Oh man… Didn’t know that, but now that you wrote that - I vaguely remember reading something, but didn’t think it might be serious at the time. Sincerely hope not.
2 Likes
5 Likes
Well done boys. Good process.
Fucking corruption…
I never took coke.
Well maybe once.
Or twice
5 Likes
Not sure where else to put this, but regarding the latest spam post, it’s the same domain as the previous few spam posts by different users.
@ISMF Is there a way in the forum software to ban particular domains from being linked to? If so, that might at least mitigate the issue somewhat.
2 Likes
Wow, this thread is buzzing. And you guys don’t have time to post in Flags thread 
.
4 Likes
Dear @ISMF ,
Please add a “yawn” emoji (or similar) to our options.
It would enable users to express their thoughts on my posts quickly and efficiently.
Thanks.
10 Likes
I can think of other posters that make me roll my eyes far more (or yawn).
Then again, I suppose I am in your absolutely demented fan club. Me and the odd other looney. The “Special Ones”.
We like it here
3 Likes
Your payment bounced this month.
3 Likes
But my ward promised that you would get it ! 
2 Likes
Hi Mods,
What about merging the US political threads? I think we’ve got the Ding Dong one, the election one, the Walking Eagle and Trump’s Court Cases, any I’ve forgotten?
Wouldn’t that be a good idea now the election is over?
3 Likes
I think the election one has actually done well in sticking to election post-mortems now rather than anything else. I haven’t been in either of the other two from lack of interest.
I feel that the election one will probably die a natural death in a bit, so probably less necessary to do anything about that. Again, not sure what the other two cover, but the letter is probably going to wind down now too, no?
1 Like
Merge the two threads. Close the election one.
So, one US politics and one Trump?
I don’t think it needs to be closed, unless people want election post-mortems to be cluttering up the general thread. I think things like Cabinet appointees belong in the general thread, but I’m not sure if it’s ideal to move the election talk over.
It’s also in line with the general laissez-faire moderation approach anyway.
1 Like
Probably underappreciated at times, but think we all know how lucky we are with the way our forum is managed…
‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year
Story by Tory Shepherd
The Macquarie Dictionary said ‘enshittification’ captured what many felt was happening to their lives.
“We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit,” author Cory Doctorow said earlier this year.
In 2022, Doctorow coined the word “enshittification”, which has just been crowned Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year. The dictionary defined the word as follows.
“The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”
Social media users, if they don’t know the word, will viscerally understand the concept, the way trolls and extremists and bullshitters and the criminally vacuous have overtaken the platforms.
Think Twitter, a once useful and often fun microblogging site twisted by a tech bro into X, a post-truth swamp.
Or Facebook, where you’re now more likely to be presented with crocheted arseless chaps from Shein than a humblebrag from a dear friend.
Or Instagram, where cute dog videos once reigned. Now, yet another unfathomable algorithm serves up a diet of tradwives, gym bros and uwu girls.
The dictionary’s committee described enshittification as “a very basic Anglo-Saxon term wrapped in affixes which elevate it to being almost formal; almost respectable”.
Without those affixes – if one were to say, for example, merely that X has got a bit shit – the deliberate degradation of the platform is erased.
With those affixes, the impression is conveyed of the platform owners tampering with their own product until the bad stuff, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.
Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.
“First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote.
“It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying.”
The Macquarie Dictionary committee’s honourable mentions went to “right to disconnect”, and “rawdogging”.
But enshittification not only won their vote, it took out the people’s choice award.
“This word captures what many of us feel is happening to the world and to so many aspects of our lives at the moment,” the committee said.
Doctorow himself is surprisingly optimistic about where this could all end up.
Action on competition to prevent market dominance, regulation on things such as digital privacy, more power for users to decide how they use platforms, and tackling the exploitation of workers could reverse the process, he wrote, because “everyone has a stake in disenshittification”.
Big tech can’t be fixed, he argues, but maybe it can be destroyed.
He adds a fourth stage to the tech platforms’ scatological journey from being good to users, to abusing them in favour of their customers, to abusing their customers to serve themselves.
“Then they die,” he wrote.
4 Likes
Both in one thread.
I think a single thread covering a wide spectrum, or a number of threads divided by their own titles, but still under the umbrella canopy of same theme, both have their own good merits…
However, feel these come into play more, whether you are a daily poster/visitor, or a sporadic poster/viewer.
Hitting the one thread that encapsulates all divisions, is easy enough to navigate daily, sporadic, it becomes a chore and the thread is picked up by the last few posts only… a lot of the content is missed because of this.
Hitting the numerous (divided) threads daily, is again easy enough apart from a bit of searching… sporadic, again, likely to have less posts (total), and easy enough to cherry pick subject matter choice…
IMO for what it is worth on the matter, and being a daily visitor most times, either way works for me… but can also see the sense in streamlining the threads to prevent clutter…
1 Like
My thinking was not to merge, but just let the conversation wind down in 3 of them and funnel it back into the US Politics thread.
The Walking Eagle thread is about Trump’s bullshit. That is now once again mainstream US politics.
As we have seen over the past couple of days, all of the cases against Trump are being shut down. As that process comes to an end, we can lock that thread.
The US election thread is not quite done, but it is also winding down. Some recounts ongoing, still some analyses hitting the press. Matters like the emerging transition fiasco are really for the main thread.
So yes, I think we will be locking 3 of them in the next week or so.
6 Likes
Ok, sounds good.