/r/whowouldwin :(
Also /r/tiktokcringe, so many of the videos there had me nearly in tears in laughter
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Hellebore, a small press devoted to British folk horror and the occult
(helleborezine.bigcartel.com)
Spammers and other bad actors are typically more likely to make the effort than people who might well add a lot of value.
Why do you think this?
I disagree with that. The larger subreddits have significant moderation problems. Only through extraordinary efforts by the mod teams, such as at /r/askhistorians, are things kept in line. It's simple math: the more users you have, the more likely you are to have people posting in bad faith. If a subreddit of 1 million users has only 0.05% of its users posting low quality content, that's still 50,000 people that need to be moderated for.
The more popular a community becomes, the shittier it gets. The easier you make it to join and interact with, the more popular it will become.
In the case of places like Gab, Truth Social, Parlor, and other right wing nut job havens, while the quality of users might not get higher if you raised the barrier to entry, those places certainly wouldn’t have become as popular as they have.
But the barrier to entry isn’t the only reason they’ve congregated there, they have other cultural reasons driving them, primarily the owners or moderators being friendly to that kind of mindset. I don’t think the same crowd would be able to gather here as they’d just get defederated.
Okay. Well, we're all hungry. We're gonna get to our hotplates soon enough, alright?
I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:
The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.
It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.
All we can do is try to make the best of it.
These kinds of monsters are totally cliche, but even as a veteran horror fan and late-30s male, this one still creeped me the fuck out. Anyone else?
Supposedly Valak first appears in The Lesser Key of Solomon: https://allthatsinteresting.com/valak
Solomon features King Solomon of Old Testament fame who was renowned for his wisdom. At some point around the second century B.C., the idea spread that the king’s realm of knowledge had also included certain secrets of astrology and magic. The grimoire bearing his name lists the 72 demons that the king supposedly vanquished during his reign, providing readers with their names and instructions for expelling them should they come in contact with such spirits themselves. Valak, which is sometimes also spelled Ualac, Valu, Volac, Doolas or Volach, is the 62nd spirit listed in Solomon, according to which he “appeareth like a boy with angels wings, riding on a two-headed dragon.” His special power, according to the text, is finding snakes and hidden treasures while leading an army of 30 demons.
I don’t believe in any of that and I’m not at all religious, but it’s creepy and interesting to me anyway!
That's helpful to think of it that way, thank you. Perhaps I will reconsider :)
I'm interested in getting into this, but I think I'd probably end up abandoning it and having it feel like a chore, then feel guilty about not getting it 'done.'
Fine. Let him have the place. The experience here on Lemmy has been vastly superior anyway. Engagement is 1,000x better. It’s night and day how much kinder, thoughtful, and intelligent people here have been.