I don't think they're being ridiculous to say that US politics has an impact outside of the US. To quote a former Canadian Prime Minister:
"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt."
I've been pleased with The Verge's ongoing coverage of this and really respect them calling out this poor behaviour.
You'd think if it was important to them they might try to teach their kids themselves. Or have we defaulted to we can only learn things in school already?
Seems like an appropriate time to remind people we can buy Ernest coffee for all his hard work to give us kbin!
While that quote has been attributed to Twain (and several others) over the years, there is nothing to suggest that Twain used this particular phrasing nor was he the originator of it. That credit goes to George H Derby, under the pseudonym John Phoenix, back in 1855.
The trifecta of “kings, editors and people with tapeworm” has been widely attributed to Mark Twain, but like so many witticisms credited to him, there’s no record he ever said it. It’s also unlikely that Henry David Thoreau ever made the remark once ascribed to him: “We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms.”
Worms, or more specifically tapeworms, figure prominently in we-related humor. The earliest known joke to combine parasites and pronouns comes from George Horatio Derby, a humorist from California who assumed the pen name John Phoenix. “I do not think I have a tapeworm,” he wrote in 1855, “therefore I have no claim whatever to call myself ‘we,’ and I shall by no means fall into that editorial absurdity.”
I'm not sure where it ranked at the time but I remember when one of the subs hit 100k (this was circa 2014) and by the time I left we were close to 500k. When I checked before the blackout they were sitting at 1.9m.
You're absolutely right about an alt not doing much, if you ever had time for that. Modding definitely affected my Reddit experience, even after stepping down, and combined with how it changed over the last several years, my participation went way down, maybe a handful of comments a month at best, and I lurked and upvoted/downvoted for the most part. I'm slowly shaking off those cobwebs in this exciting new space!
My time as a Reddit mod left me with no desire to do it elsewhere and I'd modded other forums prior to Reddit. I stepped down about 5 years ago and while I won't say I'll never do it again, I'm exhausted just recalling my experience and that's enough to put me off.
There are communities I'd love to have and see here on kbin but the mere thought of the time and effort has me taking a hard pass.
Relay and old.reddit really kept me sheltered. I knew chat was a thing but I managed to avoid the rest. That all sounds awful.
r/pics & r/gifs pulled no punches with that announcement. I'm glad some of the big subs, users and mods alike, are continuing to push back against these changes. I'm fairly certain I'm done with Reddit but I hope things improve for those who do stay.
Are you someone who believes rape is okay because of how a woman is dressed? Because "she was asking for it dressed like that"?
Because that's what you sound like.
Edit: the person I was responding to has edited out the "you wanted this" from their comment which is what I was responding to. They were effectively suggesting that people wanting old Reddit wanted child porn. Fucking disgusting.
This is, by far, the best article on the subject I've read to date. I really appreciated this paragraph being included:
This tension between these communities and their host have, again, fueled more interest in the Fediverse as a decentralized refuge. A social network built on an open protocol can afford some host-agnosticism, and allow communities to persist even if individual hosts fail or start to abuse their power. Unfortunately, discussions of Reddit-like fediverse services Lemmy and Kbin on Reddit were colored by paranoia after the company banned users and subreddits related to these projects (reportedly due to “spam”). While these accounts and subreddits have been reinstated, the potential for censorship around such projects has made a Reddit exodus feel more urgently necessary, as we saw last fall when Twitter cracked down on discussions of its Fediverse-alternative, Mastodon.
I'm thinking you should probably stop speaking on behalf of everyone. I am not American but I do care that millions of Americans are losing their rights. I care that US businesses got over a trillion in PPP loan forgiveness but that the same can't be extended to 40 million individuals and their student loans for education they are almost forced to have if they want a shot at making more than minimum wage and even then, it's not a guarantee.
I'm not a refugee but I care that the Greek government effectively let hundreds die rather than assist them.
I'm not French but I am interested in the riots happening there.
I'm not Russian, Ukrainian, or even European but I want to know what is happening with the occupation of Ukraine, the coup attempt, and what other countries are doing to ensure the Russia doesn't violate NATO and the repercussions if they do.
Why do you believe you get to narrow the scope of what is news on behalf of everyone else?