A 56 y/o half-brother that I would do almost anything for and a step-sister that… well… whatever.

Look at the demographic of any “left” and you generally find kids that don’t understand how societal power works.

Taking a few classes on sociology and reading Marx is fine and all that, but they need to understand the framework of conformist, consumerist America and leverage that… and as it’s anathema to what Marx says… they’ll forever be smacking their heads against the walls.

Then they grow up and become Wall Street brokers.

Sause: Am 60, and have seen this same shit happening over and over - for decades.

A face so ugly, the dog won’t play with him.

Thing is, it’s not half as ugly as he is on the inside.

Read a bit of history on him, the guy is massively fucked up, and I wonder what secret trauma he’s got that made him like he is. It goes beyond just being a young man that was angry at the world and has grown bitter as he’s aged.

It’s likely something emotionally crippling and so traumatic that he will never face it.

Unfortunately, the violence directed at them is what many on the right and even Trump himself want, because it will be used as a pretext to interfere in the mid-term elections coming in 2026.

I mean, they’re going to try anyhow, and stirring up shit will just give them that much more leverage to do so.

As rage-inducing as Trump is, just biding ones time and voting and getting everyone you know to vote in the mid-terms for the Democrats - even if the candidate is an absolute stinker - is what is needed to put the brakes onto this administration.

The weird thing is apparently, I wasn’t allowed to delete my account last night. I thought I did, but I went back not too long ago and on a lark, signed in again. Account’s empty of all my unarchived posts - since I deleted it all, but I still have access. Think I’m going to see if the PM’s work and just start hoovering interesting articles and items from there. WTF, it’s not like I didn’t bring content to the site… Gonna take the best of it back and bring it here. Fuck it.

I was a 14 years long redditor that was more into the arts and graphics and from the time of the IPO, my feed pivoted to much more rage-bait content and subs appearing on my homepage that were completely unknown to me. Definitely some site-wide fuckery going on, that’s changed the nature of that beast. Moreso now since they have corporate investors and within the last week or so, a whole bunch of bad reports about the data not being used for AI training as much as they hyped it up. Methinks they’re pivoting to the right in order to appease their investors…

AI, maybe, but upheld by a person upon appeal.

I honestly think those appeal responses are bullshit and no one is actually reading them. Maybe paid members will have their appeals looked at but I doubt anyone else does.

That is what happened to me… the bots banned me within a minute for a metaphorically based - though salty - post. 14 years.

Thing is, I noticed a change in the algorithm not too long after the IPO since my homepage started in with more rage-bait subs and many were ones I’d not visited or even heard of. It was subtle but also kinda disheartening. I decided to manually delete all of what I could and as I was going through the posts I noticed that the art subs I used to go to had all but disappeared on my home page.

I used to go to photoshopbattles all the time and as I was scrolling my home pages, it was nowhere to be seen. Nor was AppleHelp, VintageApple or MacPro…

Delete all your Reddit bookmarks and favorites and find a lemmy community to launch yourself into. I picked gaming and a few news ones and so far, it’s fine… Even moreso that I found the old.lemmy.zip page and it’s comfortable to me as I was dedicated to old.reddit and RES.

As horrifying as it will be… it’s going to take some godawful disease like polio to rear it’s ugly head again for the vast muddling middle to wake the hell up.

I remember a friend of my aunt who was in a wheelchair - she was in her 70’s when I was a teenager and she had gotten polio as a little girl. Lovely woman, and a real example of what can happen without vaccines.

God save us, generational amnesia is a thing, and we’ve gotten complacent because vaccines haved worked so well for the last 75 years.

Honestly, that’s not accidental. Reddit’s a hot mess right now…

Once the IPO dropped last year, the algorithm started steering users to the least productive, most rage-bait inducing content. I was on many art-related subs and within 6 months, my feed pivoted to the political feeds… MurderedByWords, LeopardsAteMyFace and others. The AppleHelp and VintageGaming and VintageApple where I had the best, most in-depth conversations all but vanished from my home page feed.

Oddly enough subs like anime_titties (which was non-US based global-only news with the sub’s title used to keep the 50-cent Army from seeing it as the Great Firewall doesn’t like anime_titties) also went down my feed list. Then mystery subs with really rage-inducing content like NewsHub which was lots of middle-east and Gaza related stuff appeared - and I hadn’t ever visited that sub… stuff that I han’t even heard of showed up.

NGL, I fell right into it. It’s slick, that’s for sure.

Eventually the rage-bait posts got me… I had started to get snarkier and snarkier and the mod-bots bumped me yesterday - within a minute - of making a metaphorically mean post. I spent the evening on old reddit getting at the unarchived content I’d posted and manually deleted it. Then managed to get to the delete account page and left. 14 years. Oh well.

The AI they’re using isn’t as well trained as they think, (hence the Reddit stock tanking in the past 2 weeks) and of course Steven MIller (the real POTUS right now) is looking to go after the mainstream social media sites.

It’s getting a bit schizophrenic, what with the fear of the Trump Administration meddling on one hand and the algorithm on the other driving engagement by highlighting the EXACT strident content that makes it a target.

Oooooffffff. Fun times ahead.