Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.

They’re also evidence of why the book banning doesn’t really work as well today as conservatives would like it to.

Book banning was an effective way of controlling what your young population was exposed to before the internet and social media. It worked best when the young weren’t even aware of the information they were being denied.

But social media is making sure they’re all very much aware of what has been hidden from them. They know what’s going on. You will find teenagers in particular are kind of resistant to being told no by an authority, so they’re going to do something about it.

Now, don’t feel too excited about this, because there’s a threat here. Every single time you see a conservative talking about more stringent age verification for things on the internet, part of what they’re actually trying to do is create an avenue to control the information kids are exposed to. They are pretty open about how LGBT issues, particularly the T ones, can be labeled as “sexual” and “inappropriate”. With very simple changes to the regulation, they can suppress children’s access to anything they like as long as they make a half-assed argument that it’s “inappropriate”.

I suppose that would depend on what I get to watch.

Why not?

You wouldn’t love a nice acknowledge from uncle Woz?

Do they even claim that anymore? I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard a conservative talk about small government in any way that even comes close to amounting to an actual philosophy.

Not to “both sides” this, but the war on drugs did have some legitimate motivations, they were just buried underneath the other larger and ultimately more important reasons: i.e. hurting communities of color, poor people, disenfranchising the young, etc.

The solution to the issue was never “end the war on drugs”, it was to scale it back and refocus it on the actual entities that create the problems. Don’t make certain drugs illegal, make them regulated and taxed to control their abuse from the distribution end.

Reddit’s value as a social media platform drops as it’s value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that’s was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.

Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.

In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.

Reddit, as a concept, can’t make more money without destroying it’s value. The more advertising is injected into it, the less useful it becomes, and the less people will want to use it.

So yes, it’s up, but they’ve hurt themselves drastically to get it up by hurting so much of Reddit’s usefulness, and even then, they fell short. People who remained are already low on patience with it.

To drive it even higher, they will have to cripple it even more.

It’s possible to make money with Reddit while leaving it unmolested, but it’s not possible to make ALL the money that way. Investors want ALL the money.

I will say, though, anything that disincentives people to spam useless images and gifs in the comments, kind of like the next comment down, has its merits.

If there’s one thing I miss about Reddit, it’s that there was a lot less of this Discord-esc image spam over there than there is over here

As 10+ year vet, I still go back for certain things. Mostly communities that have not been recreated here yet in any meaningful sense, and there are a lot of those. There are people here, yes, but the niches, the non-general topics, are lacking a true community. That will come with time, but I still can’t substitute Lemmy for reddit 100% yet, much as I might want to. Unless I only want to talk technology, news, and politics all day.

But I will say Boost for Lemmy has taken the spot RIF once had on my mobile home screen. Lemmy is what I open reflexively now. I only go back to reddit when I need to see something specific, I’m not browsing there. Partially because it’s very tedious to navigate old.reddit on mobile, but partially because I just don’t want to spend too much time there anymore.

And all he has to do to get out of there is calm down and lie.

The fact he can’t control himself enough to get through court without crowing on about his intent to do more crime speaks to a lack of self control, and for that reason alone, his skills are moot in any discussion of his future prospects.

I don’t see anyone simping for corporations, just not rushing to celebrate or defend someone so obviously unhinged.

Also, the point is not to get caught, and he’s extremely brazen about it even when directly under police watch.

There are plenty of other black hats out there that don’t act like this. No one is shaking a finger at them. By all means, crack these corporations wide open.

But this guy in particular is not worth raising up.

No one is condemning him for hacking Rockstar. They’re defending the decisions to put him a hospital because he’s unstable. It doesn’t help anyone having this kind of black hat shit being so public, sloppy, and visibly unhinged.

I don’t even see how he’s a prodigy. He’s part of a larger group, and used a lot of social engineering tactics.

Not even that he wants to do cyber crime, just that he’s unstable and violent, and is absolutely the kind of person who will refuse or even undermine certain tasks if they don’t feel like doing them.

This kid deserves a 7-8 digits salary as a pentester, not prison; plenty of pentesting companies would hire him in a heartbeat.

I keep hearing this.

Find me any company that will hire someone so unstable and destructive, and I’ll show you a company with bad hiring practices.

This is someone you can never count on to do anything they don’t want to do. Someone who will destroy things if they don’t get their way. Triple letters won’t touch him.

Also, let’s be clear, a lot of this was social engineering. He didn’t do anything impressive, he just did things others wouldn’t be brazen enough to do because they didn’t want to get caught.

I promise that’s not it.

Nobody “forgot” anything. They were just too lazy and too unwilling to accept even marginally less polished or content-rich experiences. I think we all severely under estimated how much the average internet user has changed from a decade ago. The entrenchment is real and it goes far deeper than we realized. The days of userbase jumping from site to site might seriously be over. At least in the way it was back when Digg jumped to Reddit.

And that’s really, really sad because that effectively means the boardrooms and shitty admins that run these sites can do anything they like and never face seriously pushback. As long as the content is there, the money will flow. Those of us that give a damn about useability, customization, moderation policies, user control, etc. they have literally no incentive to ever listen to us when they can reliably keep getting income from every teenager that only understands how to hit “Install” from the app store and literally nothing else.

The active daily user count is probably going up because Lemmy is a bit more settled now than it was 6 months ago. There’s far less drama, the “main” communities are a little more decided, the 3rd party apps are all in place and more polished, and it’s all a bit less janky now, with a bit more content to boot.

We’re growing. Slowly. Very slowly. There will be no great exodus, there will be slow trickle.

It took me a second to realize what cardassians you were talking about. I constantly forget the other ones are spelled with a K

Unless you want content and more people to interact with.

Like, people keep saying “oh yeah you can jump instances” as if that wasn’t possible on Reddit. You could go to different subs or make your own. But what good were most of them? As long as there’s a “default”, a main “hub”, people will go there, and that’s where everything will be happening. The alternatives and smaller instances will be starved out.

Centralization is not about the software, it’s about the people. Users centralize where others are. So when the big hubs are allowing threads to poison the well, it’s poisoning the thing most people want to drink from, and the thing new visitors will be most likely to drink from.

Threads represents something that a lot of people came to the fetiverse to escape. If threads wants to join, fine, but I believe it is in the best interest of all of us if there is a large alternative “cluster” that is separate from it rather than being tied up with it.

A separate galaxy in the fediverse, that says in big red neon lights, “Get your corporate bullshit away from us. This is our space, for people, not for you to make money.” And if we let them in immediately, it becomes increasingly difficult for that galaxy to retain that identity.

And I’ll just gently point out that once Threads joins, separating from it will not be easy because you will have Threads users here actively pushing back on the separation.

How is that different from Reddit? If trolls want to search and scrape and find information on people, they’re going to. You can’t put your information on the open Internet and not appreciate there’s always a danger of that.