That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.

How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily “gone reddit.” It isn’t so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental “social protocols” like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.

A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There’s many reasons why they too over the world.

A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.

You have your own definitions of joke, best, and sad. That’s fine.

Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.

Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the “best” or “easiest” are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn’t handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.

Why were they using it? It wasn’t because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren’t using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn’t involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck’s shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.

Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?

The short answer is that I’m not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?

The only solid vector graphics app I’ve used in open source is Inkscape. I agree, it’s very difficult to get to know, even moreso if you’re coming from old school raster imaging and don’t get all the mathiness. I had to learn Inkscape though, because I needed to make fantasy maps with textual titles that didn’t look like crap when rescaled.

I’m no expert, but it does pay off to learn. It’s a very powerful set of tools.

I have tried lots of text editors, tons. None of them quite do what I want. I installed CudaText. It’s now my favorite. I love it so much. The settings… Oh, the delicious settings…

I know it’s a big jump from Adobe Cloud (which probably used user behavior tracking and their work to train AI) but it is possible to make great stuff with open source apps now.

The newly released GIMP 3.0 is quite amazing considering that it is free. Is it as good as Photoshop? Maybe it lacks all the features, but it’s pretty damn good. If you install GMIC, an amazing suite of tools, it gets that much closer. Inkscape is also professional level for vector work now. Honorable mentions to Krita and kdenlive (for video editing). edit: I shouldn’t leave out blender, jeesus.

I left Adobe Cloud 9 years ago. Yeah I had to endure a lot of ridicule and weird looks when I told people that I only worked in GIMP, but more recently, the response is less “You’re weird” and more “I need Cloud for my job/it’s all I know,” which is a positive change.

If nobody ever makes the leap, things will stay the same indefinitely. Don’t expect market forces to change things.

That doesn’t mean the technology didn’t/doesn’t exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).

“It’s janky. It’s charming. It works. It’s Copyparty.” ®

My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.

I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit’s content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn’t quite “training data” yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.

So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it’s called. Why’d people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?

“Barack Obama committed treason… That’s why I hired a bunch of prostitutes to talk shit about him while they pissed on a bed he slept in as Russia taped me…” - Donald Trump.

Yes, I know, I meant that you can’t blame the USPS for being required to function as a corporation.They are constantly targeted. If they were to not generate a profit, this would surely give more ammunition to the morons that think privatizing (more to the point, destroying their union) the USPS will make things better or more efficient. By necessity they have to make money where they can.

I brought up the old credit and savings service because it provided genuinely useful and helpful options for people, and it generated enough money for the post that they didn’t have to lean on such cheap tactics as soliciting junk mail. I don’t think the thousands of mail sorters are happy about it either; it’s demoralizing to sift through and dump garbage onto people for a living.

This is what they do now. Some counties and cities tax junk mail, this is very effective. When my city did this, it so affected the amount of paper being recycled that the city worried that people were no longer interested in the recycling program (they figured it out). You can’t blame the USPS for junk mail. They deliver, as fast as they can, and that’s it.

One thing that should be brought back to the post, and my president, Elizabeth Warren, agrees, is payday check loans. That used to be a USPS service, and it was very popular. The payday loans were always locked with interest no higher than inflation, so it wasn’t a disaster if you got one. In the 1940s. the USP Savings System held billions in receipts, and was so trusted that even the rich invested in it.

When banks returned to full health, the “government monopoly” was taken from the USPS and ended up in the hands of a bunch of predatory check cashing companies that you now see littering every struggling neighborhood in the USA, except in the few places they’re banned. Ironically, the 1980s destroyed the small town community bank (part of Reagan’s legacy was the S&L scandal), which were supposed to be replacing the USPS, and the extortionists proliferated. Major banks are now in the game, offering payday/salary loans with 200-300% introductory rates.

Blame this guy.

It goes without saying, the business of payday loans hits the poor hard. Interest can reach 1000% if payments are missed, it’s hell. In contrast, the USPSS helped establish credit for millions of working poor people in America. Even when it was judged “redundant” in the late 60s, over a million people still had an account with USPS. And nobody ever talks about it.

Because maintaining the USPS is a federal obligation as stated in the fucking Constitution. Anyone that doesn’t understand this hates America and has AIDS.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Mint.

There’s a small army of Linux “snobs” that look down on it for recondite and mostly silly reasons. Mint is a great and user-friendly OS. The only thing I can say against it is that many of the binaries in the distro app manager are very out of date, but this hardly matters now because AppImage and Flatpaks are so on top of it and great.

it’s sad, pathetic, and stupid that one has to download a potentially dangerous hack to do something so basic.

yo compiz is the shit. You can do ANYTHING with it. It took me a while to figure out because where the hell is the manual, but I have my own custom thing going on and it’s brilliant.

I think the fastest way for linux to spread are a) a state-sponsored (totally open source) product that sees a free and open OS as part of a commitment to a free and open society. or 2) one of these fuckhead billionaires drops $200M or so into a trust, rather like the Poetry Foundation, which has the singular commitment to create an OS for people and to support it indefinitely.

I don’t think the answer to any of society’s ills is to get Wallmart involved. ed: walmart however its spelled WGAS.

congratulations, you now walk with the righteous.