Serious answer, as someone who’s been through years of therapy.

Pretty much everyone rich and powerful experienced intense trauma early in life. And one of the horrible ways our early childhood trauma plays itself out is by causi us to recreate it on younger generations. You don’t just wake up one day as a child molester. That shit was visited upon you in some fashion when you were a child.

Our entire culture is based on generational trauma (strongly suggest you read the Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate).

People who seek power and fame are almost all incredibly damaged from a very young age. Not necessarily an excuse, but if you want to stop the cycle you have to be able to step back far enough to see it.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

I miss that man

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don’t invest in Detroit real estate

I’m not an expert but my general understanding is that its unlikely you’d have both parents be narcissists. A true narcissist is too self absorbed to stay in a relationship with someone else who’s also that self absorbed. Narcissists tend to be in relationships with people who have opposite traits, highly empathetic and easily manipulated. Not saying it can’t happen but youtube isn’t necessarily the best diagnostic tool.

If at all possible, I recommend you see if there are any counseling resources available to you at school or through your local government. Also recommend you read some actual books on the subject, not just get info from YouTube and the internet. Hopefully you live in a place with a public library. Many libraries have a way to check out ebooks and read them on a phone app, which may easier and more discreet.

And I’d urge you to remember two things.

First, it gets better. It can be hard to believe, and it can feel like forever, but it gets better.

Second, narcissism is just another reaction to a traumatic childhood. No one is born a monster. They’re worthy of compassion, even if you can’t have a functional relationship with them.

This is both terrifying and hilarious at the same time. The last paragraph is so good.

In another indication of the operators working to potentially inefficient quotas, Meta noted that the pages it had on Facebook, with around 560,000 followers, “were likely acquired from spam operators with built-in inauthentic followers primarily from Vietnam, Bangladesh and Brazil” meaning the pages “that mainly posted in Chinese and English were almost exclusively followed by accounts from countries outside of their target regions.”

Late 40s, from the US. My mom drove a manual so I learned on her car. Then my first car was an old VW Bug, and my next couple of cars were also manual.

Now that I live in a city with soul crushing traffic and a completely broken public transit system, I drive an automatic. Driving a manual in stop and go traffic is just not fun. Plus, it’s gotten hard to even find a manual transmission anymore. But when we went on vacation to Costa Rica a few years ago they gave us a car with a stick shift and I had a blast bombing that thing around.

But when you listen to jam bands random YouTube videos ARE the high quality music!

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it

I love YouTube music. I get all the same songs as the other big services, plus free YouTube premium. Between my jam and habit and my quixotic quest to teach myself woodworking, I watch a LOT of YouTube videos.

I have heard conflicting versions. Some people are saying it seems that the locked-down subs are the ones where the new comments aren’t sticking. Which makes sense, but who knows what the truth is. None of us can trust anything Reddit or /u/spez says ever again, so it could be malicious or it could be technical.

I have 11 years of prolific commenting to edit. But I might use powerdeletesuite to change all my comments to have that phrase in them.

I am trying out the Kagi search tool for that very reason, and their Orion browser. Have not yet signed up to pay them $5/month but am leaning towards it.

But when I mentioned it here I had someone immediately saying they couldn’t see spending $60/year on something they are used to getting for “free.”

Now there’s a thought. How would I go about doing that? I have 11 years of prolific commenting on reddit that I am getting ready to nuke.

Well, you posted and have a username so you must have done something right. Welcome!