This sounds like the battery and the charger's problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I'm supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

This election is going to be one of the worst ones and that's saying something.

Aw shit, gotta show her the decoy emotions, the ones you can have in a movie for women

Yep. Some of us remember when it was Fuck Ellen Pao, they seem to like their sacrificial CEOs over there, though I'm sure they get paid too much to be the scapegoat.

That just makes me stop and think about how bad Musk loves being That Guy. The other ones will take the heat and then float away on their golden parachutes, you never really hear from them again. Not him. He keeps making new companies so he can be That Guy at them.

That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr's fields, as well.

Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn't shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.

So that's the issue we're going to have, here, and I'm not sure if the "some guy running an instance for the fuck of it" model is prepared for it.

Reddit has been dying for a while.

Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.

You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It's not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.

The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you're there, but it's not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It's really not a competitor. It's just easy to steal from, because text.

Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don't know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren't that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It's not a recipe for growth.

Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.

Reddit doesn't have that far to fall, is what I'm saying. There isn't a mass exodus, though. You're seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.

I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site's entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they've decided to take an "everyone's replaceable" attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they'll pay. It'll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they'll pay. I swear I'll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.

I'm putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.

Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you're really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. "Social Media Manager", gotta be code for OF, bro.

That's how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.

If you're going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.

I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.

Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It's still gonna take years for that old man to die.

Fuckin Yahoo isn't anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.

The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don't need us, and we'll never know because we don't speak the language. So it's gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.

But don't be too dismissive about the idea of "mass exodus". Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren't that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.

I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn't worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it's gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it's covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone's face, and they're fucked.

I just don't think that is going to make the splash you'd expect.

But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I'd keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.

Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?

Cash money says there's already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn't doing half bad, financially, maybe they'll bring tapes back.

It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old "sign the EULA or lose everything" bullshit and it's just not working for them. Too bad we can't kick them in the dick like other nations can.

That is a "meth as a career" 36.

Also the trolley is how you get to work, so if you stop it you can't get to work and pay your rent so

I gotta hand it to ya, Philly, you don't act predictable. This Mom for Liberty is a black man Republican, checkmate, atheists.

These are so bad that it makes me wonder if they're careful acts of parody

"When her IQ reaches 50 she should sell" is probably the wittiest one.

I'm going to assume that none of these teachers are real, some corndog just pulled this thing out of the fucked up meme engine that makes facebook suck so bad. Some schmuck who writes jokes for morning FM drive time radio probably sat down with a pencil and wrote these.

If it gets any worse it's going to say "REAL FRIENDS STAY" in shitty cursive on a purple background and that's it, that's the whole meme, because facebook.

I wonder how close to the bottom of that drain we are now.

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn "common knowledge" for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it's not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don't want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn't just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like "my movie got unbought" are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are "special" websites that you can just surf to and it's like a janky Netflix that "just works" so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it's just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can't tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

"I want to watch a movie" is a very "This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie" kind of activity so, yeah. "Be pirate" is not that useful, it's just the internet's go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we're actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to "own" something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it's yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it's not worth bullets it's not changing.

Honestly I doesn't even take bullets but if you're going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you're stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it's not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It's only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and "buying" it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don't pay for it.

The move by Fitch makes sense.

No, it does not help that the US has a very high level of national debt, but here comes somebody to scold me about how debt is different when you're the government and yadda yadda, so never mind that angle.

No, this is a direct reaction to yet another game of fucking chicken with the debt ceiling. The finance world moves both fast and slow, second by second but also quarter by quarter; for every day trade where microseconds count, there is another action where it takes, oh, 3 months for the relevant body to react to what just happened. This is one of those actions. They've spent the last couple of months running their numbers, and now here we are. They have delivered their verdict for the current fiscal quarter, after much deliberation.

It does not make any sense at all to go around talking about US Fed bonds as if they are "zero risk", or even "effectively zero risk", if every 8 years there will come a game of chicken slash pissing contest where the hostages are everyone who has been foolish enough to buy US Federal debt under the expectation that the interest rate will be paid on time. If somebody in the US government does not blink in this game of chicken, then fuck you, the US will default on its "zero risk" debt.

And so here is Fitch quite reasonably questioning that status quo, that US debt is "zero risk".

Keep in mind that the entire damn globe is holding US Treasury Bonds, the debt in question. Just as importantly, the biggest holder of US debt is US citizens. You, somehow. That's where the yields on a CD come from, and your money market account. US Bonds.

Typically, 10 year US Treasury Bonds provide the highest guaranteed interest rate -ignoring recent rate inversions because COVID black swan shitshow- because obviously if you are going to lock up your money for a decade, you would expect the best return at maturity.

But this debt ceiling BS happens every 8 years. This means that every truly serious investor who holds a 10-year T-Bill, from Wall Street funds to the Chinese government, is heavily exposed to the threat of complete default on this debt thanks to that entire debt ceiling thing, to say absolutely nothing about the solvency of the US government, in general.

That's not fucking zero risk. And Fitch is tired of pretending that it is.

Fuck sake, they aren't even trying to have a debate upon whether the US can sustain its frankly obscene debt level. No, it's just that AAA rating means "zero effective risk, barring nuclear war or alien invasion or some unforeseeable shit" and all that clownfuckery with the debt ceiling is NOT "zero risk", nor is it unforeseeable.

Is that zero risk? When the person who owes you money can watch the due date tick down from 5 years out and wait until the last fucking minute of the last damn day to decide they're going to pass the law that will allow them to pay you? No, the fuck it ain't.

Did they appear to care about the creditors? The bondholders who they owed interest to? No, that whole song and dance was about, I don't know, probably abortion. The Republicans have been using the debt ceiling as a hostage for a decade or more, so if you're the French government, for example, and hold a bunch of US Treasury bills, you can't call that shit zero risk with a straight face, come on. It doesn't even matter if the US can pay the debt, the question is, will they?

I need you to understand that literally everyone in the world is investing in US Federal debt, it's not just you, US person. It's kind of frightening how US Federal debt is the cinder blocks that many other nations are building their economic foundation on. That's what being the reserve currency is about.

Fitch knows that, and they know it back to front, so when they issue a rating, the weight of it is upon them. Can we call it zero risk? Like zero, zero??

If you have any money in your brokerage money market account, or a CD, anywhere, you're in this boat, wondering if US Bonds are zero risk. The whole world is in this boat, wondering if US Treasury Bonds, especially the 10-year ones, are really zero risk guaranteed money on maturity. Like, really really, tho? Maybe there's a smidge of risk? Even the 30 year bonds??? 30 fuckin years on the bond, my dude, zero risk on that?

We've all been on American social media, they all talk like they're going to have another Civil War; probably not, but still. Zero risk on the 30-year US Treasury Bond? That's a long time. Shit can go nuclear. Zero risk?

Could you look your best fucking friend in the face and say, "oh, yeah, buy a US 30 year Treasury Bond, there is absolutely no risk of any sort on that, you will get your interest even if Florida slips under the sea, taking Disney World with it." Could you? No.

So pretend that there you are, some team of analysts at Fitch, knowing all of this, knowing more than I do because it's your job, and looking at each other like, "Can we call this zero risk? Because that's what AAA means. We all know that. So can we?" And nobody wants to, because it isn't, and we're all tired of pretending like it is.

And Fitch looks at the obvious, it downgrades US Treasury debt from AAA - perfect, the best possible - to AA+ - still near perfect, but room for improvement.

Fitch is right. Fitch is right to shoot up the warning flare. We're lucky that China's situation is still a bit of a mess, and the United States Federal Reserve needed the wakeup call, not that they want it. We're lucky that buying a bond from the Chinese Federal Government doesn't quite make sense, because if the state owns all things, then what is a bond? It doesn't matter what the answer is, it only matters that we have to discuss it. We all know what a US Treasury Bond is, that's beyond debate. That certainty elevates it.

It's not like Fitch are acting up to get attention, fuck that. Every other respectable bond rating house should have done this first. It's not fair that Fitch has to be the odd ones to call the obvious. Fitch is right. The US needs to get its shit together.

Welp, fellas, I think we have our first Lemmy meme straight from our own mines, I ain't seen't the like elsewhere, that's for certain.

Now that the tone has been set I hope everyone's ready to get fricken weird with it.

I really have to play more chess

Sir. SIR. If you are shitposting, the posts should be shit. They should be bad. Most of them should not even make sense.

I understand that there is a miserable hipster art to the thing but that must be the hipster's problem, this is very much a case of 90% sewage, 9% silver, 1% gold, and if you aren't ready for the sewage, then out of the business you go.

This is the problem. Somebody managed that dril thing where it appears that they defecated on themselves in the night and yet it was big funny, and now you expect too much, everything cannot be dada, not even dada.

If you are lucky, somebody comes in here on meth, and posts a picture of an elephant dick which is labeled "margaret thatcher" and it makes no fucking sense but yet it is funnier than all. This is what shitposting is about.

But in order to get there you must allow atrocity, probably a bunch of 9gag trash if we're honest, but the rules gotta be a big no, on rules. You need a tall slushpile if you ever expect good shitposts. The id must leak. Some kid from rural India has to have room to cook, posting shit memes about something none of us even understand. You delete things if they break laws, or worship actual Nazis, otherwise you leave them to stink. Quality control is NO. They are shitposts, not impeccableposts. Quality control is allowing the crap to slide under the waves as we all ignore it.

Hold the fuckin line, sir, the lemmyworld meme channel is obscenity, it's down to you and 196.

let him post feet

Somebody once remarked that it's funny how everyone acts like Italians all walk around being Mario Brothers but the Italians just roll with it.

It's because some Italians were the people who invented Fascism as a formal political movement, and you know damn well how that ended up, so if going "It's-a me, Giancarlo!" every once in a while gets the world to forget, they'll take it.

But then this happens, and you have to start talking about spaghetti as much as possible.

That's beyond "wow he's tall" and well into "somebody fucked with this in Photoshop" tall.

If they didn't then he's well into uh oh, something is wrong with this kid and his life expectancy might not be the greatest, tall.

Please note that the prompt says "queens of England" very clearly, which turns it into a glorified Google image search, so the results are unacceptable trash, and vaguely leftist language about people being angry for the lack of racism are your problem, only. Fuck off, troll.

The real issue is that even with a handholding, direct and easy prompt, the tech cannot simply hand over pictures, even generated ones to avoid copyright issues, that come from easily discovered answers on Wikipedia and who knows how many other credible sources. The lineage of the British Royal Family is all but open-source data - probably is, literally - and your mom can probably name three Queens offhand though she's Canadian. This thing completely ate shit on an easy, easy prompt.

I don't know how many times now I've seen some YouTuber use "evil Jerome Powell" as a prompt for a thumbnail, and get a clear picture of him complete with devil horns, copyright be damned, so what the f? The AI isn't this stupid, that means they're nerfing it and screwing it up. You best believe they're still selling it, though.

What other results will it comically fuck up, but you don't have the knowledge to critique? You won't see the results, either, somebody else will use them to judge your resume; IS using them, now. Fucking lazy hiring managers are going to just plug your name into this thing and ask for a synopsis of your life so they don't have to work. It will just fill in missing information with lies, and they'll eat it up. I guess you shot two people a couple of years ago and didn't know about it. I wonder why you didn't get the job?

People have been crazy dumb with this AI, meaning young, smart, tech-savvy people with heavy internet backgrounds who should know better than to trust keep treating it like an oracle, because they have some weird blind spot about this technology. Ignorant executives who think math is for slurs are going to make it do everything.

They're going to use this technology to decide who gets an apartment, who gets arrested, and a bunch of other shit, save your leftism for that.

At this point I'm afraid to update anything because it will turn into a debilitating subscription fee. One is whatever, but 50 of them is insane, and that's kinda where it's going. Monthly fee for breathing next.

He's a survivor. He had a hunch and started walking casually toward the mountains, never to be seen again.

Why don't you simply turn off the unwanted emotion??

That's how emotions work, right? Right, that's how they work.

They're expecting you to have a mount for your wall, already installed, even, from the last TV. So the legs are an afterthought, they're cheap, easy to remove and you'll probably toss them, they know. So they're enough to use for store display, no more.

It's been very strange. When I was a child in school I was not well liked, I was fat neckbeard with no internet because late 80s. Truly I was a sad pile. They called me all manner of hateful things, but it never even occurred to them to call me short, at 5'7".

I rarely feel "short", only average. Most men seem to be around my height. Some minority of men are taller. I still manage to tower over many women, because women be small, yo. A "tall" girl is roughly my height, so they're either at eye level or shorter, with the occasional very tall woman in the mix.

I'm tall enough that other people ask for assistance with things on high shelves on a regular enough basis, mostly women.

There is a DRASTIC difference between how the world treats my height versus how the internet shitbag community does. Go figure, abusive people are abusive.

I can only pinpoint the 2000s, and online dating profiles where you can sort by height, plus many women having a height fetish in the exact same way that men will ask people their bra size, and the continuing popularity of the NBA, plus women wanting to have sex with the players, plus their truly freakish heights throwing off the populist curve so that anybody under 6'0 is teeny tiny. Somebody is gonna start squeaking about "6 foot is average" so sure, chief, you win. But there was a time when I just wasn't particularly tall. Suddenly I am perceived as an actual midget.

It's just another example of the way people constantly try to find excuses to treat you like shit over just about anything they can think of, it shows how they're constantly inventing that. It's one of God's little reminders to not worry what happens to them.

I hope DMX sues him for trademark infringement just for the fuck of it

X gonna take it from ya

Yeah, I don't know what else they're gonna do. People are already getting pretty fed up with the search results from their core product, the bitching started years ago and it's starting to get pretty loud, with power users of search becoming determined to find a better solution when they can. Don't think Google doesn't hear such things, or isn't aware of them.

So if search starts returning a bunch of results that are supposed to be Tweets but people keep hitting login paywalls, that just makes Google look bad. There's already widely circulated plugins - which Google knows about because they're getting installed on Chromium browsers - to automatically block Pinterest results, people were getting fed up with "fake" image results that weren't usable. The value proposition of what is still their primary business is under attack and can't stand more erosion of trust.

Maybe it looks like retaliation for Musk not paying his bills, but it probably isn't, it's just more fallout from Musk's actions.

The upvote/downvote system by itself is really just a human powered sorting algorithm that uses consensus to move the most relevant comments up where they can be seen, and to hide unproductive comments at the bottom.

So if all you have is an upvote/downvote system, that's all it is. Note that it doesn't matter that much, with a simple up/down system, if you got a bunch of downvotes. Your comment got buried, but that's kind of the end of it.

Karma is a score attached to individual users that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but it tallies whether you have more upvotes than downvotes, and probably some other mess under the hood. It was supposed to be a measure of how often a given user provides relevant and helpful feedback to others. In practice, it's a social credit score like the one being developed by the Chinese government.

Even worse, karma got used as a metric to aim for, and it's what you used to make sure that your accounts were marketable to buyers, who wanted lots of positive comment karma on accounts, so they could post where they liked once they bought them.

When Reddit was born it was even techy-er than it is, now. So there was a lot of discussion about programming, and programming problems, similar to what happens on Stack Overflow these days.

Imagine I've asked Reddit a programming question of some sort, and soon, some comments reply.

User A, first on the scene: Idunno, man this looks like a tough one (doesn't answer the question, not really relevant)

User B, who showed up later: Ah yes, that's a bitch [proceeds to answer the question in detail, very helpful to OP and everyone else].

So, as a user, even a spectator, you were supposed to upvote User B, and maybe downvote A. Upvoting B was more important than downvoting A, since the upvotes would bring B's answer up to the top, anyway, while A's answer would fall down without anyone downvoting them on purpose. You were supposed to be hesitant to downvote, because of this. The poor answer essentially downvotes itself, no need to dogpile on User A.

Without a karma system, that's the end of it. User A's poor answer has no bearing on their treatment anywhere, their performance is not recorded and shown to the public at all, and User B may develop a reputation as a helpful person by name alone, but there's no karma, there, either. The whole thing stayed within the context of that post. User B's helpful post floats to the very top of the thread on a wave of upvotes, the end.

With a karma system comes a new dimension.

User B, who provided the great answer, would begin to accumulate positive comment karma, and in theory this would help you to judge B's answers in the future, just like you check the reviews on an Amazon listing. Remember that B might be answering a question on which you were ignorant, so you depend on karma to see if this person gives good answers, usually, or if he's just troll noise.

Reddit was born in the era of people asking a computer question and getting, "oh, yeah, just delete system32" as an answer. For the record, that is a very important Windows system process you must never delete, so that's just troll shit, trying to fuck an ignorant person over for lulz.

Reddit was trying to thwart that with the karma system, they needed people to be able to ask questions and get good faith answers. If a user provided lots of troll answers and lies, that should mean lots of downvotes from other users, negative karma. People know not to trust this person's answers, at least not easily. If they have tons of positive karma, shit man, that might be The Woz answering you for all you knew, a good sign.

It was entirely up to you, the user, to be very high-minded about this. So, even if User Z said something that you didn't like, but it added important information to the conversation, you would still upvote that comment. That kinda sorta worked, but then the Great Digg Migration happened, and a flood of normies came on board.

Normies all used the downvote button for what it was obviously for, it's a fuck you go away I don't like you button. It was pretty naive to think it would be anything else, but the founders had high hopes.

Now you can start accumulating negative comment karma from saying or doing things other people don't like, it doesn't take much, and automated moderation systems will start doing things like blocking you from joining communities because you have too much negative comment karma. It is assumed that you would have better karma if you weren't a shitty person. However, it's easy to abuse. If a bunch of fashy people downvote the everloving shit out of somebody for saying something like "black lives matter" now the wrong damn person ended up with lots of negative comment karma.

The fash can also open lots of extra accounts and upvote the hell out of each other and themselves, so they have lots of positive comment karma while being literal practicing Nazis at the same time. It's pretty easy to game the karma system and not very useful anymore. In practice, your karma score just records how often you comment things that the Reddit hive mind agrees with. The highest karma points probably belong to bots.

It's problematic, to say the least.

So it's possible to ditch the karma system entirely while still using upvote/downvote, they're actually two separate things. Since we are no longer all that worried about a solution to programming questions, and since the idea of karma got corrupted and stepped on pretty bad, it would be nice to leave it the hell behind with Reddit, where it belongs.

That is what OP is arguing for. Perhaps on the Fediverse we can forge ahead with new approaches, and let this Reddit-like situation be a springboard to something better in the future, something more unique to Lemmy itself.

Continuing to rebel against the site by using the hell out of the site and driving its numbers up, I see. Have fun with that.

I am curious about this IPO, because I want to see what a clownshow their cash flow statement is likely to be.

It's not my educate to job you.

bro I had some long-ass comment, but I looked up and remembered this is shitpost town I gotta get out more

I wonder how all that's going. I don't care enough to check, but last I heard all the ugly monkey pictures were worth zero and the entire market had finally imploded, but these things do limp on and on, trying to turn your driver's license into some horrible new kind of shackle.

The only winners of the debacle were the two women who managed to turn the memes about them into fuck you money, and they were never seen on the blockchain again. Sometimes I wish I was actually good at capitalism, you really don't need a job if you are, money just kinda falls from the sky for you. Sigh.

I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I'm going like a month with this on my phone and haven't really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn't miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don't know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

Canadian flag intact, a wholesome sight.

People just completely lost track of what "mildly infuriating" meant, maybe because there's no venue for r/IncandescentRage (who would want to mod that?).

It's like when the tiles in the floor are crooked, and it's making you angrier than it ought, lady, that's mildly infuriating. This? You need to sue this motherfucker, so the settlement pays for the hopeless surgery you're about to have, for fuck's sake. This is not mildly infuriating, you should be screaming and punching the walls.

Reddit tended to be best where it had stolen better communities from the old web.

For example, r/Excel was always a stunningly chill place to get help with MS Excel. But notice that the community was/is tightly focused on a subject, that subject would have objectively correct answers to any questions about it, and the mods could politely but firmly discourage any spicier conversations as off-topic. You can keep that sort of place decent almost indefinitely.

Such communities would have been their own little message board before Reddit came along and hoovered them all up.

Likewise with all the other subreddits that were famously full of answers, ones you never had heard of. Just the other day I googled a question about some random piece of cable I had in my hand and guess who had answered it 4 years ago? Yeah. Those little communities tend to be really solid. They never get that big, either. You can't just fuck around in them, you have to stay on topic and the average user hates that.

But Reddit turns into a wretched, life-draining parasitic monster in any form where the public feels like they have the right to run their mouths and chatter. So, most of Reddit, really. Anywhere that gives the average schmuck a place to vent will degenerate, rapidly, usually toward an abusive groupthink. It's just populism, then, and a textbook answer to why that's bad.

It's the bane of all social media. I don't think people are generally that shitty. I've decided that social media, including Reddit, just empowers small, loud minorities of miserable, exhausting people who have nigh-fascist opinions on every single thing, and as soon as the normal-ass people see that they've joined the chat, the normal-ass people all vanish, overnight, leaving behind only shitbags who love attention, or believe they have a right to it, at everyone else's expense. There's no getting rid of them when they show up, you can only get rid of you. I hope you weren't having a nice time, because it's over now, time to move on.

Reddit always had its great little subreddits full of truly precious answers as a counterweight to all that. It would appear that they were the only thing of value that Reddit ever had, too.

Lemmy doesn't really have that. It looks like the most obnoxious parts of Reddit came here, so, you know, every computer problem is solved by installing Linux, and other mouthfuls of that flavor. Then somebody opened the floodgates and now you're arguing with Commies about every political thing. Meanwhile, no great little subLemmies full of answers for your obscure questions exist to make up for it.

Like you said, it was super chill for a month, but then, yeah. It's kinda same shit different day. It's reminding me that I've decided to view social media as a vice, almost exactly like smoking, and changing cigarette brands does not solve the problem.

that's cool. The Masto instance I've been on for the last half year is no longer available and I'll have to start over because I didn't have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that's alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain't Mastodon.

I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.

I don't think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don't think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn't mind being the dweebs of the internet.

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I'm about to permanently borrow somebody's ThruNite T1 but it's too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.

So it's just another clickable lie, because of course it is, it's too perfect. I can't fact-check everything and it's a bad use of time if I have to.

I gotta get off of social media entirely, I can work with fiction presented as fiction but it's just an endless firehose of lies from people who think they have a god-given right to lie as much as they need to, on every platform. The AI thing is just getting started. I lost track of reality several months ago, and that's not supposed to be some sort of jokey joke.

The whole point of calling somebody "middle-aged" is that they're in that indeterminate space where they definitely aren't young anymore, but they aren't like, old, old, yet, basically they're still able-bodied enough to hold down a job.

Not one. Not the other. Somewhere in the middle. Middle-aged.

30 isn't so old, but it depends hard on the person in question, some are still in great shape, but many 30-year-olds have been nursing a back problem and/or jacked knees for years by the time the birthday comes, they sure as hell don't feel young. Some 30s haven't had kids yet, some of them have kids in middle school. So that averages out, and we onboard you to this shitty party at 30. If you can still rock the swimwear at 30, do it, and don't take it for granted.

For the record, we don't care what children think old is. Children are insane.