I would argue otherwise.

Wikipedia is incomprehensibly large. Perhaps the largest database of vetted human knowledge ever.

I know for a fact you can find inaccuracies and biased information if you look for it. But it’s rare relative to the amount of information that exists there.

Yeah, RDO is pretty much garbage. Blatant cash grab.

Did you beat the game?

I agree with this guy that it may be the best Western ever written.

I really love that you said test hamster instead of guinea pig.

I’m using this from now on.

I’m not saying it never happens, but it’s not a super common occurrence.

And even if it is, locking down the entire internet and monitoring people in an Orwellian fashion isn’t the government’s job.

What happened back in the day when kids walked in on their parents doing the deed? What did the parents do when their child snuck a passage of Shakespeare and read all the filthy jokes he wrote?

Oh, they spoke to the kids and guided them through a normal part of life?

I have a son. I would like for him to not see graphic images on the Internet. But when he does, I will explain to him that human beings have sex (which is why he exists). I will tell him that sometimes people like to watch videos about it because it feels good to them. I will explain to him that it’s fake, just like the action movies and violence he sees on TV. I will tell him it’s nothing like that in reality and I will explain to him that he’s not ready to see that material yet.

Fascists always gain control by offering “safety.” Ironically, they’re more dangerous than the thing they claim to protect you from.

Yeah, making a government list of porn watchers with their watch history available is 100% going to be abused. It will not turn out well.

I think what a lot of people are missing in this thread is that not everyone has access to convenient physical stores and many people do have good reasons to want faster shipping.

For example, young families who don’t live near a Walmart. When you realize you need a few things for the kid, it can be pretty tough to pack them up and drive however far to the store that may or may not have what you need. If they do have it, you aren’t going to get reviews or many options.

My recent prime purchases have included bottle brushes, a crib mattress protector, a replacement remote for our sound bar (dog ate it), and a cheap car camera to check the baby since he started daycare last week and I’m completely paranoid about my ADHD brain leaving him in a hot car and killing him.

Did any of these need to be prime purchases? I guess not but you can see how I would want them sooner rather than later.

Walmart near me didn’t have any good car cameras in my price range.

The sound bar remote was online only and was required for us to watch TV since our TV speaker doesn’t work.

The bottle brushes were just convenient.

The mattress protector could have waited but would have been a gamble on ruining our very expensive crib mattress. This could have been a a Walmart purchase for sure though.

I’m not saying these were life or death purchases. They weren’t and people got by just fine before Amazon. But does the convenience and reliability outweigh the monthly prime cost? For us, yes. And I admit we have become pretty dependent on it.

I don’t have to trust it though? I just told you I revise and edit.

It doesn’t do my job for me, I still have to understand how to do the work properly. But I can use it to save time and then revise, check for errors, etc.

You’re basically arguing that spell check is useless because it’s wrong sometimes. It’s just a tool.

Perhaps you just don’t have a use for it?

It doesn’t do the thinking for me but man it’s a time saver for busy work.

It turns a lot of my work into “editing” rather than writing and then editing.

It’s very good for teachers to differentiate materials for students with a variety of reading levels.

I imagine your priorities become different.

You start out young and idealistic. You find success and maintain that idealism for quite some time. Your morals are intact and you still feel connected to your users because you’re one of them.

Eventually though, you have to make some tough decisions. You want to maintain your community and sometimes that means choosing financials first. You make unpopular decisions for good reasons and your users don’t understand because they aren’t privy to all of the details. You have MBAs walking you through these steps and they’re probably more understanding than your users who don’t have a lot of stake in these choices.

Then your platform grows and it’s not just your computer nerd circles anymore. It’s open to the general public and corporations as well now. You have to deal with a bunch of vile, shitty people and you still have to make unpopular decisions. Nobody is ever happy no matter what you do.

Personally, I can understand reaching a point where you say, “You know what? Fuck em. I’m a different person now after all of these years, and the people using my platform aren’t even the same people I made it for in the first place, at least not mostly.”

I assume at that point you’re just trying to cash out. And you’ve listened to the MBAs for long enough that you’re thinking like them now. It’s even technically possible that Spez is still a good person and an idealist. He might still be making tough choices the rest of us don’t understand. Reddit may very well be in a place where it needs to get way more profitable or die. The Internet is tricky. Nowhere else in the free market do you have people who expect to pay $0 for a popular product they use for many hours per day.

I’m not a Spez apologist. Just offering a possible scenario that would explain how we keep ending up here with so many different companies.

I like the idea that tolerance is a social contract.

You’re only covered by it when you practice it.

You break the contract by being intolerant, nobody is obligated to be tolerant to you anymore.

Tiny Scanner for Android

The whole thing with folk music and punk rock is that it can be good whilst not technically sounding good.

As an example, Johnny Hobo is perfectly situated between folk and punk rock. Horrible chain-smoking voice pushed to its max, shitty acoustic guitar just being beat on, and it sounds so like it was recorded on a laptop.

But it’s completely unique, authentic, and heart wrenching.

You can feel his despair and a lot of it is precisely because of these things. I don’t think any high-quality version of this song would make nearly the same impact. In fact it would probably sound like shit.

I’m interested! Can you PM me? I currently use an IPTV service that’s just okay.

Capitalism can commercialize anything including critiques of capitalism.

Similarly, corporations can sell anything, including critiques of themselves.

Reminds me of the Beatles selling “Beatles Hater” merch.

You’d miss exactly nothing.

I have tried several times over the years to pick up a game of theirs that looks interesting due to the story, setting, or due to the fact that it’s a sport game my friends are playing.

Every single time, for well over a decade now, it’s taken me about 20 minutes to realize they haven’t changed one thing about their formula in any genre.

All of their games feel kind of cheap, floaty, and/or just “off” somehow in terms of physics and gameplay. They have nonstop in-game purchases, and they fill their game with hundreds of thousands of copy and paste quests. Like, the most tedious thing in the recent Zelda games is getting the Koroks seeds, and even that is more varied and interesting than the vast majority of Ubisoft quests.

If Ubi made smaller games less frequently, they’d be an amazing studio I’d bet.

The sports games from EA are also the same exact thing every single year. Similarly, if EA released fewer sports games, instead just updating rosters and stats through free downloads, they could probably make some pretty incredible games.

One thing I’d like to see EA do is add more fun and experimental features. First person mode in Madden where you play with a full team of guys, creative rule sets, totally off the wall fantasy settings and rule sets, career modes where you start as a high school player and get noticed, marathon games where you don’t get to call plays and instead it’s a constant stream of making it to the end zone and having to immediately punt the ball to the other team so they can start running and passing freely instantly, etc.

They could do so much to make sports interesting to non-spors guys. And someone who likes sports more could probably tell me some of the more realistic/simulation style upgrades they’d like to see from these games. Things that have been missing way too long.

Prime example. Atomic bombs are dangerous and they seem like a bad thing. But then you realize that, counter to our intuition, nuclear weapons have created peace and security in the world.

No country with nukes has been invaded. No world wars have happened since the invention of nukes. Countries with nukes don’t fight each other directly.

Ukraine had nukes, gave them up, promptly invaded by Russia.

Things that seem dangerous aren’t always dangerous. Things that seem safe aren’t always safe. More often though, technology has good sides and bad sides. AI does and will continue to have pros and cons.

I think the issue is that these service providers are more than capable of providing “unlimited” data, but choose not to because they can make a lot more when people inevitably go over their limit. The salt on the wound is the fact that ISPs usually have no competition. They usually have a monopoly on the area in which they operate.

Where I live, we have unlimited data that only gets throttled if you use a truly absurd amount (like if you’re constantly pirating large amounts of 4k movies or something). No caps or unexpected fees. Overall, I always felt like I had it pretty good, and I still think that…mostly.

The funny part is that my ISP had competition move to town recently. I kid you not, the week before the competition officially started up their service, my ISP sent a letter saying they were doubling my Internet speed for no extra charge.

They were trying to show how awesome they were but really it was the biggest slap in the fucking face. You’re telling me you were overcharging me that much for years?

Another issue is that advertising, which you never asked for, makes up part of your monthly data usage, as do routine and unavoidable downloads like security updates, video game patches, etc.

To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven’t seen doesn’t look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.

YouTube though. It’s functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.

For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.

I said this in another thread - I bet they’re going the YouTube route and are going to start allowing content creators to make money.

Might sound good on the surface but it’s absolutely going to shred what Reddit used to be. Goodbye discussion forum and hello new social media.

I actually like where the Fediverse is now. And I think a long trajectory of slow growth will be very good for it.

Reddit is a great example of the “enshitification” process at work. A community grows way too big, way too fast. People don’t adopt the norms, the norms change. That’s why the front page of Reddit is full of “Am I ugly?” Posts when it used to be (more) high quality discussions with a bunch of nerds. Hacker news is a good example of a slow-growing community which has mostly maintained an environment of intellectual curiosity.

Excellent blog post about this here: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community/