Propaganda is powerful. You convince your followers that some classes of people don’t deserve kindness, you convince them that everything out of Hollywood is part of a leftist agenda, and once they believe both of those statements it’s very easy to spin this as further proof of the narrative they’ve already bought into.

Define what you mean by ‘crash’. What’s been happening will continue to happen, but if you’re expecting any kind of singular dramatic moment, what would that be?

I hope you stub your toe and it really really hurts.

There are more tells than just that.

Actually, the biggest tell is that for how long it is, it’s mostly noise with little signal. Some of it doesn’t even make sense, “check what instances or users you’re federated with”?

Maybe whatever automated detection service you’re using can’t reliably tell, but a human who knows what to look for can. This whole format just looks very obviously out of place compared to any typical reply you’d see on this platform.

AI writes formal. No one replies to a discussion thread in this kind of format. Where on Fedi do you see an ‘average’ that looks anything like this?

em dash spotted

I don’t understand streaming music as a concept. My collection of individual tracks stands at about 1,700 (clocking in at 190 hours – that is 22 hours more than a week), and there are several full albums atop that.

Streaming is very useful for people who don’t have such a curated collection already. Especially younger generations who didn’t grow up on physical media.

you don’t want to choose what you listen to

You can though? You can always pull up a specific artist, album, or track. You can even curate your own collection of favorites on these services, and shuffle from there.

But for a lot of users, there’s added value in discovery algorithms that’ll find new music for you. It is radio with extra steps, but those extra steps of telling the system what music you like and dislike do result in much better results than radio stations that weren’t tailored to your exact tastes. Before you built up your collection, how did you use to discover new music back in the day? I’m guessing probably from the radio, this is that for the current generation.

The slow death of being able to own things is sad. But unlimited access to nearly all music, with discovery tools, is a pretty dang tempting deal. The average user doesn’t really care about whether not they ‘own’ their music, just the practicality of being able to listen to music.

Consider that music piracy is way way way down compared to how rampant it was in the 2000s, because people are really happy with streaming now. There’s an old saying that piracy is a service problem, and after unsuccessfully trying to fight it head-on for so long, the industry won in the end by simply offering a better service.

The first time you try Linux, you will have to take a little time to learn something that is new and unfamiliar to you. But this was true of the first time you tried Windows too.

The point is that it really isn’t hard to learn, and today it absolutely is easier than ever.

So you want it to be everyone else’s job to fact check your bot for you? If you can’t be bothered to check your own bot, why should we take it seriously either?

Reddit’s enshittification has been steadily getting worse for years. I moderated a large sub that took part in the blackout protests over the API changes, until the admins threatened us into reopening the sub. That was the point at which I decided I was completely done with this garbage fire of a website.

We’re in an era where every large social media platform is becoming increasingly awful, and all of this can be attributed to corporate ownership of those platforms. I believe that the only way forward is federated platforms that no one CEO can control, putting power back into the hands of communities. The Fediverse is the only capitalism-proof solution to everything wrong with the internet today.

The broadcast part is what matters, not the character limit. A normal SMS message has just one recipient, maybe a few more for a group MMS, but a Tweet goes out to the world wide web. Although Twitter was designed such that it could be used via SMS, that never defined the purpose of the platform, and changes to the SMS protocol do not obsolete Twitter’s use case.

‘Civilized’ is definitely not the right way to describe less privileged nations. People there certainly aren’t ‘uncivilized’, and to describe them as such carries heavy colonialist overtones.

Though really you should’ve recognized the red flags from this person the moment they tried to justify the use of slurs.

It does take some dedicated study to get to a point where you can start to comprehend even the most basic content. If you just start reading/listening from zero, none of it will be comprehensible.

The goal for comprehensible input should be i+1, meaning you understand almost all of a sentence but one word or grammar point, which then allows you to work out the missing piece from context.

Look up community-made resources for the language you want to learn. Depends on the language, but you should be able to find plenty of great materials. Without knowing which language you’re trying to learn, it’s hard to give any better of a generic answer than that.

That said, flashcard apps like Anki are probably the single most powerful tool available, and vocab card decks will be the first thing you see at the top of those community resources. Any reason in particular you’re averse to something like that?

Does taking care of everyone mean saying “sorry you can’t get HRT, it just doesn’t poll well enough”?

If we want to take care of everyone, then we need to be sure that we actually are taking care of everyone. We have to stand up against persecution and injustice. We have to proactively offer a hand up to those who need it most right now. When people are being oppressed, silence is complicity.

If you want to sweep issues under the rug when they feel politically inconvenient, then you can’t also say you’re taking care of everyone.

I understand where people are coming from when they say “identity politics” are politics getting in the way of class struggle. I vehemently disagree with it, these are also important issues we need to stand up for even when they are sometimes unpopular, but I understand where it comes from.

But if she also thinks we shouldn’t be talking about class either, what the fuck does she want to do?

No, the scientific consensus is very much trans-positive. But thanks for coming here to show your true colors and prove my point.

Okay, I’m looking and… the very first post on the front page of HC is transphobia. Right below that is an antivax conspiracy theory.