StaggersAndJags

Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?

I'd expect them to be... I don't know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn't finding it.

Processed cheese is highly meltable. To maintain the shape in the picture, wouldn't the middle of the cheese stack have to be cold?

Is this working though? I turned that setting on a week or more ago and I've never received a notification despite getting comment replies. I thought maybe I just didn't know what notifications look like, but I got one when someone mentioned my username.

To what end? This was embarrassing for everyone involved.

Yeah, I wish people would stop spreading this lie, especially when the truth is no better: As reddit's admins, spez and the others explicitly oversaw, tolerated and defended r/jailbait and every subreddit like it on the site, for a period of multiple years.

This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit's downfall I've read.

There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.

Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit "dying" in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don't have to talk to him in person.

And that's a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it's the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.

It's easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit's chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.

A thought I've been having that might be more controversial: Star Trek isn't sci-fi.

It's basically a series of morality fables with magical premises. There's always a paper-thin sci-fi explanation, but for all that these matter to the story, they might as well just say "fairies did it."

(And many of Gene Roddenberry's "godlike being" characters, like Q, are almost literally fairies).

There's also its treatment of space. Just as Star Wars' combat was an excuse to do WWII fighter combat in space, Star Trek is an excuse to do WWII submarine combat in space. They're equally unrealistic in that regard.

Shared universes between franchises are a bad idea. I don't mean commercially. They're a great idea if you want to make a billion dollars. But they're bad for storytelling.

Reason 1 is that the story being told is always in service to some other story. By which I mean, the writer has to make decisions that aren't about making this story the best it can be, but about making it make sense in context with everything that's come before it. For example, Batman can't just be a story about a smart, athletic vigilante in a costume. He has to be the smartest, most athletic human being who has ever lived, because he has to compete with, and remain relevant amongst, actual superheroes and supervillains.

Reason 2 is that it undermines the impact of each story because, again, the stories have to be considered within a massive context. In Watchmen, we can imagine the awe and horror people felt about Dr. Manhattan because, like in our world, nothing like him had ever existed. If you put him in the same universe as Superman, he's just another superhero.

Obviously I'm talking about large comic-book style shared universes with multiple authors and largely independent stories. I have nothing against franchises that use other works to expand on previously introduced concepts and do it in a coherent way.

I don't understand the timeline. It's been reported elsewhere that the tourism company didn't report the submarine's disappearance for eight hours. This article says "The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications."

Did the crew sit there trapped for eight+ hours and then the sub imploded? I thought any hull failure would happen a lot faster than that.

Or is this article confused? It would make sense that the navy is always listening, and deduced what they'd heard after they learned of the disappearance.

Agreed, and the fact that the hateful parent comment is still sitting at the top of the thread also makes me concerned for kbin's ranking algorithm.

At the moment it has 28 "upvotes" and 51 "downvotes," which on reddit would have it buried and hidden at the bottom. Here it's remained the top comment since the article was posted.

Possibly because it has three "boosts"? I don't understand the difference between boosts and votes. But this site is going to have to do something about it, because normal people are going to run from this place if this kind of sociopathic content is elevated here.

I've seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it's accurate, Reddit should just... do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They'd be stupid not to.

And honestly, I wouldn't even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.

You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it's your productivity that will suffer, no one else's. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you're not being huge hypocrites and pretending it's community-run.

They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.