Someone writing a wall of text when it is not asked for or appreciated may be being insensitive to their audience. On the other hand, I’ve literally had people ask for it and then someone else steps in to complain, so definitely there are Karens who feel entitled to whinge no matter what you do. Just settle in your own mind whether you are doing the right thing, and let being correct remain your guide as to what to do.

So far… this time could legit be different.

We’ve Fucked Around with the planet (since the Industrial Revolution), and also invented nukes, so… I suppose we’re about to enter the And Find Out stage of FAAFO.

Aren’t we in the USA already at >200 electoral votes total that have pledged to put all of their votes towards whoever wins the popular vote? That said, I would expect a more serious resistance as it inches closer to where it might actually make a difference.

Also, I realize that isn’t quite the same thing as fully moving away from a first past the vote system, but it is a type of reformation and it does help get away from the electoral college system in particular, so seems somewhat related.

I think Capable should be downgraded to a Maybe at this point…

I know in some places, like Texas, they seem to presume that you have a tall truck. Anyone with even a normal-height vehicle is thereby put at a severe disadvantage, especially when you try to see past the tall truck that has pulled way far FORWARD past the line, just to stop at a red light.

i.e., it is for measuring the size of one’s dick, even (especially?) for women drivers. Learn to swing it proud, or else never get anywhere in those places!

Recommended by who though? Spez, that’s who. Race-baiting works to increase “engagement” e.g. clicks and comments, thus it continues.

I doubt you can simply listen to someone online - maybe, but there’s no accountability here and that seems like a hindrance. So maybe try to find an actual irl counselor? If you are part of any clubs like a religion then that often offers streamlined access.

I will offer one piece of direct advice though, not from myself as a good source but from someone who I have come to trust: maybe pause the dating scene. So many people try to rush into that, but if you haven’t gotten yourself put together, then how are you going to offer to share your life with someone else? Depending on the circumstances ofc, like if someone was super awesome then they could help you, but it’s a lot to put onto someone else, and isn’t that a bit unfair to them? It seems kinder to both yourself to narrow your focus to getting your own life put together, and to others as well. If you are currently dating someone, note that I am not saying that you should immediately break up with them, it’s just something to consider and make your own determination about what to do.

You define your own meaning of life. Whether you are Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jew, or whatever, that is still true. If you want to be high literally all the time, go nuts and have fun with it - but please note, it sounds like you don’t, not really?

Consider possibly joining a support group, to help you through working that all out, by hearing stories of others who are further ahead on that path than you? Plus you may be surprised that you could be further ahead along it than you thought.

And yeah the world really does seem fucked, but so what? Don’t use that as an excuse to give up, if you would rather have more fun standing up on your own two feet. The world may burn (and freeze, and more likely alternate rapidly between both extremes), but you still get to decide what you want to do about it!:-P

Maybe watch the movie Braveheart, as William Wallace (Mel Gibson) gets eviscerated at the end, knowing full well that he could have chosen to avoid it, but instead choosing to value his pride… and freedom. We all die, every single person who has ever lived has died up until now (barring weird freak events like someone time-traveling from the past beyond us into the future:-P), but you get to choose how you want to LIVE.

Maybe it is the…

I think I was “wordy” - I appreciate your thoughtfulness and conciseness both.:-)

I get you.

Even toddlers learn to speak first by babbling, and only later to converse and communicate with someone rather than talk at them. Some technological platforms have even evolved to facilitate that - like instead of “^This” and “I also choose this guy’s wife”, what about emoji reactions that do not extend the length that you have to scroll through to find the next substantive comment? Except that - this is the enshittification part - when ads can be placed in-between comments, or even someone hopes that they could be in the future, or more likely they want to purposefully obscure the signal so that “x number of comments appear on this post”, rather than “x number of comments + y number of emoji reactions”, that works against their profit model. (and yeah, there was “awards”, but who even used those, plus they just were not… good, especially for this purpose)

About both that and being combative: fwiw, we all are that way - the good thing is that some of us are honest about it, which gives hope for change.:-) But we all will have bad days when we are cranky and especially when we feel “attacked” we feel the need to strike back, and the feelings at least are not wrong, just how we handle them may not be so productive.

So I get you - I am the same way, though fortunately less and less over time. Leaving Reddit truly has helped me leave a lot of that behind. Over there that is just the “expectation” that people encourage you to do, but the culture is better here.:-)

Spez did manage to understand something real about Reddit: that many people (not all but enough for the sake of his profits, he hoped) want to speak, rather than listen. Never mind about feeling heard or it being worthwhile by adding anything to the conversation, just simply, plainly, shouting your opinions into the void. Like Discord chat except based on topics rather than channels.

Those of us who HATE that about Reddit, and want a greater balance, enjoy it here much more.:-)

The SEC got its funding slashed by Trump - are they like the IRS now where they don’t have the resources to truly do the job anymore?

Abso-fragging-lutely. Communication is always a two-way proposition, and it is mandatory for us each to do our part to succeed.

Kubernetes: “I make organizing large computer systems simpler, by getting the computers to manage themselves.” (translation: something something computers, but only the “fancy” ones, so she doesn’t try to get you to fix her Windows XP machine at home that she plays solitaire on:-P)

Doctors: “I make sick people well”.

Neurosurgeons: “The human body is so complex, so people specialize, and my area of expertise is the brain.”

Rocket scientist: “I make things go up properly, rather than boom.”

There is always a way. You won’t convey enough to get gran to perform any of these tasks, but you can make her feel welcomed into your world just a tiny bit.:-)

A TON of people irl have their literal jobs based on / revolving around making a show that they know stuff. Don’t forget that confidence is not the same thing as capability.

An example is the crowd of people that showed up at the January 6 riot in the USA Capitol - how many of them truly knew what they were doing, or even so much as glanced at the document (the Constitution) that they claimed they were trying to protect?

At the absolute highest levels of capability, ironically you find the lowest levels of needing to engage in showing off behaviors, e.g. Jon Stewart is at the top of his game, and it shows.

I will add also: it is worth learning to explain things to people, bc in the process you also should find out that you improve your own knowledge. For one thing, it is a bit like compiling code: you may think it will work, but until you put it into practice, you can never truly be certain. And for another, there is the famous quote most often attributed to Albert Einstein (possibly it wasn’t him but it doesn’t even matter really):

I probably can’t solve your issue entirely, but if it helps, one thing I note from your post is that most of your stress seems to come from YOU trying to be too hard on yourself. Did anyone call you stupid? Yes, you did. Did anyone say that you should just quit? Yes, you did. Stop being so mean to your coworker! Yes, even/especially if that person is you!:-D

Second, to get accurate information, LISTEN to your teammates!

I get a lot of, “Wow, that’s crazy,” or, “Yeah your job does seem to have a lot of unusual blockers.”

Especially those more senior than you!

when I explain what I’m blocked by, every person has said, “Oh weird, this seems like a really confusing task.” Or, “Damn I’ve never seen anything like that.”

(emphasis added)

What they gave to you to do is on them, but how you handle it is on you. Don’t stress yourself out too much.

Third, yes you got called into a meeting with a senior dev. USE that to your advantage. If you were really were stupid, this is your time to get that crucial feedback - if accurate, then better to get out now before you get too deep and find it even more difficult to change careers. However, it seems to be the case that it is NOT accurate, and that information is INCREDIBLY HELPFUL, and you may want to treat that great feedback with the value that it has instead of dismissing it?

Also, that senior dev can help you boost your skills. How many people get that opportunity? Free training, woot! Even/especially if it is not related merely to technical skills but skills on how to exist in a job environment.

Fourth, you might also want to touch base with whoever created that ticket. They might even say “oh yeah that is still there? I totally forgot about that. Nowadays that would make zero sense, ever since we implemented that XYZ thing about a year and a half back. Just ignore it and go on to something else.” YOU could be the one knocking those tickets out of the park, resolving each one simply as “Won’t Do” citing “owner said so”. Okay, I doubt they will all be so easy, but it’s a thought.

And you seemed like you needed an ego booster. Sorry, I don’t know how to do that well, but the least I could do is spend some time on your issue, so that you know that you are not alone. I hope these musings help some too:-D.

Oh no, I must have misremembered the details about lemmy.ml and conflated the original developers of Lemmy as being in charge of lemmygrad, not lemmy.ml? (or perhaps it was… both? or something like that?) Thank you for setting me straight. Yes I am with you there… now:-).

Something that sets LG and HB apart from other places is not merely what was said, but the manner in which things are handled. e.g. I say one thing that merely doesn’t support their world-view hard enough and even WEEKS later they barage my account endlessly with continued mockery. More importantly, not just once but as a firmly established pattern of behavior. That is just not how I want to spend my time, on the internet or irl. It is LEAGUES apart from this civil discussion format that you and I are having - each willing to bend, not so much to each other but to whatever the Truth happens to be. If I am correct (hey, even a stopped watch…), or if you are, or neither, or both - it is that chasing after TRUTH that concerns us, and unites us in our shared mission.

Neither admiration nor equality are mandatory there (e.g. a hypothetical discussion between an adult moderator and a child first-time lemmy-er), but respect is, being foundational to the communication process. B/c otherwise what good is “tRuTh” when it cannot be conveyed, due to corruption introduced by the message delivery method? i.e. a truthful message is no longer truthful when it becomes corrupted, either by the delivery method or by the deliver-er (the latter goes off on a tangent that could get quite a bit deeper but the short version being that the message thus proferred for deliver is no longer the real message - e.g. if the truth were 1+1=2 but the sender caused the addition of +1 to each element, then 2+2=3 is no longer an accurate representation of the TRUE original statement; nor even would 1+1+1=2+1, b/c while that one preserves the mathematical integrity, it still differs in other ways e.g. it would take more resources to store, or brush strokes and paint supplies to write down if it were intended to be represented in such a manner, etc.).

Getting back to how this relates to LG and HB: their lack of respectful forms of communication makes them “wrong”, regardless of whether the message they were originally aiming to convey was correct or not. I do not care if you are a communist, anarchist, freedumb-loving bald-eagle slaying Americunt or whatever, you are respectful to people, and I love that about you. In case you are interested, imho they do NOT seem like “your people”. That said, I acknowledge that I am VERY biased myself here, b/c I have judged them by the worst set of interactions that I have had with them… and yet, is that not mostly a fair way to do things? (someone who kills is usually called a “murderer”, someone who steals is usually a “thief”, and so on) I am aware ofc that not every single person on them is “that” way, nor do I particularly care b/c I had a problem with some large-ish fraction of their userbase, which I solved by blocking them, and now I am happily enjoying the Fediverse, whereas before I was not happy anytime I forgot and accidentally responded even to what may seem like an innocuous meme post on it. If that one simple action (well, that pair of blocks) can dramatically improve my Fediverse experience, then I am happy to think of LG and HB as “a place where people tend to be disrespectful” (surely not all, but enough of them that they warrant that description?). And unless someone convinces me otherwise, I am also happy to share that opinion, in case it may help others to similarly improve their own Fediverse experiences.

Likewise, it seems that you are suggesting that even if in a far more limited scope, lemmy.ml has a lot of similarities. To confirm your suspicion: yes I was thinking about the LW handling of the actual CP. And I guess I do not know about the lemmy.ml handling of it - though I would draw a distinction between some commenter filing a report saying “this is pedo shit” vs. an actual admin implementing a policy, whether written and agreed to in advance aka above-board or unwritten and enacted on the sly. Still, if enough of them do that then… yes, I see that you are correct, that’s “witch-hunting”.

Though I was pointing out how Reddit at-large was LEGENDARY for doing that, though typically more in the most popular (and therefore largest) centralized subs, while the smaller & more niche subs were able to get away from all of that and at least have a chance at a better mod team. At least, if they did not rock the boat too awfully hard during the protests that went on.

About right-wingers: every accusation is a confession, yeah. Though left-wingers do have a different set of issues, e.g. the ivory tower / walled-garden approach that aims to be “correct” even while not actually being thus, i.e. this witch-hunting that we are discussing now. Between the two though, the Left vs. Right, they do not love witch-hunging “equally”: I would say that the Right uses that tactic far more often, at least in the sense that there are some few Leftists who do not use it, where I have yet to see a Rightist that does not.

So I think my point might be phrased as saying that it might not be fully fair to say that the Fediverse has a witch-hunt problem that is in excess of what was observed on Reddit. Though you have convinced me that it is significantly larger than I thought here, while I hope that in turn I have convinced you that it is also possibly less extensive that you thought here (being more concentrated in a few areas rather than baked in throughout the entire Fediverse) but more to the point that Reddit was far more so. Especially nowadays, where the mods are extremely often the literal scabs at best and at worst the very people who were banned from those subs previously for refusing to play nice, and who now enjoy lording their power over others in the same way that they choose to view how others previously treated them, i.e. unfairly, capriciously, etc.

You feel what you feel though. Both of you did.:-)

Thank you. Of course you are free to believe as you like but I did find your comment interesting and enjoy talking about it:-). Let’s go from the bottom of your comment up towards the top: I agree that we tend to expect much more from those who act like adults than those who are already acting like children in every other way, so in that sense this would be a good problem to have, as in one source of bias in an otherwise highly agreeable experience, as opposed to Reddit where it’s just one more splinter of shit.

Next, I thought the admin team that you mentioned was Lemmygrad? Which doesn’t negate your point, it’s just that my entire view of the Fediverse (lately) is without either that or hexbear, which explains why I am not seeing it as often, if indeed it is concentrated in such areas (who, like Reddit, seem to act more like children than adults). Although then, if indeed it is concentrated in a few areas, then it is possible for a user to avoid this source of bias. A known bias isn’t the same as a non-existent one, but at least its being known allows for it to be controllable. I will be curious to hear how or if your thinking evolves as a result of us discoursing on this particular matter:-).

CP I have to (somewhat) disagree with you on: the definition of a “witch hunt” being “a campaign directed against a person or group holding unorthodox or unpopular views”, which implies that a fully welcoming society should not do thus, i.e. that a person should be innocent until proven guilty. On the other hand, CP is literally a full-on actual crime in many countries, so a place sending content such as that out across the entire Fediverse can bring the unwanted attention of authorities not only to the place hosting that content but to any place federated with it as well. i.e. it seemed to me to be less of a “witch hunt” than a “self-policing” so that external authorities did not need to step in and pass regulations (or enforce existing ones) to shut down Fediverse servers, treating them like pirate seeding bays or such. Also, by definition they are not “innocent” if such content has already been shared that “proves their guilt” - the crossing of an actual, legal line really does make the situation different.

Therefore, you likely don’t even mean that per se, and rather something one step removed, as in witch-hunting not actual CP but just people being nervous about anything that even remotely seems similar. That… seems understandable though? e.g. if your house was robbed, then you might spend extra time peeking out the window for awhile, for fear of it happening again. Especially if door locks haven’t been implemented yet:-). Overall though, the Fediverse has to pick one side or the other there (of the law): either it is a pirate signal that attempts to evade detection and being shut down by authority structures, or else it cooperates with it. We seem to have decided (against the former and for the latter), hence people are understandably nervous about rogue entities that may jeopardize what we are building here. Especially since all a bully needs is an excuse to shut us down - e.g. Reddit, Meta, Twitter/X, etc. - and I would not put it past someone like Musk to intentionally share CP, then use that fact in a campaign to try and prevent his biggest rival (Mastodon) from competing with his profits. Thus, with the stakes being so very high (one morning we may wake up to find that all or a/some major instance(s) has(ve) been shut down?), and the existing amount of protection so low (as you say mod tools are next to nonexistent)… anyway, I would not call this “witch-hunting” then, b/c of the implication (in modern times at least) that the target is innocent in such situations (and I mean that entirely separately from morals, just in the sense of fulfilling the letter of the law). Though I am not sure what phrase would suit it better - something acknowledging that people performing actual crimes using the Fediverse, and which may cause the Fediverse to be shut down, is not good for the Fediverse as a whole? But maybe you meant something else entirely, in which case I hope all of this was at least somewhat interesting to read regardless:-).

Right-wingers… yeah that one I think you are probably right. And it goes along with politics bleeding into non-political matters too like cartoons and memes that specifically ask in the rules to be non-political (as distinct from the actual political memes communities - e.g. one on lemmy.world, another on lemmy.ca, and surely there are others). Fwiw, the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the USA, and the act of Brexit in the UK, really have people on edge lately - some people talking here may literally DIE, or lose their jobs, or some other huge life-altering effect as a result of politics not leaving them alone, even if they wanted to ignore politics. Ironically though, the extremeness of the irl events highlights all the more the dire need to have a place that people can come to get away from all of that, if they wish to escape that for just ONE MOMENT and, e.g., enjoy a Star Trek meme:-P.

That said, being a fairly centrist person myself, I tend to get reactions FAR more often from far-right-wingers accusing me of not being far-right-wing enough than from left-wingers doing similarly. Even in such meta-matters, of talking about how we all talk about such relevant matters, the two sides are FAR from equal. Though, it’s also a LOT more common in X (I hear, I literally do not have an account there) and on Reddit than here inside the Fediverse. And yet, I can definitely see what you mean if you are comparing not to “Reddit as a whole” but “certain specific, smaller Reddit communities” - those two categories are LEAGUES apart from one another, the latter being a million times better (and entirely plausibly still worth visiting, even now?) while the former has devolved into a shitstorm that just is not worth going to, for an educated adult human person imho. So: mystery solved then!:-D

TLDR: witch-hunting exists here, and even if far less so than on general (not niche sub) Reddit, it is more noticeable b/c here we expect better. Though is a common problem across all social media, not specific to here. [Insert in-group membership signals here, to increase acceptance of and therefore maximize accrual of fake internet points?:-P]