Both. It’s actually funny. Someone posted that image of alternatives to things like Reddit and Whatsapp and Google, etc, and it had Lemmy on it. I was at the point where I was getting sick of Reddit and had one account banned already. I joined Lemmy, and a few days later my other account got banned for up voting a comment that was just the gif of Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. I had already decided I liked Lemmy more at that point, so whatever. The one thing that sucks is that I had my own little sub with a couple thousand members where I posted my writing, and people seemed to like it. I enjoyed sharing my stories with all those weirdos, and now I can’t.

It really depends on where I am. Winter in a city sucks. Winter in the mountains is awesome. Summer in Phoenix sucks. Summer on the Albanian Riviera is awesome.

Agreed.

Florida beaches have mosquitos too. And sand fleas. It doesn’t seem to stop women from wearing bikinis.

Goddam what an obvious fucking name. If you wrote a procedural cop show where the child traffickers ran a site called KidFlix, you’d be laughed out of the building for being so on-the-nose.

There is no law that says women can’t wear bikinis in the forest.

up to $1 billion

It will be much less than a billion.

If a fine can be paid without causing financial strain, then it just becomes part of the cost of doing business.

If you want results, fine him $100 billion.

‘Death in the City of Light’ by David King. It’s a true crime story about a serial killer in Nazi occupied Paris. Dude would trick Jews into thinking he was smuggling them out, then kill them. Truly diabolical.

“Hey, if some caked-up mud pie got on your face, would you just wipe it off with a dry piece of tissue and call it a day? No! You’d wash it. So why is your butthole any different?” - Detective Allen Gamble, ‘The Other Guys’

This is the kind I have, and I will never not have one again.

You are working under the assumption that these “pedo hunter” groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.

Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:

Innocent dad tortured and killed by group of chainsaw-wielding ‘paedophile hunters’
A gang of vigilantes tortured and killed a father of eight as they tried to force a confession out of him for crimes he didn’t commit.
The case of the brutal torture and murder of Bradley ‘BJ’ Lyons, which shook Australia in December 2018, is once again under the spotlight as a jury has brought to justice the gang leader, Albert Thorn, and some of his mates who helped during the hideous attack.
Mr Lyons was referred to the gang by his wife Jana Hooper, who had falsely accused her husband of sexually assaulting two of her teenage daughters.
Thorn, the leader of the vigilante gang with a specific hatred for paedophiles, was found guilty this month of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Mr Lyons. Later this year, he will face a pre-sentence hearing.
Two other members of the gang who took part in the ordeal, Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, were found not guilty last week of the killing of the father.

And I can’t tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here’s one example, and here’s another, here’s one more, and here’s yet another.

These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process.

Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.

Sorry, Captain Ron. Gorillas are native to equatorial Africa.

Yeah they’ve come out and said recently that even interacting with any content or comments that could so much as be perceived as being related to Luigi Mangione is a violation of Reddits policies against promoting violence. People have been getting warnings that their accounts are in danger of being permanently banned just for visiting certain subs. Not for posting. Not for commenting. Not even for voting. Just for visiting.

I had two main accounts. My oldest account got permabanned for a joke about Nick Fuentes. After his address got doxxed and he pepper sprayed a woman who rang his doorbell back in December of last year, I said “hey as an incel he should be happy that the ladies know where he lives now so they can share a cocktail with him”, and I added a cartoon gif of a Molotov. It was obviously a joke, but they said it was “promoting/glorifying violence”. I ate the bullet on that one because they were technically right, even if they were a bunch of humorless twats.

My other account got banned about a month ago when I up voted a comment that was just a picture of Luigi Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. Again for “promoting/glorifying violence”.

Elon Musk is a weak little crybaby and Steve Huffman is a pathetic coward.

This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.

Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.

For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,

The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.

Even more interesting is that her mother (VP Vance’s mother-in-law) was instrumental in advancing DEI at the university she works at (UCSD).

I would pay a lot of money to see a journalist ask JD Vance if he approves of his mother-in-law’s work in promoting DEI. Just knowing how awkward that next family gathering would be would make it worth it.

We’ve become so complacent. A unified community would have intervened, violently if necessary. I would love nothing more than to see a crowd of folks popping out of houses and cars and surrounding these terrorists at gunpoint.