As SadStruggle said the other day:

This site is mainly kind of hell to be on, for anyone who is not a Tabby-esque power-user.

Almost every bit of text I encounter on this site is further vindicating that claim.

A huge amount of completely unexamined Reddit "culture" made its way over here, or I guess maybe broader issues with internet cultures. It's not getting fixed, people are cultists about preservation of the current state of things. They are people who would be totally at home on a place like Reddit if not for Reddit falling on the wrong side of some particular wedge issue.

To be clear, if Redditors have a stance on something that people here find to be a wedge issue, the Redditors will always have the worse position. My point isn't that the Redditors are in any way less bad, but that people here have more in common with them than they understand or would ever admit.

The community is so fucking obsessed with the "dirtbag" "bullying" thing that they have no idea how to navigate disagreement. They either immediately resort to stupid harassment tactics or they just have zero ability to comprehend someone else's position. I can't attribute this entirely to them having told themselves for years that never engaging in discussions with people who disagree is good, actually, but I can't imagine that helps.

And no, that's not me doing civility politics. My problem isn't them being uncivil or not relativist enough, it's them being completely complacent about their perspectives on every topic and not being able to conceptualize what other people think on a basic level, which is harmful to you whether you interest is in being empathetic and in assessing reactionaries from a totally oppositional perspective.

I could go on. I've been on the site since the day it launched. I was on the Discord. I was on the sub for maybe a year before it was banned. But that's kind of not the point.

The point is that I've known all this for a while and I still rationalize staying on the basis that "oh, it's a nice news aggregator" or "there are good memes and animal pictures" or "what else would I be doing with my time?"

I'm struggling to get past this block because, at base, I'm an unhappy person who is so incredibly lonely that I keep coming back to a site that even the Admins told me to leave because I feel like I would be even-less-moored without it.

It's like Stockholm Syndrome. I formed an attachment to this because my available options for things to attach myself to were so lacking and now I'm fucking myself over.

Anyone have pro tips?