In general I disagree, often you can't read it it's satire, trolling or someone being serious, there are weird people and also bots on the internet.
However this piece was pretty clear satire, if you read far enough (probably I would have stopped in the middle and downvoted this crap if it was not marked).
The "ChatGPT showed me a new sorting algorithm" part really does make it pretty obvious to anyone with dev background that this is not serious.
I think about Reddit-style platforms being the centralized bulletin boards and forums of these days, and Lemmy is closest we have to a DIY kind of thing which is controlled by the community.
Back in the day only a sufficiently tech savvy person could set up and run a forum software. Now everyone can do it, and with the Fediverse it's all nicely interconnected, interoperable and truly free and open.
In general the Fediverse is the best shot we got right now to get back to the non-corporate Internet of my childhood and youth, I really hope it will succeed. And succeeding does not mean that it must grow and outcompete the commercial offerings, I think success is if enough motivated and interesting people join and participate. Quality > quantity.
Fair enough. I'm sure NixOS is a great tool, like Haskell is a great programming language (in fact my previously favorite language with a special place in my heart that taught me most about properly structuring and thinking about code).
I just wanted to put it into perspective, because not everybody wants to go into THAT deep end. But anyway, it's all good.
On a side note, your first sentence is something that I have never seen being said ever by anyone on Reddit. Yeah respectfully agreeing to disagree is also a perfectly fine option.
How is that useful to OP who asked for something "without terminals"? Unless that was a joke.
Because I've been using Arch Linux for 15 years and live in the terminal, but even though I like the idea of NixOS, it's not only scary because it is alien and I have neither motivation nor enough free time to learn a parallel world and gain non-transferable skills for a niche solution. And that with being interested in what NixOS is doing.
I would say it is horrible advice to a novice, unless you want to scare people away from learning terminals and configs and managing an operating system without GUI tools.
I wonder how much it was manufactured and how much is just the worst of human nature self amplifying. Probably bit of both. It's just easier to spread hate and fear than make people chill the fuck out and respect each other.
Any human community that tolarates bad behavior and does not sanction it appropriately will eventually fail and degenerate into a pile of shit, i.e. simply implode. The paradox of tolerance. Good social spaces are like gardens, they need to be maintained and weeds need to be removed. Otherwise it happens what happens.
Well I mostly never used any kind of social media for political things until very recently. Just read news on the respective newspaper websites. Maybe that did the trick.
And just wow. Yeah well, some people are just always trying to pick up a useless tribal fight or stir up some drama, or just mess with others i.e. troll...
That's why good mods are worth their weight in gold.
Just check a sub like /r/askhistorians, they might sometimes appear harsh but they managed to keep that place true to its vision and purpose (accepting only high quality responses by people who know what they are talking about). But sure, that is rather the exception.
Compared to say the Meta networks, reddit always felt to me like a platform where I can still control what I see. The feed is only filled by stuff I actively chose to subscribe to.
Sure it is a part of the problem - it's the reason I joined Lemmy. And I wonder how long it will take to become the same kind of wasteland of trash. Not sure that the "smaller community and less viral incentives" approach will be enough to keep it more civil than the "offers" by the commercial attention economy.
Just as a reminder, before the internet was privatized, people were on self hosted forums. Some were good places and some were toxic shit holes. Really depends more on the moderation and community than anything else if you ask me.
That said, surely I am distrusting any platform owned by some oligarch to have policy in the interest of the user base.
That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.
Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I've had my nihilistic phase in my 20's. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the "arbitrariness" of ethics.
Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.
I'm thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.
I managed to be 10 years on reddit in niche hobby and nerd communities and it feels like I lived in some parallel reddit all the time, reading about how toxic and broken it is supposed to be.
Same with YouTube. There are nice channels with less than 100k Views per Video or even just a fraction of it, producing amazing informative videos.
Gotta find the gems in the dirt.
I have a nagging feeling the platform is not or only a part of the problem, but collective human nature is. When enough people join a platform to be a representative sample, you get the representative shittiness of the literally median person on the internet.
Bandcamp solves all problems - you buy the CD as before, but digitally, including lossless FLAC, like 90% goes to the artist or their small label instead of Sony or Universal or Spotify, you can download the album or stream it with the app. It's good enough for me that I only store the files for backup and use the app for listening to most of my recent music purchases.