Hi Tom,

I was just taking a look at your resume, and your experience at Deceased really caught my eye! I'm especially interested in your knowledge of being missed by friends and family. Did you know that complications from heart surgery is in high demand right now?

I'm a head hunter looking for dynamic individuals who are interested in positions at an exciting new startup, and I think you'd be a perfect fit!

I hope we get a chance to chat soon!

Oops, now abortion is illegal and gay people can't marry!

Strong but unfounded beliefs have consequences...

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

Why would this hurt Amazon? People will just see a different set of reviews. It's manufacturers if crappy knock-off products that should be shaking in their boots.

They detect when a whole bunch of reviews are posted at exactly the same time, or are posted on a fixed schedule, or use extremely similar language, or with a brand new account...

Basically they use spam-detection techniques on reviews.

Guys, this is a golden opportunity!

Get on Right wing forums and tell them this test has been aborted, because all the clever paranoid nutjobs were onto them.

But, in fact, the test has just been rescheduled to a random time, or rather at random times for the next year or so. Until Biden's time is up and Trump is declared Supreme Emperor I guess. Because really, if you were really conspiring to send a mind control message, you wouldn't broadcast the date & time ffs.

So the only safe thing to do is to turn off their devices, all their devices, and leave them off until after the next election. That includes TVs, of course, and especially Fox News, cuz the Democrats know that Fox News viewers are more cautious and took fewer vaccines, so they'll have scheduled extra Emergency Broadcasts for them.

Fast forward a year, in which all the crazies have to go out and live on the real world and talk to real people, and we might just have a sane country back. At the very least, we'd have a year off...

As others have said, it doesn't quite have the user base to reach critical mass. A lot of my old favorite subs aren't here.

Also...the user base isn't as diverse. I used to click through to see the comments on Reddit to find those comments that provided fresh perspective, gave more context, or explained nuance. You'd click on some thread about Trump's latest legal troubles and get some real information about why things are moving slowly or why the defense made a particular choice. Or go into a thread about some upcoming video game being cancelled, or Google plan being changed or whatever, and get an actual analysis about how the financials don't work, or maybe how the market changed, or how some users were abusing the system.

On Lemmy, I often find myself just skipping the comments. They seem much more uniform, all just repeating the popular line: variants of "Ha, fuck Trump!" "Lol, Russia sucks!" "Company X doing this should be against the law!" etc. I can usually predict what the comments are going to be without bothering to read them, and rarely do I come out with new information. It feels much more like an echo chamber.

Part of it is just that there's not as many users, I think, so there's just not as many posts and thus fewer 'gems'. Also, I think that the users who made the effort to migrate from Reddit probably skew younger, tend to be more uniformly left-leaning, and a larger share will be students or programmers as opposed to lawyers or carpenters or auto mechanics.

The especially annoying thing is that the same thing seems to have happened on Reddit. Yeah, I still moonlight there when I run out of content on Lemmy. And the number of comments seems to have dwindled, and the viewpoint diversity seems to have narrowed there, too. Maybe the normies just gave up and left.

"No, wait, it's not what you think! There's a continuous integration system, a commit would've triggered a new build! It might have paged the oncall! Babe! The test suite has been flaky lately!"

Dude I was at this concert, but there was another guy there who was on his phone doing something weird...the whole concert was ruined!

Are we going to try paying artists by the level of effort it took to create a track?

Leaving it ambiguous activated the reader's imagination and elevated a TIL into a shitpost.

Back when I was in high school (in public school), chess caught on in a big way. Chess. It was the weirdest thing. It was a public school in a small farming town, and pre-Nerd Renaissance, so picture a stereotypical 80s or 90s school where jocks were top of the food chain--and then picture those same jocks in their letter jackets rushing to the library on their free periods to take turns playing chess. They set up tournaments and kept track of win/loss ratios and talked about chess strategies in the hallways.

So obviously something had to be done...I guess? The school started making rules and posting them around the school: one game per student per day. One game at a time in the lounge. No chess in classrooms or in the library! The chess board must be returned to the lounge supervisor between games, then signed out by the next person wanting to play--not just passed willy-nilly from one student to another! No outside chess boards allowed!

That pretty much strangled the chess fad. The jocks went back to stuffing nerds in lockers and sneaking out to smoke behind the school, and the chess boards returned to the shelf by the lounge supervisor, where they collected dust.

Problem...solved? The whole thing was pretty surreal.