Sure, I understand the arguments. I’ve had this debate plenty of times, virtually and in person. I’ve even lost a couple of friends over it. Some people see things my way, some people see things yours. Your way is in the ascendant, it’s undeniable. But you must know that there are other ways of interpreting the same facts, that people - yes, even good people - have different values to you. For me you are selling a creed of victimhood, of fragility, of hypersensitivity, in which people are incentivized to find offense, where everyone comes out a loser. Again: you seem to be a decent well-meaning person, you’re not throwing insults around like others here, and I hear the points you make. I’m sure you’re intelligent and I completely respect you. But I fundamentally disagree with your analysis. Good night.

This, again, is my point. A puerile ethnic slur (I didn’t read it closely but I think that’s what it was) by provocateur spammers is cause for a big song and dance of solemn apologies and ostentatious contrition. But your personal insult lobbed against me is apparently fine. This is the modern value system that I don’t understand and don’t want to be part of, personally.

But you know nothing about how privileged or not I am.

At heart, liberalism just means putting the individual before the collective. So there can be lots of varieties of liberal. But a debate on terminology will quickly get quite boring. From what I can tell, this community is hardly even liberal, let alone neoliberal. That was my point. It seems that people are seeing in others the ideologies they want to see.

This anecdote only reinforces my point.

Completely! Didn’t know it existed either till I checked. Much more logical than GMT.

We will agree to disagree. Despite your obviously good intentions I think you, and they, are making this problem worse. By validating it and propagating the (quite novel) idea that somehow we can be almost physically harmed by mere words and must therefore be on constant guard against them. I respect people’s right to think this way but personally I don’t want any part of it.

We do.

This was exactly my point! “Neoliberal.”

A complete non-issue. This was not “hate”, it was spam. I received the offending email this morning, deleted it and moved on. The whole episode took up two seconds of my life and was forgotten within another two. Except for the waste of another 4 seconds dealing with Codeberg’s inevitable grovelling apology a few hours later.

Stop giving in to provocation! This kind of histrionic response is exactly what the spammers were looking for. It doesn’t matter what rude words were in this email. It was spam.

Yes of course I know that, I used it for years for that exact reason. Re-read my comment more slowly.

A geographically based default is a great idea.

What “obvious” political stance might that be?

To me, it’s “somewhere on the progressive side of the median” but I’m almost expecting you to say “fascist” or something, given the extent of America’s polarization.

Another thing: in popular communities the comments are coming from all over, so without keeping a mental tally of everyone’s usernames I find it’s getting quite hard to pin down any particular instance’s biases.

But it’s not serious and evokes images of a spotty teenager in a basement.

While this is of course true (and I too have professional experience in this field), my own experience is the opposite. The UX and defaults here are generally better than on, for example, the R-site.

Especially if they’re dark (literally midnight) blue, which is what my screen currently looks like!

I’m going with my feelings on this one. To me, an untinted white screen is like a standard LED lamp - it screams “Morning! Time to get up!” (which is why my lamp is covered with orange cellophane). A (heavily) red-tinted white screen feels like sunset. And my dark screen feels like, well, midnight. I sleep like a baby so in my case the problem’s solved.

Sure, images and video are the exception. But I figure that a redshift app can only help so much when a video suddenly cuts to a picture of a white sky. That’s really another problem: choppy contrast. Only solution is to increase ambient light behind the screen.

So I basically use only terminal apps (black!), a couple of messengers (dark mode) and Firefox. And yes, the problem is the latter. For a couple of years I used the Dark Reader extension. It works, pages look great - BUT! nothing would solve the occasional white flash problem. Last time I checked, it’s basically unsolvable by addons. Then I discovered the simple solution: Preferences > Manage colors and override the default colors! It works and it’s native! Pages sometimes look a bit ugly but always readable and zero white flash. This is a pro tip that hardly anyone talks about, you saw it here.

Use dark mode at night and you won’t need Redshift any more. It’s only relevant for white screens.

PS: This IS in fact the optimal solution - if not for you then for others. I used Redshift for years, suffering its periodic breakages, babysitting the timezone issue, and it was worth it, because a retina-searing reddish-white screen is better than a retina-searing whitish-white screen. But a dark screen is SO much better for my eyes than either of those. I can’t believe I waited so many years to do that and I’m never going back.

Excellent question! I too lurked on the R-site for a decade and hardly ever contributed - maybe 100 comments in total. Twitter: same story, more or less. Zuckerbook: slightly more in its heyday, but still not much. And I was on the internet in the 90s so I’ve used all kinds of forums and even IRC. But for better or for worse I’ve probably posted more here in the last 18 months than on all other social media combined in the last 25 years.

Some theories:

• Less competition! Having less contributors on a forum is worse for or passive consumers (i.e. lurkers) but it’s better for the active participants. On a really busy forum, if you don’t post your topic at exactly the right time of day, or your comment within a few minutes of the topic dropping, then effectively it will be invisible. Completely demotivating. Here the pace is much more human.
• No ads! This one is huge. I hate hate hate having to suffer ads. Here we’re free of them.
• I like the interface! Seems a silly reason but it’s true. The guys who designed this thing did a surprisingly good job. The UX and design are both really good.