Hillmarsh

But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That's devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.

I'm not surprised. An instance of this would be the monarch butterfly which was abundant when I was a child. Then there were years where no one saw them and they even were presumed extinct in our area. Finally in 2016 I saw them again in a different part of the same state I was living at the time, and slowly they returned. But the overall volume of insect life in general is down. I would guess a large part of it is owing to both destruction of habitat and excessive use of pesticides. Suburbanization in my region has accelerated this process.

I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won't go to Apple's closed ecosystem, and I don't care what teenagers think.

Yes, that makes sense. There used to be this place called Tower Records in London, which I visited the one time I actually stayed in London (I'm from the USA). And this was, at the time, probably the biggest and best-stocked record store I had seen, so I bought a bunch of stuff. Hawkwind albums were among them. In those days there was an "old rock revival" ongoing and also that was the heyday of the first wave stoner rock/metal as well. Very interesting to reminisce on those days which seem like a lifetime ago.

I vaguely remember Hawkwind: wasn't that a project that Lemmy Kilminster was in before Motorhead? I listened to them back in my stoner daze. But I left all of that behind, so I haven't listened to as much psychedelia ever since.

I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that's the best we can hope for at this time -- at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.

I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.

Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it's not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They're an old company with a big name and a lot of money.

Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.

Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going -- FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren't for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it's probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.

Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it's Reddit's turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.

You ain't kiddin' man, I went there and I couldn't believe the amount of chiseling you all have to put up with. And I'm American!