They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.

But how do you keep making the line go up, especially in a “market” with such a guaranteed drop-off point in user retention? You can do what these companies do and fill your apps with bots to keep engagement metrics up and users coming back as they fail to date your fake users. I’d call that enshittification, and it probably makes everything worse in this case.

Is Gen Z becoming the new Millennials?

“Gen Z is ruining the Dating App Market!”

And yet you fail to see the parallels between Trump’s rhetoric (one of Hitler’s first campaign promises was to build a wall around Germany to keep the job stealing immigrants out), his and his party’s stated goals, even his failed coup attempt (the Beer Hall Putsch sound familiar?), and the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party. Even the phrase “Make America Great Again” was used by a pro-Nazi American political group during the onset of WW2, who only disbanded after Pearl Harbor because it united the aggression of all sides of the political spectrum in the US.

Your argument basically boils down to “They’re not oligarchs unless they come from the oligarchy region of Russia. Otherwise, they’re “sparkling billionaires.””

You majored in this in college, while I’ve learned much of the finer details of the Nazi party because of Republican policies in the past decade. If it steps like a goose, Sig Heils like a goose, and quacks about the purity of Aryan blood, I’m sure as hell not calling it a duck because it’s an American goose and not a German one of 1910s breeding stock.

And even in that metaphor, you could argue a direct lineage between the MAGA party and the Nazi party because the incoming president is the son of a real estate tycoon who was a German immigrant whose previous business was refining jet fuel for the Third Reich’s Me-262 Schwalbes produced by Messerschmitt.

To quote the incoming administration, “We need a genocide of trans people.”

The LGBT community was one of the first groups in the camps. Alongside the immigrants and socialists. You know the famous picture of the Nazis burning books? Those books were records from the German Center for Sexual Wellness, a repository of knowledge about sex and sexuality, and the first known medical facility to treat transgender people using hormone therapy in the 1910s.

Maybe you should learn history before saying something like a know-nothing ignoramus and discrediting whatever you have to say. But go off about “progressive biases.” To also quote a Republican complaint, “Reality has a left-leaning bias.” Is that what you think, too?

I’ve seen it described as the social media site for people who hate social media.

The story goes that when Facebook was becoming mainstream, a guy came along and decided he hated Facebook. So he hired a software engineer at his company to help him make a site that wasn’t Facebook in any way. Basically, the criteria for the site were that he could post photos on it and follow people whose photos he wanted to see, and he didn’t have to see anything he didn’t care about.

So Tumblr is a very self-curated social media experience where there’s no brands or celebrities. You just search for stuff by hashtags, follow blogs that interest you, and post and reblog stuff at your whim. Everything is displayed on your dashboard chronologically, and the only stuff you’ll find on there is stuff from people you follow.

The closest thing I’d describe it to is Twitter, but it’s more blogging than microblogging and the more direct interaction between you and the people you follow can feel a lot more personal than other forms of social media. You can send people messages that can be answered in a public post in addition to the usual direct message system. There’s no character limit on posts or anything, and people will write full short stories and stuff. It also has more of a sense of permanence, in my opinion. It isn’t uncommon to see popular posts crop back up that were created in 2012-2014.