God yes. Back in 1995, the web felt like a little village. You knew everyone in your particular digital neighbourhood so to speak. Lots of great forums, lots of little niche websites… nothing was really commercialised yet:

And frankly, I liked that it was a nerdy thing as well. Everyone shared at least some level of knowledge and understanding of what the web was. And we were all some level of nerd, whether it was Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, trains, flightsim, Sci-Fi or whatever niche interest you had.

We lost all that when we made the web too accessible to the general public. We should’ve kept it to ourselves.

Not exactly surprising, and certainly a broader trend than the UK. Lots of parents aren’t really parenting. There’s parents who just let kids do whatever and ‘they will tell you when they are ready’. That soft approach just doesn’t work for things like this.

There’s also plenty of parents who see school as glorified childcare, and that teaching them even basic life skills should be the school’s job, not the parents.

It’s certainly disconcerting. One would hope that parents who CHOOSE to have a child would actually want them to grow up well and properly prepared for life’s challenges. Instead, kids are more like Instagram fodder, something to be shown off but otherwise nog given much attention.

Very scary indeed.

Yeah… no. None of that sounds appealing.

‘Curbing toxicity with AI’ means a bot is going to ban you because it doesn’t recognise sarcasm.

And ‘new tech to verify your identity’ sounds like a privacy violation at best.

‘Verifying that you own a product before they let you post in its community’ is a complete lack of understanding of how people use places like this.

Digg can fuck right off.

The main thing holding me back is the fact that it doesn’t have an OLED display. With the price hike between the original and 2, in my opinion it should’ve launched with an OLED as standard. When even cheap phones come with it, Nintendo has no excuse not to include one.

And the game prices also aren’t helping, I imagine. Not when the games themselves are lacklustre as well. The new Mario Kart should’ve been a system seller. But the people I know who own it, have reverted back to playing the previous version. That’s a baaaad look.

I’ll likely buy the Switch 2 when they launch an OLED and release a new Animal Crossing.

I was one of the very, very, VERY earliest people to ever buy Minecraft. This was late 2009 during the early alpha development.

I bought it because it looked fun and relaxing. I introduced a fair few people to the game, but frankly… I expected it to remain a niche thing due to how it looked and the fact that it didn’t really have set gameplay goals. You basically had to make your own fun.

It was wild to see it become a cultural icon. It was even wilder to go to the cinema and watch a billion dollar movie starring Jack Black based on a dumb game about blocks that I bought from some random Swedish dude’s site 16 years before.

Shit, that’s definitely the kind of people you don’t want to know your name.

I imagine you probably gave a card to someone who handed it off to another guy who donated his jacket to Goodwill or something like that.

What in the ever loving FUCK is GOING ON THERE in the US. This is the kind of silly shit you expect from a third world dictatorship. He really just… renamed the fucking thing and put his own name first. That’s just utterly disrespectful, not to mention distasteful in general.

It used to be you had to at least die in order to get your name put on things….

Yep. I’m an 80’s kid. First PC I ever touched was a C64 in grade school, this was in 1991. At the next school, we had a single DOS PC and my high school only had a few DOS PC’s. This was in 1995. A year later our family bought our very first home desktop with Windows ‘95.

I absolutely would’ve loved it if my schools had good computers and actually taught tech at that time. But back in those days, computers were seen as something nerdy and generally useless.

I basically had to discover and learn about tech on my own. Which I did enthusiastically. I carried a Palm Pilot through college and even wrote software for it.

5 years ago I would’ve called you insane, but with everything happening right now… it’s a distinct possibility.

RAM’s unaffordable, GPU’s will likely be harder to come by and more expensive. Microsoft is actively driving people away from Windows, Steam is launching their Steam Machine…

Here’s hoping many gamers will jump to Linux and grow that platform instead. But even then, too expensive hardware will be an issue.

We’re living in interesting times.

That doesn’t feel too surprising. There’s nothing really new to buy in terms of hardware; likely everyone who wanted a specific console now has one. And others like myself are waiting: I want a Switch 2 OLED, but that’s not available yet.

And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck, with no real must-have titles for console to boost sales right now. And new physical titles are expensive.

It’s just a dip caused by a combination of factors. If GTA VI releases next november, the chart is going to look like a rocket taking off.

Well ‘buy local’ tends to be the solution most people offer when this particular discussions arises. But I agree that only solves some issues. Especially since local shops also get that stuff from the same sources.

I’m more of a ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’ kinda guy.

But frankly, I’ve got too much going on to worry about the ethics of where I’m sourcing pens and notepads. I’d rather focus on the big things.

It’s also a question of availability. Looking at my last ten purchases, simply none of those were available locally here. We don’t HAVE a camera store here to buy things like lens caps. The stationary store where I went didn’t HAVE large elastic bands, only small ones. Nor did they have the specific Pentel gel pen that I use for work. The shoes I bought (US size 17) are not available, since stores don’t stock past size 13.

I did buy a laptop stand, so technically I could’ve bought say, a plastic box or some books locally to do the same thing. But the stand is nicer.

For me, it’s not about the price. I’d rather spend 10 for something great than 1 for something that sort of works. I am by no means cheap. But I do have specific needs and tastes that my local stores don’t cater to.

And hey, if they won’t sell me what I need, I’m not going to feel bad about buying it somewhere that will 🤷‍♂️

Well, that’d mean missing out on some really cool stuff.

Games like Vampire Survivors and Stardew Valley were made by a solo developer. A couple thousand bucks is a LOT of money for some people. I’d hate to have missed out on either of those.

We certainly do need some quality control, but I don’t think the financial route is the way to go.

This shit frustrates me to no end. These days I just look on Aliexpress first, just so I’m aware what the usual drop shipping item actually goes for.

It’s very annoying that platforms like Amazon tolerate this. Because it’s actively driving me away from them. I want to see good quality items, not the same Aliexpress shit priced ten times higher. But I can’t FIND the good stuff because the platform is literally full of garbage.

Hey, you and me both; sweet and salty is an excellent combination. But some people have not yet seen the light and the glory that is pineapple on pizza. Goddamn heathens.

No doubt the thing had some no-no thoughts. Probably regarding the acceptability of pineapple on pizza, or the total extinction of the human race. Either way, good on them for pulling the plug, I guess.

You don’t reward a thief and murderer, you shoot them between the eyes. As a Dutchman, I wholeheartedly support shooting every uniformen Russian or allied you can find. Twice.

To be clear, I’m not ‘not adopting’ - I’m actively boycotting that shit. The whole TOM thing was annoying enough, but everything else surrounding it has proven to me that Microsoft cannot be trusted with that level of access to MY hardware.

So yeah, I’m going to put Linux on my PC and ultimately back to Mac full time, I imagine.

These will always be challenging topics for sure :-)

I love a bit of statistics to be honest. If you look at general web use of men versus women, it’s actually fairly close: 65 percent of women are online, versus 70 percent of men.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362981/share-of-internet-users-worldwide-by-gender/?srsltid=AfmBOorKXVKN0UiT2Y390LczKu4wTJIUfgaandRAK1rCE22WrXwrgXow

There are obviously some discrepancies to be found, for example in less developed countries, women are online a lot less.

If you look at platforms, men certainly are a majority on all of them - which makes sense, since we obviously outnumber women online in general. But the gap tends to be smaller than most tend to think.

For example, Facebook is 43 percent women, 56 percent men. Reddit is around 65 percent male.

https://adamconnell.me/reddit-statistics/#%3A~%3Atext=Like+most+social+networks%2C+Reddit%2Cplatform's+audience+identifies+as+male.

Now, Lemmy might be a bit more niche which attracts a bit more men. But I imagine women will certainly be more than 6 percent here if we did a proper, honest platformwide survey.

I imagine the male-centric feel of these platforms is more determined by amount of posting and engagement. If men outpost women 2 to 1 for example, it’s going to feel way more like a guy place. I also imagine many women don’t feel like pointing out that they are women for obvious reasons, further skewing our perception. We think the person on the other end is male, and since they post nothing to the contrary, our assumption must be correct. Even if it isn’t.

I’d certainly love it if women felt safe enough to share their perspective without fear of being harassed. Even if it’s only 1 in 100 men doing it, it only takes 1 to ruin your day I imagine…