Very ‘inspirational’, but as useless as your previous reply.

Finding a romantic partner should come naturally from making friends. Friend may introduce you to a romantic partner, or they could become one.

That’s a lovely idea, unfortunately a lot of us are growing old waiting for this bullshit.

I don’t agree with everything the guy above you said, but my circumstances are very similar to his.

I have friends, but they don’t know anyone they can introduce me to.

Sports are off the table due to both health problems and a lack of interest (do you really want group activities to be full of disinterested guys just there to chat up chicks?), never mind that they’re all heavily male-dominated around here.

Local councils put on events, but they are either for children, for mothers, or for seniors.

Everything has been turned into a product to be sold to you, almost every event costs money, and when you do pony up the events are somewhere between borderline scams and actual scams.

…

This is a recurring issue with this subject. Someone offers advice, someone points out why that advice isn’t very applicable, and the first person makes no attempt to “adapt and overcome” themselves and either a) offer better advice, or b) admit that they don’t have any better suggestions.

Calling it a thirst trap is too innocent. These dating app companies are scum-sucking vampires designed to make most people feel lonely and desperate enough to give them money in perpetuity. People just handed one of the most important and intimate aspects of their lives over to US tech bros, pressured everyone else to do the same, and two whole generations are not just having less sex than their parents, but half of them have never had a long-term relationship as they’re approaching 30.

You search for one thing and it starts showing recommendations.

I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Youtube’s old default homepage would show scam and content mill recommendations.

Had a look at it, seems to lack dedicated modifier and cursor keys. Looking specifically for a PC-style keyboard.

Does anyone know of an alternative to Hacker’s Keyboard? It hasn’t been updated for about 5 years and I’m worried it will stop working on newer versions of Android.

I mean I agree that this is a new user nightmare, but we’ve been conditioning people for 30 years to download and run random .EXE files as admin too.

So what would federating involve, then? How would it change how lemmy.world users see lemmy.world?

I thought Threads was supposed to be a competitor to twitter? I don’t understand how they’d even integrate with Lemmy instances. I’m here to see posts from boards/forums/subs, not from specific people. Would posts from random Threads user profiles start showing up on the main page?

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

Ars’ quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.

Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.

They cited their sources and included direct quotations from the bill.

And the direct quotations from the bill were less-than-damning without several paragraphs of editorial leading the reader down the garden path. This is on the same level as the ‘death panel’ hysteria from about 10 years ago.

At some point in the future cars will have to incl. some form of assistance technology as a standard feature, big whoop. It doesn’t say it has to be enabled by default, or always turned on, and with all the assists and autonomous driving features already being added to cars, it’s very likely most manufacturers will end up meeting the requirements of the bill without even trying.

…

If

driver behaving erratic and interfering with safe function of car

Then

pull safely to the side of the road and temporarily disable ignition

…

BuT mUh FrEeDoMs. Something something ‘right to travel’ = right to operate a car whilst intoxicated (sounds like some SovCit bullshit), as opposed to right to a functional public transport system or something…

I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.

This isn’t just an issue in terms of romantic relationships, or gender-specific.

We used to all be exposed to the same media and had common points of reference and interest. It was called water cooler discussion. Unless you’re into sports, this doesn’t really exist any more.

We used to share a more common set of customs. Schools used to have etiquette/finishing classes. Was a lot of it ultimately arbitrary and made up? Of course, but we were all taught the same things, and they became a common language. You knew to take off your hat/glasses when talking to me to show a level of courtesy and respect, and I knew you were showing respect when you did that. This also worked in terms of things like knowing when to adopt a formal tone with others… many people don’t have a formal tone any more, let alone know how to use it.

Everyday life thrust us into more social interaction, too. You used to have to go to stores, talk to people. Even public transport and public spaces used to be a social experience before everyone buried themselves in their mobile phones and headphones. Now the majority of people left trying to interact with you in public are weirdos or trying to sell you something, so people assume anyone approaching you in public is a weirdo or trying to sell you something, suddenly it is taboo to even try to strike up a conversation with a stranger.

And modern outlets like social media encourage some of our worst tendencies. Everything escalates into outrage, tribal warfare, makes us really bad at self-moderation and letting things go.

The-way-things-were was never ideal for a minority of people, but the way things are is ideal for no one. I strongly believe even the innovations that are supposed to help a lot of minorities are hurting them to a degree, too. I fit into a couple of those minority categories myself, and have to force myself to go outside, to use manned checkouts, to put away my phone when outside, as while the alternatives may be easier in the short-term, in the long-term they are making me both physically and mentally less-resiliant.

That’s almost precisely their business model.

Get users, retain users, turn users into recurring paying customers.

Dating apps don’t exist to find you connections, they exist to keep you hooked. They’ll give you the bare minimum of opportunities necessary to make you think they’re viable, drag it out as long as possible, pressure you to pay for premium, and if they ever developed a matching system that worked well, they’d bury it to stop half their userbase from marrying each other and uninstalling the apps.

Maybe I’m just weird but I think the tech focus is better.

Like that’s where all this started. Kevin Rose wanted a better version of Slashdot, a tech news aggregator, so he created Digg.

And Digg was about tech news for several years before going to a general format, at which point it became trash.

And then Digg’s redesign killed the site and everyone flocked to a Digg clone called reddit, even though reddit was a clone of post-shittification Digg, not pre-shittification Digg.

Being tech-focussed really does help. I’d sooner deal with Well Actually neckbeards than the average Facebook user, even if I’m not just interested in tech news.

Forums worked really elegantly when you had an active userbase of maybe a couple of dozen people a day.

Megaforums… not so much.

It’s hard to avoid the US politics. Worse than reddit in that regard, it is giving me flashbacks to 2008 Digg where every second thing on the front page was about Obama and Ron Paul.

Oh, there’s your mistake. If you close one window at a time, Firefox thinks you no longer want that window/pinned tabs, and only restores the last window still open when restarting. Close Firefox with Ctrl+Shift+Q or go to the hamburger menu and exit.