MetaFilter! It’s an old-school text-only community blog that’s been around since 1999. I love the variety and depth of posts on the front page, and the AskMetaFilter Q+A section is super useful.
It’s an organic community, small enough and long-lasting enough that it’s easier to get to know people as people instead of as names on a screen you’ll see once and likely never again. The admin team is similarly small and easy to talk to, not an algorithm or a faceless corporate enforcer. The mods are paid professionals funded largely by community donations. The site is also in the process of transitioning to a non-profit management, so less risk of selling out or enshittifying itself. I like the posting and commenting culture – text-heavy, minimalist style, and a wide variety of topics often deeply researched and explored in lengthy posts by people passionate about the topic, rather than 24/7 outrage-bait headlines and viral videos. And the subsites are really fun – I mentioned AskMeFi, but there’s also a place to share one’s music, personal projects, discuss media, organize meetups, etc. I also appreciate how the mods and guidelines take a strong stance against bigotry and microaggressions – hate speech and spam are virtually unheard of. Very refreshing when the bigger platforms seem intent on pursuing growth at all costs and minimizing administrative overhead. Overall, a cozy, human-scale community that seems more and more like a throwback that we should be moving back to.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but my favorite eerie/creepy horror movie that doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore is The Mothman Prophecies. It’s about a journalist who stumbles across a small town haunted by this horrifying presence that seems to predict terrible disasters. The style is on point, and it’s especially creepy because it’s supposedly based on a true story.
Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I’m not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it – literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.
I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the “teachers are secret pedos” and “the war in Ukraine is a hoax” variety. Super sad to see.
Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last...
There’s always going to be an activity difference given the userbase gap, but it’s a mistake imho to see a slow-paced community as “dead”. As long as it has active subscribers, any post will get votes and comments from people who see it, even if it’s been weeks or months since the last post in that community. Slower-paced, but still there for whatever content gets posted.
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate – seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It’s a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that’s honestly pretty fair.
I fear this is going to be a turning point for the party to turn fully against Ukraine. McConnell apparently argued forcefully in favor of keeping the funding intact, but got overruled by most of the caucus, including Thune (one of the top candidates to replace him). And this is the Senate Republicans we’re talking about, the House caucus is even more openly antagonistic.
Keeping Democratic control of the White House and Congress next year could be key to Ukraine defeating Russia.
Up until now, I’ve only gotten the Pfizer vaccines. And while I’ve reacted to them, it was never particularly bad. Light muscle aches and some fatigue were basically it. Worst was the second one - I could feel my hair follicles and eyelids with that one....
I’ve always gotten Moderna, and yeah, it sucks for like 36 hours. Headache, fever, chills, sore arms, fatigue. It passes pretty quickly though, and it’s a hell of a lot better than getting COVID.
Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.
If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.
You are buried in a coffin 6ft deep, with no light or cell phone. There is only a small tube connected to the coffin from outside that allows you to breathe (edit: you can breathe with no difficulty). After 48 hours, you are dug up and given 1 million dollars. Do you do it?...
You can’t go two days without eating for a million dollars?
Make it two weeks in the coffin and it would be a hard sell, but this seems like a pretty easy call. It would suck shit but it would be physically safe and more than worth the money.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) on Tuesday feigned a shocked reaction when asked about Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) announcement that he would direct House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden....
I’m all for shitting on Xitter, but this is a pretty bad article. It’s written like somebody put it through Google Translate a few times, and doesn’t cite any sources for any of its claims. Closest I could find was this Business Insider story on a report by Apptopia, which only says that its downloads in various app stores declined 30%, not its overall userbase.
Recently I was wandering if there is someone or some group preserving , collecting , organizing and publishing all the knowledge of mankind ever created throughout its existence so that if ever mankind faces the 6th mass extinction we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can have a kick start to our new post apocalyptic...
In Hong Kong there are many of us who want to preserve Hong Kong/Cantonese culture from erosion by CCP/mainland culture. For example, sometimes you can see a lot of mandarin around school kids rather than cantonese. The government is also pushing for schools to teach in mandarin rather than cantonese. Mandarin is the language...
It’s something I started noticing shortly before the API stuff. Bot accounts using ChatGPT to respond to random posts and comments. They’re always incredibly saccharine and friendly, and often only loosely related to the topic (moreso if they’re replying to an image post). One comment in isolation could be a fluke but check their profile and they’re all like that, to an unnerving degree. I imagine they get sold off to spammers once they get enough karma. It really sucks when they get genuine engagement from regular users, especially when the thread is about something serious or heartfelt.
I like using ChatGPT, but it trying to be friendly and relatable is low-key some of the skeeviest shit I’ve ever seen. Reminds me of the old Patton Oswalt bit about “clean filth”. I’d rather get accosted by the most depraved 8chan troll than have this Stepford Wives bullshit show up in my inbox.
Oh, I totally get where you’re coming from! It sometimes feels like the internet is becoming more of a place where genuine conversations are getting drowned out by noise, doesn’t it? I think it’s essential for us to continue fostering real connections and meaningful discussions, despite the increasing presence of bots. Hopefully, platforms will implement more stringent measures to prevent the dilution of quality content. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and continue to engage in thoughtful and insightful conversations!
Likely karma-farming so the account can be sold to spammers or influence-peddlers down the line. Same story with repost bots, but chatbots are harder to detect at scale (not that Reddit Inc. cares about stopping either).
Nah, I scrolled through your recent comments and you’re fine. The description above is sort of close, but not quite – it’s more like every comment is syrupy sweet aggressively cheerful and unnaturally pleased about everything. Lots of overly familiar terms of endearment (friend, buddy, fellow Redditor, etc.). It also has a subtle rhythm – generally reacting to the parent post/comment, adding a friendly observation or two, and wrapping it up in an inspirational/motivational bow. Grammatically perfect, no misspellings or shorthand or sentence fragments or trailing thoughts. Zero negativity. Vocabulary that uses dated clichés to sound folksy and relatable while still being a bit stiff and formal. “Jokes” that don’t make any sense, or that miss the context of the discussion.
Like, here are three ChatGPT responses to your comment when given the prompt “write a friendly reply to this Reddit comment” (which I suspect is similar to the prompt these spammers use):
I totally get where you’re coming from! Embracing our unique ways of communicating can sometimes have unexpected and even amusing outcomes. It sounds like you have a great sense of humor about it! Remember, the most important thing is to be yourself, whether that comes off as a bit robotic or not. Who knows, maybe the robot-human hybrid future is closer than we think! Keep rocking your unique style! 😊
Hey there! Embrace your unique way of communicating. 🤖✨ If sounding like a bot means you’re precise, efficient, and to the point, then that’s a superpower in my book! And hey, who wouldn’t want to be a cool robot-human hybrid? Rock on with your awesome self! 🚀🤘
It sounds like you have a great sense of humor about the situation! Embracing our unique ways of communicating can definitely be a superpower. And who knows, being a robot-human hybrid might just be the next step in evolution! Keep being your awesome self! 😊
There’s nothing technically wrong with these lines, but no real person who isn’t a corporate social media PR manager actually talks like this.
When the sun is very low (nearly touching or even partly below the horizon), it’s typically shining through such a large amount of atmosphere that the sunlight is significantly weakened by the time it reaches your eyes. This isn’t always true though, for ex if the air is unusually dry, clear, or thin (such as near the poles). Good rule of thumb is that if it looks red rather than yellow or white, it’s likely safe to look at for at least a few seconds.
Sometimes when I use exact matches like “keyword1” “keyword2” I see results that contain some of the matches but not others. Is there a search engine that only shows results with all the exact matches exactly as they are written?
I have a feeling it isn’t related to a fun musical style or animal poo. I also get the feeling I don’t want to Google it. Can I get an explanation fit for a 5 year old, in tone and verbiage....
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
I can’t imagine how soul-destroying it must be to put so much time and effort into a big-budget game like this only for it to flop so utterly. Even notoriously bad games sell at least a few thousand copies; being ignored is even worse. I’d say “at least it’s not an indie game,” but then most indie developers would expect their games to have minimal uptake these days.
“WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS, DON’T MAKE LEMONADE. MAKE LIFE TAKE THE LEMONS BACK! GET MAD! I DON’T WANT YOUR DAMN LEMONS! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THESE?! DEMAND TO SEE LIFE’S MANAGER! MAKE LIFE RUE THE DAY IT THOUGHT IT COULD GIVE CAVE JOHNSON LEMONS! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?! I’M THE MAN WHO’S GONNA BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS! I’M GONNA GET MY ENGINEERS TO INVENT A COMBUSTIBLE LEMON THAT BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!”
Blithely continuing the blatant reposting of the same old submissions, especially the same two dozen years-old Twitter screencaps. Lemmy doesn’t even track user karma, and it’s still way too small to bother selling accounts for astroturfing! You don’t actually have to karma-whore here!
Assuming you’re familiar with forums, an instance is like an individual forum (with its own topical subforums, UI, and member list), while federation is like a built-in feature to automatically cross-post threads and comments to all affiliated forums. So you can stay comfy in a chosen small forum with your favorite topics, users, and moderation culture while still being able to see and interact with content from the wider universe of all federated forums. The advantage is that the forums are independently owned and operated so no one admin can fuck it up for everybody else; if one instance gets too big for its britches and tries to pull a Reddit everyone can easily transfer to some other instance.
I want to upload some short videos to post online but I don’t want them on YouTube. Any free video host that is either open source or at least not big corp owned?
What's a cool website you’ve visited that no one seems to know of?
What is a horror tension scare / visual scare movie is actually scary?
Which of your favorite creators content quality went downhill very quickly?
Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
The American psy op continues.. Now the wind is against Russia... (lemmy.ca)
Is there any way to reverse degrowth of the niche communities on Lemmy?
Like others, I came over when Reddit was banning 3rd party apps. Many communities were being started and I wanted to help. So I chose one community to form here and try and grow. And we did! There was a time a short while in the little KC Chiefs community was in the top 100 communities on Lemmy world. I knew that wouldn’t last...
Seriously... (r.nf)
Defederation from Lemmygrad.ml
Hello World,...
Goodbye Youtube and thanks for all the fish (infosec.pub)
Youtube let the other shoe drop in their end-stage enshittification this week. Last month, they required you to turn on Youtube History to view the feed of youtube videos recommendations. That seems reasonable, so I did it. But I delete my history every 1 week instead of every 3 months. So they don’t get much from my choices....
US House passes bipartisan bill to avoid government shutdown (www.reuters.com)
The new Moderna vaccine kicking anyone else's ass?
Up until now, I’ve only gotten the Pfizer vaccines. And while I’ve reacted to them, it was never particularly bad. Light muscle aches and some fatigue were basically it. Worst was the second one - I could feel my hair follicles and eyelids with that one....
Reddit’s new Contributor Program will let you cash out gold given to your posts by other users in real money. (www.theverge.com)
Would you be buried alive for 48hr for a million dollars?
You are buried in a coffin 6ft deep, with no light or cell phone. There is only a small tube connected to the coffin from outside that allows you to breathe (edit: you can breathe with no difficulty). After 48 hours, you are dug up and given 1 million dollars. Do you do it?...
Is there a tv series that shows what things are like in China or Soviet Russia (one party system, with english subs)
Female surgeons sexually assaulted while operating (www.bbc.com)
(Reposting because I fat-fingered the delete key, there’s no confirmation, and you can’t un-delete… >_
Fetterman jokes about McCarthy impeachment inquiry: ‘Ooo don’t do it’ (thehill.com)
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Penn.) on Tuesday feigned a shocked reaction when asked about Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) announcement that he would direct House committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Biden....
Unity adding a fee for devs for each time a game is installed, after certain thresholds (www.gamesindustry.biz)
"Bring Your Kids to Work Day" on the 58th floor of the World Trade Center North Tower, April 1974 (live.staticflickr.com)
TIL the adjective 'daily' in the lord's prayer is actually written in the original Greek as *epiousion*, which occurs nowhere else in known history (en.wikipedia.org)
the full line being “Give us today our epiousion bread”...
Twitter (X) loses over 30% of users in two months! (en.shiftdelete.net)
The splines have been reticulated (lemmy.world)
What's your favourite niche website?
Could be obscure hobby related or a useful underrated site.
Is there a collection of all human knowledge ever created ?
Recently I was wandering if there is someone or some group preserving , collecting , organizing and publishing all the knowledge of mankind ever created throughout its existence so that if ever mankind faces the 6th mass extinction we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can have a kick start to our new post apocalyptic...
Is there a word in English to describe someone who wants to preserve a (minority) culture against erosion from a majority culture?
In Hong Kong there are many of us who want to preserve Hong Kong/Cantonese culture from erosion by CCP/mainland culture. For example, sometimes you can see a lot of mandarin around school kids rather than cantonese. The government is also pushing for schools to teach in mandarin rather than cantonese. Mandarin is the language...
The absolute state of NuReddit (lemmy.world)
Why do people look at sunsets?
I thought you could go blind looking at the sun....
What search engines really have exact match?
Sometimes when I use exact matches like “keyword1” “keyword2” I see results that contain some of the matches but not others. Is there a search engine that only shows results with all the exact matches exactly as they are written?
It's the most wonderful third of the year (i.imgur.com)
ELI5: What is scat? The internet one.
I have a feeling it isn’t related to a fun musical style or animal poo. I also get the feeling I don’t want to Google it. Can I get an explanation fit for a 5 year old, in tone and verbiage....
In its first week, Immortals of Aveum had a peak count of just 751 players on Steam. (steamdb.info)
After 5 years in development and heavily pushing Unreal Engine 5 technologies, Immortals of Aveum was met with a whopping 751 player peak. For reference, Forspoken was considered a flop but still had over 12,000 players peak total. This may be the biggest flop of the year.
The awkwardly adorable way seals move on land is called "galumphing" (thumbs.gfycat.com)
aquariumofpacific.org/…/galumphing_how_seals_move…
GAMERS, USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE VIDEO GAME QUOTE? SCREAM IT INTO THE VOID.
NO LOLLYGAGGIN
Jan. 6 Rally Organizer Created Her Own Mugshot Because She Felt Left Out (www.vice.com)
faster, rudy (lemmy.world)
PresidentialRaceMemes: a place for meme-ing the 2024 horse race (lemmy.world)
PresidentialRaceMemes...
[CONTEXT] Rudy's Fulton County mugshot released (lemmy.world)
Reddit users who switched to Lemmy, what is the most annoying thing you have seen about Lemmy users?
Feel like I missed that memo (imgflip.com)
where do you upload videos (that is not YouTube
I want to upload some short videos to post online but I don’t want them on YouTube. Any free video host that is either open source or at least not big corp owned?