Backstory: My son has been learning to code. We had a breakthrough recently. I wanted him to figure out how to use the Internet as a resource, so I gave him a set of increasingly harder tasks. He was encouraged to ask Gemini and Google for help, but to try not to ask me. Although it was a rough start, he eventually figured out how to leverage Gemini. This is interesting part: When he'd ask it for information, the AI would give him a wall of text. He would rephrase what he learned in his own words and ask the AI if his understanding was correct. When he did this, the AI would give him back a nuanced response identifying where he was right and where was wrong. This feedback loop leveled up his coding skills big time. In a few weeks of this he felt confident and comfortable enough to build his game.
This sort of postmodern deconstruction of everything leads to an endless pit of nothing. Why even write that comment? What are words even? Let alone letters? Why is a capital A three lines? What are lines? Why are vectors? Why is anything?
It does not lead to nothing, it leads to emptiness, which is everything, like space.
Why write this? because deconstructing everything also leads me to read your comment see that I am getting irritated and angry. I can see I am angry because my knowledge or intellect feels insulted, I can then see how foolish that is, I can then read your comment again and see that you are triggered by what I said, but I don't know why. So I decide that your reaction to my opinion, is your problem.
This helps me calm down and harbor no, or far less ill will towards you than not.
That's why I write and suggest this. Also investigation may also be used if deconstruction doesn't work.
I do ask you, consider it if you can get over the anger and be open to it.
I don't dislike Jimmy Wales. "Please donate to Wikipedia" is one of the most common "please donate" type messages, and at least in the past it was usually written from the first person with a picture of Jimmy Wales' (usually unshaven) mug. It's just a joke. Nothing more.
Wikipedia used to have this huge banner with the cofounder staring right at you as if making eye contact[1]. Inevitably, it became a meme for a time with other people seeking donations creating graphics mimicking the original.
It's not for Jimmy Wales specifically, HN just tends to have a kneejerk reaction towards any NGOs asking for money. Mozilla, Wikimedia, Gnome, FSF, Creative Commons, it really doesn't matter. Any thread even tangentially related to such orgs is always met with dozens of comments where people go out of their way to either justify not donating, or saying how they used to donate but stopped because of X, Y and Z.
The only exception to the rule is the Internet Archive.
I deleted my long term account a few months back for other reasons (too much time on there, becoming toxic is weird ways). But, it is astounding just seeing how poorly they are handling this. It seems like they are willing to do anything to try and contain any form of resistance with the thinking that others will never find out or tell others.
It is a very juvenile way of handling criticism and feed back. They simply cannot accept that they have handled this API thing poorly and have completely doubled down on it despite all the negative feed back.
i have a theory. Remember many many years ago when reddit had that donate button and everyone was expected to complete it to 100% on a daily basis to make sure reddit had enough funds to host the whole thing? people around the world made sure, everyday that reddit could be up so that they themselves could enjoy it.
along comes VC funding and a dream of IPO, afterall, if facebook, google, reddit and others could do it, why the heck not reddit.
first they brought video and photos which astronomically increased hosting costs, then they started enshittifying their app with slow feature decay for third party apps.
at this point, the playbook was set. reddit was to follow twitter who used the generosity of third party developers to make people get hooked to the "twitter" and then decided to dump them. today, only twitter app works. reddit wants that.
reddit is claiming "costs" but if not for these third party apps, there is ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR REDDIT TO EXIST. Its not like we have friends and family and sacred photos and memories there. Its memes and flame wars.
here is my predictions,
1. any/all of reddit's TPA's will re-emerge with a lemmy/kbin backend and people will use it as they were earlier.
2. there will be slight issues with federation and searching for communities across fediverse but browse.feddit.de has already solved that bit pretty nicely so all they have to do is introduce that in the app in the search.
3. you can see, unlike mastodon that needs USERS, and hashtags, a community, say technology on lemmy.ml can be reached by anyone searching for technology on browse.feddit.de and the same people can reach other subs so it shouldn't be much difficult to restart from where they left on reddit.
4. if reddit thinks it can just shove the whole thing under the rug, well, these people leaving are NOT coming back, regardless of who they bring as new mods. The "TRUST" wont be there.
Mine was the dumbest throw away thing ever about cow tipping. Simply that cows don't like strangers coming up to them and that it is difficult to tip a cow because 1 ton of cows is not a lot of cows.
