Oh, but you can always have a fake election. That’s how many totalitarian dictatorships work these days. Just follow the example given by North Korea and China. In a system like that, you could technically hack the numbers, but it won’t matter if the people who read the numbers have already decided what they want to see.

To be fair, human memory works that way.

I don’t remember most of the conversations I’ve had with people, like, what they said, what I said etc. All of that gets compressed, summarized and distorted in my brain. Usually that summary includes the general vibe of the person, and maybe one embarrassing thing I said.

Time flies because you had something to occupy your mind with. Had you been bored out of your mind, counting minutes, and watching the paint peel off the walls, time would have felt very slow.

However, none of this changes the fact that you’ve spent a lot of time on YT. I’m glad you came to realize that. This is the first step towards changing things.

Yeah definitely in a WW2 Germany there were plenty of people who just decided to go with the flow. I think that most people who nowadays get labeled nazis are mostly hard core racists. The number of passive supporters and collaborators is probably rather small by comparison.

Implying that there could be nazis who don’t really support white supremacist values, but are a part of the movement due to peer pressure or something?

It sounds like a name for a boy band. Sort of like backstreet boys, but more gay.

For me, it didn’t. Also tried DDG with safe search off, and I got only gay picture of two guys kissing. All the other photos were from demonstrations etc. Never tried this search before, so I don’t know what it was like in the past. Was it like 100% gay porn?

My guess is, industrial automation also played a role. Fewer people were needed to get to the same amount of production.

Hope this cheers you up 💐

Not much else I can offer right now.

Well, besides some more flowers 🌺🌷🌻🌸🌹🌼🪷🪻

In 2020, people made similar jokes abbot that year being weird, insane or wrong. I guess that was just a warm up.

If EU did that, it would probably result in equal retaliation. It would mean that all patents and IP would become local. Stealing these things from others continents would become fair game, which would make patents and IP almost completely pointless.

Could we please try that out? Sounds like an interesting scenario.

How’s Reddit these days? Haven’t been there in a long time.

“Fungal zombie spiders“ check almost all the boxes. Just add some demonic black magic, and you’re all set.

My guess is, YT is experimenting with different ways to discourage ad blocking. We’ve seen similar tactics before. During an experiment like this, a new feature is rolled out to only some users. If it works out as expected, it becomes a standard feature for the entire platform and every user.

I may just be one of the lucky few Guinea pigs.

This is my first reply on Lemmy that isn’t a post.

Well, at least as far as today is concerned. Anyway, we’re both off to a good start.

Thanks! I am aware that it might end up being more than just a brief experiment. What if I get used to not having any of the annoyances that are common on YT. What if going back will truly open my eyes and I’ll see how bad it really is. If that happens, I may end up cutting back a lot more than I ever anticipated.

Quitting Reddit and switching to Lemmy wasn’t really a problem at all. There was only one really interesting subreddit, but it turned into a complete dumpster fire just before the APIcalypse, so even that one wasn’t holding me back. Most subreddits worth following have already been sufficiently replicated on Lemmy, so I don’t really miss Reddit at all. Besides, I also like the vibe of a smaller place.

Thanks. I’ll try that out when I get back home and the challenge ends.

I did that too for a very long time. Recently, something changed on YT, and now there’s an aggressive ad-blocker-blocker. All videos run for about 60 seconds and then they just stop. It applies to all mobile browsers and all ad-blockers I’ve ever tried. Still not a major issue, since real computers are unaffected.

LOL, yeah lots of advice, but they’re all appreciated anyway. After about two weeks, I’ll have to try them out.

My YT use has been highly variable. If I’m doing something else, I can have YT videos in the background. Usually something where the actual video component is more or less irrelevant while the audio part actually matters. When I’m listening to videos like that, I can easily go through several hours every day. If I actually use my eyeballs for watching the videos, I could probably watch about 1-2 hours every day. Who knows really. These estimates could be be way off.

I’m looking forward to finding new videos I had never even heard of. If you spend lots of time on YT and ignore all the other platforms, you could miss some really cool stuff. So far, the local TV channels have delivered 99% trash and 1% meh videos. I did watch one documentary on Mark Zuckerberg, and that was mostly tolerable. Way too sensational to be taken completely seriously, which would have deserved a downvote and an negative comment had it been on YT.

Actually, watching videos has become a mildly boring thing again, which means I’ll probably be doing non-video related things too. Probably a good thing in the long run. Also looking forward to getting bored and occupying my time with more useful stuff.

Amazing. Never even thought of trying that. Well, in about two weeks I’ll find out.

Great! I’ll try that out when I get back home.