Entire Internet feels like a propaganda warzone nowadays. It used to be possible to have civil, open-minded discussions, not anymore.

Donald Trump is 78 years old, that is not unheard of that people might die at that age of entirely natural causes.

We had these kinds of debates when I myself was a minor (in the late 2000s). I would have thought it would be over by now and people would have realized that allowing teenagers to watch porn isn’t actually very harmful to them at all. Seems not, humanity doesn’t get smarter over time.

The Vice President’s only constitutional power is to break ties in the Senate, which is not a very relevant power.

I was born in the 1990s and teenage me thought that the future would be awesome because people like me would be in power.

By now, people my age and younger have reported back, become politicians, celebrities, journalists or otherwise people with more power than me, and said “nah, we are pretty much the same as our parents were, some of us are awesome and some horrible”.

The reality is that in the grand scheme of things, the world does get better over time. Most of human history consists of wars, plagues, famines, power struggles, authoritarian rule.

But occasionally some aspects of the world get worse, too. For example, the widespread introduction of cars was “human progress” in the sense of enabling everyone to be mobile; it led to environmental problems and degradation of quality of life for many people.

Without expressing an opinion on it: some people believe that it is meant to say that America was greater during times when women and minorities were more oppressed than they are now.

My own interpretation at least in 2016 was always that it was meant to say that Obama was a weak leader in terms of foreign policy and that Trump would restore America’s place in the world to be stronger. This may have been my interpretation because I am not from the US and so mainly care about it because of its foreign, not domestic, policy.

the back button works fine for me here

then you’re visiting websites that are badly coded

Apps aren’t even that bad an idea, by themselves. Transmitting only the actual information and not the entire UI every time is a good idea, even more so if the apps are FOSS and the services have open APIs (which admittedly is the exception).

I grew up with IRC and of course everyone seriously using it used a standalone IRC client, not a browser chat interface.

Yes, so much this! I always believed that in the mobile internet era it would still be like this except we would be able to access it everywhere. Instead all we have is “platforms”. 🙁😡

When I first joined Internet communities as a preteen, I just followed forums that interested me and got exposed to whatever people happened to be talking about on those forums.

Why, oh why, has the world decided that we need recommendation algorithms at all?

Number of German-language posts? I’m somehow not seeing those. I am however a native speaker of German already, so no need anymore to learn it.

lmao bleien

For what purpose? Basically the same thing happened in the 1960s with Lyndon B. Johnson. For purposes of not being allowed to be elected more than twice, she would be eligible to run once more because of the text of the 22nd amendment (“and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once”). We are considerably less than two years away from the end of Biden’s term.

funny thing is I, and probably most people, had never even heard that there was something called “CrowdStrike” until Friday of last week

In that case you could buy very visibly different socks from all the ones you have every time, eg blue vs white vs black vs beige. That also makes it easy to find matching pairs.

Buying lots of identical pairs of socks massively reduces the amount of time you need to find matching pairs after drying them.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? Where did I defend censorship?

2004: The Internet will lead to a utopian society without gatekeepers, without censorship, where we get our information from each other and primary sources, not media companies!

2024: The Internet is based on algorithmic attention. Those who control the algorithms control what parts of the immeasurably large pile of data will get attention and which not. Yet they are protected by the same intermediary liability laws as if they were traditional web forums, blog hosters, wikis with no personalized algorithm (for which those laws are very good and necessary).