True - I think it’s a combination of those personality traits, social pressures, and a desire to believe that leads to irrational conspiratorial/superstitious thinking.

Conspiratorial thinking.

Many people are motivated by a need to feel superior to others, have a strong distrust of authority, and/or feel that acceptance of a belief system is a requirement of their internalized group identity.

Ha, I can definitely see how that could be visual clutter. You should also see it for posts when scrolling through the community.

I help mod a handful of communities, and I suppose it helps sometimes when I’m navigating into random threads from my inbox - just as a reminder.

That shield symbol just means that YOU are a mod in that community and can take mod actions on those comments.

I was really motivated to get one to play the Demon’s Souls remake, beat it 3 times in a week, and since then I’ve probably spent more time updating the system and collecting the monthly ps+ games than actually playing.

Is any other app out there able to handle streaming games to your friends as easily as discord?

It seems like we should probably be looking for the next ship to jump to…

I had them! Hurt myself plenty…

Schools (both K-12 and university) keep loosening their expectations of students, and now we have kids starting college with 6th grade reading levels.

School administrators don’t want their graduation stats to look bad, and universities don’t want to lose $$ by flunking students out, so there’s a massive conflict of interest that is ultimately resulting in a disservice to students and society at large.

The other day, I saw this 8th grade graduation exam from a county in Kentucky in 1912, and it drives home how much things have changed:

Wait till it’s so enshittified it’s unusable

Discord is going public soon, so start the timer…

Do you use it a lot? Or does it auto-run on startup?

I might open the app maybe once or twice a month, and it frequently asks for credentials.

I had no idea this feature existed.

I was a “Reddit is Fun” user for at least a decade

The impression I had of the US election based on it was completely out of line with reality

I’ve largely switched to Lemmy for the past two years, but this was really the last nail in the coffin for reddit for me too. It’s an enforced echo-chamber and no longer a reliable source of information. It’s hard to notice how bad things are when the politics are leaning in your direction, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it feels gross.

Lemmy is obviously pretty politically homogeneous too, but the difference is that I don’t feel like someone is trying to trick me. Topics and and sources are clearly influenced by the individual posters’ opinions, but it doesn’t feel like there’s a coordinated behind-the-scenes effort to push an agenda, which makes for a better vibe.

It’s the social media equivalent of supporting a bunch of Mom and Pop shops (or opening your own!) vs some hyper-sanitized, corporate monstrosity like Wal-Mart.

For as much as I played Super Metroid back in the day, I’m not sure if I ever completed it. I should fix that.

Yes, definitely. It has to be that they’re all using the exact same engines and methods or something.

I can’t imagine what it would look like now. I just wish everyone could experience the same incredible growth.