Rexxitor. Biology nerd. Roguelites, indie games, and TRPGs. Drowning in unused yarn, unread books, and mandatory cat hair.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Fanning slowly – “I am married.”

    Fanning quickly – “I am engaged.”

    Using as a fan – “Introduce me to your company.”

    …?

    I have to wonder who came up with this. One would imagine it was just some idea someone had and they published a whole etiquette book about it, and it slowly but forcefully caught on from there, because otherwise I can’t imagine this just being a thing that evolves spontaneously in a way everyone equally understands. Imagine sitting all the way across the room at a ball or something and witnessing someone break up with their boytoy through body language. With perfect clarity for all to see. You might as well just say it out loud.


  • It’s really a mix of both. More heavily the way the site has been for years because people love drama more than anything else. If you want the sweet serotonin of karma, you’ve gotta be simultaneously the funniest, meanest, and most jaded person in the room, and everyone is jockeying for that position.

    It just breeds assholes by design. I’ve noticed my own behavior has changed, too, since leaving that place, although partially that’s because I just didn’t want to be like that anymore.

    But it really has been noticeably affected since the protests. I was originally trying to stay for one single sub I was in, because they were the kindest, calmest community I’d met since back when forums were a thing.

    Just the best group, for reasons none of us really understood and some of us kept trying to find psychological commonalities to explain. Truly 98% of them were people I’d chill with irl and I still know a few on discord. And also here. If you’re reading this, hello!

    But the migration away was enough to completely alter the atmosphere imo. A lot of the more conscientious users left for other pastures, leaving behind those that were more neutral or even openly hostile about the protests.

    There began to be fights and insults thrown where before this, any aggression had been unusual. The posts took a turn that reflected that feeling and I really stopped bothering with the place after a few months. I’m still a bit sad about it and there are things that I miss, but there just wasn’t enough to hold me anymore. It seemed to increasingly echo every other part of the site.

    For the moment, this place is quieter but better. We still get dumb shit every now and then, but it’s not to the same degree and hopefully never will be. As above, I blame the demographic. We’ve grouped all the people with stubborn morals into a little room and it turns out they have things in common. I do miss a couple people I used to see everywhere all the time when kbin first ramped up, but we run in different circles and they’ve gotten lost in the crowd.

    And yes, btw, I am also going to name you one of my favorite users to see around. You seem as kind as you are prolific.


  • The post can, yeah. The predictability with which all posts or comments containing the word “Google” will have several responses underneath evangelizing Firefox almost certainly will not, after it exceeds a point it very clearly routinely exceeds.

    Not because you guys are wrong, (you’re not), but because you’re annoying, which is almost as bad. There is something in psychology called reactance theory, and it’s the reason why, when you’re just about to do the dishes and then someone else tells you to do them, it’s suddenly the last thing on earth you want to do.

    It is a choice so small it isn’t worth arguing over, but it’s no longer your choice born out of your own free will, and now you feel cheated and resentful and you are not doing it, both out of spite and more truthfully to regain your sense of choice.

    This is the same reason everyone hates vegans so much. They’re not wrong. They’re annoying. Firefox has vegan PR.

    I held off listening to Hamilton for three years for no other reason than nobody else I met would shut the goddamn fuck up about Hamilton. Same with the TV version of Good Omens, whatever stupid cartoon jester thing has been in a third of the memes lately, and a hundred other things.

    I am very likely to switch over to Firefox myself in the ever-nearing future. That ice is breaking. But it will not be because a bunch of strangers whined at me over my own choices for over a decade. It will be because the cons of whatever Google, Windows, etc. have done finally outweigh the pros of not having to exert effort to maintain my experience.

    It bears consideration that in the meantime, Firefox users have a tendency not to even read the several duplicate comments before they start jacking off into them, not uncommonly in a way that’s loudly judgemental towards their own target audience.

    The resultant spam cements a mental association between Firefox, the brand and the feeling of being annoyed and insulted. Don’t be those vegans. If I had to think, be like the art community treats Adobe. Fuck Adobe, but I’m not just gonna overload someone with aggressive pompousity who’s only using the industry default.





  • Yeahhh. Even if they reverted everything, brought back the apps, and released a scheduled weekly video of Spez crying as different mods whip him with a belt, I am not interested.

    Reddit can do whatever. I found an adequate replacement due to the protests, and I took it in direct response to Spez’s clockwork PR disasters, so the protests did not fail for me.

    Interesting read that should have gone without saying to anyone trying to manage a company, what trust thermoclines are and how to avoid them.

    Judging the worth of the protests depends on what your individual goal was. If it was convincing reddit admins not to cut and run with a giant pile of free money, now you know better. Nothing in the company’s history made me think they were the type, which is itself a warning sign.

    If it was reddit going down in flames, that’s always a slow burn and seems nigh unavoidable for any company as the years stretch on and management grows complacent, but they visibly did damage themselves because you’re reading this.

    And it was enough damage that several hundreds of thousands don’t really mind making their home at a competitor instead. It’s only going to get worse, not because they don’t already have millions of users who didn’t leave, but because they have a solid reputation for never listening to those millions.

    The protest was a death sentence because their proven problem solving method is to ignore the problems as they mount.





  • Can’t find the source, but I did see a rumor they’ll be turning on federation a few months after the official release so as to not spring all of this place on a bunch of old people. So if they do that, they’ll already have their own ecosystem/culture in place. I’m also a bit worried the extended introduction is going to lull people.

    I think regardless, it always needs to be at the forefront of user’s minds that they’re not averse to playing it slow. Likely, they’ll be on their best behavior starting out, especially since having a working platform at all means making as many friends in the fediverse as they can. They’re not gonna come in swinging their junk around like spez.

    Acting the gracious benefactor will not stop them from leaving this place a haunted backwater once they gather enough standing to start poaching users via shiny toys and high engagement. The kbin dev hasn’t said anything to my knowledge yet, but being an overly reliant lapdog was XMPP’s mistake and I support defederating as honestly the best way to avoid that.

    Theirs is always going to be a numbers game, any niceties will be presumed by me to be a fakeout, and I’m pissed off that what was supposed to be a way to worm out from under the corporations semi-permanently stands to be drowned out immediately by corporations.


  • If anyone here has some info on how to adequately include conversational dialogue, I’d really appreciate it.

    I’ve done some reading on it once I realized kbin, at least, has that option, but I can’t find anything on this topic apart from “Try not to repeat information.” Which I think is implying I shouldn’t mention the speakers’ names more than once? I’m kind of winging it here as best I can.


  • Same for me, that would be nice. That and being able to see the whole thing in paragraph form instead of four words at a time. I’ve resorted to pre-typing a description into WordPad while I have the image pulled up, and then just copy/pasting it.

    Pro tip, hitting enter while typing alt text on kbin will not add a helpful line break like I reflexively want to do, it will submit the unfinished post =_=;;