Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort

I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.

The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.

If an OSS project is designed to connect people with each other, and it doesn’t do that well, it’s kind of a failure.

Looking at you, Matrix.

Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer

This annoys me, not because discord is doing anything wrong, there needs to be a way to report spam and abuse, but because users can potentially abuse the feature. My hope is that reported DMs past a certain age are automatically ignored.

Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch

This one is just inevitable due to all the kids on it. Discord doesn’t want media and govts breathing down its neck after kids are bullied into killing themselves via the platform.

Where it gets annoying is one of the bigger public servers in Oz is straight-up a neo-nazi recruitment vector, and no amount of reporting seems to get anything done about it.

I can’t be sure it’s morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death.

That has been true for just about everyone throughout history.

the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.

People in the developed world not having kids is part of how they ‘win’ the game.

The reason boomers were able to demand so much is because, as the name implies, they’re a big fucking cohort. They were politically influential from the time they could vote. Keeping birthrates depressed and shipping in cheap foreign labour is how those with power keep everyone else powerless.

It’s a weird situation, but the way to improve living standards for future generations is to… have future generations. Even if you don’t feel like you can entirely support them now.

Had a look at it, seems to lack dedicated modifier and cursor keys. Looking specifically for a PC-style keyboard.

Does anyone know of an alternative to Hacker’s Keyboard? It hasn’t been updated for about 5 years and I’m worried it will stop working on newer versions of Android.

Your first mistake is using dating apps.

I did. It had some okay ideas (the ones that weren’t heavily borrowed) but questionable execution.

I didn’t like the EU, and I don’t like what they replaced it with either.

SW is just three movies and two seasons of Mando.

Also if I can go my whole life without hearing a bunch of mystical gibberish from dudebros holding glowsticks, it’ll be too soon. Wizards are usually supporting characters, and far less overtly dumb, yet everything SW tries to make these guys the centre of that universe.

I mean I agree that this is a new user nightmare, but we’ve been conditioning people for 30 years to download and run random .EXE files as admin too.

I hope they continue to resist and eventually cause a larger change for the better across the region.

Except that’s not what’s happening if you read the article, on either count.

Women aren’t resisting childbirth as an act of rebellion or as an exercise of their rights, there’s just too many competing pressures in their lives to table in having kids. Coupled with declining rates of attachment and a distraction-based economy, this isn’t a ‘win’ for anyone.

And population decline is a crisis we don’t know how to deal with. Old people have little economic output, but use up a lot of resources. It means the kids who are still born end up carrying a huge burden paying for and caring for older generations, they end up tax serfs in an aged care-based economy, and if older generations aren’t cared for you end up with human atrocities on a massive scale.

…

Most of these comments are problematic. You don’t have to have children, but for most people it has been a pretty consistent and natural inclination. Now a whole generation are convincing themselves they don’t want children when they really just can’t, and rather than holding those responsible to account and improving all our circumstances, they’re treating it as some personal victory.

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

Is it that hard to read the post? OP is right, almost every TV on the market has the same cheap, shitty plastic feet, and they’re spaced as far apart as possible so you’re unnecessarily size-limited when trying to buy something like a bedroom TV to sit on top of bookshelves or a tallboy.

I’d like something more than 32" for my bedroom too, but I can find one new 40-42" TV on the market with a central stand now, and it is some obscenely expensive 4K OLED thing from Sony. I am keeping an eye out for older, pre-owned TVs as a result, but am yet to find any good deals.

This isn’t just an issue in terms of romantic relationships, or gender-specific.

We used to all be exposed to the same media and had common points of reference and interest. It was called water cooler discussion. Unless you’re into sports, this doesn’t really exist any more.

We used to share a more common set of customs. Schools used to have etiquette/finishing classes. Was a lot of it ultimately arbitrary and made up? Of course, but we were all taught the same things, and they became a common language. You knew to take off your hat/glasses when talking to me to show a level of courtesy and respect, and I knew you were showing respect when you did that. This also worked in terms of things like knowing when to adopt a formal tone with others… many people don’t have a formal tone any more, let alone know how to use it.

Everyday life thrust us into more social interaction, too. You used to have to go to stores, talk to people. Even public transport and public spaces used to be a social experience before everyone buried themselves in their mobile phones and headphones. Now the majority of people left trying to interact with you in public are weirdos or trying to sell you something, so people assume anyone approaching you in public is a weirdo or trying to sell you something, suddenly it is taboo to even try to strike up a conversation with a stranger.

And modern outlets like social media encourage some of our worst tendencies. Everything escalates into outrage, tribal warfare, makes us really bad at self-moderation and letting things go.

The-way-things-were was never ideal for a minority of people, but the way things are is ideal for no one. I strongly believe even the innovations that are supposed to help a lot of minorities are hurting them to a degree, too. I fit into a couple of those minority categories myself, and have to force myself to go outside, to use manned checkouts, to put away my phone when outside, as while the alternatives may be easier in the short-term, in the long-term they are making me both physically and mentally less-resiliant.

You can either try to do things the right way and cure multiple social ills, or you can do it the wrong way and end up with different rules for different adults all in an attempt to prohibition your way out of one issue.

NZ already did this and it is the most cowardly way to avoid political blowback.

There’s plenty of other options for minimising smoking. A more altruistic way is by lifting people out of poverty and tackling social disintegration, since smokers are overwhelmingly poor and disaffected.

Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums… not so much.

This was my first thought as well. My second thought is all the harms we’ve caused to ourselves in the digital age, and we only start to care when it hits our pocketbooks.

I think you’re just supposed to avoid heavy acids with them. And it’s one of those ‘lifetime risk’ dealies.