I recently switched to "new comments". That ensures I get a healthy mix of new and old, and get to see as many different threads as I can.

I'm not sure I do, but one thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet is consumer psychologists. I once read an argument that they could be improving people's mental health, instead they are working on manipulating people into buying more.

no, it's a feature, not a bug, that we can have more than one community for discussing the same topic here; makes it harder to censor

no, this is one of the worst answers on Stack Overflow

OP had a specific question to capture opening tags. The thing OP asked about can be done with regular expressions. It is true that arbitrarily nested languages like HTML cannot generally be parsed with regular expressions, but that is not what OP asked about.

All VPNs do is change who has your browsing data: your ISP or the VPN operator. You may or may not trust either of them not to keep records, in either case you have no way of verifying this.

I think that mainly mocks the idea that if only people talked to each other more, communicated with each other more, tried to see things from the others' perspective, then everything would be great and everyone would arrive at a common conclusion.

Fortunately no one is forced to use it in a world where OpenStreetMap and apps that use it exist (OSM is exactly as good as volunteers made it).

I think it mainly means that Google invests a lot more money in the quality of its navigation for cars than bicycles, meaning that they think it's pretty likely that the cycling directions might lead you into a place where it might not be a good idea to cycle.

No, it doesn't.

The Wikimedia projects are made by volunteers, almost none of the money goes to actually making the content. Some of it does go into keeping the servers running or into software development.

And some of it goes into expanding an ever-increasing bureaucracy, which is tasked among other things with enforcing intransparent "global bans" or lighter sanctions against contributors the WMF doesn't like (opinions of the editing community don't matter at all on these). If they had less money, perhaps they would lay off some of their trust and safety team and not catch some people who are making useful contributions by evading global bans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

There are so many more worthy free knowledge organizations to donate to: OpenStreetMap, FOSS projects (e.g. Software in the Public Interest), even Miraheze.

When I was 9 or 10 I decided I wanted to dress up as a character from a show I was watching at the time for carnival.

Together with my mom I performed a web search in order to find images of that character.

We found a website specializing in that show and after a while I found out it had a forum attached to it. My mom allowed me to register there and I started to participate in it.

Most of my social contacts during my teen years were in online communities I found indirectly through that forum.

I would love it because there are subreddits I use a lot on reddit that don't have an active equivalent on lemmy at all.

another episode of this phenomenon https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread/

Ketchup effect is known outside your family. Some years ago, the then head of government of my country used the term in the context of COVID-19 vaccines. I can't quickly find sources in English, but: https://kurier.at/freizeit/trending/ketchup-effekt-mcdonalds-scherzt-ueber-kurz-sager/401206246

I have never been to India and have no intention to travel there. My imagination is that it is overcrowded, the people there are mostly polite, hard working but not especially skilled. It is definitely a relatively poor country with a lot of inequality and crime.

Technically these kinds of things are decided by the Wikimedia Foundation but they'll usually not do things that the editing community of the local wiki doesn't want.

In 2014 the WMF forced a new software feature (Media Viewer) on all wikis and enforced this by "superprotecting" the JavaScript on the German-language Wikipedia so local admins (who at one point even blocked the Deputy Director of the WMF from editing) couldn't disable the new media viewer. The WMF doesn't really want these kinds of constitutional crises to happen again.

I am not familiar with the ones you mention. I do however suggest you read this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/

Especially the part you find if you search for "Voat" on that page.

Adult here, have plenty of money (and growing) actually. Wish I could easily buy more time with that money, but the system of wage labor mostly just isn't flexible enough that there are many employers who will agree to "you get a few more weeks of vacation but a few thousand currency units less annual salary". If I could do that, I would.

you see, the problem is: if you can do that, any spambot or troll farm can do it too...

Some years ago I was actually able to post to reddit through Tor. Has that really changed?

From a technical point of view you are right. But commercially, I am pretty sure many companies and developers that used to make Flash games now make mobile games. There are many mobile games that are ports of old Flash games.

It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn't support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.