SootyChimney

"I want to remove our violent oppressors by any means necessary so we can be free and happy" - Bad violent leftist who ruins parties

"I knowingly sent material support for a genocide resulting in the deaths of 300,000+ people literally being gunned down in the street, oopsie doopsy everyone makes mistakes" - "Wholesome" "Nicest fucking dude"

It's a good question. I'm not sure there's a single answer, but the big thing is probably corporatisation and amalgamation in the internet. In the early days of the internet, it was absolutely viable to just buy some tiny site, post your own webcomics, mention it in a couple IRC chats or online forums, and watch a forum and community flourish - it was actually achievable for the average user, and I know because I watched average people start up and get fans and have a nice time. Most communities tended to be no more than 100 regulars in a web forum. The first decade or two of the internet really was a time where any schmuck off the street could make something fun and it would enjoyed and participated in by others. They didn't make much money if any, but that was never the point.

As SEO, Corporations, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram so forth started to monetise and dominate, its now basically impossible. Money-making is the primary objective and so monetised things have been pushed on us and these big corporatised communities are the only way to hear about anything. Nowadays you've very, very little hope of making it big anywhere on the internet without aggressively advertising and monetising it. And if you're one of the 0.01% that still become popular while steadfastly refusing to do those things, then the massive tide that is the internet will probably break or shit on it anyway.

As a fun fact, I know two people who moved across the world and got married because they met on some stupid tiny pixel art forum two decades ago. I don't see those kind of personal connections being made online anymore.

No surprise that a leftist blames corporatisation for 'ruining' the internet, but as someone who's lived just long enough to watch that transformation happen, it seems the biggest contributor to losing the good aspects we once had.

https://www.buttersafe.com/ . It's a cute webcomic that peaked in the webcomic years, but is still going despite the much smaller traffic now. Everyone knows about xkcd and SMBC, but Buttersafe really just cheers me up on a bad day and appeals to my silly, inoffensive side. And the authors are just nice peeps. My Personal Highlights.

ublock obviously should be installed on Firefox by default. But I seem to have a host of privacy add-ons that break few-to-no websites.

• Privacy Possum , which blocks certain tracking headers/js. Privacy Badger by the EFF is an acceptable alternative but I've personally found it doesn't block quite as much.
• NoScript Honestly my favourite addon of all time. You can operate in block-everything mode and just allow javascript/HTML5 from sites you trust, or if you're lazy then just operate in allow-everything mode and every now and then set crummy sites to untrusted (looking at you google tag manager). In block-everything-by-default mode, this add-on will break some sites, but the UI is so easy it's a couple of clicks to trust all the sites in a tab and auto-refresh.

Be warned - If you're not privacy conscious, you might cry from seeing the hundreds of sites that are running javascript on your machine without asking.

• User-Agent Switcher Really easy add-on to just leave on and misdirect sites. Never caused me a single problem, and in fact is useful when sites (looking at you Microsoft Teams) claim they don't work in Firefox and refuse to load but actually work fine if you use this addon and pretend to be Chrome.
• Sponsorblock kicks ass. 30 hours of ads skipped in half a year.

And my personal silly couple ones:

• Wikipedia Vector Skin because I'm an old fuddy duddy and I like old Wikipedia.
• Cat-In-Tab because I'm also an old fuddy-duddy that likes whimsy sometimes. This is just silly but I like it.

So you're homeless and starving huh? Why didn't you of just think of putting in a little effort?

Every person with this attitude was born with a silver spoon in their mouth or otherwise given all their wealth by knowing rich people. 99% of people who work devastatingly hard end up even poorer, me and many of my family members have chronic mental and/or physical conditions as a result of working too hard, and now we're still piss fucking poor as well as in pain and traumatised.

The post history says otherwise ;)

More and more I find myself becoming the old man criticising 'kids these days' for thinking they invented everything As I reminisce on the old days where all we had was some ASCII characters, a few special colour and formatting tags, and a /me to top it all off.

:nukebear: when?

Liberals: Nice try tankie, but all of our leaders and popularised heroes commit genocide, so it can't be criticism

This sweet plan seems to include a lot of being approved for masses of credit and hoping you can pay off your un-write-offable loans (there are an upsetting number of ways debts can't be written off). But if anyone can go bankrupt and fuck over their debtees, please do.

I don't have much in the way of helpful resources, but please dear comrade, I'd certainly say you shouldn't feel ashamed. You're putting active thought and effort into combating a society-wide and very long-lasting attitude that gets pushed onto all of us, and that will take you very far. Be proud that you're learning more about racism and confronting it, and how that genuinely makes the world a nicer place for all, 'cause I'm sure proud of you for this post; We could all do with more self-reflection

I appreciate basically all those believers are being dumbdumb, listening to misinformation, and the vaccine is incredibly, incredibly safe (get vaccinated, vaccines are amazing). But to be honest, 'thousands of sudden deaths in otherwise healthy people' is not a very high bar for a vaccine distributed to billions.

The AZ vaccine is incredibly safe, get vaccinated, but it has roughly 10 serious, frequently life-ending, clots per million doses, more commonly in healthy young people. No hard numbers I can find about consequent deaths, but if 1 billion people have had the AZ vaccine, then 10,000 people will have suffered that. Roughly 13.5bn doses administered worldwide, so even if vaccines in general are 4x safer than the AZ vaccine, and only 1 in 4 of those people actually die, and only 1 in 4 of those deaths is a person that was otherwise healthy, it is plausible that the claim 'thousands of otherwise healthy people have died suddenly from the vaccine' is true.

The risk of death or lifelong injury from COVID is significantly higher, get vaccinated. COVID bad, fuck antivaxxers, get fucking vaccinated for your own and others' sakes - but the number do add up in a silly way. I suspect the sentence is actually true.