Uh, no. I tried Linux (Mint). I hated it. It doesn't even have a damn colorblind mode... The best you can hope for is a goofy workaround with some app that's meant for devs testing colorblind modes, and that may or may not even work. Colorblind mode is a rock bottom basic accessibility feature, especially in 2023, and the most highly recommended distro for people coming from Windows doesn't even have that.

And it rather shows that average or non-Linux-nerd users, and what they need from their OS, are not a priority at all, which means the system will never be friendly or appealing to them until and unless that changes.

I also personally hated the way it wanted me to install everything from a launcher, vs downloading exe's from their owners websites that have a lot more info than the generic Linux launcher does.

I hated all the crashes, the requirement for tinkering at random times when I really just needed my PC to work reliably, and the way so many people in the Linux community look down on and/or insult everyone who asks for help with anything or has any gripe about Linux (thus assuring helpful feedback from average users won't be reporter or heard, their problems won't be fixed, and confusing UI will remain confusing and bogged down in jargon).

Linus Tech did a good youtube series on what Linux is like to encounter as a newbie. He had problems. When even one of the most popular tech/PC youtubers has problems right out the gate, how can you expect it to work for everyone else?

I want it to get better and become a real conpetitor to Windows, but it just flat out isn't yet except for specific applications like servers, and pretending it is only insures it won't ever be. The culture around it is holding it back.

Tl;dr: there are actually quite a lot of people like me who are aware of Linux and choose Windows or Mac instead.

There was that kerfuffle ages ago about u/spez editing comments in r/thedonald, iirc. It's not like it would be that much of a stretch for him at least.

But it looks like from OP's edits it may be unintentional. I'll withhold my rage for now.

People who are addicted or who have given up to that degree are less likely to want help if they think real life can only be totally miserable for them (like, "the world is unbearable, there's nothing good left for me except [drug name here]"). Same reason people who are depressed turn to drinking. Making the lives of unsheltered people even worse, thus making drugs more appealing in comparison, is counterproductive. And the longer they're stuck in that, the more that'll just feel like what life is to them.

Maybe people who don't want to, or don't act like they want to, better their situation actually would if they could see any hope for it, and if the path looked more doable and less like scaling mount everest with a broken leg.

I think anybody can think of times they didn't want to do something that would benefit them - clean a house, do their homework, go to work in the morning - and other times that the situation was different and so it was much easier to do.

I wosh we had an alternative site together, so as to avoid newcomers immediately seeing a) lemmygrad and b) that one NSFW instance that bills itself as "shota/loli/cub friendly". That turns people away, understandably, especially because it's not clear from the outset how easy you can avoid interacting with those instances at all, or that the rules and culture between instances can be totally different.

I'm aggravated by all the people who said the 3DS was "dead" now, when the eshop closed. Like, no? There are no new games, sure, but there's a shitload of old ones, and nothing has actually replaced the 3DS. I'll be playing and enjoying it for a long time yet!

It feels like saying a kitten is dead just because they've finished growing - it just means they're a complete cat now. That's great. (yes, I realize this metaphor is a bit much. But even so.)

I'm actually getting impatient when a weapon lasts too long, because I want it to break already so I can use something new and interesting without feeling like I'm wasting it. :P

I think part of it is having enough weapon slots that I'm choosing different weapons in different contexts, and so they all subjectively feel like they're lasting longer than they did at the start of the game (even accounting for regular vs sturdy weapons).

Also making more use of shield fusions lately, and consumables on arrows, which again results in using the weapons less.

I keep kinda wishing I could fuse things to my bows though lol, even though I can use so many different consumables with the arrows already.

I'd be interested in one, too, provided we're careful not to let it become like some support subreddits did where people in pain ended up venting to each other in circles, nobody knowing how to help, and all just feeling worse (I don't think r/cptsd in particular had gotten this way, though. I just mention it as a potential risk to watch out for, for the neurodivergence hive too maybe.)

Anyway, I think CPTSD posts should be welcomed here in the meantime, imo.

You could play on gamepass, then just wait a while for the steam version to fall off the price cliff, then buy goty version too

I think that's only visible to people on your instance that doesn't have downvotes disabled? It doesn't show up to me as a beehaw user, at all, and I don't think it's getting calculated into the overall score I see or the position of the post.

And on comments on posts I've made on beehaw, I cannot see any downvotes, either. (Do not tell me how many you see lol).

Reddit also spreads fake news and shit, though. The communities you participate in determine whether you see it, to a degree, but nonetheless. Like, when Bernie was running for Pres, the Bernie Sanders subreddit had everything that looked good for his chances upvoted, and everything that looked critical of his opponents (including the same accusations of Biden being a pedo that the far right likes to make) upvoted, and comments or posts that were like "... Wait a minute this doesn't seem to be true" or "this over here isn't a good sign" or "Bernie isn't popular with these Black voters for xyz reasons" or whatever would get downvoted to the point people didn't see it. Voila, echo chamber. I say this as someone that voted for Bernie.

That said, I do wonder if a system that eschewed votes altogether might be better. Like old forums.

Does that really balance it out, though? A downvote or pile of downvotes won't persuade the person who made the bad argument that they're wrong, nor will it persuade any lurkers. The bad argument can stand without an explicit refutation, or without the person who made it even knowing why they were downvoted (always a frustrating experience).

Here, you can still see which argument is the most popular, because you get the initial argument A, then because there are no downvotes we're more likely to get a counter argument B, and then you can see easily which of the two has more upvotes.

And if people keep talking, there be more nuance this way, I think. It's not limited to a binary option of bad vs good, and you can maybe more "I agree with x, or think you might have a point about y, but I disagree with z because..." Vs someone with a nuance opinion instead just deciding if they think it's overall more bad or more good and voting in a way that erases the nuance.

You can't - it'll look like your downvote went through on your side, when you downvote from another instance, but it doesn't actually show up for anyone else or change the comment score.

When I looked at it briefly, I saw so many posts with no comments at all. Maybe I just didn't know how to search it? But it felt dead, compared to here. I'll try again though.

I think nobody has the same feeling for how much a downvote or upvote weighs, too.

One might person might think, hmm, I disageee mildly = downvote, and the downvoted person might see that and think "oh, they hate this, why are they so mad?" and then you get the useless little argument about votes after that sometimes.

Especially with negativity bias making 1 downvote feel worse than 1 upvote, to most people.

That sounds kinda awful to me, because it could be used to just disappear unpopular comments complaining of racism or transphobia or whatever, or even just to disappear a comment saying "I hated this really popular game actually because xyz". It sounds like something that would exaggerate the hivemind effect of downvotes rather than alleviating it, and probably be used to silence even justifiably angry or emphatic comments, if now you can't even see the few comments that disagreed with the majority in a thread.

We can even hide the fake internet points!

I like see my little piles of upvotes though. But maybe it's bad because ultimately it means I'm giving importance to the external validation of strangers, and the flipside of that is being easily affected by downvotes too. It might be better to hide scores (in profile settings). But I also kinda don't want to because it shows someone read my comment/post and I didn't waste my time, even if nobody replies.

I've had similar worries, but overall I'm coming around to the idea that for cases of bigotry it's better to just report the bigot and maybe also yell at them (which is allowed) than to put it to a public vote and hope that lands them at -200 downvotes or whatever. Not being able to downvote them stings a bit, but if they get reported and booted reliably, I think it's worth the tradeoff.

Especially since reddit definitely had the same problem in a lot of cases anyway. Sometimes, in some subreddits, transphobia would be downvoted. But in others, the """polite""" or even blatantly not "polite" transphobia would be upvoted. Sometimes even in places where I didn't expect it.

(looking at you, gaming subreddits mad about some trans people asking you not to buy a wizard game, jesus. That ~2 weeks was hell on the internet. And meanwhile, posts calling for people not to pre-order games, or to boycott games that have microtransactions - those are acceptable and go right to the top, apparently! Ugh.)

At least some of the AI spam might start to point me at the solution to my problem, unlike a lot of current "we just put a shitload of this keyword in this listicle that says exactly nothing" SEO garbage.

But yeah. I miss old search that actually worked.

I get what you mean, though on the other hand, a company that bills itself as privacy focused and is funded by user payments is (most likely) serving the users with search as the product, and not harvesting minute data from the users in order to serve advertizers with users as the product. Maybe they have your name and credit card, but don't track and retain anything else? I wouldn't assume that and would read through their actual terms - I think this could go either way - but I wouldn't write the whole thing off automatically either.

Edit: could be it's not unlike paying a VPN/privacy focused email provider like Proton, which supposedly has your payment info (for premium/pro) but not the content of your emails, etc.

And that market already does essentially the same thing (sans gaming) with tablet + keyboard stand/case and portable mouse.

And both a tablet set up like that and the steamdeck, depending on use case, is significantly cheaper.