Tyrannosauralisk

Forever DM since DnD 3.0. I averaged roughly one played session per two years. Until when I transitioned to PF2 I got 2 sessions of beginner box and 2 sessions of AP run by a volunteer. It was greatly appreciated and helped a lot with the transition.

RE DMing, I phase it in and out. Its mostly a winter thing for me - too many good-weather-dependent hobbies in summer complicate scheduling so things need to wrap up in spring. I'm preparing to start back up in a month or two, probably every-other-weekly roughly September to April/May-ish.

Also, Baldurs Gate 3. It's so good (it makes me wish for a PF2 ruleset adaption mod, but even under 5e-ish rules it's great).

But there is also no need to invoke "freedom of speech" if the things you're saying are unpopular and many people are offended by it... unless the government is trying to stop you from expressing those things. If people are asking the bouncer to chuck somebody out of the bar, that person might as well invoke the third amendment against quartering soldiers in their house because that's exactly as irrelevant to the situation as the first.

Yeah, its the tech-aware who have dumped Reddit. Unfortunately part of the magic was that it had grown to the point that if you went looking you could end up talking to anybody from a diesel engine mechanic to a paragliding instructor, not just a bunch of tech nerds. I think this'll be the sticking point, lemmy/kbin is still 95%+ tech nerds.

I think this wave just gave us enough of a userbase to start establishing the infrastructure for general communities here, not even really specialized ones yet. But those will provide escape areas whenever the next wave occurs.

Whoo, you saved me the effort of typing out a response!

I'm not sure I understand: rental inspection as in they look around and make sure you're keeping the place reasonably clean and there is no major damage? Because to be blunt, in that case the agent doesn't give a flying fuck what you or anybody else is doing, and the visit notification is pretty much "please don't be naked."

I'd guess if the agent saw a relatively clean place and looked into a room to see somebody working on a computer and taking a call, she probably just decided to not bother you and to get on with the rest of her day.

I'm just confused because I don't understand what else could or should have happened. Are you supposed to lead the agent on a tour of your bedroom while offering them tea and cookies?

In summary, did the inspection actually "go badly" in that you're being charged for something or whatever? Because it sounds a lot like they saw a clean place and called it quits, which is usually the ideal outcome.

The other thing is that they've just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.

I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made "the front page of the internet" a pretty honest claim. Their software isn't worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they "win" rather than "reddit seizes control" even if that's what it is).

Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn't even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you're "very sorry" about all the "confusion" and you'll be "putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions". You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it's not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or... did they completely forget that the community even mattered?

Its highly topic dependent:

On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:

1. Lots of people don't want to think and didn't think themselves into supporting what they support.
2. Lots of people are dishonest about why they support/think what they do, even with themselves.
3. Unless somebody is exceptionally rational, you're not going to change their opinion in a short online argument.

So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week ("woke" most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of "you can't win a chess game against a pigeon". You can just walk away, sure. But if you're going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren't actually arguing with the person, you're performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too... hopefully if that happens a lot he'll take a different position (but it'll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn't just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I'm too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a "win". Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they'll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it's like ripping a bandaid off.

I mean, if I were the mods in question I'd do one of two things:

1. Riot. See if we can get goatse on the front page in the 30min before the sub gets locked. I'd get purged and replaced, the sub will be reopened without me but whatever - cause the biggest mess possible on the way out.

2. Quiet rebellion. Stop removing spam and disable some key automod settings. "Sorry guys, turbulent times, you know?" Allow low effort memes. Delete the occasional important post for BS "rulebreaking". Over the next couple months you can probably destroy the sub.

Oh, I'll be coming back. Under old.reddit, with adblockers, to subs that didn't blackout, and my comments aren't going to be exactly... productive. May as well rack up a few bans before deleting the account.