Good for Canada. I've been reading a lot about the Gilded Age lately and I truly believe we're in the Second Gilded Age. Toppling oligarchs and monopolies required governments to start calling these greedy scumbags on their bluffs and rethinking how these businesses could operate more ethically. I believe we've finally reached a point of reckoning with social media and tech companies more largely. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google, Amazon, and others have been reaching new levels of greed in the past few years. It's time that we reject them and fight for something better. And where our actions fall short, we have to do everything in our power to push politicians in the direction of regulating them.
Gray
joined 2 years ago
I love the name! My wife has a theory that any food item can be a good name for some kind of animal. I have tried with all my might to find one that doesn't work, but she always manages to think of an animal it would be good for.
Instagram is owned by Meta.
To me, the larger issue for the world outside of Russia is the ensuing chaos would be pretty scary when there are nukes sitting around. All it would take is one bad actor to get ahold of those for bad things to happen. I don't think it's likely and I can't currently see the motivations for using nukes on any other nations apart from Russia itself and Ukraine, but chaos is chaos and many would consider the evil we know to be safer than whatever else lurks around the corner.
Personally, though, despite being aware of this it would regardless please me so much to see Putin fall. I would especially love to see Russia democratize more, but I'm afraid that's probably a pipe dream anytime soon. Uncontrolled chaos generally doesn't lend itself to more democracy.
More like based 60, amirite?
I have so much respect for anyone that can hear an opposing opinion and see the value in the dialogue rather than going straight to "this person shouldn't be allowed to have opinions around me". So often social media causes us to segment into opinion bubbles with no differing opinions allowed inside. It takes a certain strength of will from a moderator to resist the urge to carve out those bubbles.
I see the justification for some opinions online start to get really lazy. Like they're full of holes. Even if I agree with them, I can think of so many ways I could poke holes in their logic if we were arguing in good faith. I really believe this comes from our refusal to allow opposing opinions in these spaces. When you aren't challenged in your beliefs you get really lazy at justifying them to other people. It weakens your arguments.
I was once a fundamentalist Christian. After a long and difficult process I deconverted and became a very vocal atheist. One of the "all religion is horrible" types. But at some point I realized that I had never abandoned my fundamentalism. I had only changed the flavor of it from religious to nonreligious. I still dealt in extreme beliefs with very little room for questioning and nuance.
It was when I introduced that nuance into my thought process that my worldview genuinely changed. I've come to understand that most lines you can divide people on will have well intentioned people and sinister people on both sides. I have met so many delightfully kind and welcoming religious people in addition to all the terrible ones I've known. They're generally in different circles, but not always. It does us a mental disservice to think in such black and white ways.
The same can be applied to arguments. It is possible for two sides of an argument to have genuinely good points. It's possible for an argument to not have a "good" side. And of course it's possible for an argument to have a completely good side or a completely bad side. The point there is that I think we should think critically and dissect arguments and look for good faith arguments and bad faith arguments. We should understand that things aren't always going to be easy to make decisions on and that's okay. It's okay to struggle with an issue and admit that you don't have an answer to every question.
Religion is a great example. Nobody can prove something that isn't provable. You can think that religion is sinister for that reason, but I think that does a disservice to religious people. I don't believe in God. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to believe in God if I'm being honest with myself. But I haven't forgotten what it was like to believe and I don't blame people for finding comfort in it. Who can blame people for searching for a little bit of hope? I don't think it matters to those people whether they can prove their beliefs in God because for them it's not really about believing the "truth" but rather clinging to hope for a bright future in a very dark world. And those hopes don't need to be attached to bigotry like so many religious people have unfortunately done.
You could just refuse to say their name.... Orrrrr you could just get some fun SEO terms going so that when people Google it they get results like Reddit sucks dick or Reddit is shit or Reddit hates you.
This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It's a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.
I don't doubt that ADHD exists and that your experience is valid. But I also think we need to be really careful about our expectations. I know I don't have ADHD. I can focus plenty when I try. Social media has shortened my attention span and made me prone to procrastination, but it's definitely not something I am actively incapable of. Yet so many people have self-diagnosed me with ADHD.
I have at least one friend who in college landed a prescription for Adderall because he wanted to be able to get extra focus even though he knew he didn't have ADHD. Later on he went off of it and managed to become a lawyer and made it look easy. This is someone who never struggled with focus. I knew him since grade school. His use of the drug was clearly abusive.
I get angry at people like my friend because I know ADHD is real. And I know his abuse of Adderall only makes more people out there minimize the existenxe of real ADHD. But just as you're saying my rhetoric makes it difficult for people with ADHD, I think overdiagnosing hurts people without it. Like I said in my first comment, if I'm in a really competitive environment like a school and I'm going against people that are using a "performance enhancing drug" for focus, then our societal expectations for what I should be capable of are out of whack and I start to be expected to perform and focus like someone on Adderall.
There has to be a compromise between handing it out to everyone and refusing to give it to people who genuinely need it. I have no idea what that compromise looks like and I'm truly happy that people like you and another friend I have who genuinely has it are able to get their medication. But outside of the very real world of ADHD, I see it becoming a problem. My wife who has been able to write an entire PhD dissertation in a very normal amount of time and experiences far less distractability than most people I know regularly questions whether she has ADHD. It's that state of mind where everybody thinks they have it that I worry about. We don't need to all be on Adderall.
I think the main issue we run into with the concept of a user account server is that banning needs to be an ability that someone somewhere has. If someone starts posting some highly illegal content we need a way to ban them. But then invariably giving someone that power is exactly what centralization is. Separating that one user server into multiple leads to other awkward outcomes as I posted elsewhere in this thread. Namely, you end up back where we started where certain instances ban certain user servers that are known to host problematic people.
I love the ornithology app so much! I recorded an oreole singing in the forest the other day, then the app identified it and gave me a list of recordings of oreole songs, so I was able to loudly play it on my phone and sure enough the oreole came over to investigate! (I felt a bit guilty for faking it out like that, so I stopped as soon as it came over.)