That’s terribly disheartening. I’m sorry, Italy.

How about instead of reddit being the example, we use craigslist? A mostly innocuous non-profit with wide usage, founded by a person who could have easily “gone reddit.” It isn’t so hard to imagine the same ethos and technology being applied to fundamental “social protocols” like reddit, facebook and others. My objection is that there seems to be an assumption (in American culture at least) that the way things are are the only way they could have turned out or the end result of making the best thing.

A widely cited example: Microsoft did not make the best operating system. There’s many reasons why they too over the world.

A lot depends on what one considers the best, too. Your points about the examples I gave are valid, we just had very different experiences of those platforms.

Anytime large numbers of people flock to some platform is because they made it easy and attractive to use.

Is this really the case? There are many reasons why people flock to things, but those things being the “best” or “easiest” are not necessarily chief among them. People left friendster because it couldn’t handle the traffic and it was annoying. People left myspace for various reasons, some political (it was acquired by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Sky/FOX), and many simply because college kids were using this newer thing called Facebook.

Why were they using it? It wasn’t because it was the easiest, or best, it was because their parents weren’t using it and they could be themselves without being snooped (a similar force has driven Twitter and Tiktok success). Youth culture tends to attract more users, another reason that doesn’t involve making something the easiest or best; add this good fortune and Zuck’s shameless profiteering by selling user data in order to cover the growing pains of their servers, and Facebook became a thing.

Like, couldn’t I just ask, why didn’t you create this Usenet based reddit killer yourself?

The short answer is that I’m not a developer. Another short answer is that even if I were a developer, convincing habitual users to do other things is a different planet of annoying. I hope that not developing reddit-killing software does not prohibit me from having criticisms of reddit and other corporate social plats?

That doesn’t mean the technology didn’t/doesn’t exist. Create a UI for it. Teams is just a copy of Slack, which is just a pretty face slapped onto IRC (not literally, but the point stands).

“It’s janky. It’s charming. It works. It’s Copyparty.” ®

My VPN for about 7-8 years is run by Italian hacktivists (airvpn, it’s a nonprofit, they’re good people), I haven’t heard about this ban. Perhaps it only applies to Italian citizens using VPNs, not to Italians running VPNs. Wait, that doesn’t make sense… I’ll check out their newsfeed.

I worked for an early AI project for [large tech giant]. While there, Alexis Ohanian came into the office and talked to my boss about using reddit’s content (your posts and probably private correspondence, too, we got it from every other social network) as corpora for the AI/bot, it wasn’t quite “training data” yet, it was early still in the game, but most likely it has become such.

So yeah, add that to reasons to hate reddit. I have never understood the appeal of what is essentially a for-profit USENET/BBS system, except that you can decorate yourself with flare or whatever it’s called. Why’d people start using it? Why do we give away our collectively-owned technology to these dipshits?

If your primary reason for using Linux is to play all the newest games, don’t use Linux. You cannot expect open source to compete with a game software monopoly. They intentionally have it this way. That being said, you can use Proton and Wine to play most games, but again, if you absolutely must play the newest releases and that’s your reason for going Linux, don’t main Linux.

For a few years what I did was just dual boot Mint with Win 10. I did most things on Linux as I tried to learn it, but would boot back to Win for certain work reasons or to play the newest game. Now that I don’t care about new games so much, I erased my dual boot partition and am 100% Linux. I play many games on Steam, which is made on Linux, and I’m just fine.

Use Wine and Proton instead,

It pleases me to read these things. I worked for M$ and coupled with more intense reasons I left Win/OSX about 10 years ago, and have never looked back. Carry the flame.