It took years for me to really disconnect.

• They introduced, with much fanfare, a mysterious new way of counting votes, and back-propagated it. Suddenly, all upvotes of past and present posts and comments got boosted by a factor of 8-9 or so. Felt hollow, manufactured, disingenuous.
• The founders admitted that in the early days, they made up lots of sock puppet accounts which talked to each other. That eerie, self-congratulatory sentiment never really left the site.
• Proven to tamper with comments.
• That derailed AMA with Julian Assange. It felt 99.9% inorganic.

And so much more.

My Discord registration was denied several times without explanation, so as soon as I discovered Lemmy, I came over and never looked back.

As the old and venerable neuromonkey once said:

Welp. Just let the nukes fly, then. First it’s “on accident,” and before long you’ve got meth addicted baby prostitute warlords running the local Walmart.

• Get a fire extinguisher for your home.
• Get legal expenses insurance.
• In both private and professional affairs, be fair and honest.
• Don’t waste too much time with shitty partners or in shitty jobs.

In the B2B world, there’s no escaping these banners. It’s as if GDPR never happened.

I’m already chafed.

Then again, maybe there’ll be discounts for partial nudity.

Join some Whatsapp group that piques your interest and meet with them IRL. I wouldn’t have thought that drinking beer and shooting the shit with total strangers could be so much fun, but here we are.

John Lennon at home:

Geez, that reminds me of a former colleague that, when asked for “the numbers,” would just send screenshots of tables in the ERP system instead of exporting them to a spreadsheet. What’s even worse, usually a lot of values were plain wrong, on one occasion more than half of them.

That, and internet in the late 90s started to get really fast. Some blokes sat in their rooms for days on end, downloading music or movies, as there were no laws against it yet. Or at least they were not enforced. In other words, those were the days when average Joe could still be one step ahead of The Man. You know, before he turned against us with a vengeance, everywhere, 24/7.

Strange, just for the last few days, I’ve been thinking just what a big cultural turning point 2005 seemed to be. From then on, everything started to circle the drain, and I put the blame on globalization and the advent of large-scale social media. Which might have left an imprint on product design and fashion.
And, as I wrote earlier in a different thread, the shift from 1994 to 1995 was the biggest one I’ve witnessed, and it was very visible in public spaces. Audible as well: It went from Metallica and ZZ Top as supermarket background music (imagine this!) to “Easy Listening” or whatever.

Yeah, it feels quite petulant and deconstructive at times.
But a lot of what you wrote is just a feature of any small online community. Then you end up with these bitter types who, if you rubbed them slightly the wrong way, get up at 6 a.m., downvote everything you ever wrote and report as many of your contributions as they can get away with.
I mean, downvotes and upvotes could be capped at -1 and +5, respectively, like on /. which has been going strong for more than 20 years with this concept, or there could be enforcement of some sort of netiquette, but that would put additional strain on the mods.

Could you please post a link to “real life”? Thank you. I just hope it’s not invitation-only.

I noticed AMP links started popping up all over Reddit. Before Google started injecting money, posting those was discouraged. Surely it’s a total coincidence.

I’ve been lurking for months before joining and honestly, the voting appears quite random. If you post a comment early in any thread, it’ll probably get upvoted even when it’s totally silly and inane, as long if it can be construed as being in good faith. Write that same shit a few hours later, it’ll go into the abyss.
I’d say it’s still better than on That Other Site where you can get a good idea from the headline alone what the hackneyed ‘top’ comments will be like.

“In the corporate world, nobody has any compassion, ever.” - A friend told me as I was about to take my first real job. Brutal and maybe exaggerated, but exactly what I needed to manage my own expectations.

Pass the dutchie, coast to coast.