I’m gonna be brutally honest here, as I don’t care about the downvotes, but the amount of insanity and taboo around sexuality on - presumably predominantly American - online forums is indeed hard to bear. Always ready with the negative connotations: skimpy, slutty, cooties, cheating, home-wrecker; don’t even eye your cousin, that’s incest, therefore the worst thing in the world; a young woman loves a much older man, oh, he must have been grooming or coercing her; don’t masturbate or you’ll go blind, hair will grow on your palms… From a European POV, these seem like compulsory figments of messed-up minds. Love, sex - why can’t they just be there? So people can enjoy them? Why must people shit all over everything that brings joy? Even when mentioning these taboos “ironically,” such people perpetuate a culture of prudery and I don’t want it to creep into my own culture.

I might completely lose my mind if I had to record the inane drivel my boss is spewing, and train an LLM with it. But if it would rid me of him, I’d still do it.

Friends don’t let friends visit Reddit.

🔝⬆️THIS⬆️🔝 To the top with you!

Going down a Wikipedia Plutonium rabbit hole, I just realized that the Metropolis algorithm was named after a real person.

Felony

Wake me up when he has his vial of Francium ready.

“I Hate Elvis”

“We still talk about you”

Filbert

Having not seen the subtitle, I thought at first that this was a drawer full of rods and belts and whatever else they used to beat the autism out of kids, back in the day.

Wikipedia never ceases to amaze me.

they’re casually manipulating public discourse

🌏👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀🌌

It’s particularly bad on Reddit whose entire business model seems to be selling out the “front page of the internet” to the highest bidder. That’s how you get an IPO after all. You can observe competing political and commercial factions duke it out on the daily. The day after, I can hear my colleagues, especially the older ones, revive and pass around whole chunks of Reddit threads.
And I’ll always remember that insane shilling with mushrooming bots, virally hyping at first the amazing “bargains” you can get on Amazon, then the “one-day delivery” which nobody needs, and then, when quality undeniably faltered, the “amazing return policies.” As if I want to spend my free time purchasing sub-par products and returning them after a few days.
The only glimmer of hope is we can still talk about this on other forums like this one. Even the ever-living-in-denial Hacker News finally caught on, as I saw over the past one or two weeks:

dingnuts:

Reddit comments are mostly bots shilling ideology or products nowadays though.

halyconWays:

The major subreddits are almost entirely bots as well. Try posting anything authentic and you’ll be banned, regardless of how old your account is or how human you appear to be. It’s entirely controlled, fake discussion tending to be authentic due to the legacy of the site. The concept of moderators being volunteers from the community died off a long time ago, and there are zero safeguards to ensure they aren’t captured entities from some organization or NGO; in fact, the architecture of the site itself doesn’t even view this threat as a threat. Remember, once considered a conspiracy theory, Ghlisane Maxwell was a powermod.

How considerate to have a guy in the corner translating to Italian.

So glad only a cricket was there to hear it.

Very few people can operate a transporter, though.

“Fassbinder” in German, a quite common last name. So Michael Fassbender means “Michael Cooper.”

- Not to leave the room… even if you come and get him.
No, no. Until I come and get him.
- Until you come and get him, we’re not to enter the room.
No, no, no… etc.

This is definitely snow, methinks.