OpenStars

That's why I never had an account there:-)

Fwiw, a lot of people here call it Xhitter. Bc it sounds like Shitter, which is what the site has become (I wouldn't know personally, I didn't have an account there even before the Musk took it over:-).

Florida says hello. A bunch of other places too, sadly:-(.

B/c Congress.

We are not allowed to have things.

Tbf I have never seen that before in the last year, and it was from an account mere minutes old. So this spurt was all over the place but overall quite a rare occurrence.

I wonder... how many months would it take even Google to sort it all out now, if it wanted to? At some point, even if they haven't crossed it yet, certain knowledge simply becomes lost forever.

Ads have become so deeply embedded into search results that even Google now can no longer tell the difference between them!?!?

Imagine Jesus Christ as a time traveler, going back from a dying planet to just about the dawn of both roads and also safer sea travel than previously, those two connecting what would become the entire modern world.

Jesus: like, forget all this "religion" crap about what foods to eat & where & when & with who, and like, just be excellent to one another dudes & dudettes

Everyone since then, especially those who borrow His actual fucking name to label themselves: um... how about "no"?

I avoided Reddit like the plague for the first decade - I knew that it had the potential to suck me in and I did not want that. But then during the pandemic, I kept finding myself going to it for answers, and then seeing how I could improve things, and then...

I noticed that at work I would say something "snarky", which they did too but even so it's like I was going too far. I typically did not enjoy seeing such things on Reddit, but as a mod I couldn't block most of it without banning the person themselves from the entire community, so I felt that I had to put up with it - and it changed me, but not for the better. I mean not deeply or anything, but it normalized that style, which still was not good. And now for the same reason I've blocked lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - b/c I don't want that to come into myself. I am no fan of e.g. capitalism but "behead all landlords" seems to me a position lacking entirely in nuance or possibly even substance - like "okay Karen, why do you care what I do so much, and are ready to threaten literal violence unless I comply with your wishes?!"

Yes the mistreatment of all the app devs but especially him b/c he was so careful to document it was a big one for me too, though I glazed over that b/c in retrospect I had realized that I had already started thinking along those lines before that happened. Even so, that was the final straw that crystallized it and made me finally move off the platform. A watershed moment in history, for all of us I think. Well, to be more precise I gave up my mod position and went from checking r/popular quickly from like every few hours to only checking in on my former community once a week, then once a month, then... I can't even remember how long it's been now. For awhile I became more active in r/RedditAlternatives than I was in my niche community!:-) But there is only so many times that you can tell someone something before it becomes their choice to not listen, so I just stopped going there at all.

Anyway, the problem is not just Reddit's toxic AF culture (vision, like bullshit, tends to flow from the top to bottom direction in a company), nor even entirely the for-profit model - though each of those has their own, unique bad things that they add into the mix - and in some sense as you alluded to the issue is social media itself. Like candy, it promises good things, and like candy if taken in moderation it can be absolutely fine (especially during a pandemic when social distancing, especially in countries like the USA where "flatten the curve" was somehow taken as a challenge to encourage doing the exact opposite, to "pwn the libs" or sth I dunno), however also like candy it can leave someone unfulfilled if we always turn to the "easy doomscrolling", rather than allow our attentions to absorb longer-form content like say, a TV show, or even movie, or even a fully online & free college course like Crash Course World History.

Social media can wreck our lives! Or it can enhance them, depending on how wisely we make use of it:-).

https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb

This is an excellent article. I was just barely beginning to think (still subconsciously, i.e. still intuitively rather than focused) about leaving Reddit anyway, b/c of all its toxic BS, even prior to the blackouts and Rexodus, when I read this. I could not put it down!!!

But I had to, in order to go to work, and yet I picked it back up again ASAP and kept reading through lunch. And as a result, I gave up my mod position of two subs, left Reddit virtually entirely (though I partially stayed for a couple months to post about Kbin/Lemmy), and came here (the age of my current account does not match up b/c I was first on Kbin).

So yeah, it's long, but like... it PERFECTLY describes what I was intuiting! That Reddit was trying to turn me into a pedantic, narcissistic asshole, by curbing my impulses whenever I wanted to be kind yet encouraging the opposite to let my dark side flow against someone in order to demolish their arguments. Long, detailed answers to someone with specific questions and pleading for answers were penalized, yet short quips like "u suk" got heavily up-voted.

But it's not merely Reddit ofc, it's also Twitter, now X, and FaceBook, and any for-profit social media that prioritizes "engagement", e.g. talking rather than listening. e.g. why is Reddit's search function virtually nonfunctional, and why can each sub only have a maximum of two pinned posts? (I almost started looking into what it would take to write a bot that would allow for a megathread of megathreads, which the native Reddit refuses to provide for, except I could see the writing on the wall that bots were going to be obliterated, so I didn't bother.) Every single time such limitations line up with making new posts, their profits always magically seem to be increased - bc recall that ads are between posts, not between comments, so more posts = moar ads! Even if people stopped responding to people's questions... although usually someone somewhere would at least try, so it increased "engagement" of the type that furthered profits, while decreasing it overall. Hence these items were never going to be fixed.

Hence Reddit was enshittified. e.g. in r/Android people would constantly ignore the begging, pleading, demanding, and threatening from mods to put requests for new phone recommendations into the weekly megathread... and some huge fraction of posts to it were always like "what phone should I buy?", "what Android phone should I purchase?", "Which model phone should I get?" (until they could get removed) - often with no other details given, somehow extremely often back to back, as if nobody else in the whole entire world existed with the same identical damn question, these childish minds (of whatever age) just continually blurted out their requests for attention, spamming the entire world and preventing serious discussions about Android, which basically had to move elsewhere - i.e. the kids got so noisy that the adults had to flee the room looking for a more contemplative quiet.

Which is why we all find ourselves here:-). But even here, the addictive nature of even not-for-profit social media still has its dangers, as too does eating too much food etc., it's not the thing itself (once the profit incentive has been removed) but the amount that can be deleterious.

This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn't so extremely click-baity.

The ends do not justify the means?

Entirely separately from the message content, I find it so awesome to see the author acknowledge their potential biases right at the start! :-D

So much of journalistic integrity seems dead these days that I wanted to call that out as being good, even though it probably is mandatory, but even so... how many would actually do it?