I think it’s more physiological. Since microplastics are ingested maybe it’s related to the rise in oral and rectal cancers.

I had a feeling this post is race bait. Apparently nobody actually read the body anyways and are responding to the title.

Block is useless on lemmy. They can still cause a nuisance. Just becuase you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there…

Those who take issue with loss of profits without ads must take it up with big tech. They’ve have literal trillions of dollars from dominating the ad industry. They have your money. Nobody else.

They have old/orphaned dependencies on their machine. It’s hanging on a by thread. They have no idea the packages have disappeared years ago. The house of cards is a bit flip away from collapsing.

It’s the tech oligarchs. They’re doing their own gilded age. Their empires exist in the tech domain. Mostly IT services. They’re going after the whole pie. They want the entirety of American industry.

What they have in mind exactly is anyone’s guess. We’re not going back to the times of railroad or oil barons. We’re not necessarily going back steel and auto manufacturing. The future is in things like robotics, renewable energy, semiconductors, or whatever the future holds.

I think crashing the economy just to buy stock is old news too. The saying has become rather mindlessly echoed. They have relatively little to gain from this. The rich hold 90% of stocks. There’s little to extract from the remaining 10%. Plus I think people have believed too much in the idea that stocks are a shell game. It’s not as much as people think. The markets are still based on tangibles meaning actual industry. That is what the oligarchs are after. What’s better than owning stock in the industry is owning the industry itself. Complete total monopolies just like the gilded age and just like they’ve monopolized IT services sector.

There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.

Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.

You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.

There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?

In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.

In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.

Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.

It’s not uniquely an American problem. The American symptoms are quite a sight to beheld though.

Americans are going to take this as a statement that Canada themselves are paying the tariffs.

Forums were micromanaged far more than modern social platforms. Reddit is one of the “free speech absolutist” sites like its sibling 4chan. These were opposing paradigms to forums.

I’ve long contended that modern social media users would absolutely hate the old style forums. If people think subreddit mods and reddit content mods suck. They haven’t met the admin of Joe Bobs phpbb forum hosted from his garage. Joe Bob doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

I don’t think it’s a free speech problem. I think people have not only been conditioned to be content junkies. They’ve become addicted to being Greater Fuckwads.

Maybe nobody cares what you think and whatever your words are they aren’t that important. Social media has devoured peoples egos turning them into the Greatest Fuckwads. With social media everyone has a podium and everyone has very important words with billions of doomscrollers as an audience. Don’t you dare steppy my freedoms!!1!

Anyways I think the real test is whether people can handle a small forum with strict moderation and focused discussion. That will reveal who has half a brain apart from the fuckwads. I’ve seen people come to what are now basically private forums acting like a garden variety social media user only to get smacked down real quick. A sobering dose of reality for them.

I wasn’t making a political statement about Flatpaks.

That’s how it is anywhere that doesn’t have any real moderation. There are those actively seek to harass anyone who isn’t right leaning cis hetero white male. Lemmy like every other modern social platform is an open air forum available to the entire 7 billion population of the world. Moderators don’t see 99% of the posts. And 99% of what they do see, they don’t take for than a few seconds to consider. The nefarious abusers are almost always more subtle than moderators give thought to. This allows harassment to run rampant. This is a fundamental issue with social media. As as I’m concerned it’s an intractable problem (brought you by free speech absolutist libertarian bros).

That’s as opposed to the traditional internet boards where posting was orders of magnitude lower volume. Site administrators and moderators cared about fostering a good community. Moderators saw a not insignificant portion of the content posted. Not just reports. Forum members used one pseudonym. No throwaways like the reddit/lemmy paradigm. What you posted was attached to you as a person. Therefore there was consequences to being an asshole. In other words deterrence.

Also I find it kind of amusing how they out themselves for their simpleton world view. I’ve noticed a pattern where they take superficial readings of a post to identify keywords/phrases. Then assign identity to that user. Then engage in harassment based on that.

For example say I posted something that was sympathetic to women. Ergo they assume I am a woman. And they engage the usual framework of belligerent replies appropriate to that assumed identity. I know for certain the key words in the second sentence of this comment already has triggered someone for sure.

Edit: The prior replies are just *chefs kiss*. I can’t tell if they’re being intentional or if they’re just that dumb. I guess that’s part of the fun isn’t it.

I downloaded the tor browser binary which runs standalone. Why does it need to be a flatpak?

The old meme was to “hide your power level”. Meaning don’t reveal the extent of your right wing beliefs. That has reversed in the past 10 years.

You don’t even have to question how it used to be. People were out in the open before too. Another popular meme was that women belong in the kitchen. The “make me a sammich” meme was a common joke. Programming was only possible to be learned by white men. Never mind that women pioneered the field in the early days. Also anyone of Asian descent in the field were merely cheaters or just proficient at copying.

They all drank this weird koolaid about how leftist they were (they still do). It’s strange. I think because many guys never left their podunk town. So being exposed to the slightest bit of different things through the internet made them very different from everyone else their christian conservative home town. They supported rather milquetoast things like legalization of pot and carried an affinity for anime. So that meant they were very progressive relative to the god fearing cross burning klan shit happening all around them in real life.

It started with gmail IMO. That was an early milestone of the evil empire. They announced mining your emails to build an ad empire. I remember being bewildered that nerds on forums were going nuts over 1GB of storage. What a shit trade off I thought. But what did I know then especially relative to the expertise of internet nerds.

Gmail was launched around 2005 which means the concept was in development several years before. That puts the timeline around 2000 probably. Google was evil from very early on.

I’m certain those replies are in bad faith to discourage people from leaving reddit. The first one is obvious for your aforemention reason. The second one. I mean the internet has been around for decades. People haven’t suddenly forgot how to use it. Even normies have been able to figure out how to click a server. They’re fomenting lazy inertia.

When you can’t win, accuse them of cheating.

Dear Penthouse Forum reddit, I’m a 20 year-old college student and I never thought I’d be writing to the Penthouse Forum reddit, but…

It’s the lowest common denominator of smut entertainment. The tech companies have managed to veil it all in prestige. It should be called gossip media or something.

Instead people think there’s some kind of real human connection. Some kind of deep discussions happening.

Their bullet points are spin-doctoring.

Also the comment got a few dozen upvotes almost immediately. Suspicious.

That’s why Chinas manufacturing is being targeted too. Otherwise they will inevitably develop the process for bleeding edge in house chip fabrication. Technology is only a matter of time. The US is trying to stall any way they can.

It was to wipe the news cycle. It worked. Do you remember what it was? Does anyone?