaginous troglodytes and one mustn't extend to them the credence that they're dealing in good faith.

720 streams run from strange websites in timbucktoo have higher fidelity than the 4K stream I paid good money for.

Here's a great price and you can share it with your friends. Wait not those friends. Wait your phone isn't authorized anymore. Okay you authorized your phone but you need to authorize it again. Okay we just doubled the price and cut the quality again. Now you can't watch the movies that you downloaded for offline viewing without an internet connection. Now your ad-free service has ads.

Netflix can take a long hard suck on my pudding factory, they're never going to see another penny of my money again, and this is from somebody that goes back to the DVD days of Netflix.

The short answer is you really can't.

Reddit Admins and developers have gone on the record multiple times over the last decade and then some, detailing how they specifically save every comment and every edited version.

Replacing your comments with a single SPACE or deleting them does nothing. At least insofar as you frustrating their attempts to sell your comment data.

"with whom I have no meaningful connection with"

Oh it hurts to read.

I was very surprised to find that I feel more calm, more balanced, more confident and true to myself, less worrisome and controlling, and just generally happier with every passing year.

I've had a very sharp mind, but I must confess I've noticed it slowing a little in the last few years. One of the mysterious benefits of that is now it causes me to reflect for just an extra moment before I respond. That has opened up so many more lines of communication and understanding in my personal relationships.

I didn't realize how much younger women would love older guys with some grey. I didn't realize how many women thought going unshaven and looking like a bag of shit (joking here but not)... was incredibly sexy.

I got a lot of experience seeing relationships all around me, and my own. And I came to discover some things about how we work inside. Majority of people never figure it out, but a lot of people do around 40. I found it very refreshing and surprising to see that within others, and it was a really cool light bulb going off for me when I got it.

I was super surprised to find out that despite my thrashing, really mostly my life was a series of random events or unlikely confluences. That is to say, through experience and reflection, I discovered that we really have far less influence in our own lives than we think. This goes for the high points and the low points.

I was really shocked actually to see how little emotional maturation there generally was as I watched my peers age alongside me. I know people who are in their 50s and 60s who do nothing except gossip in a sinister way about everybody and stir up shit. I am aware of a group of 50-year-old women wherein a marketing director got into a spat with 3 other women over a man at our social group, which ended with slashing tires. I really, really did not expect to see this kind of insanity at my age. And it still surprises me every time I see it, I must be naive at this point for giving people the benefit of the doubt.

I'm very surprised how quickly life changed from being so bored you purposely extend a poop from 2 minutes to 20 while you read the shampoo bottle for the 50th time... To the point where there isn't a single second in our day where interaction isn't available! We wouldn't miss a phone call for the world in the '70s-90s even if it meant jumping off the garage roof in the middle of reshingling to answer in time. I'm surprised at how bored I feel with more media to consume than ever before.

I was very bright when I was young, but unless I was given practical application of knowledge, it just leaked out of my ear.

I was exactly the same with trigonometry, I couldn't understand it or why were even learning it.

As soon as I started to get into programming and I wanted to have a gun with a bullet that had a certain speed, and it was going at a certain angle, and I needed to break down the horizontal and vertical components of the motion, all of a sudden it felt like I had invented trigonometry myself.

I found that true of so many different things especially with math. No matter how much it was explain to me theoretically, it never made sense until I had a practical application and then it was just obvious to me.

I wish more of my education was that way instead of just learning theory.

I cannot remember the specifics because it's going back almost 15 years now but at one point...crontab (edit and other various vital tools) was disabled by policy.

To get necessary processes/cleanup done at night, I used a scheduled task on a Windows PC to run a BAT that opened a macro program which opened a remote shell and "typed" the commands.

Fuuuuuuck.

In my view, the issue is that most people are not willing to change their own patterns in the slightest.

It's always somebody else's responsibility to give things exactly how they want. Personal responsibility and decisions have no play.

"Fuck Nestle. Oh yeah but I needed water, what was I supposed to do, die? I had no choice but to purchase water in plastic, there was no other store around and I don't know how to plan for my needs in advance. There is simply no way to anticipate that I could have needed water and fill a reusable bottle before I leave the house."

"The price of fast food is insane. It does not occur to me that I don't need to purchase this, and I have no inherent right to get it at a cheap price. It has also never occurred to me to go to the grocery store. Oh wait, yes it actually did occur to me, but I really don't want to cook, I want somebody else to make the food for me and for it to be cheap."

Personally, I'm done with Sony, I'm done with Nestle, I'm done with Walmart, I'm done with fast food, I'm done with Netflix. I'm done with all the places that behave unethically, and it would not be fair of me to complain about them while also patronizing them. I don't think you'll find this attitude in general population.

Well that's at the crux of it, indeed. Steam has these killer features that enable and empower me as a gamer.

Then there's Epic that still doesn't have controller support.

I work in the field of mental health, specifically mostly in the area of recovery mentorship.

This is an area that is effectively dominated by women.

I wish women could see how that within the realm of healing, they have constructed their own systems of power where men are oppressed, abused, belittled, and prevented from accessing those services without standing up to / enduring that level of hatred.

In short, once the oppressed have the guns, they become the oppressors.

That's super true, so many times to stay ISO compliant (I'm thinking about the lottery industry here), security policies need to align with other recommendations and best practices that are often insane.

But then there's a difference between those things which at least we can rationalize WHY they exist... and then there's gluing USB plugs shut because they read about it on slashdot and had a big paranoia. Lol

It's like you didn't read the article, and are specifically focusing on a one-dimensional argument while you can conveniently ignore the greater issues at play.

Go and read your own comments, in fact go read the article, and please try to come back with some meaningful thoughts.

Two actually...

Jian Ghomeshi - Something about him told me he's trying way too hard to project the feel of cool, smooth, groovy and suave. Just had a creepy feeling about the guy the whole time, was waiting for the news basically. Then it came out that he was violently assaulting and raping women.

Kevin Spacey - Having grown up with sociopaths, I could see right through the guy. Trying and not doing a great job of acting human, in the way somebody who's not really human thinks humans act.

ITT: I do mushrooms and I don't go crazy so therefore it's impossible, and also I don't understand human psychology at all.

There's a difference between disability paid as income assistance from government services, and disability from private insurance.

Even at the maximum disability allowance, you get about $15.50 a DAY.

Is the universe deterministic or probabilistic?

I think this would have profound bearing on technological advancement and psychology, and would to answer many ither questions.