happybadger [he/him]

All my subreddits that I moderated went to shit after the protests. I stopped, the replacements stopped, the sudden influx of shitty posts and shady users drove off the normal communities.

Fuck em. I haven't felt the urge to post on reddit in months and it's lovely knowing the people I'm interacting with probably aren't rabid fascists unless they're Lemmy.world pissbabies.

…I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/teagle/texts/martin-luther-king-jr-letter-from-birmingham-jail-1963/

That's where you are right now. You can hopefully do better if you challenge yourself, but I wouldn't consider you anything different from the most milquetoast liberal hiding behind rhetorical civility while you support the violence of the state. Your progressive politics are at best redistributing the loot of that violence while perpetuating the system causing it, either out of cowardice or malice or apathy. All of them would make you the same judas goat for the imperial slaughterhouse.

That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.

On second thought, this is as good as you get. I'd just give up.

It's the youtube algorithm wearing a skin suit to convince children to gamble.

Fuck yeah. Burn baby burn.

/r/snackexchange/ - I made it a protest subreddit by embracing Spez's call for user democracy. Every day every single thing about the subreddit would be reset and users would have to vote for every aspect. The only rules were that you couldn't abolish democracy and you couldn't abolish me as the caretaker. /u/Icxcnika was a weird little goober who took it seriously instead of seeing it as a protest meant to derail the subreddit. He voted to make himself mod for a day and then the admins did a mod coup to make him the head, even over the other two mods that had been there for a decade and built all of the third-party tools we relied on to make the subreddit work. He had only posted once, some 8 or 9 years before, and had never moderated. The users and other mods fucking hated him and activity in the subreddit fell off. Now he no longer posts, one of the other mods no longer posts, and the last remaining one is apparently now a bot that sells funko pops.

/r/fifthworldproblems/ - The other mods and I were all on board with the protest. They forced us back open so we refused to do anything. Now it's restricted and the only link posted since the protest was a Lemmy instance that I didn't have anything to do with.

/r/modernart - I started rebuilding this one after it was overtaken by spam from people who don't know what "modern art" actually means. I want to keep the subreddit because there's good radicalisation potential with it in the right hands, but I stopped posting and only remove the most obnoxious spam days after it's reported to tank the quality of the subreddit. I'll be replacing everything with a Lemmy instance link at some point but was always holding out for Hexbear to open up community creation.

I had a few others that I just left or let the admin bot take over.

A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we're chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I'm putting the needle in his arm he says "you're from the government." in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He's furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask "what?", he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming "you're from the government" repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.

They gave r/snackexchange to some random guy who had participated in the subreddit one time a decade ago. When he was getting weird and manipulative trying to reshape the subreddit, his top priority was instituting a new ID verification service of his choice.

The first guy to request control of r/science was an antivaxxer who sold supplements.

It's so wholly arbitrary and underhanded. I just stopped interacting with my other subreddits and don't care what happens to them.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-roblox-exploits-children-w-quintin-smith/id1507621076?i=1000547080283

Roblox is industrial-scale child labour to sell microtransactions to children, normalising the idea at the earliest stage of their 𝑔𝒶𝓂𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒸𝒶𝓇𝑒𝑒𝓇.

The last one showed four important things:

1. It can be coordinated super easily and has broad support amongst the mods

2. It's popular with most users outside of sports subreddits and they're hostile toward scab mods and admins.

3. Reddit fundamentally has zero response to it and anything they try compounds their issues. They can't offer mods anything short of the wage that 24/7 customer service job for a multi-billion dollar company should entail. They can't censor the protests without it causing a Streisand effect and major backlash which reinforces points 1 and 2.

4. Mods don't have any control over the subreddit anyway. It's arbitrarily taken away and given to anyone who asks for it. The only consequence for anyone protesting is reddit saying you can't do the volunteer work that you're protesting over the conditions of already. The next schmuck still has to do that work with those conditions knowing reddit hates them just as much as they hated you.

I think the next mod strike is the breaking point for the website. They're going to have a worse response, people are going to be angrier, and the shareholders are going to add a whole new layer of demands that can't be enforced without making everything worse for mods and users. Once that mod exodus hits, the website instantly becomes unusable and full of wildly illegal things. There's no Plan B for that which isn't very expensive.

He was weird. In addition to the posts on the daily election threads, he was sending me PMs that were flattering in a way Patrick Bateman would compliment someone. Everything was blatantly manipulative and worded in a way that was simultaneously an interrogation I knew he was feeding to the admins. Then the dog caught his car and had to drive it while everyone else on the road screamed at him. I think he lasted like three days before handing over control to one of the mods who was so offended that they quit the website.

Nothing irks me more than someone who can't handle positive chaos or slight inconvenience. He was so determined to stop the protest which was only over us not being able to moderate the subreddit without those third-party tools, all to preserve the sanctity of a community he hadn't interacted with in almost a decade. There's something deeply pathological about a power grab like that. Like what the fuck.

It's 8% of the shares in total. Everything prior was purchased in venture capital drives well below the IPO price. We both know that the price is going to crater after that. My incentive is to buy in now and cash out the moment it launches, but that's also their incentive and they're doing so much quicker with far more shares. If I kept my shares, my only hope would be that whatever dividends it pays out cover the 24/7 customer service job of moderating at the state minimum wage. It wouldn't at the amount it allows me to invest. The people drawing much more profit from their much cheaper shares will make that 24/7 customer service job worse as the website becomes worse to use and everything I say on it is sold to train the LLMs that are threatening labour more broadly.

The gamble every person who got that message faces is whether or not they think they can cash out within the first day. After that there is no happy ending for reddit, its mods, its users, or people dumb enough to invest in the modern Myspace.

My t-shirt saying "I'm no fucking predator or paedophile" has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

It's the kind of thing worth putting up in random bathrooms just to Streisand Effect that business.

Some kind of dementia. It's a cancer of the soul which arbitrarily removes parts of you that you can't even perceive the loss of. I had an MS patient whose vocal processing was reduced to the point that he could only say variations of "you fucking bitch". He was totally bed-bound and dependent on a mostly female nursing staff for every single need. Most of those employees were burned out and he could only communicate to them using a wildly misogynistic slur. I've seen it reduce a famous AIDS researcher and a WW2 pilot to toddlers, others to cornered raccoons, for some it's a nightmare they can never wake up from and they just spend all day/night reliving their worst memories. For a good 10% on the ward it just takes away their executive function and they can no longer control their worst impulses or recognise that they should.

Cancer and strokes are a close second for more or less the same reason, but dementia is so existentially terrifying to me.

I like beets for the same reason, but cabbage is underrated in its versatility. I'm making Romanian sarmale tomorrow with pork/beef/rice cabbage rolls: https://www.jocooks.com/recipes/sarmale/ . Much better than dolmas and the cabbage adds so much body and flavour to the dish.

Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.

I really like esperanto as a project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

It had a lot of support with early 20th century anarchists who saw it as a way to make people less nationalistic and prone to their domestic propaganda.

Lemm.ee Nazis never disappoint. Print out your comment and choke on it so it has value.

/r/chapotraphouse was the best socialist subreddit and it got banned over saying "death to slave masters". The intense censorship campaign, at one point consisting of being site banned if you upvoted a comment in the subreddit, was so disgusting that I wanted to take the Reddit out of reddit. Chapo.chat-turned-hexbear was its direct continuation.

r/snackexchange was fun. I sabotaged the subreddit by embracing Spez's call for user democracy, making everything about it up for a vote every day. Some weird little goober ratfucked that and the admins made them the head mod, despite them only participating in the subreddit one time ten years before and there being two existing mods who programmed third-party tools we were protesting for. Those tools were necessary for running the subreddit. The users instantly turned on this guy despite me being a more or less absent mod for years and destroying the subreddit in protest. He became a proxy for the admins and caught so much flak that he has only posted a couple times since, and not in r/snackexchange.

There were a few larger subreddits that got mod couped with similar hate toward the scabs, but having seen the worst case example it's great. They do their big power move and it's the gun. When they threatened to do it in r/Science the guy requesting it was an antivaxxer who markets herbal supplements. Let a thousand fuckups bloom.

Municipal fibre is the only good ISP I've ever had. Communities around Colorado are rolling it out. I pay like $70/mo for 1gb/s, consistently get 300-600mb/s download speeds, haven't had any downtime in a year, and zero piracy warnings using public trackers without a VPN.

What's the size of my hard drive? About 20 acres.

What specific ideology are you looking for? There's no neutral political community because there's no neutral ideology. Either you have a place with Nazis and Genocide Joe enthusiasts or you have a leftist one that's critical of the entire political spectrum and wouldn't tolerate those freaks in our communities. Anything in the realm of /r/politics becomes /r/politics.

https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/

I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.

Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,

Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ

English: Give us this day our daily bread;

We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I like the Snowflake Method. You start with the core idea and branch out in a fractal-ish pattern to develop different elements and plot points. Mindmapping software helps keep it organised: https://xmind.app/

They said filling. 10 apples.

It was fun at its high point. The problem was like you said, always the same map. Shipping costs run like $20-150+ and that's a month's wage in many of the countries that have interesting snacks we aren't already over-saturated with. Scams were only ever like 5% of trades at most and we never had a poisoning though, so overall a successful prototype of the thing that would work.

That might happen but that's not where the real pressure point is. Sometime shortly after the IPO, whatever hype exists around it is going to give way to the reality that reddit is an unprofitable company at the end of a tech bubble built on 0% interest rates that aren't coming back. There is no way for reddit to become profitable without making itself unusable and sanitising the NSFW content that drives a huge amount of its traffic. When the price tanks, they've bribed their 75k most loyal users and mods into accepting the IPO with advanced purchase options at what might be the high point of its value. That's when shit stands to rupture. Reddit will have failed everyone to enrich Steve Huffman and the venture capitalists who invested in their earlier rounds and there's no way for them to control that tantrum spiral.

Huckleberries. They're the summer ground cover in Colorado subalpine forests. Like a mix between a raspberry and a blueberry. So good when you're just laying in a hammock by a lake smoking doobers and eating berries off the ground.

https://www.reddit.com/dsp

They just sent out the emails for offering their 75k most valuable users advanced purchase. It's based on your total karma and/or your total moderator actions. It's that latter where I think they're really going to get fucked. Volunteer labour is such a massive part of reddit not immediately being consumed by redditors and bots. If I took on a dozen moderators for a smallish subreddit like /r/snackexchange, maybe one of them would stick around past a month. Of those who did they either treat it like a 24/7 on-call job or they do advanced labour like programming 3rd-party tools. It's absolutely terrible work and the only reward for it is more work, now with extra enshittification from investor pressure.

Lose those mods and it's a doom spiral for the entire website. What's the Plan B? Hundreds of paid customer service agents doing that work or trying to do the mod coups that failed last year because the new guy sees he's being fucked just as hard as the old guy? Organic user traffic is going to plummet once that quality filter is gone and they see the version of the front page. The next wave of admin crackdown to enforce investor demands is going to provoke another mod strike and compounded with the stock price falling I think reddit might be going the way of Digg very fast.

edit: Also, the top tier for moderators is 5k actions. The loyalty of someone willing to do 5k un-fun things is now dependent on the value of a stock for a company that can't turn a profit, and they can't turn a profit without making things massively worse for the person willing to do 5k acts of labour for them. There is no way to make any of those 5k acts of labour fun and any attempt to short of being paid is a pizza party NFT which will only piss them off more.

I try to cross-reference things and then look at the critical angles. Public media generally has higher editorial standards for me. I don't trust right-wing sources or the New York Times because they lack editorial standards. State media I don't trust for domestic issues, but while I don't go to Al Jazeera for news about Qatar I trust their coverage of Palestine and France. I try to avoid sources that have an involved stake in the conflict, so something like Ukraine means no RT/Pravda but I'll watch the primary footage coming off Telegram and then compare it to multiple countries' coverage of it. I try to stay dialectical with all of it, so I'm cognizant of the history and material/social angles which create the issue and the biases of those covering it. I'll read a socialist article but I don't want to uncritically agree with news so that's more supplemental unless the media hasn't yet/won't cover it.

Otherwise I listen to a lot of podcasts that are leftist or left-liberal, keep a critical eye on social media coverage, and follow scientific journals/niche science websites that summarise those journal articles without editorialising.

When you touch something dirty, do you feel cleaner when you wipe your hands off with paper or when you wash them under a sink?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They're a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they're congregating in the only reliable food source left. They're a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.

Baby's first political take.

Whoa there lil guy. Dogs don't speak. You bark.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me Pickle Rick being crucified on a cross by three Roman centurions. He is crying while looking toward the sky. Style: impressionism

step 1: get them fired for anything or nothing