Indeed, I find that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we become a burden to others and can’t help anyone, so that’s so important to remember (that if we want to help “others”, it has to start with ourselves).

*I* do not, and if there’s one, then surely there’s more like me? :-P

Moreover, I think it’s impressive that you have dedicated so much of your efforts to improving people’s experiences here on the Fediverse. Even if people disagree with you on some point - which for myself I am aware of nothing but even if there were - that would still be true. You probably don’t get thanked often, so I offer it, and I hope that you will accept.

But also, I hope that you find a way to show kindness to yourself too:-). Our families may have royally fucked us up for life, but we can do different, for ourselves! Or at least, I very much (desperately) hope that can be true.

Thank you for sharing this story.

Since GamerGate was mentioned, here is a link to Innuendo Studios’ analysis called “Why Are You So Angry?”, although I prefer its more broad sequel “The Alt-Right Playbook”.

Though without the kind of linked personal stories, so many people would not be receptive to hearing such analyses, so they both are kinda necessary. :-)

Oh man, some written phrases you can just hear!

Reminds me of this one:

Is this the new “Honey Badger Don’t Care” meme?

What could go wrong with creating a treasure trove of data that AI miners would do anything to get their hands on?

Oh no, think of how that will affect your coworkers!?

That might have been some kind of fad in 1999, when that movie (Office Space) came out? I dunno, it was before my time. But I choose instead to think it was perhaps intentional, to help make this guy a highly visible parody of just an absolute dick. Ofc, both of those things could be true at the same time - it may have been those type of people that liked to wear that type of clothing style!:-P

The TV series Earth: Final Conflict, made by Gene Roddenberry, had a story based on this premise:-).

Open source software may be a good model to look at. People contribute bc they want to, regardless of any monetary remuneration.

But it’s hard, and a for-profit corporation can often move forward more quickly to develop an objectively better project. Except even though they *could", they (usually) don’t, and really they have zero reason to, bc their goal is to make a profit, not a product. Reddit vs. Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin/etc. is one such example.

But it gets complicated bc of all the counterexamples, like at one time Google really was awesome, and free, so most of the open source projects did not push hard to replace it, bc it worked so well for so many. Similar to Lemmy I suppose - before the Rexit it had existed for many years, but it wasn’t until that shakeup that it was propelled forward extremely quickly by the influx of developers, e.g. who made the front end apps. Before that, the Reddit experience was fairly good even if not great, so not as many people bothered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Right, it is quite a stretch, I get it. Citizens pay taxes and vote thereby have extremely diluted control over the means of production for schools, as opposed to private schools where they control it by means of their dollars going towards whichever one they choose (causing them to compete for that privilege). It’s an extremely watered-down form of socialism existing inside of an other capitalist-dominated society, but the main point is that whatever it is / whatever words are used to describe it, the goal of it runs counter to the goal of capitalism to make profits, and instead just benefits the populace directly (many caveats aside, like how schools are funded in large measure from local taxation, causing a segregation effect where the rich tend to congregate together and thus have good schools whereby the poor must also congregate together, out of whatever is leftover, and thereby have lesser quality schooling - but that aside, within a given school district, the aim is usually for the children to be taught equally without regard for ability to pay, though heavy caveats exist there too e.g. supplies, lunches, etc.).

Anyway, I cannot defend the OP meme, I was only trying to point out what looks to have been the POV behind it.

While technically true in theory, I was pointing out how in practice people tend to implement it differently. It doesn’t help that almost every irl system that people describe as “capitalist” is not pure - e.g. the UK (& the USA in the era of 50s-60s) are a mixture of socialist policies & capitalist ones, like there can be “public” (socialism) schools funded by taxpayer dollars and controlled by the government side-by-side along with “private” (capitalist) schools that aim to provide a different experience (usually higher-end but oftentimes something else like a more religious affiliation). So the “pure capitalism” theoretical model does not seem to have much irl practical application, without adding all of those extra features that while not mandatory in the theory, seem to almost always be used in practice.

It is the way we do it! :-P

Including one of its two cofounders. They agreed they they would use puppets but never CGI, and they said that they would remain pure to the storyline rather than “sell out” for the sake of profits.

But then season 1 was a success and one but not the other cofounder wanted moar monay, so as soon as the second season it had already begun to lose everything that it spent that first season building up.

The magic was gone, not entirely, but mostly, having been sacrificed for the sake of chasing profits “above all else”.

Or worse, after a successful first season, enshittify the entire thing for the sake of moar profitz. Stranger Things…

That boat show, made by the same people who made Dark, was pretty good. Think like LOTR’s first movie - it does wrap up, even if it had also meant to go onwards (and in this case did not).

Step 1: it would be nice if we could at least talk about this in a friendly & civilized manner. I have spent a portion of my day today trying to defend even so much as casually mentioning in passing - in a reply to a reply to a reply even, iirc, much less a full-on post - that I would like something similar to what you said. I give up whenever I detect that someone literally did not read what I already wrote, at which point I see that they just wanted to complain rather than add something of substance to the ongoing conversation. And even if we took it for granted that I was a dummy Mc-Stoopid-buttface, nobody bothered once to explain why I might be wrong.

i.e., there seems to be significant push-back to this approach. I have no idea why though - it seems entirely logical and do-able to me? Especially if it were purely optional, like a new sort option rather than taking over the existing Hot one? At a guess, it may just be a difficult task, so it awaits someone to be interested enough to actually implement it. Also, please remember that the entire Fediverse has and continues to be under perpetual attack (message from DMV.social closing down due to being spammed by illegal CP & CSAM amid concerns over the ethical considerations of being a server that allows posts from external users, i.e. the entire Federation model, quoting: “Quite frankly, this is disturbing and I just don’t want to deal with the possibility of this crap.”) - I do not know if it is Huffman, or Musk, or Zuckerberg, or whoever might not enjoy how this could potentially take away from their profits, but they are correct that if we continue to exist on our own, that we need to do something to protect ourselves against this type of thing. So… sorting is important yes, but I could see if it was not the HIGHEST priority, right now.

But moving on, one thought regarding it: allow each user their own customization filters for each “category” of posts, e.g. 1% politics, 2% sports, restrict news to 5% (though the latter requires significantly deeper thinking to implement - e.g. is an article in a Technology sub still “news”? tbh, “news” is probably not a real category then). Or, as you say, an algorithm that would just work mostly fine for most people. The problem with all of this being that tags would have to exist first, so someone would have to develop that before any of this could begin to be developed and tested.

Which brings us back to: it is really fun to talk about such matters, but ultimately it will take someone rolling up their sleeves first, maybe learning an entirely new language (or several - according to this GitHub page, Lemmy is: “Rust 76.4% PLpgSQL 16.4% TypeScript 5.5% Shell 1.5% Other 0.2%”), and just getting something done. Otherwise, beggars cannot also be choosers, if there is nothing else available to choose from.