Yeah, it’s a 100% self-imposed moratorium just because I don’t want to appear to have a modding bias. There was a period where I was trying to enliven the community by posting a few articles each day, especially from sources not submitted to our mirror community on lemmyworld, but then my real life job was draining my soul for 3 straight months, so that endeavor fell by the wayside. Also, unless it’s an article dumping on one key player, our user base doesn’t tend to comment on news articles. It’s a weird phenomenon I’ve observed.

I will add though that my hobby communities that I belong to never make it to my feed, which seems to imply that those communities are stagnant, too. I would probably comment more in those spaces, but it’s rare that new threads are created, I guess.

Ah - yikes. I was really not anticipating you seeing my mini pity party here, ernest. I know you and the team have been really working hard on kbin and I’ve seen massive changes with the modding panel and functions as a result of the latest instance update. I have a ton of respect for what you all are accomplishing on the fediverse and I was originally a very vocal early adopter after the first reddit migration in June. I trust that you all are shouldering a major responsibility with this instance, and I’m grateful for the fediverse at the very least. I hope when you read this you didn’t get the sense that I had any criticisms of kbin as the particular user interface I use for the fediverse - just that even across the federated instances (mostly lemmyworld), my ability to doom scroll for hours a day outpaces the userbase.

I think I feel a personal sense of failure(?) or disappointment(?) that I wasn’t able to usher in a similar sense of community and activity to the sub I moderate compared to reddit. I think moving over here, it felt like my sub would be the natural beneficiary of inheriting the volume of users and content that existed on reddit, but our mirror community on lemmyworld got the lion’s share and it isn’t even scratching former reddit heyday numbers. Also, the people in their community are… suspect. I don’t care for the comments section.

I hope you didn’t take umbrage to my comment. I’m eager to see what new features the kbin dev team will roll out.

Haven’t even directed my browser to reddit since migrating to kbin in June, but it’s never fulfilled the same dopamine hit for me. I’ve supplanted my online addiction with YouTube now, which because of what I flit past and what I actually pay attention to has been extremely educational because of the algorithm!

Pretty early on, I ended up becoming the head moderator for a magazine on kbin, which then made me feel an ethical sort of guilt about commenting there anymore, so really the only place I wanted to be part of the dialogue is now gone for me here on kbin. Our magazine has a much larger mirror community on lemmyworld, so our magazine is barely holding on by a thread even after an initial burst of new subscribers. Discussion is almost non-existent in the magazine, and I’m not sure if it’s because we tried to instate common-sense community guidelines early, or if because we missed the momentum of growing userbase after the rexxit since most people migrated to lemmyworld instead of kbin.

I’m not even sure why I keep my account. (I know I sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh in this post.)

By virtue of the fact that up until just a few months ago, you could even go there and casually peruse security sensitive and classified information if only you found the right bathroom, I guess you could say it was priceless.

This makes me wonder if team Trump isn’t preemptively muddying the waters for pending news of Trump’s inevitable death. I wonder if Trump got a prognosis recently and this is just a type of staw poll taken about how ready and willing the GOP would accept a replacement name on the ticket.

I guess you missed it when the story was broken that apparently Nancy Reagan used to give epic jobbers.

But no school district in Texas who stupidly thinks that chaplains should work in public schools would knowingly hire Satanists when there are probably many Christian denomination chaplains available.

Different story if the only applicant is a Satanist, but the district just declares the search as failed without interviewing the Satanist. Then it’s a matter of religious discrimination in the hiring process for that one individual.

I can’t think of any situation in which the actual chaplain at any given school could challenge this law to the point it starts moving through the courts.

To get into the court system, some parents are going to have to sue. I’m predicting a Jewish family, Muslim family, or Bahai family raising suit after the WASP chaplain starts evangelizing to the non-believers.

Of course he said that because if Trump is disqualified because of J6, then so would also half the GOP’s varsity team from Congress. I think if all of Trump’s in-government co-conspirators (just to name a few, but not an exhaustive list: Meadows, Scott, Hawley, Boebert, Gaetz, Greene, etc.) were expelled and never allowed to return to government, I’m pretty sure at least half those seats would go to middle of the road Democrats (I mean at least Boebert’s seat, minimum) and the GOP would lose their razor thin margin in the Senate.

I think this is one of the many major reasons Pence keeps towing this line for Trump.

Absolute lack of self awareness. Like, what does it mean if the criticism is coming from both the left and now the right about how blind the loyalty is to this orange fascist? They’re desperate to link DeSantis and Hillary, but don’t you think DeSantis also stands to benefit from conservatives’ blind loyalty. When even he is trying to be the wake up call, and they reject it… Good God.

America. Where others’ enjoyment of looking at your pregnant body is more important than what you can do with your own body.

I am glad I left Texas when I did. The disgust I have for this entire ilk of people would have me choking on my bile 24 hours a day. My stomach is turning thinking that some people make a living or heaven forbid are prospering off augmenting the suffering of hundreds of thousands.

Someone remind me if Ken Starr is alive or dead…

A couple of years ago, my mom somehow seemed very insistent about the “caravan” crossing the border. Turns out she had started watching Fox news when I didn’t even know her to pay attention to news at all.

I was trying to explain to her that this was really small potatoes news since - at the time - I had seen very few headlines about it on the usual subs on reddit. I also encouraged her to strive toward empathy about why a person would leave their home and all their previous life to travel by foot through Mexico to the US. And then after more news came out, tried to point out that they were asylum seekers from a country the US had intentially interfered with to maintain control in the region. She never got super Trumpy, but she seemed to keep talking about the “border crisis” almost every time we had a discussion. I then flatly told her that this was a distraction because of mid-term elections.

Eventually, she abandoned Fox news, but I’m not sure if it was my brow beating or some other reason. She started watching CNN a lot and a few times that I’d walk through the living room in the evenings, Don Lemon’s big head (or Chris Cuomo) was just always at this shrill tone of exasperation. One day I told her that just because we may agree with what’s being said here doesn’t make this news either. News shouldn’t tell you how to feel about what’s going on in the world.

I’m harkening back to my college journalism days when my professors bemoaned the 24-hour news cycle. Working in a newsroom, we would sneer at the way TV stations covered current events. And now, I don’t know how or when we will ever get to a point where the news can be communicated during prime time that doesn’t get editorialized to hell - on either side of the aisle.

The difference is that the GOP will discard him immediately in order to fill his vacancy with a useful idiot unlike Feinstein who refuses to go.

Wow, that’s on another level.

So since starting this thread, I had to change my login account to a professional account on my phone, and then after I was done I switched back to my personal account. All of my " do not recommend settings " have completely reset. I’m seeing videos on shorts that were shown to me two months ago. I’m getting recommendations for Ben Shapiro, his fucking sister, people doing interviews with Jeffree Star and his problematic ass. I can’t believe that the algorithm totally resets just because you switch accounts! I have to start all over again trying to take the trash out.

What’s kind of weird to me is that the very little political content I watch is ostensibly left wing.

I will echo what another user in this thread said and assume that it’s because of standup comedy I’ve seen. However, I usually swipe through the clearly right wing comedians or people whose jokes are like bitching about wokism.

The reason left wingers don’t have the presence the right does on Facebook, YouTube, etc isn’t because of a lack of voices or audiences - it’s because of deliberate manipulation of what is put in front of people.

I recently have gotten into wasting tons of hours on YouTube shorts, and I was very surprised that after a grand total of maybe 12 hours of using the platform, Andrew Tate content was just shoehorned into the algorithm of shorts being presented to me. Up to this point in time I was watching cosmetics, baking cookies, comedy, cooking, just funny hot takes, but then completely out of the blue one day that guy’s ugly ass monkey face was on my phone, and even though it was so quick that I couldn’t even think of his name, my lizard braid already recognized that he is very dangerous to women, so I opened the menu to select the feature on YouTube that prevents those channels from being promoted to me ever again.

There is 0% chance that the content that I had previously been watching links up in the algorithm to Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, or Andrew Tate. This leads me to believe that YouTube intentionally carves out space for these content creators and makes promises about getting their content in front of everybody’s eyeballs, regardless of level of interest in that type of content.

It’s surprising the new flexibility these mental gymnasts are demonstrating.

8 years ago it was, “But he goes to church. He says he loves the bible, so yeah. He closed his eyes when we prayed for him and laid hands on him and he didn’t burst into flame. You know, it’s all a wash after you’ve asked for forgiveness.”

Now it’s “We are smart enough to elect a president, not a pastor.”

Ya sure about that one, biscuit?

They’re not even hiding the fact they think he’s a piece of shit. He’s just a piece of shit who falls in line with their view of social dominance and control.

The upbeat background music is killing me in this video, but I also can’t help but think that MGT is saying these things with a positive voice inflection. Like, this isn’t the wind-up to a “AND THIS IS BAD” shoe being dropped at the end of her cadence. I’m fully surprised at how benevolent her tone of voice is here in describing anything about Biden given her other howler-monkey tendencies.

Possibly dumb question, but are you u/PoppinKream???