• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I bet a lot of folks have just quietly given up or moved to lemmy or mbin because they’ve gotten frustrated with all the issues.

    I made an alt two months ago when Kbin would never connect. I have barely been back since, so it is now my main. I hoped Kbin would come out if its slump but… that seems unlikely at this point. I’m actually quite happy on Lemmy, especially after the v0.19 upgrade allows blocking of an entire instance. I personally virtually never see any spam (maybe one comment per month) and while connection issues do occur, they are like a handful per week rather than handful per hour (it varies a lot though, sometimes it does get bad for a day or two and then weeks go by without a hitch).

    I avoided the initial hurdle of making a Lemmy account for so long and, while it was super annoying, in retrospect it wasn’t that bad, compared to all the other problems here and still having to go through all that, eventually.

    If anyone is thinking about switching: don’t worry unduly about it, just make an account and see if you like it, but you can always keep your Kbin active too, assuming Kbin remains alive.

    Also, you may need to try out a few places before you find one that fits you best. But that reduces your anxiety bc you know more and don’t need to worry about having to do it again in a worst-case scenario.





  • Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

    For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

    As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

    And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

    DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

    Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)










  • I don’t follow you. They are BOTH the capitalist party, though not equally so. Also, voting for one side vs. the other does not mean that you agree with EVERYTHING that they do - in fact it is more common these days to vote against the other side and ignore what your own might plan or actually do. Nor is it true that avoiding voting - e.g. for mental or physical health reasons - means that someone does not care at all about what happens as a result of the election. Plus, a rather ENORMOUS fraction of people in the USA could skip a particular vote and it would not make the tiniest iota of difference, due to the electoral college system, though that heavily depends on where you live, and also trends to be more true the larger the region impacted (federal > state > county), whereas local elections could turn on a dime and also make a huge impact regardless of what goes on in upper levels - e.g. federal sends monies to help people but locals turn that aid away b/c “reasons”.

    Unpopular opinion alert: I dare to say that many people who should NOT be voting - especially those who do little to no research beforehand - would vastly improve the outcome of elections by NOT voting, and thereby contribute more that way than they do now, by actually voting, where they tend to just magnify the votes of whatever the TV & radio talk show people (or more recently, pastors behind the pulpit) tell them to do. The latter makes the USA even more of a plutocracy than later, when the votes get ignored and the rich get whatever they want regardless of who got elected does.


  • I mean, not directly no - we boiled it first - but you gotta drink something, sometime.

    What worried me more is not when the screw-up is so easily detectable, but when it goes unnoticed, like the permanent damage done to the residents of Flint, MI, or all those toxic chemicals caused by the multiple train derailments, where the company men tried to pay/threaten/whatever people to say that they were not sick.

    Company profits >>>> human health & safety.





  • This should make us all very very afraid of what that water is doing to US!

    (Especially if/when it is colored - last year my water became orange and started giving everyone I knew that drank it mouth soreness, I only wish I was kidding, and ofc it was traced to a corporation found illegally dumping toxic chemicals into the water reclamation systems, thus exposing the entire city to those effects. No, they never faced any legal consequences beyond the slightest slap on the wrist iirc, why would they? That is what finally tipped the scales and helped me realize: the USA is not a first-world nation anymore.)


  • In the wild, it is rare to see a predator before it strikes. Have you ever seen one of those games where there is a picture and you are supposed to find it… but you can’t, even zooming in and scanning every section, and then even when the answer is shown you can barely make it out? In the wild, prey aren’t supposed to evade death - the entire food chain is predicated on that fact. Ofc the predator still has to cross the distance between it and the prey, but lulling it into a sense of complacency is the first part of its successful strategy, then it waits for the prey to turn its head, and only THEN does it pounce. Sorry if this is upsetting but it’s very relevant I promise you, and in no way shippable for this conversation.

    So in the wild, if I ever were to see this large fat orange buffoon, bumbling around while making wild hooting noises, actively trying to get noticed by saying whatever manages to get the most reaction from everyone around, I think I would be wisest to run away. Crucially though, not from the orange thing - which has no obvious teeth or claws or anything at all harmful - but from whatever it is that may be following it (whether the orange thing has any knowledge of that or not), waiting to take advantage of the distraction that it provides.

    Whether any particular person wins the next election or not, there are always more willing to step up in their place - more Republicans, more Democrats, etc. - and a smart predator is ready to take advantage of whichever side wins in order to get what they want.

    Sorry if you thought I was building up to some point worth knowing about - I have found no solutions, only more layers of problems the further deep you dig into these matters.:-( I will say that often when you meet Trump supporters irl, they can be very kind people - they are mislead, but aren’t we all? It is the system that is broken, not solely them (obviously outliers exist, on both sides, and no they are not remotely close to being equal <cough>KKK<cough>, but nor is the problem uniquely on one side vs. the other either, plus the whole division between “sides” is working out VERY well to Putin’s benefit, hence making me question just how much involvement his agencies have with the recent Civil War style divisionist thinking that is currently fashionable).

    I think all we can do is question what we see, and compare it against what we KNOW to be true. Which not everyone is capable of - e.g. who has the luxury of that kind of time? A great place to start, imho, is to recommend watching https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs.