they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips

Holy crap. I had no idea. We've heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.

I have never, ever posted a picture of my kids online. I've sent a handful to family and friends via messaging apps, but only ones that are naturally flattering, and that is as far as it goes.

As it turns out, my overwhelming hunch that this is the only decent, respectful course of action in the mindless social media age, seems to be correct.
I love my kids, and I respect them as people, as individuals with a right to privacy at any age.

Reddit looking like Tik Tok, which is looking more like Facebook, which wants to look like Instagram... and what's that over there? Oh look, it's Twitter, spooning glue with its' hand and putting it in its' mouth.

You know what's controversial? Bombing hospitals, schools and residential buildings.

You know what's controversial? Blowing up a dam that destroys an entire region of the country.

You know what's controversial? Keeping a nuclear power plant as hostage.

You know what's controversial? Abducting children and taking them against their will to another country.

You know what's controversial? Torture and mutilation of soldiers defending their home land.

Whoever says or implies at this late stage of russian atrocities that cluster bombs for Ukraine are "controversial" - fuck yourself gently with a rusted chainsaw.

EDIT: typo (half the time I try and type "of", it comes out as "if")

I’m not going to set a precedent of confirming with The Verge every action we do or don’t take

If you feel compelled to regard everybody as either your unpaid servant or as a hostile entity - except for taking deliberate time to pointedly kiss the Twitter imbecile's ass - maybe, just maybe it's you yourself, with a profound lack of self-awareness, that might be the very root of the problem you're flailing to deal with.

You watch this one thing out of curiosity, morbid curiosity, or by accident, and at the slightest poke the goddamned mindless algorithm starts throwing this shit at you.

The algorithm is "weaponized" for who screams the loudest, and I truly believe it started due to myopic incompetence/greed, not political malice. Which doesn't make it any better, as people don't know how to take care of themselves from this bombardment, but the corporations like to pretend that ~~they~~ people can, so they wash their hands for as long as they are able.

Then on top of this, the algorithm has been further weaponized by even more malicious actors who have figured out how to game the system.
That's how toxic meatheads like infowars and joe rogan get a huge bullhorn that reaches millions. "Huh... DMT experiences... sounds interesting", the format is entertaining... and before you know it, you are listening to anti-vax and qanon excrement, your mind starts to normalize the most outlandish things.

EDIT: a word, for clarity

I'm going to say what you did, more diplomatically:

While I don't condone extortion via hacking or any other means, I acknowledge that Reddit and its' dysfunctional, incompetent corporate culture - with Huffman at the top - brought this development upon themselves.

I think it's an important reminder.

Potato - potatoe, tomato - tomatoe.

You see 196 as

queer and especially trans friendly

I see it as a garden of shitposting delights.

Ok, I just gotta say that watching this type of talk here, puts my mind at rest that the Fediverse is going to be alright. That we are in the right place.

Meanwhile, here in the Fediverse I've been seeing a lot of impressively creative memes. I don't know if they're originating here, or if they're copy-pasted from elsewhere, but I'm comfortable here where memes are concerned.

Any deadweight who shrugs all of this off as bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe WhY bOtHeR VoTiNg is just as much of a social parasite as the goddamned mouthbreathers who vote for this type of creature.
If they ever bother to pause from fondling their purity and superiority then lovingly sniffing their fingers, if they would stop to actually look, they would find that there is a lot of blood on those hands.

Broken people breaking things.

Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.

This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.

The GallowBoobs of the site.

"Live on, survive, for the Earth gives forth wonders. It may swallow your heart, but the wonders keep on coming. You stand before them bareheaded, shriven. What is expected of you is attention."

Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

A more recent one, meditation-related, short and simple and I have no idea who said it, I just happened to catch it a couple of years ago on a website-that-shall-not-be-named:

"I am not my thoughts."

And it's not even about the profit motive, it's about the fundamental way in which he approaches situations with a zero sum game mentality. It's about concentrating power over something as slippery as water, replacing something that works with something shittier BUT that he can control (see Victoria and AMA, or the photo and video hosting instead of continuing with Imgur). It's about regarding with contempt the community that gathered around the site he created.

Even if you don't mind the insidious invasions of privacy that these companies have undertaken with relentless determination:

Because everything these companies touch, they sooner or later enshittify.
Because the past decade has shown that Facebook's intentions cannot be trusted.

In one of those 70s Fat Albert episodes, I think it was Rudy who one day showed up wearing a jacket of "genuine imitation leather". That term has stuck with me for decades.

The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Whatever blackout/boycott/migration happens with Reddit, this should go double for Twitter, that's another place I silently dropped like a rock and have never visited again.

When something happens with Ukraine and I feel compelled to dive into it, I've used Nitter, which mirrors the Twitter content but Musk and his right-wing idiocy gets no goddamned clicks and traffic from me anymore.

I love reading and writing, replying and interacting. The quality of discourse around here has been excellent so far, the right kind of people have migrated here.
Fully granted that there are many topics in which I'd love to see more activity, but the space is young. Neither Rome nor Reddit were built in a day.

Also, a way to keep track of conversations, an unobtrusive notification and a direct link to the spot in any given thread.

Cynical/Pessimistic ≠ Savvy/Sophisticated.
Seems that way too many people are unable to make the distinction and are unwilling see this perception flaw about themselves.

Back in the late-80s or early-90s, I remember OMNI Magazine ran an interview with a researcher of veracity in science publications as a topic, don't remember anything but a whopper of a quote in which he said that around a third of science papers fudge the numbers, even if just a little bit, to make them fit the hypotheses.

If any of you savage invaders bitch and groan about dying from these cluster bombs in a foreign land where you don't belong yet insist on soiling and brutalizing:

You can quite straightforwardly avoid getting maimed or killed by these cluster bombs, via a simple enough IRL hack - by going back to your backwards waterless toilet of a... I mean beloved homeland... and staying there.

The knight should talk to that dragon about Bitcoin.

I can agree with all you are saying, while also agreeing with the stance that Meta's presence is corrosive by its' very nature.
There will be a sugar rush up front, diabetes down the road.

EDIT: They WILL find a way to insert themselves more severely if and when this thing grows.

Godzilla, Superman and five Shreks before we would be even allowed to login

On Captcha?

Мамочкааааааа

"It happened to me! To me!!!"

Maybe she could have also gone like this every time Kyiv and/or Odessa and/or any and all Ukrainian cities have been relentlessly attacked for the past 500+ days. But just as I'm not expecting water to be squeezed out of a rock, neither am I expecting reason and empathy coming out of these lazy, cruel, mindless savages.

Here's hoping this turns out to be their LBJ moment, who commented upon signing the Civil Rights Act, I paraphrase here: "We (meaning Democrats) just lost the entire south for at least a generation".
Although the HUGE difference is that LBJ did the correct and decent thing, and it was all done within the letter and spirit of the law, while all these ignorant, festering right-wing republicans fail miserably in every one of these qualities.

Bullseye! I was not expecting such an explosion, nor defensive fire before the explosion. So it must have been a drone that they noticed too late.

In such an environment, what sort of mindless orc squatter still wants to remain in Crimea? They are not wanted there, they are connected to their waterless toilet homeland via a shoddy and vulnerable bridge, the disruption and inconveniences of daily life are constant, their midget mobster in the kremlin has proven to be fallible and crumbling in a Potemkin land where image is everything.

Damage is minimal, comrade. Jetski destroyed. Bridge will remain closed for the next eight months due to... scheduled maintenance.

And here's the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and "normal" - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.

Scrunge

Man do I hate the clickbait title wording they have to use on YouTube.

Masquerading as "news" while blatantly spewing out whatever toxic and dangerous, insurrectionary bullshit you make up day by day to a community - knowing full well it is bullshit - should and MUST have serious, or at the very least expensive, consequences.

I mean... imagine severing ties with a petty and greedy loudmouth bully that generates environmental and humanitarian catastrophes out of sheer spite.

For eight goddamned years already we've been subjected to their "idea" - more like "mockery" - of Free Speech.

They've had their chance, and they proven over and over and over and over again that they act in bad faith, that wherever they rear their sick little heads, they are there to deliberately fill with noise, to fill with lies, to doxx, to corrode.
Nobody hates Free Speech as much as THEY do, and it's not even close.

They are a bigoted, stubbornly-ignorant circlejerk that incites violence, that wants to watch the world burn.
These creatures delight in the suffering of others, and should be dealt with in the exact same manner as this space should deal with Al-Qaeda or NAMBLA if they decided to plant their unholy seed here.

Free Speech doesn't figure into it anymore, not after all the shit that's gone down for the past eight goddamned years. A line was crossed a long, long time ago.

El pene - the penis
La pena - the shame

"Any decisions made in this organization are UNILATERAL, and I'm The Boss. So... are you going to be a team player, or what?"

Notice any authoritarian bullying and gaslighting in this sentiment?

EDIT: Maybe that should be...

sO... aRe YoU gOiNg To Be A tEaM pLaYeR, oR wHat?

It's a soulless and savage (and ultimately mind-numbingly boring) spectacle, vulgar and cruel. As entertainment, I would put it on a par with dogfighting. By which I mean it should not exist, but there are too many psychotic people in society for it to ever be put out of its' vulgar, cruel misery.

EDIT: As power politics go, this is like the mafia or drug cartels, with a bunch of short-term clever but long-term stupid pigs jockeying for top position, using each other's families - their own wives and sons and daughters - as pawns, as collateral damage, as cannon fodder.