Enjoying this quite a lot, even more than the “unofficial” way of doing it on Classic servers with an addon.

It feels like, for the first time in a VERY long time, an actual game with slightly more to it than getting a purp that’s +2 iLevel from your last purp, so you can grind another one that’s +2 iLevel from that one.

I guess the real question, ultimately, is how do you deprogram the worst elements of this cohort so that they can like… respond and converse like a normal human without having to argue every single thing and go on and on and on until they “win”? (Which, IMO, means the other person has just gotten tired of dealing with them more than anything else.)

I will happily admit I have absolutely no idea, and will also admit that I have on more than one occasion been That Guy Posting but I really really try to not let myself be.

While I’m not a psychologist, I read far too much crap online, so take this as a layman’s view.

There’s been a lot of research around the dopamine feedback loop around social media, as well as the fact that arguing and “winning” is a major dopamine hit, so I wouldn’t be the least bit shocked that a lot of the more toxic people are literally addicted to the dopamine that social networks give you that they’re arguing and posting for no other reason than their next hit.

Goons are responsible for the destruction of so many good things on the internet. Best $10 I’ve ever spent.

That’s a misquote: it’s “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism”. It’s basically saying that you, as a consumer, cannot legitimately make ethical decisions when buying, because the entire system is built on being exploitative, and thus any decision you make cannot be ethical because the choices you have are already the result of exploitation by the time you’re making the decision.

A good example is the “going green” fad: it does not matter which consumption choices you make, because your choices are effectively irrelevant. You spend a little bit more money for the “green” product, and that money will go directly to megacorporations that are exploiting and polluting on a scale that so outstrips your ability to combat it. Thus, your “more ethical” choice did absolutely nothing but fund the exact same polluters and environmental exploiters as if you had not made the “green” choice in the first place.

Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.

Alternate option: see if the performance of the various cloud gaming providers meets the mom approval factor. She’s not playing anything the extra latency is really an issue with, and you can then avoid the hot, noisy, expensive gaming laptop category entirely and just get almost ANY laptop your mom likes, instead.

And that’s why corporate social media is so sticky: your average user doesn’t care WHAT is done to them and the most they’ll maybe do is grumble slightly and spend a little less money, but won’t actually bother to do anything or make any changes, or go somewhere else.

Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.

I love the Silicon Valley techbros lately. Their sales pitches have gone from ‘we have this cool new thing’ to ‘we’ve created something that solves the problems you didn’t have until we created the problem you’re now dealing with!’.

Much shareholder value or something, I guess.

IRC is extremely federated: building a network of linked servers sharing the same channels was done pretty early in it’s existance.

If anything, IRC is more decentralized than ActivityPub-based services, because there’s no ‘home’ server for a given IRC channel, and if thus if a server goes down, you don’t lose all the channels that were created on it.

I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.

There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.

And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.

But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.

Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.

I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.

And of course, since they have the best platform, it’d be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they’re the best.

Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the ‘value is the platform’ while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they’re behaving.

No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.