Ignoring the my-uncle-works-for-microsoft flex for a moment, are you trying to pretend we’re talking about changes that occurred in the last 10 years? Jerry was working in television 35 years ago, and is talking about programmes even prior to that. You probably weren’t even born then.

It didn’t take long for Lemmy to turn into a carbon copy of reddit, I barely post here and you’re like the third dude in the last day to pull the same sleight of hand by trying to change the argument.

This isn’t about ‘not letting people enjoy things’, you straight up equated tiktok with the likes of MASH, one of Seinfeld’s examples. But lets just pretend we were arguing about something else.

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

American television was always known for production interference, but it was mostly from advertisers, bored executives, and censors. Not even close to the same thing, widespread use of focus testing and demographic committees and having 12 different sensitivity consultants is all relatively modern, and that’s on top of most of the traditional interference.

And you in all likelihood knew all this, but chose to waste our time anyway.

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.

You don’t need to use meth to have an informed opinion on it, and dear lord its popularity has no bearing on its value.

but from what I hear coworkers listening to and laughing at that is like a telephone game description of it.

No, it is accurate. The three primary sources of inspiration for TikTok videos seems to be Facebook style outrage bait, black american subculture, and anime, which all rely heavily on zany and sassy and dramatic reactions to shit. Every time someone shows me something, I just have to smile and nod to be polite.

It isn’t by accident, either, every social media platform is designed to appeal to the 14-25 demographic, the rest of us are just stuck along for the ride, and you get exactly the maturity and sophistication you’d expect from that design focus. The short format and pressure to grab people in 0.5 seconds before they scroll past aren’t helping, either.

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.

So what is his issue with the “extreme left” exactly if those were the shows he picked?

You could legit just read the screenshot and answer your own question.

Looks like Jerry is a pretty mainstream liberal who is okay with shows tackling issues of their own volition, but doesn’t appreciate the current production model of everything having to pass through focus groups, committees, and wanker consultants, coming out the other side so impotent and safe that it doesn’t arouse the intellect enough to really make a point or stand for anything specific.

Like if you watch Disney stuff and think that’s normal, you’re part of the problem.

Where is the funny stuff? On the fucking streaming services, YouTube, TikTok, etc.

You may have just made his argument for him. If Ticktok is what passes for comedy today, loud, obnoxious reaction bits from people who think a bad hair day is literal, all delivered in 10 second disposable bytes, yeah nah.

Rap got popular in the 80’s, like NWA and Run DMC, right as GenXers were entering their formative years. Really not hard to figure out before posting pointless replies.

Can confirm, the spiders swear like sailors.

The whole trend is nothing new. Millennials and some GenXers were stealing all their slang from American rappers when they were young, too.

I wouldn’t mind the star trek stuff if star trek fans could meme. So much painfully shit spam from those boards.

Do yourself a favour and don’t read the possible side effects on the back of the box of paracetamol you bought from the supermarket.

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.

Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort

I went through the same effort and all I got for my troubles was a few dead chatrooms where what little discussion exists is purely about distros.

The barrier to entry filtered out everyone else.

If an OSS project is designed to connect people with each other, and it doesn’t do that well, it’s kind of a failure.

Looking at you, Matrix.

Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer

This annoys me, not because discord is doing anything wrong, there needs to be a way to report spam and abuse, but because users can potentially abuse the feature. My hope is that reported DMs past a certain age are automatically ignored.

Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch

This one is just inevitable due to all the kids on it. Discord doesn’t want media and govts breathing down its neck after kids are bullied into killing themselves via the platform.

Where it gets annoying is one of the bigger public servers in Oz is straight-up a neo-nazi recruitment vector, and no amount of reporting seems to get anything done about it.

I can’t be sure it’s morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death.

That has been true for just about everyone throughout history.

the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.

People in the developed world not having kids is part of how they ‘win’ the game.

The reason boomers were able to demand so much is because, as the name implies, they’re a big fucking cohort. They were politically influential from the time they could vote. Keeping birthrates depressed and shipping in cheap foreign labour is how those with power keep everyone else powerless.

It’s a weird situation, but the way to improve living standards for future generations is to… have future generations. Even if you don’t feel like you can entirely support them now.