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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2026

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  • Sounds like an opportunist. Someone who just says what he needs to get his way, but has no guiding principles.

    I can see how a message like this would sound coming from someone like Bernie Sanders, ie. high prices are squeezing regular people while oil companies bag the profit. Even if it’s good for people to drive less from a climate perspective, it has to be done in a way that doesn’t harm real people. But this guy just sounds like he’s angling for political points with no concern for real issues. Would make a terrible president, so I guess he has high chances to become the Democratic nominee.







  • Lemmy is like that to some extent. The fact that users have to pick an instance is, for a lot of people, too much overload and drives them away. But I see it as a filter. You have to have some absolute minimum baseline level of understanding and proficiency of the platform you’re using. That’s why the massive number of people on Facebook, etc. are oblivious to how they’re being exploited by the platform, because they don’t understand what it is or how it works.



  • Smartphones ruined the internet.

    When you needed to sit at a computer, use a keyboard, and spend a bit of time to write out thoughtful content, the quality of the discussion and community on the internet was so much higher. With smartphones, they had to dumb down the UI, consolidate content and reactions into likes and emojis, and generally just had to deal with smaller, more unsubstantive and rage-baity comments.

    Plus, there’s just the undeniable fact that computer users are more tech-savvy than people who only know how to use a smartphone. Making the internet smartphone friendly opened the floodgates up to a sea of low-quality engagement.

    Before smartphones, we would go outside, live our lives, then come home and see what happened on the internet that day. When the internet started following us around in our pockets on crippled devices that are designed for consumption and cheap-ass engagement, that’s really when the internet went to shit.


  • Internet tech companies have perfected the art of enshittifying a service. Internet services these days practically follow a playbook of, 1.) hook users, 2.) build a walled garden, 3.) exploit users. Basically the EEE of the user-driven web. Pretty much every company at this point, both old and new (Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, TikTok, Discord, Twitter, Netflix) follow this exact pattern.

    Modern UI design, dark patterns, deprecating services while raising prices, “install our app!”, etc. We didn’t have this in the days of IRC, Usenet, all that other good stuff before corporate web came around.