Libra00

I mean it’s definitely both, but the fashy admins were the last straw.

Yep, entirely fair. S’why I left.

I’m not complaining about people leaving, just saying the bots are not the biggest problem.

Oh no doubt, everybody had some kooky ideas.

Positively giddy. :)

The Navy cooked up all sorts of whack-a-doodle ideas that didn’t have a chance in hell of being feasible, much less useful, but that’s definitely the silliest I’ve seen in a while.

You’re right, relative density and the chemical composition necessary to oxidize fuel combustion definitely are irrelevant, thanks for reminding me!

Ohhh, shit, my bad. I hadn’t seen that.

That’s fair, it just seems like that if they’re going down the list of problems looking for things they can do to make reddit a better place, it doesn’t make sense to not start at the top.

Yeah it’s definitely the bots and not the fashy admins that drove me away from reddit.

Why are you replying to someone else and pinging me? I’m just making a silly joke over here.

To the best of my knowledge the navy has never flown a plane underwater. If I’m wrong about that then please do enlighten me, I’d love to read that shit.

Plane not fly in water, plane fly in air.

That sounds like some incel shit right there. But since you said you’re married I’m forced to assume that you came by your misogyny honest?

Yeah that’s kind of my point: society has not stopped to think about the fact that the water is at a full boil and has been for a while. If I had my way ads would just be a basic, boring, ‘This product/service exists, and this is what an independent panel of testers has determined about its functions and capabilities.’ There have definitely been products that were advertised to me that make my life easier and that I use every day, so I don’t want to lose the ability to discover them, I just also don’t want these companies putting their dick in my ass and whispering into my ear that I’m not good enough person as a person if I don’t like it.

The first step is not accepting everything you read at face value. Start investigating the claims you see on the news or social media and you will develop a sense for which ones tend to be bullshit and which ones tend not to be, you will learn to recognize the bullshit ideas not because they’re obviously bullshit at first, but because they’re surrounded by the kind of language that bullshit claims are often smuggled into. It’s just pattern-matching, it’s a skill like everything else and you can practice it and get better. One way to do this is to just find a news article, scroll to a random point in it, highlight a sentence that makes a truth claim about something, and go ‘That seems like bullshit, I’ll look for corroborating sources’ even if you’re sure it’s true. Then go do find 3-4 other sources that talk about the same thing and see how they shade things differently. Aside from learning to match the pattern you also learn which sources are more or less reliable, more or less biased, etc. A good tool for this specifically for news is GroundNews, every article they show includes ratings for how biased the source is, a list of other sources that also report on the same incident and what their biases are, etc. Plus it’s been my experience that looking at things from several angles is kind of like drawing a bunch of lines that pass near the point of truth - the more lines you draw, the narrower the space in which the truth must reside, so the easier it is to find the center.

The second and perhaps most important step is being willing to be wrong, especially in public. Be concerned not about whether or not you will look bad but whether or not you are putting good information out there. Develop the habit of stopping in the middle of your political rant or whatever and going ‘Wait, am I sure about this? I should check.’ In a similar vein, get into the habit of providing sources for your own claims, even if only because that reinforces the habit of checking yourself. I discuss politics a lot online and have often found myself going ‘Oh yeah, well <this> is how the world really works!’, then I go looking for a source to cite and discover that I was wrong. Don’t flee from that uncomfortable feeling, swallow your pride and embrace it. The more you get into the habit of checking yourself the easier it becomes to remember to check others too, and again, the more familiar you become with what truth and bullshit look like from the inside and from the outside. It will also help you develop a bit of humility, which is unrelated but still a good thing to have.

Also on the subject of sources, look for authoritative sources first. If you’re investigating a claim about vaccines making people sick, for example, don’t look for news articles about it; go straight to the CDC where they have data about adverse incident rates for vaccines that is publicly available. When you hear about something that happened in a particular place check the local newspapers first because they’re likely to have picked up the story before anyone else and are more committed to providing accurate information that’s relevant to locals than the national media, they tend to sensationalize stories less. This isolates you somewhat from some of the more egregious bias and spin out there.

Advertising. At what point did we as a society decide that it was perfectly acceptable for companies to manipulate us - especially children - into buying shit we don’t need and didn’t even want until the ad sold us on it? It’s fucking wild.

I find the right balance (for me) to be actively seeking out conversations that challenge my beliefs and worldview, being open to being wrong, and developing a good bullshit detector. I guess growing up during the Cold War helped instill in me a fair amount of distrust for authority of any kind helped. Even still I believed the propaganda about the US being a beacon of freedom and democracy until I was exposed to the truth of the matter, but still, I sought out counter-narratives and listened to the weight of evidence and was willing to admit to being wrong and changing my views, so… shrug

Nope. I was on reddit for like 14 years and I couldn’t tell you what my karma was because I cared so little about it. I paid a little attention to up votes and that’s about it.

Eh, I see them as fairly interchangeable. There’s some subtlety in the difference between them, but.