> so that automation makes things cost less instead of siphoning the money into the coffers of megacorps
I cannot trust any company with any modicum of success not to immediately exit into the hands of megacorps. I cannot hope that companies have any type of morality/"want to make the world better" anymore.
I mean, it's the only meaningful way of punishing the company/site. It becomes unusable, people don't contribute anything further because it stops being a hub/valuable site, and eventually their costs outweigh their benefits. That last bit is probably a pipe dream, but saying "Oh well, might as well still enrich them with my knowledge/contributions" doesn't seem like an alternative.
The incentive to contribute is based on the potential return of social currency (prestige, togetherness, etc). If it's evident that you won't generate enough currency to outweigh enriching Reddit, why bother?
Canada has neither, though. My parents and their parents assimilated quickly from Eastern Europe, forgot their language, and then set up a system where they pulled up a ladder behind them for housing, opportunity and stability.
Boy does it feel great to be constantly shamed for being a white male as the source of our country's problems while not being rich enough to influence the political system like billionaire donors. Boy does it feel great that our industries and political system are completely captured, so they can shame us out of one side of their mouths while making sure their donors who are bought into the housing market (and they themselves, who are too) will never have to worry about their house of cards collapsing.
I go to a Dollar Store fairly frequently in my city, and it's just a nightmare due to self-checkout: one physical cashier open with anyone over 50 lining up to use, and another overworked worker dealing with errors in the self-checkout units. Just incredibly amounts of scale errors and other things that require a fingerprint scan by employees to clear.
>I sometimes wonder what western historians will think when they study this era 100 years from now?
I sometimes find myself wanting aliens to find us and make contact, just so we can have an outside, hypothetically enlightened source (if we're going by the Star Trek fantasy) to say "You're doing WHAT?!"
My benchmark is how much social capital one stands to lose by admitting to be a member. If you're still admitting to be a Juggalo despite knowing what's associated with it, and how the mainstream is going to treat you, you're fine with those people being "your people" without anyone else.
I feel like the Internet where forums thrived is very different from the present Internet. Forums won't make a comeback because they're much harder to make money or clout from, and the owners get to assume all the risk of hosting content, dealing with deplatforming by payment processors, and trying to find people to advertise.
Regardless of how you feel about them, Kiwifarms is what would happen to any forum that got too successful without the approval of a major player: a constant barrage of being removed from hosting providers, DDOS mitigation platforms and domain registrars.
Forums still exist because they're passion projects to very niche communities with very stubborn people. I treasure those communities but that's kind of incompatible with mainstream Internet and consumption habits.
It's always uncomfortable with a new therapist because they lack the context to know what you're going through, for how long, and the factors that are affecting it. I've seen mine for over a decade at this point, and when I talk to people about their potential growing pains when they're seeking out help, a lot of it is a reminder that you have to create that context/history with them over time.
It seems like yours is more comfortable making suppositions without the historical context, which sucks to hear and is pretty exhausting.
This is similar to what people found when they went back to World of Warcraft after it introduced an automated "dungeon finder" that matched you with people doing the same content across multiple servers. You had no real social interaction, because you just queued for your role with the tool, got teleported to the instance immediately, did the content, then left. Because you were never going to talk to these people again, you had no real incentive to "meet" them properly, unlike when you were doing public (but admittedly clumsy) "Looking for Group" channel pings/organization.
Also, it's important to realize when going back to remasters/old games how much less distraction players had back then. Because of the prevalence of free-to-play games on phones/Steam, or the immense backlog people have, or the OTHER "lifestyle, log in every day" games people have, they aren't likely to be sticking around with games as long as they did before. A game like Diablo 2 could be "your game" for the entire YEAR because of how much content you had, but also because you might not be able to afford another game until Christmas/birthday. This is also what has kind of killed custom content: people made Starcraft Brood War or Warcraft 3 custom maps that became their own games (Dota, some Tower Defense variants) because they needed to extend the value of the games they were playing.
Learning how to import bulbs into HomeAssistant, or learning how to flash different firmware onto bulbs has been a difficult (yet kinda fun?) way to give myself peace of mind about that. Having that all run on NAS has at least given me some belief it isn't leaving my system.
>It's unfortunate that bitcoin became a hoarding/speculation thing, rather than a useful thing.
Brave tried to do this with their Basic Attention Token, but they seem to be focused on adding generalized crypto features like wallets rather than developing how it could work better.
Learning how to self-host things on Docker and a NAS has been a lifesaver for me. Almost every SAAS I've wanted to use at a consumer level has an open-source equivalent on Docker that I can reverse-proxy to access from anywhere.
>I wonder if Threads and Bluesky will eventually be as nasty as old Twitter of if they'll manage to foster better discussions somehow.
Both of those places seem to have gotten their initial swell of "actually using it" users from anti-Twitter/Musk people and pro-leftist/progressives. They also seem very militant about making sure that they are the gatekeepers/rulemakers of these new kingdoms.
>FB is still surprisingly strong in growing markets.
In a lot of those growing markets, Facebook is the main (or only) way of having a web presence for their business. WhatsApp is similarly the main way to have IM support, as well.
I cannot trust any company with any modicum of success not to immediately exit into the hands of megacorps. I cannot hope that companies have any type of morality/"want to make the world better" anymore.