pretty sure because there’s a bunch of amateur porn communities, and people generally stop posting pics of themselves if they get downvoted.

so, since downvotes literally kill those communities, they added the ability to not display downvotes.

my only gripe with this is, that it’s apparently an instance-wide toggle, which is a bit inconvenient…

it’s not a question of age; it’s a question of origin.

that doesn’t change.

probably cause it’s an austrian invention? which makes it austrian by defintion?

it’s common in germany, but not native…that’s like saying pizza is a german dish…

FYI: it really shouldn’t…

bit late to the party, but:

it’s not that reports out of a warzone shouldn’t be questioned… it’s the way the user up top chose to frame their skepticism.

it reeks of alt-right divide-and-conquer tactics…

there’s plenty of people with poor articulation, but this is not that. this is on purpose.

there’s a certain way the far-right tends to speak that’s very distinct, once you start noticing it. and tankies, certainly not by accident, use a lot of the same language.

may i offer you a cactus in these trying times?

does “novyi svit” translate to “new world”?

thank you very much!

also: ha! i’m doing the same thing! currently at book 2 ;)

you probably already know this, but for anyone else:

The Cosmere Series (of which the Mistborn Saga is a part of) does heavily feature Sci-Fi as well as post-apocalypse themes alongside (mostly) fantasy (Sci-Fi: the sunlit man, tress of the emerald sea; post-apocalypse: Stormlight Archives, Yumi And The Nightmare Painter), which made me think OP was talking about this series specifically.

In some of the other books it is mentioned that all of the powers originally came from a being called Adonalsium (basically God). what fuels all these manifestations of powers is called Investiture. Each Shard of Adonalsium manifests different Powers, Allomancy is just one of them.

so it’s a unique mix of classic fantasy, sci-fi, and post-apocalypse genres in a single gigantic saga, in which the sci-fi and post-apocalypse themes are intentionally kept vague and in the background.

highly recommend all of the other books!

they are great in their own right, and also give a LOT of extra bits and peaces of the overall lore!

what’s best about the series is, as you’ve already explained, the “hard-fantasy/sci-fi” approach to powers: all power requires some kind of source, everything comes from something.

best to do the Stormlight Archives after Mistborn (either order works), then the rest; order doesn’t really matter, although i recommend Tress of the emerald Sea and The Sunlit Man to be read last, because they contain a lot of sci-fi lore, which is best enjoyed last (imho)

also: Stormlight Archives Book 5 is coming relatively soon, i think it’s december?

austria is gonna burn before we give up falco, lol

hazbin hotel is an adult cartoon musical tv show about the daughter of satan trying to establish a hotel with the aim of rehabilitating the souls of sinners so they can enter heaven.

it’s an excellent show! a lot of fun with a bunch of famous actors doing the voices/songs ;)

eh, discord started catering to people using it as a forum, so they are actively making the problem worse…

they introduced pseudo-forum channels where messages are grouped into threads, like a traditional forum…of course not indexed, and with their signature terrible “last message first” sorting, and terrible UI that doesn’t do any of the things a forum is supposed to be good at…

so yeah, discord absolutely belongs to the other awful internet diseases you mentioned, it’s not an exception…

you shouldn’t use it because it’s a black hole for information.

anything out on discord should be treated as deleted, because it inevitably will disappear one day, with no hope of recovery.

when a public forum is indexable that means that projects like archive.org and wayback machine can save the contents, even if the site itself disappears some day, meaning the information is preserved for future generations.

communities use discord way more than they should, and all that those communities create is effectively non-existent. most of it is already as good as gone.

think of modding communities, which are by far the worst offenders when it comes to discord: not only are way too many mods hosted on discord itself, way too many communities are only sort-of indexed through discord, meaning the links to where the actual files are hosted can only be accessed through discord. so even if the files survive the inevitable purge, they are lost anyways.

so many communities have already just… disappeared without warning, because the server got nuked for one reason or another, often completely idiotic reasons. and all the knowledge stored on those is gone. forever.

that’s why discord is insanely bad for the internet as a whole, but for data driven communities especially.

it would be fine if people only used it for what it was meant to do, chatting, but misusing it as a forum is where the problems begin.

it gets even worse when people insist on using it as a support channel: questions and answers are constantly buried and impossible to find, search engines can’t show you the contents, so you don’t even know that your problems even have answers, questions are constantly repeated over and over, even though they’ve already been answered, and on and on the list goes.

discord is bad for communities. it is destructive. it is insanely divisive!

there’s a trend for every single creator/author to have their own server!

so instead of having one big community, where users can easily find information and content, and creators can easily exchange ideas and concepts, you get tiny splinters that either don’t talk to each other, or don’t even realize they exist at all!

and all of that is completely hidden behind opaque “search” and “discover” algorithms that only serve what discord itself thinks the user wants.

it’s top to bottom terrible for communities, but people flock to it anyways, for all the wrong reasons.

discord is the bane of online social groups!

and the worst part is: you are absolutely FORCED to use it, because damn near everyone uses it! and there’s no alternative way to access it, you HAVE to use it! that alone should set off alarm bells!

that’s a ridiculous concept from start to finish:

“you stood near a cop when he killed someone, so now you’re a murderer even though you objectively didn’t kill anyone and we know who the actual killer is”

this is completely insane.

it’s not “a different animal”, it’s insanity.

just insanity.

if it isn’t murder, then why is the kid charged with it?? that makes the entire thing even MORE ridiculous!

you forgot the necrophilia in Under The Dome! ;)

not true; that’s a developer thing, not steam itself.

steam offers it as an option, it doesn’t force developers to use it.

plenty of games bought on steam can be run entirely without steam.

“practical” and “pragmatic” implies proof, soooo…source?

generally a very good point, however i feel it’s important to point out some important context here:

the pedophiles you’re talking about in your comment are almost always members of tight knit communities that share CSAM, organize distribution, share sources, and most importantly, indulge their fantasies/desires together.

i would think that the correlation that leads to molestation is not primarily driven by the CSAM itself, but rather the community around it.

we clearly see this happening in other similarly structured and similarly isolated communities: nazis, incels, mass shooters, religious fanatics, etc.

the common factor in radicalization and development of extreme views in all these groups is always isolation and the community they end up joining as a result, forming a sort of parallel society with it’s own rules and ideals, separate from general society. over time people in these parallel societies get used to seeing the world in a way that aligns with the ideals of the group.

nazis start to see anyone not part of their group as enemies, incels start to see “females” instead of women, religious fanatics see sinners…and pedophiles see objects that exist solely for their gratification instead of kids…

I don’t see why molesters should be any different in this aspect, and would therefore argue that it’s the communal aspect that should probably be the target of the law, i.e.: distribution and organization (forums, chatrooms, etc.)

the harder it is for them to organize, the less likely these groups are to produce predators that cause real harm!

if on top of that there is a legally available outlet where they can indulge themselves in a safe manner without harming anyone, I’d expect rates of child molestation to drop significantly, because, again, there’s precedence from similar situations (overdoses in drug addicts, for example)

i think it is a potentially fatal mistake to think of pedophiles as “special” cases, rather than just another group of outcasts, because in nearly all cases of such pariahs the solutions that prove to work best in the real world are the ones that make these groups feel less like outcasts, which limits avenues of radicalization.

i thought these parallels are something worth pointing out.

aber “DU”, da geht noch was!