ITT: Apple customers think everyone is as bad at purchasing decisions as they are.

I literally could not care less if you disapprove of my response to literally anything.

Okay, but the difference here is pretty stark. YTMND pages were made from people’s individual creativity with no monetary incentive. Nobody was profiting from them, they weren’t being shown via some mysterious algorithm that creators spent all their time trying to appease. They weren’t presented in a format that encouraged constant joyless consumption. They weren’t advertisements or corporate messaging or coopted by fascists. There were no YTMND trad wives or manosphere influencers.

It was literally just people making silly, often irreverent pages to make people laugh. It wasn’t something with the end goal of addicting people to scrolling their way to oblivion for countless hours as the world fell apart around them, and it didn’t literally diminish their cognitive capabilities.

I’m not saying everything on TikTok or other short-form video platforms is bad, but they’re fundamentally different platforms. It isn’t a generational thing. Amazingly, I was alive for YTMND and am also alive for short form videos. It’s not something any generation has an exclusive claim to.

I too find myself at times scrolling through YouTube shorts finding little of value. I too notice that I’m staring at an AI voice telling an engagement-bait story that probably didn’t happen while watching unrelated satisfaction-bait arts and crafts videos with no purpose because that’s what people have figured out will keep us staring long enough to get through their video.

I try to ask myself if I’m actually enjoying this and disengage the moment I realize I’m not, but I also close the damn thing just to realize I have it back open again a couple hours later.

That’s the difference. That’s why it’s sinister. It’s why social media in general is sinister, even Lemmy. Because even after you close the window half the time you just open it right back up again. That’s the loop.

I don’t remember that being the case back in the days of YTMND and Newgrounds and all those old sites. I’d look at some stuff and then move on and look at some other stuff. Not close the window and then go right back to looking. And nobody was fighting to keep my eyes locked into their shit as long as possible. If anything, there was a ton of weird countercultural stuff that didn’t care at all if I looked at it, or even actively worked to make itself unpalatable.

Not as engagement bait, but as anti-art. As crazy surrealist or dadaist nonsense. As experiment and unfettered expression.

These two things are not the same.

God knows what disease contracted from a couch Vance is walking around with.

I think it’s just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we’re more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we’d found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

I remember hearing that but I’d forgotten the specifics! Thanks!

Just be glad they didn’t turn into crabs or cats.

Europeans used to think tomatoes were poisonous. They referred to them as poison apples.

You can wash your clothes, yes, but I’d still expect Mr Catalyst to have more than one outfit. Though to be fair maybe his closet is just full of the same plaid shirts.

Only the reactants ever change their clothes, and reactant 1 only changes after leaving the catalyst.

That man stinky.

Also there’s a bridesmaid in the back covering some guy’s face out of crab in a bucket distress at not being in the picture.

Maybe take a look around the call center.

Personally I suspect that Hexbear is inundated with bot farm trolls, but that’s not what I was getting at. I meant that despite what said trolls insist, one does not have to approve of Hexbear to be a leftist. Many leftists (not centrists or liberals, but proper leftists) take issue with Hexbear.

But yeah, Hexbear also gives zero shits about human rights. They mostly seem to be about breaking up any left-of-center coalitions that they can.

It’s unpopular with actual leftists as well. Because it’s a toxic mess.

Walk barefoot in the woods and take up guitar.

Do you think it’s realistic to take back any branch of government from like, actual whole ass conservatives by dividing the only coalition we have?

This framing isn’t particularly helpful for solidarity.

The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.

We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It’s a matter of survival. This isn’t that.

Why is this thread full of Nazi propaganda? Yikes. 😬

Well, not really. Sort of.

2025/“04-28-2025.xls”

You still want the year in the title format so you have it if it ends up on its own somewhere.

Sorting with either the month or the day ahead of the year results in more immediately relevant identifiable information being displayed first. The year doesn’t change very often, so it’s not something you necessarily need to scan past for every entry. The hour changes so frequently as to be irrelevant in many cases. Both the month and the day represent a more useful range of time that you might want to see immediately.

Personally, I find the month first to be more practical because it tells you how relatively recent something is on a scale that actually lasts a while. Going day first means if you’ve got files sorted this way you’re going to have days of the month listed more prominently than months themselves, so the first of January through the first of December will all be closer together then the first and second of January in your list. Impractical.

Year first makes sense if you’re keeping a list around for multiple years, but the application there is less useful in the short term. It’s probably simpler to just have individual folders for years and then also tack it on after days to make sure it’s not missing.

Also, like, this format is how physical calendars work assuming you don’t have a whole stack of them sitting in front of you.

Which is why we need to spend our energy this election on motivating voters who are already on side but think voting is pointless, rather than bothering to convince fence sitters who aren’t already convinced by a Trump’s behavior.

Get your friends in swing states to vote! Get them to get their friends to vote! Harris has this, especially if we can motivate even like 5-10% of non-voters!