VoxAdActa

Let 'em.

interestingasfuck has been unmoderated and closed for weeks now. Other subs are going to get the same treatment, and going dark is worse than going NSFW. The most effective form of protest any sub can engage in at this point is forcing Reddit to fire and fail to replace them.

I guess people just don’t want to moderate anymore.

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

I am not a finance guy; this is my kindergarten-level understanding of the situation:

When the interest rates were hovering down around 0%, it was a no-brainer for VC firms to shotgun money out to everyone who walked past their office building. Most VC money doesn’t come from some rich dude’s pocket; it comes from banks and hedge funds and other deeply-market-tied entities. If any one startup they’ve invested in can win the profit lottery, the VCers will massively beat the rate of return they’d get for anything else. One big success can cover a dozen small failures, and, anyway, a business isn’t a failure until it’s a failure.

Now that interest rates are rapidly moving higher, those startup investments are less of a good deal. VC money is more expensive. VC firms are starting to close out their positions on start-ups that aren’t beating them market, because they want to stick their money somewhere more reliably profitable.

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.

Can we please keep the Reddit spam in the specific Reddit-centered communities? I’m trying to stop paying attention to Reddit.

It’s 2030. The world has changed. Russia has fallen. Ralph Nader’s reanimated cyborg-corpse is president. Britain is back in the EU. And Lemmy is known everywhere as “The Poop Site”.

When it comes to tragedies, the number of fucks I give for the victims follows a simple formula.

I start with a billion fucks. Then I subtract the combined net worth of the people affected by the tragedy. The result is how many fucks I give about their tragedy.

For this one, I’m at about negative three billion fucks.

Now I’m imagining a National Treasure-style heist, where OP has to smuggle this out of the museum by pretending it’s his own for a three-day hitchhiking adventure back to the buyer’s safehouse, and that’s why he asked the three-day challenge question.

A good friend of mine made good money turning glass bottles of various types into bongs. The best sellers were the marble soda bottles with unlicensed Hello Kitty labels, but Sanrio C&D’d him pretty fucking quick.

Otherwise, I can say for 100% certainty that the answer is absolutely not pretty rocks wrapped up in wire, aka, “jewelry”. Every lazy wannabe craft fair monarch is pumping out these low-effort bits of trash to the point that at least a third of the booths at any craft fair I go to is just stuffed to the gills with them.

They’re basically tall El Caminos at this point.

All Reddit had to do was STFU and wait for a month or two. Lack of any reaction or results is probably the most demotivating thing in all human experience. Go forward with the plan, say nothing, give no interviews, send no messages, do nothing to the mods or the subreddits, and within just a couple weeks, the users would get bored and force the place to return to normal. Either through pressuring their mods or just starting new subreddits with the same theme as the closed ones. The effect on the front page and the common lurker would be minimal and transient.

Instead, Spez has to go around slinging shit from his diaper at literally every opportunity, taking more and more extreme actions, hiding behind a fake mod name, saying super salty things to everyone, etc. He’s basically the only person continuing to add fuel to this dumpster fire. It’s literally just him. If he got sick or hit by a bus or something and had to shut up for even just a week while he was recovering, Reddit would lose interest in the whole thing, because without a visible enemy to fight, the users would turn their frustrations on each other. But he’s clearly suffering from some deep psychic wound that keeps him from being able to shut his pie hole.

YUK I don’t think that will sell very well. There will be more than enough resistance to lab grown “meat”.

Yeah, I’m 100% down with cricket-based protein, but even I balk at maggot-based protein. Gonna be a hard sell, for sure.