In this context “politics” clearly conveys “things directly related to governments, such as wars, elections, or socio-economical ideologies”. It is only a subset of the definition of politics that you’re probably using, something like “things direct or indirectly related to human groups and their conflicts of interest”.

We got a whole Lemmy to talk about Israel vs. Hamas, late stage capitalism, elections etc. We could - and should - have at least one community to chill and talk about other stuff, and without that rule we won’t have it. For example without that rule 99.99999% of the content as of late 2024 would be about Trump, as if Americans didn’t have multiple communities to talk about it already.

The userbase is small but stable.

I agree that Reddit will become irrelevant to internet power users. However, I disagree that it takes a massive fuckup to lose the critical mass of users.

A simple way to explain this is to imagine that everyone has an individual “I’m pissed and I leave” threshold; if a platform displeases a user more than that threshold, they leave.

For power users, this threshold is really low, so they ditch platforms like Reddit faster. However, that does not mean that the others aren’t getting displeased - they do; it might not be enough to convince them to leave, but it quickly piles up with other things displeasing them.

As such, even a large platform can lose that critical mass of users over time, even without a massive fuckup. It’s just about small things piling up.

Another thing to consider is that power users are more important to a platform than the rest of the userbase, because the power users interact with the platform more. And they’re typically the ones doing janny crap, or finding and sharing content, or that actually have anything meaningful to add instead of “lol lmao”. So once the power users leave, the platform becomes less desirable for the others too, and that’s recursive - as the power users leave, the almost-power users leave too, then the ones after them, so goes on. And there the critical mass goes down the drain.

My guess: there won’t be a specific date that you can poinpoint and say “Reddit died here”. It’ll be a slow decline, with small outbursts of re-engagement. Something like this:

Profit will follow a similar pattern, as both things are intertwined.

Ginger with turmeric? Now that’s something I need to try. Thanks for the rec!

Ginger. But only because I refuse to call yerba mate “tea”.

I wish that it was darin (darling). It rolls off the tongue so much better.

I don’t think that handedness plays a huge role. I think that in some cases it’s simply random, and in other cases it’s “we write in this direction because that’s how we learned it”.

Inkwriting exists since at least the 2500 BCE, it was already used with hieroglyphs, and yet you see those being written left to right, right to left, boustrophedon, it’s a mess. Even with the Greek alphabet, people only stopped using boustrophedon so much around 300 BCE or so.

Plus if it played a role we’d see the opposite of what we see today - since the Arabic abjad clearly evolved among people who wrote with ink, that’s why it’s so cursive. In the meantime the favourite customary writing medium for Latin was wax tablets, where smudging ink is no issue:

Just tested it. It works.

[Just to be clear for everyone: I’m describing the issue, not judging anyone. I’m in no position to criticise the OP.]

The unfamiliar vocab is just the cherry on the cake. The main issue is that it’s hard to track everything; at least, when reading it for the first time. And most people don’t bother reading an excerpt enough times to understand it.

Makes me wonder how many people read scriptures/manifestos.

Almost nobody, I believe. And I’d go further: I don’t think that most people read longer texts that would “train” them for this sort of stuff.

We’re both interpreting it slightly different ways:

• you - the utterance is specific, the speaker is unspecified
• me - “utterance” is a placeholder for “discourse”, the speaker is whoever answers the question

To be honest this is really cool. Now I’m curious if one of us got it right, or if we’re both reading it wrong.

As you said in the other comment, the sentence is grammatically OK¹. However, it’s still a huge sentence, with a few less common words (e.g. “utterance”), split into two co-ordinated clauses, and both clauses are by themselves complex.

To add injury there’s quite a few ways to interpret “over the airwaves” (e.g. is this just radio, or does the internet count too?)

So people are giving up parsing the whole thing.

I also write like this, in a convoluted way², but I kind of get why people gave up.

1. I’m not sure if it’s semantically OK due to the word “utterance”.
2. Except when translating stuff, since I’m forced to roughly follow the “informational layout” of the original. That’s usually a PITA but it helps wonder for clarity!

Sometimes it’s about not conceding defeat in the debate, I agree. And sometimes it’s about convincing people that the proposition is true - sometimes the others, sometimes themselves.

You see the later a lot when people are witch hunting (accusing someone without solids grounds to do so), and the person is actually able to defend themself, or someone defends them. Often the attacker show signs to still genuinely believe that the person being attacked should be attacked, regardless of how you prove them wrong, because they claim that you’re straw manning while doing it.

[Sorry for rambling about this stuff.]

And in some fun cases they set up a straw man, then accuse their opponent of doing it, so they can hide their own.

It’s kind of fun to watch from afar, but annoying when you’re the opponent - because it’s a straw man plus red herring, and yet if you call it out people will understand it as a “NO! U! WAAAH”, even if that is not the case.

My most controversial discourse* can be roughly phrased as “screw intentions”, “your intentions don’t matter”, “go pave Hell with your «intenshuns»”. It isn’t a single utterance*; I say stuff like this all the time, and regardless of the utterance used to convey said discourse, people will still disagree with it.

The one that I’m sometimes at fault is “people who assume are pieces of shit and deserve to be treated as such”. Because sometimes it is reasonable to assume (to take something as true even if you don’t know it for sure); just nowhere as much as people do.

*I’m being specific with terminology because it’s a big deal for me. “Discourse” is what you say, regardless of the specific words; “utterance” is a specific chain of language usage (be it voiced, gestured, written, etc.)

wtf does this even mean

OP is asking two things:

• the most controversial shit that you say
• the shit that you say and think “mmh, maybe I’m wrong but I’ll keep saying it”

…or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

Happy birthday! :D

it is a wonderful adventure to start gathering all the plastic that has a minimum depth and make holes with a wire and get intoxicated by the smell of burning plastic

This is one of those joys of gardening that books and online tutorials definitively do not talk about.

Then there’s the self-employed equivalent of that: savage some sense of freedom by sleeping up to 11:00, lunch, then spend up to 02:00 of the next day working nonstop because you got work piling up.

That’s a damn great choice if you killed a cactus. You probably overwatered it, but mint loves water. Water 2~4 times a week and you should be good.

It will quickly overgrow your pot, but resist the temptation to plant it on the ground. It isn’t like mint doesn’t thrive on soil, it does a bit too well… killing everything in its path.

I used the peanut butter pot, support the extreme cheapskates.

I know that feeling. Apple trees in margarine pot:

Mandarin oranges in coke bottle:

Cheapstakes unite!