Mostly agree with you. I think the parents that agree with you should feel some regret though.

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Even Taylor.

Yea, that’s fair… I did a bad job of making my point. I tried multiple different vitamin D supplements, none of them did anything beneficial for me.

They don’t do anything. Go outside more.

No

I’m surprised I’m still around

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Concur about the lack of black and white. Interestingly enough, a major portion of your list of evils are things that I consider good. Addictive drugs are bad… everything else has a helpful, practical use, but could also be bad if used by a bad person.

I’m really only familiar with Meetup from that list, and yea, I agree. I think they inherently aren’t intending to do harm as a company, but what if domestic terrorists / cultists were to use meetup to find other likeminded individuals? Meetup may be in part responsible for getting harmful people together and they may never be aware of it. Sure, it’s a hypothetical, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

IMO, mistreating and underpaying people does make the world worse. It’s not the company mission, but yea… the whole capitalist machine thing. It’s hard to escape the output, which tends to harm at least someone.

There’s exceptions, but almost every company harms at least someone, or some thing through their existence. Maybe not the world as a whole, maybe just a small portion of it, but considering the nature of doing business itself, it’s a difficult problem to get around.

I don’t work for Google, and you’re not wrong, but I am not sure they’re totally wrong either. I honestly believe that a majority of companies around today are making the world worse, at least, for most companies there’s an argument that can be made. I’m having some difficulty thinking of an exception right now.

Did Reddit even have Avatars before they started pushing their profile pic customizer thing?

I don’t believe so. At least, I don’t recall anything like that. That profile pic customerizer thing was stupid AF.

I think the closest we can really get is when people put an icon next to their name… which works on the browser, but not if you’re using an app.

Yes and no… I miss the internet from the time period of traditional forums; but the forums themselves… I’m not 100% sure. The community feel was arguably better back then, and I do agree with you about not paying attention to usernames on Lemmy or Reddit vs getting to know specific users. There’s something about associating an image, or a signature with a user that we don’t really get on the more modern platforms.

I think it’s a problem of scale. Lemmy and Reddit have very large user-bases for a plethora of topics and interests, all congregated within a common location. Forums were for specific sets of interests with recurring, smaller user-bases.

Maybe we could get something that’s a hybrid of both by bringing back signatures with animated gifs at the end of each post we make on Lemmy.

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Due to the sheer number of articles surrounding the AI bubble popping; I’m coming to the conclusion that this has already started.