I love the Gangnam Style reference, lol.

…I honestly thought that was a deliberate pun, because Reddit as link aggregator was not optimal, either…

I’m happy to see people thinking about this, but I think that the existence of Meta’s Threads makes any use of the word “thread” an unnecessary association with Meta, if not an outright advertisement. Deeper meaning has, historically, never been as important for controlling how a term is used as sheer numbers. Way more people are using “Threads” to refer to the Meta product than are talking about the fediverse at all, and none of them are going to care why we should have dibs on “thread” as part of our name. They’ll just go, “threadiverse? Is that like Threads? Threads is just ads, I don’t know why you’d want to use it.”

As an alternative, I like “forumverse,” because Lemmy and kbin remind me of old-school forums, and it still links up with “fediverse” because of the “verse,” and because the word has the same rhythm. But I usually just tell my friends I’m on Lemmy, since I browse through a Lemmy instance, and that greatly influences my experience. I don’t mind adding that Lemmy is just one platform for accessing the same content, because it launches me into an explanation of how this is not a corporation-owned discussion space.

U.S., and I don’t know how many businesses here use it, but I think it’s quite possible to avoid using it socially here. I’m not sure if I even know anyone who does use it, and certainly no one has asked me to get one.

Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.

Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.

“Welcome to gaslighting 101! Please take a syllabus from the pile you will [not] find by the door, which will [not] include your instructor’s contact information and office hours.”

I think they actually did put in fine print saying they could remove about a dozen different kinds of things, including insulting specific people. So this is an example of general restrictions on content creation in /place rather than specific anti-protest action. But it’s still an example of Reddit sucking. If they don’t want free expression, they shouldn’t market this as an opportunity for free expression.

And, unless your Playstation is broken, less fun.

...wait, scratch, that, even if your Playstation is broken, he's less fun.

Possibly relatedly, is this a good place to mention beans? I have not figured out where that meme actually came from, but apparently it’s a thing the cool kids are saying.

I disagree with that definition of news. Keeping politicians accountable is certainly one of the functions of the press, but there are a lot of possible news items that don't refer to politicians. "Winter storms hit [location]" is news, but not related to politicians unless it talks about steps local politicians are taking to prevent storm damage (which is not necessary for a good article). Or "Physicists find [particle they were looking for]." That one could be in Science rather than here, but it is definitely news, and I personally think it's hard to shoehorn politics into a discussion of particle physics without losing track of what actually happened. Very few politicians involve themselves in that kind of research (though, to be fair, it might be news if they did).

Whether it's possible to have a purely apolitical news forum is a different question, and I am sure it's possible to put a political spin on almost anything if you want, but I just don't think it's true that news must be political to be news.

Thanks for the link, that article is delightfully savage. I laughed so hard my cat came over to check if I was dying.

Same, their coverage has made me feel way less terrible about all of this. Just knowing someone is out there calling Reddit on their BS makes it easier for me to accept that Reddit is no longer a safe place for me and move on.