I don’t agree with this statement. I think “intelligence”, however you define that, has fit pretty cleanly to a Gaussian distribution since the dawn of man. If anything, I think advances in nutrition, preventative healthcare, and access to information has driven pretty significant negative skew. I don’t have anything to back up this claim, but my guess would be that median intelligence has actually increased - it just may not seem as such since the population continues to rise, so the raw number of dummies seems overwhelming.

But hey, who I am to define what’s smart? Maybe an inflatable hot tub, 30 rack of Busch, RAM 1500 on an 84 month note, zero turn mower, DirecTV with Fox News and the funds to pay for it all is the real secret to a happy life. I’m just someone blabbing about nothing with a bunch of Reddit exiles.

oh no there are other answers other than this… how silly :(

Super shilly comment incoming, but YouTube Premium is maybe the only subscription I pay for (other than Game Pass) that I think is worthwhile. I was also blown away by how much I like YouTube Music. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fully anticipating the platform to race to the bottom and go to complete and utter shit, but for the time being, I think it’s solid.

I was going to say… the only times I ever used Reddit search, it just prompted me to question why I was wasting my time, then googling “xyz problem statement reddit”

Hey man, I do it all - waiting for it to catch up with me :)

Some that haven’t been mentioned:

Prolonged Sitting Prolonged Loud Headphone Use Off-Label Drug Use (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy) Sun/Heat/Poor Air Exposure Thiamine/B1 Deficiency via Alcohol Consumption

We know they’re all dangerous (to wildly varying extents), but I don’t think we’ve had enough moments-of-reckoning, like with emphysema and lung cancer following long term smoking.

Same. Block is a key feature. That said, I’m actually fascinated at how many furry communities there are. You’d think blocking c/furry would take care of 90% of the problem, but who knew c/MidCenturyYiffsOnAnEamesChair had such a dedicated following.

For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).

One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.

If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.

I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.

Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely: