I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he’d been ineffective, he’d have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn’t have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.

Are you having a stroke?

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score may not be the deepest film, but it’s never failed to make me smile. “I can wire anything to anything! I’m the professor!”

For fuck’s sake, can this debate die already? It’s one those made up words that no-one agrees on the meaning of, so people with the exact same views about the real world will fight to the death over it, because they’re using completely different definitions of the word.

It used to just mean “progressive” with a positive connotation, then it got oversaturated and some progressives started using it to describe the kinds of people who fake having progressive ideals just to make themselves look good or sell shit. Then conservatives started using it to describe all progressives again, but this time with a negative connotation. Then some of those conservatives started using it to describe literally anything they don’t like.

The problem is that the meaning’s changed so fast that whatever meaning you’re using, chances are there’s someone around you who defines it differently, leading to a lot of pointless conflict that could be resolved if we just all agreed on a meaning, or stopped saying the fucking word.

+1 for GraphineOS, but I can’t get behind NFTs. The technology is cool, but for me, the definition of “owning” something includes not only the ability to view it, but also the ability to modify it. If I own an NFT of a song, then I could listen to the song, but I still couldn’t, say, make a remix of it, which for me is the entire point of owning it in the first place.

There may be variance from place to place, but most national parks are extremely restrictive on when people can come and what they can do, and at least in my state, most Bureau land is off limits to the general public for most of the year.

I get the point you’re going for, but “pasture land” is literally just public grasslands, and they’re pretty much the only truly public places left in the states.

I mean I agree with this part. That’s why I’m commenting on this site and not the other one, but that doesn’t mean we have to pretend the other one doesn’t exist and that we don’t care what’s going on there. I agree that everyone should move here, but nevertheless, most of them aren’t, and I cannot control that. The fact is that most people are not deep enough into the internet to make a pros and cons list of social media sites. They just use what other people use, or what pops up first on Google. We are neither of those things, and until we are, I have a vested interest in what happens at the other place.

Not in a way that’s accessible to casual audiences. You can watch literally any show, and chances are there’s a sub where you can go talk about it. That was not the case 10 years ago. Unless your show had a cult following, the only people to talk about it with were people you knew. I hope that someday we can turn this site into the same kind of thing, but we aint there yet.

While I don’t care for the song, NPR calling media enjoyed by the lower classes “racist” isn’t exactly a new thing, and it rings less true every time they do it. The song, at its core, is a generic “We’re tougher than you” machismo piece which is a perfectly normal thing that can be found in most genres. Someone from Tennessee writes a song about how country people are tougher, then someone from Compton writes a song about how city people are tougher. It’s just dick waving and it’s normal thing everyone does, whether they realize it or not. NPR trying to turn it into a race thing isn’t convincing anyone to change their musical taste, it’s just fanning the flames of a conflict that pits working-class country people against working-class city people, in which everyone loses except the ones taking advantage for profit

I mean we don’t have a /c/ for that yet, so might as well be here.

I am so tired of this sentiment. You’re not wrong about the corporate stuff, but blaming people for wanting it to get better serves no purpose. For all its flaws, Reddit had something that no other site, not even this one, has been able to remotely replicate. I didn’t use the site for news, politics, memes, or mindless scrolling. I used it because it was literally the only place to discuss niche topics and interests.

Whether we like it or not, it’s the only place where a lot of these niche communities exist. Users that were here since Digg will find a new home, but the one who can barely use a Macbook may not. And I’m all for helping as many of those communities migrate, but the truth is that for many communities, especially the ones less technically inclined, the death of Reddit means the death of that community, and that’s really fucking sad.

From your comments, it seems like you may just not be in the target demographic for these kinds of films. It sounds like you’re a teenager, and while there may be some teens who enjoy these films, they’re definitely intended for adults. Also, you mentioned that you live in a non-english-speaking country. There’s a lot of English films that manage to translate well to non-english-speaking audiences, but LOTR is unfortunately not one of them. The characters speak heavily in metaphor and idioms, most of which don’t translate well. It’s the same reason Western audiences often have difficulty with older Japanese media.

I agree with your examples, all of which have been heavily criticized for anti-consumer behavior, particularly Disney and Netflix, so I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make. Just because Netflix does it, doesn’t make it okay for Nintendo to do it. Digital media companies have strong incentive to practice anti-consumer behavior, so public outcry is important to counterbalance that.

I don’t think the Ford and Apple examples apply, as these companies make primarily physical products. Both of these companies really do want you to use their products for two reasons:

• Most of their marketing is literally just people seeing their products being used.

• Cars wear out with usage, as do computers, so the more you use their products, the sooner you’ll buy a new one.

Digital media is unique in that it’s not highly visible and using it more doesn’t make it degrade.

Oh shit. Yeah I kinda forgot Whatsapp is an international standard of communication. That’s still different than requiring you to run it in on your personal devices through.

Any job that forces you to use Meta services is probably exploiting you in other ways and isn’t worth whatever they’re paying you. Even employees of Facebook don’t have to do this.

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Based entirely on your comment, I would say the issue isn’t the concept of ideology, but the fact that the ideologies that matter the most and the ones that spread the fastest aren’t the same. After all, the idea that no one should starve is itself an idealogy.

Personally, I feel like most of the problems in the modern world come down to issues of scaling. We evolved our brains to coordinate in small bands of people, but we try use those same brains to coordinate groups of hundreds of millions.

The larger an organization (corporation, government, npo, etc.) gets, the worse they get at coordinating around a central goal or set of values, and the more likely they are to evolutionarily optimize around something entirely divorced from the values of any individual member.

A company of 100 employees is entirely capable of creating a high-quality product, compensating their workers well, and avoiding anti-consumer practices. This doesn’t mean they’ll always do this, but it’s possible. Meanwhile, a multinational corporation of millions of people, even if run by the most ethical CEO on earth, will always gravitate toward maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. Even libertarians recognize this as a fundamental flaw in unchecked Capitalism.

Similarly, a government of a few thousand people can create a good constitution for an orderly society, but in a massive government of a country of 300 million people, trying to make any sort of effective, positive political change is borderline-impossible because everyone has different goals that gridlock each other. Even proponents of large government recognize this.

It’s tempting to believe in some sort of easy action that could fix this, but truth be told, I think any simple solution would be horrifying, and I think any good solution is going to take an incredible amount of thought and be more complex than the sort of thing you’d see every day on the internet.