Sound advice.

PS: punctuation and capitalization are conformist and bourgeois but they do make it easier to read.

Then you’re doing exactly what you are supposed to do. Disengagement, hopelessness, resignation, it’s all in the authoritarian playbook.

Addendum: To be clear, IMO what you Americans need to do is stay engaged. That doesn’t mean protesting everything (personally I think that might even be counter-productive). It does mean voting at every tiniest opportunity, you have lots of them. And if possible getting involved in some form of local politics, even if that is just joining some club or association. It’s like a tyrannical boss and his employees, what authoritarians hate most of all is for their subjects to be talking to each other.

Somewhat true if you have anyone left who wants to talk to you by email.

First people stopped using it for socializing, and now it’s slowly on the way out for work communication too IME. Not secure enough. Better to use a secure messenger which requires login. And personally I quite like this, assuming the messenger is on the web and requires no software install.

The reality is that the main surviving use case for email is as a notification engine.

From an Atlantic article yesterday:

Bruno Maçães, a writer and consultant on geopolitics who has served as Portugal’s Europe minister, told me his phone had been ringing constantly since Trump’s election. European business leaders want to know what Trump will do with his second term, and how they can prepare. Maçães was not optimistic. He scoffed at Trump’s decision to create new, lofty-sounding administration posts for Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, and was baffled by the Silicon Valley types who believe the billionaires will transform the federal government, usher in a new era of unprecedented economic growth, and colonize Mars. “Maybe,” Maçães said. “I don’t know. But if you saw this in another country, you would see it as an acute sign of political decay when billionaires and oligarchy are taking over political policy.”

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.

Who do you talk to on it?

So, Usenet. Coming full circle.

Similar setup here, for same reasons. But I go further: my contact list is empty. Not a problem if your contacts are all on Signal or Telegram rather than SMS or Whatsapp. IMO contact lists are privacy scourge #1. They allow everyone to grass on their friends with zero consent.

As I said, SMS is secure enough without being the nightmare of a proprietary spyware app. As for fees, you have an American perspective, in most of the world SMS has been free to send for decades, and was always free to receive. The ideal solution is indeed a 2FA app, but those never took off.

Banking 2FA can be done by SMS too, which is secure enough.

A world in which banking requires us to install spyware on our mobile computers is not a world we should accept.

What I want is for thoughtful and interesting opinions to be visible. What you want is for the right opinions to be visible, and the wrong ones to be hidden. That is the difference between us.

This problem absolutely can be fixed.

Slashdot fixed it.

Hacker News fixed it.

The problem has technical and cultural solutions. It’s the second of those that looks hardest here. Seems that non-specialist communities always devolve towards bad faith and bad vibes, IMO.

But downvotes are not “just pixels”. They affect reputation and above all they affect the visibility of the actual comment.

So downvoting a good-faith opinion is not neutral. It’s censorious, it’s an expression of intolerance.

It’s because some people don’t appreciate being told to shut up after they put time and effort into writing a thoughtful comment.

That’s what downvoting is. It’s telling someone to shut up.

You’re both right!

But I see a terrible paradox in the case of ads. The creator pays their bills with ads, but I have no intention of acting on those ads. Possibly the contrary, since I did not want to see the ad and I dislike being manipulated. So in my case the ad is making precisely zero money for the company who is paying the creator’s bill, as well as annoying me. Presumably I am not the only one. There is a paradox here that is hard to resolve.

Some good points here, I stand partially corrected.

There are in fact 2 completely separate things that irk me. The biggest is the virtual lynching that is mass-downvoting. I’m sorry, I will never ever pardon the downvoting of opinions, I think it’s the illness of the social internet since the very beginning. See my many other recent comments for evidence of how strongly I feel about this.

The other issue is the actual one at hand! You’re right that this cache folder business does not really concern most ordinary users, even on Ubuntu. But actually, if even we geeks need to tell each other to “remember to do X every now and then”, I have enough of an IT mind to think “Why do we need to remember anything?! The tool should do this job for us!” These are “babysitting” chores and IMO on a decent OS there should be zero babysitting, it should be set up once and then it should work forever, with any tweaking optional.

Fair enough, tho personally I don’t see this “doom-y language” you see, I just see a slightly exasperated opinion expressed in good grammar and good faith.

But personally I don’t downvote people for their opinions, ever, as a matter of principle. It’s literally a form of censorship, given that it hides the comments. It leads straight to a deadening groupthink where dissenters are scared to open their virtual mouths. It creates a general aura of negativity and intolerance that helps nobody at all. Downvoting, as it is used by most people here and on the R-site, is an absolute scourge. If anything makes me leave this community, it will be this.

Ha! Yes I agree completely with all of that.

And with your point here. In this world of pocket touchscreens and voice AIs, where young people don’t even know what a file is any more, the geeks here are reminding each other to empty their .cache directory from time to time. I mean, do they have no self-awareness? Or perhaps they simply don’t care if nobody chooses to use Linux. That at least would be coherent, but if there are no new users then eventually the whole thing will just die.

The hate you’re getting for this is so revealing and depressing. It basically proves you right.

To the haters: where is the factual problem with this personal opinion? Have you considered making a counter-argument instead, instead of simply lashing out with the downvote button like spoiled infants? This kind of tribal pile-on really pisses me off. You are literally censoring an opinion expressed in good faith - downvotes hide comments and reduce reputation. All while offering no rebuttal, no ideas of your own, nothing. Nice work.