But the fear isn’t so rational. It’s like a fear that the cocktail in your example will replace the original vodka whether they want the cocktail or not, or that the vodka will be so diluted by seltzer that it will functionally cease to exist.

It’s like a fear of gentrification of the country as a whole.

It’s also important to remember that the US is a huge exception in this regard as well. Most other countries are like 90%+ native population, and immigrant populations tend to be sort of isolated from the wider national culture due to things like language barriers, and they often set up little “bastions” of their native culture locally wherever they live. We even see plenty of that in the US as well. While there are many distinctly US cultures across the country that are derived from a variety of backgrounds, there are tons of “enclaves” of European culture that make it blatantly clear where immigrants from certain countries settled. In Boston, the culture of Chinatown is distinctly unique and separate from the wider culture of the city, which largely has ties back to Ireland (and is very proud of it). And both of those are distinctly different from where the Italian immigrants settled, who effectively have their own districts of cultures descended from Italy regardless of where they immigrated to.

Because of the American Puritannical values, which dictate what the credit companies and advertisers are willing to do business with and the cultural zeitgeist along with it.

The Puritans were some of the earliest British colonists in the US, and were either thrown out of England for attempting a coup to replace the king with a puppet to force their more extremist form of Christianity on the country, or left by their own choice because they felt that the Church of England was too liberal. They were basically a bunch of prudes who believed that the human body and sex were shameful and disgusting.

This has led to the dichotomy where advertisers want nothing to do with sex/nudity, except when it comes to implied sex in advertisements. Because sex is bad, but it also sells, which is good.

PG-13 and rated T for teen, respectively

I agree, you shouldn’t expect people to understand every reference you make. My statement was more about how the quote in the pic and, to a much lesser extent, the comment above both seem to view being introduced to a new thing by someone you like as sort of a bad thing. The quote in the photo especially is a red flag of not caring about the things the people you care about are into.

Obviously not everybody is going to be familiar with the same media as you. But if somebody gets upset with you because you quoted a joke from a source that they’re unfamiliar with, that’s on them, not you.

I mean, how is it any different than referencing movies, music, TV shows, stand-up comedy, or any other piece of pop culture?

Would referencing a movie somebody hasn’t seen before make you terminally in-theater or something? Though, having said that, I am now going to take every opportunity I can to work the phrase “terminally in-theater” into my daily life anytime somebody mentions a Marvel movie or something.

Same energy as a YouTube comment I read on a War Thunder video that said, “The thermite mixture is a combination of finely powdered aluminum and iron(III) oxide (also called ferric oxide) in a mass ratio of 1:3 respectively, a 5-7.5cm length of fireworks sparkler.”

You can fight against it, but it’s an uphill battle. The most likely responses to work will be invite only systems for account creation (something I’ve seen predicted happening to art communities to filter out AI garbage) and some kind of reputation/report system to weed out spammers and the accounts that invited them.

This concept reminds me of a certain browser extension that marks trans allies and transphobic accounts/websites using a user aggregate with thresholds that mark transphobes as red and trans allies as green.

There’s plenty of other reasons to do this. From scammers trying to legitimize accounts to use later to groups trying to sway user opinions on the site. This sort of thing has been going on on plenty of other websites for years. This is the same strategy the porn bots on Tumblr used, and they were so prolific there that they got the Tumblr app removed from Apple’s app store.

Very good point.

I saw this exact same style of bot account years ago on Tumblr. They always follow the same naming scheme: one word or two words combined and then a string of 4 digits. I bet if you go to any of their profiles, you’ll find like 4 comments that are all copied from old threads and a bunch of upvotes on completely random subs, possibly even all of them being on other bot accounts’ posts and comments.

The real question is whether they’re being used to fake activity on Reddit, sway public opinion by posting this sort of political slant, or will they later be used to advertise scams and this is just to make them seem legitimate.

Reminds me of probably my favorite motto ever, which I believe came about on Tumblr after the porn ban fiasco: Become unmarketable.

Be open and unabashedly weird. The world’s much more interesting and fun when you don’t sanitize your personality to avoid making puritanical people uncomfortable.

instance blocks downvotes

can neither see downvotes nor downvote posts

Except they don’t say who the author is. If you want to help the author spread their work, saying who it is would help people find their work. Providing a link to the original would be the next step beyond. So it is like keeping the money as a business owner, but saying that it’s all thanks to your wonderful employees. Or throwing them a pizza party for the record breaking profits they made that year.

You see this a lot with reposted art. A repost on a Twitter account that does nothing but repost art? 10k likes, no mention of who the original artist is. The original piece on the artist’s Twitter account? 127 likes.

How many fingers am I holding up? If your answer is 6 or more, I have bad news for you and your data set.

It’s the result of growing up under 2 very different impending calamities. Nuclear annihilation was a constant but invisible threat that promised to wipe the world clean before you would even have time to comprehend what was happening, so the mentality was to live in the moment and pretend it didn’t exist, because it all might not tomorrow. While climate change is a constant but blatantly visible threat that clearly gets worse and worse as time goes on, giving a real sense of desperate urgency to do something now.

So you have a dissonance of the older generations who shrug their shoulders at the horrors of the news and pretend that nothing’s happening because it doesn’t immediately affect them, and the younger generations who are freaking out about everything all at the same time because their whole lives they’ve basically been on the train tracks watching the train come barreling towards them and begging the older folks to just drive the car off the tracks.

Do this have something to do with the ducks I always hear about?

Unless you live in the US with its Euclidean Zoning laws which prohibit mixing land use types in a lot of the country. Groceries are commercial use, and so have to go in commercial developments. Plus the big box stores have killed off most of the small grocers, so you have to go to the strip mall on the edge of town.

It’s far closer to my hometown experience than what you describe.

I know of 2 grocery stores there (the other half of that town is a mystery to me, probably a couple more there but it was 10 minutes just to get over the bridge, 40+ minutes in the summer, so I never went there), and they got their first supermarket in a decade about 5 years ago now, after the previous one closed 10 years before. For a town of 30,000.

Granted, it’s a summer vacation town, so it’s like 60% rich people’s summer homes, but everybody I’ve talked to who’s lived in a summer town has described more or less the same experiences that I had growing up.

When I lived there, it was a 5-7 minute drive to the closest grocery, where you could pay tourist prices, or 20 minutes to that new supermarket. Your other option was to drive to the next town over or 30 minutes by highway in the other direction.

People from Nixon’s cabinet have straight up said that they made both illegal and started the “War on Drugs” as justification so that they could lock up opposition leaders in both the black and hippie communities.