I read a fiction in high school about like the afterlife, and it mentioned the best English playwright wasn’t Shakespeare. It was some nobody who only showed his writing to his neighbor, but the neighbor was an asshole and told him it was trash. Don’t remember anything else about it but that stuck with me.

That’s good but there’s a lot of room between creepy and effective

I never paid for it out of stubbornness.

Are you writing good messages to potential matches?

What part of the world are you in?

In my experience, tinder is pretty bad. I don’t use facebook so I can’t vouch for that one, but I assume it’s also bad. I never got a single match on Bumble.

Hinge, I got pretty good results on. Even though they’re all owned by the same Match Group, hinge seemed to work better. I could get about a date a week on hinge, as an average guy.

I think it worked better for me because you can send a note when you see someone you like, so if you can write complete sentences you’re already a cut above the average guy.

The CEO of my old company, who is middle eastern, said that “the republicans will unlock the economy”. He seemed sincere in his belief that it would be better for everyone.

I kind of hope ICE disappears him because the irony would be weapons grade, but I’m not sure even that would get him to admit that maybe trump and musk aren’t great.

Sometimes they wear a hat or armband for easy recognition.

I’ve been buying mostly mostly from Bandcamp. It’s worked out well. I have a big library, and the people making music got paid.

I did see a job post for a role that was just reviewing AI code. This is all terrible

Tell us more about your current usage. What are you doing and where is it failing?

Some of the other posts already hit the highlights. Have a variety of well lit photos. Your profile should be short, but with some unique-ish hooks for people to talk about (eg: “reading ‘such and such’ for my book club!” - several things for someone to ask about there).

When you do match with people, don’t send generic messages. Don’t just send “hey”. Go read https://nohello.net/en/ for a post about that in other contexts.

After you’ve had one or two successful exchanges, clear any deal breakers you might have (eg: “really enjoying this conversation but wanted to make sure you saw on my profile I have a toddler. Are you okay with that?”). If that succeeds, ask them out.

Don’t provide too many choices. People get overwhelmed easily. “I’d love to talk more about (whatever we we were talking about). Do you want to go on a date? I like (local bar), but (other bar) in your neighborhood looks fun, too!”. Two choices. They’ll probably pick one.

More specific advice may be available if you tell us more about your specific experience

I think mastodon does that but not twitter

Most things with conservatives are projection.

Ehh I think celebrities is probably an example of why user-first is bad. They’re given too much weight. If Chris Evans wants to talk about the MCU he can post in an MCU forum. If he wants to go off about Israel, well he’s not an authority and we shouldn’t facilitate that halo effect of “well he’s famous so he’s probably smart”.

A band can have their own website and participate in communities for their genre/location/etc.

I’m painting with a broad brush but I think organizing by content rather than user is better in most cases.

Conservatives are wrong about pretty much everything. I don’t know of a single problem where they have a sensible policy. They’re worse than toddlers.

I’m just waiting for someone to Mario Party their boss after a return to office mandate. It would be deserved.

I had a recruiter (in the US) message me about some jobs. They’re all on-site 6 (six!) days a week. That should be a crime and everyone involved in that banished from the land. This wasn’t climate change work or anything important. It was like ai fintech nonsense.

On Twitter and Instagram you follow users. That’s user-first. You go there to see what so-and-so is saying, regardless of if it’s about cats or politics or their dinner plans.

Reddit, lemmy, and traditional web forums are content first. You go to the video games subforum to talk about games, and the sports forum to talk about sports. You often don’t even read the user names. You’re there for the content.

User-first stuff tends to incentivize bad behavior, I think. It becomes more about who’s saying it than what’s said.

I think content-first social media like forums is far less bad than user-first like Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Usually people talk about the pre tax cost.

I have a tinfoil hat theory that the taxes are kept like that to give people a recurring, low grade, anti-tax sentiment. There are a lot of crazy idiots that don’t want government to exist here, so by making people feel bad about paying taxes (instead of obscuring that by baking it into the listed price) they can win sympathy.

Cool. I’ve been off Spotify for years. Buying music from Bandcamp and similar has worked out. (Though now that I’m unemployed I’m not spending any money, but like I always say if capital wants me to spend money they have to pay me some first)

I wonder if it would change anything if instead of a quiz you just like handed people a printout of like a summary of how government works from Wikipedia. Like, maybe convert some people who think the president makes laws.

It would probably still be corrupted by conservatives, sadly.

Social media was always kind of garbage, and the modern algorithmically sorted stuff is worse.

I’d rather just text my friends