I'm still on my trial period but I think I'm going to pay when it runs out, I've been really happy with it so far. I think it's saved me a good chunk of time at work I would have wasted digging through Google SEO crap so it feels like it's worth spending a few bucks on.

Can you share your argument with Stross? I've always enjoyed his writing.

That was quite the rabbit hole, I had no idea a global cabal of neonazi "Satanists" was spawned in Shropshire back in the late 1960s. I poked around Amazon and you can still currently purchase their books, which look completely ridiculous but have mostly positive reviews.

MSG isn't "bad" at all, it's just another ingredient really. The campaign against it was entirely bullshit that was driven by racism against Asian people because it's a common ingredient in Chinese food.

That may be what happened but Reddit management definitely knew about what was going on because they created a special "Pimp Daddy" trophy just for that one mod as a kind of public reward for his work. Reddit was complicit to some degree.

I was a mod on a big sub for awhile many years ago and it was a literal horrowshow every day. It was an endless torrent that never stopped, the mod team basically ran 24/7. It was guaranteed you would see at least some fucked up bigotry every time you looked in the queue because the sub was a regular target for those people. It was really just a nonstop firehose of all the worst the internet has to offer, one reported Reddit comment at a time, forever. The tools I had access to were janky browser plugins and things like that, stuff previous mods had built themselves years before because the actual Reddit tools were inadequate. The sub involved so much moderation the team was very organized and you had to put in a certain amount of work every month, it really was like a part time job where you get to set your own hours but can be "fired" for slacking. You often feel emotionally drained afterwards just like a real job, and you start feeling anxious when you "clock in" because fuck not this same miserable bullshit yet again, just like a real job. I have so much respect for quality moderation, it is not at all easy in any way.

He does seem very defensive, and aggressive. Reddit is all his data he owns so we're the leaches who just don't want to pay, he has been so magnanimous to allow us to waste his money all these years with our stupid API calls. It's amazing they let this guy be the CEO, it's like he wants to piss people off at this point. Reddit IPO has broken his brain. I was ready to start paying Reddit to keep using RiF when this started, now here I am free from that shitshow forever and ready to spend that money supporting the growth of Lemmy. Incredible leadership from spez.

It is such a bizarre and creepy industry, everything about it is gross. I support you for world dictator!

It's definitely up there as one of the absolute worst AMAs of all time.

You can tell Reddit PR folks got their word in on this article.

Until recently I think lemmygrad was the most active instance and it's full of communists, including obnoxious tankies who scared off new users and contributed the reputation.

I'm new so this may not be completely accurate but my understanding is that individual users can't block other instances entirely, that can only be done at the instance level by the instance admins. Individual users can only block other individual users or communities.