Because that is the goal of any totalitarian regime. You think Putin has the welfare of his country in mind? Or Kim Jong Un? No. Money and Power is the only goal. There was an article recently on North Koreans saying how they’re starving and just waiting to die. The people are simply the means to generate wealth and exercise power. Their welfare has nothing to do with it.

I used to think the Republicans were wannabe dictators, but in the last few years they’ve demonstrated that they are actual fascists and a dictatorship is their endgame. There is no way to deny this anymore. If someone tells you who they are, you should listen to them. Republicans are no longer hiding it.

Listen, this is hard thing for me to type but I think is relevant to the Republican mindset. Hundreds of children are being murdered in their classrooms. Literal murder. Of children. This is not enough to sway Republicans on gun control. If actual murder of 6 year olds doesn’t have any effect on them, surely 6 year olds being hungry is not even going to make them blink. This is the reality with these people. They simply do not care about you, or your children, and everything they do is governed only by money and power.

you begin to feel like you have to also be toxic in self-defense […] Then you go somewhere that’s not toxic and it’s like a culture shock

This is exactly what I’ve experienced! I’m not looking to make any excuses for my time on Reddit but seeing the cause just laid out like that makes me feel… maybe not better, but differently, about why that behavior didn’t seem wrong at the time. I’m sure at some point early on I was downvoted and mocked and thus started the cycle of retaliation downvotes until it became normalized.

Then I come here to Beehaw and I can’t even downvote you. If I disagree, I have to actually engage with you. And in this instance at least, if I just treat you like garbage the mods are going to notice. That means if I want to engage, then it needs some thought behind it. All of this leans in the direction of starting conversations instead of silencing them.

I do not like disabling the downvote button because of this, but i think it is better to disable it, if we tend to abuse it

In theory voting things up and down for relevancy is a fine idea, a good one even. But human nature is often the reason why we can’t have nice things. It’s just way too easy to fall into that trap. Simply having an upvote button does allow the best ideas to rise to the top, but it doesn’t silence alternative opinions or encourage dog piling on someone with groupthink.

Yes, I completely agree with you. Reddit could become such a nasty place, and I fully admit that I was part of the problem. It didn’t feel like a problem because it was so socially accepted, even encouraged, within Reddit’s own culture, but I was definitely part of the problem down voting people into oblivion for “being dumb”. I never thought twice about it until the last two days. Now it feels dirty. Now I recognize I don’t want to be a part of that culture any longer.

The thing that sets me off is the sort of sparkly chime in the higher frequencies of badly compressed audio. It does something bad to my brain, literally gives me unpleasant shivers. No one else I’ve asked about it hears it or has any negative reaction from it. It’s like the worst possible ASMR response or something for me. It’s caused me to become a moderate audiophile, which is endlessly mocked by the internet at large. iTunes and Spotify are mostly okay, but once I discovered you can download FLAC on Bandcamp I’ve never gone back.

What these guys don’t realize is the “value” of their website is their users content. They tend to feel like they’re the value, that they’ve done something great. You see this in both Musk and Zuck. They feel like they’re the heroes of the internet. Except what is Reddit exactly, what is it’s value? It is only the users. These guys parade around the knowledge of other people as if it’s their own value and want to become rich off it. I’m sick of this Silicon Valley bullshit, honestly. That whole mindset is toxic from start to finish. And we see the finish on all of them: screw over the people who create the content for the next round of VC cash, or IPO.

I hope Lemmy or whatever comes next can resist this culture of “burn it to the ground for the payday”.

Yeah, exactly this. While I’m somewhat uneasy that a huge corporation has a bunch of data on me the most they can do with it is spam me. When the government has the same data their power is orders of magnitude greater and who knows how what you may have said 10 years ago can be used against you now.

There is a reason they’re not allowed to have this data without a warrant. Just because this data is for sale doesn’t mean they suddenly have the right to it. The power of the government is too great to trust with this, and we all know it, which is why those protections exist in the first place.