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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I think there’s a clear subjective difference between consciously spanking a child as a form of discipline, as a rational decision and with the absolute minimum force required for it to work, and hitting a child as a form of punishment guided by negative emotions. In the first case, you’re doing it to improve the child’s life in the long run. In the second, you’re just being violent towards someone weaker than you because you’re the lowest of the low.

    It’s like the difference between a tasteful nude photograph meant to highlight the beauty of the human body and porn, or between using dissonance in music to create tension and using it because you’re a bad composer. There isn’t a set of general, objective rules to distinguish the two, but if you see it, you immediately know which one it is.



  • The flipside is that unless you’re hired to be someone’s teacher, nobody is obligated to explain things to anybody else. There are also “the journey is the destination” type questions where the answer doesn’t matter as much as the process of figuring it out yourself. Like science experiments in school where the answer is already known and the point is to teach kids certain ways of thinking or how to use certain tools. So yeah, there are legitimate reasons to say that, but a lot of the time it is indeed a cop-out. And your example is absolutely one of those times.




  • It’s called the Network Effect. Most people, like you, want to be on the platform that everyone else is using. Others want to be on the “best” platform (whatever that means for them) and when they find one they like, they’ll start advertising it to others. Eventually, enough people will move to a new platform that it starts making sense for people like you to move there as well.

    Remember how everyone used to be on ICQ, then MSN Messenger, etc? It used to happen a lot with messaging and social media platforms until Facebook and Twitter got big enough to start buying and shutting down the competition. It’s happening now with people leaving Reddit for Fediverse platforms like Kbin and Lemmy.

    There is nothing wrong with waiting for the Network Effect to push you to a new platform, if it ever does. The point of social media is being social - if you’re there to interact with friends, you obviously want to be where your friends are.