Actually, the screenshots of the ban messages were found via a Google image search and are not me.

But yeah, Reddit has a problem with rude power mods swinging their banhammer. It’s been documented for years.

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Online dating apps. I’d:

1. Break up the monopoly that Match Group and Bumble Inc hold on the market, by working with the Federal Trade Commission and UK Competitions & Markets Authority.

2. Introduce caps on what apps can charge for Premium features. Charging the same price as several World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV subscriptions just to see likes is scummy as fuck.

3. Introduce mandatory ID verification to dissuade fake users, and have very strict regulations on how said data is processed and stored, with massive fines for data breaches that could easily have been avoided.

4. Have a correct appeals process towards account penalties/closure and outlaw the use of shadowbanning.

Some good examples:

• Fat acceptance and body positivity. Obesity is glorified (even fetishized) when it’s a woman, whereas obese men are shunned. Have you noticed that nobody in the fat acceptance movement is vouching for the 300lb basement dwellers?

• Older ladies who date younger guys are called cougars, whereas if you flip the gender roles, an older man dating a younger lady half his age is going to be labelled a pedophile, even if she’s of-age. Just look at at the anger surrounding Tobey Maguire (48 years old) dating a 20 year old actress. There are people who legitimately think men like him should be hunted for sport.

• The amount of effort you have to put into your dating profile. Women have the opposite problem of being inundated with matches even with minimal effort.

Negotiate a peace agreement between NATO, the European Union, Ukraine and Russia, with the aim of:

• Keeping control of Crimea and small parts of the Donbas in exchange for the land Ukraine gained in their Kursk incursion. This would give Russia access to a second sea port that can be used all year round, and unlike Kaliningrad, isn’t an exclave sandwiched between NATO powers.

• Negotiating the immediate release of all POWs on both sides.

• Obtaining a neutrality agreement to ensure Ukraine will not join NATO (EU or EFTA membership is fine.) Not really anything we can do about Finland or Sweden joining.

• Joint Russian and Western aid in rebuilding Ukraine.

• Lifting all economic sanctions (including those placed on Russia before 2022), travel restrictions and readmission back into the G7, Council of Europe, FIFA, IOC, etc.

I used to be hugely into World of Warcraft.

The more I think about it, what ruined the game for me wasn’t a particular update or new game feature. It was the community, or rather how much it has degraded into a hotbed of elitism, toxicity and greed.

WoW is the kind of community where you’ll be ostracized from joining groups unless you already have a high ranking. And even if you get into a group, people will abandon the group or boot you out and call you a “boosted retard” in the process over a minor error, like dying to a boss mechanic or not pressing the Bloodlust/Time Warp/Heroism button in time.

Blizzard doesn’t do anything, because Activision and Microsoft have spent years gutting out their customer support teams and installing automated systems in their place.

Not current workplace but previous ones.

• Used to work with a guy who had no filter whatsoever and would openly brag about how efficiently and quickly he’d work and multitask, and about the 9/10 models he used to shag back when he lived in South East Asia. He was fired from my workplace after a string of incidents where he growled at a female colleague, bullied several other colleagues over bad quality monitors and openly used racial slurs in the office.

• That same guy went to work for an energy company that I had other friends work at. I learned he was fired and escorted out by security within minutes after being reprimanded by a team leader. He went into a company-wide Slack channel and openly called her a “fucking bitch.”

• Two people got fired for taking dick pics in the office whilst on an evening shift and posting them on their socials.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

I used to work for a small PPI claims management company. Our accounts team had a WhatsApp group for social discussion outside of work.

All of our internal work comms were handled through Slack.

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

Disclaimer: I work in accountancy (Commercial Finance) but my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.

1. Diversify your investments. Have savings across multiple bank accounts so that the unlikely event where one bank fails doesn’t wipe out your financial wealth., and overall don’t put your eggs in one basket.

2. Currently, the best ROI/passive income you’ll get is from corporate bonds. A cursory glance at the Hargreaves Lansdown website shows me quite a few corporate bonds and gilts that have a voucher rate (% return each year) of over 8 percent. Do bear in mind that a bond is a loan instrument where the ROI is based on both the maturity date (the date you get paid back plus interest) and the overall risk of the debt.

3. Another good option is to invest in high dividend yield shares or ETFs. These can offer superior returns on investment to the interest you’d get from a savings account.

4. Avoid day trading or swing trading unless you 100% absolutely know what the fuck you’re doing. Unlike what many YouTube ‘gurus’ claim, making a living off the stock market requires a high amount of starting capital to see any kind of tangible ROI, plus sophisticated stock trading software and knowledge on how to exploit trends.

5. Same goes for penny stocks (i.e. the FTSE AIM All Share market.) You can make some rookie gains from it. Many of the companies listed on this index are oil/gas/mineral exploratory firms that are likely not going to see any kind of profit unless they strike it big, find a new oil well, lithium mine, etc and get the necessary contracts and investment to extract those resources. They’re penny stocks for a reason.

6. Side hustles. For example, I have two friends that are karaoke DJs and they get gigs where bars pay them to host nights. Bookkeeping is another one, but you really are going to have a lot of competition in that respect, and you will probably need the right qualifications to do it.

7. Screw crypto. At best cryptocurrencies are speculative assets that are scarce and expensive because the very nature of how their blockchains were designed make it take exponentially more effort to mine a new coin. At worst, they’re used to launder criminal proceeds (Monero is a good example of one where the blockchain is encrypted.) NFTs are even worse.

Still trying to find that out. A harsh lesson I learned a while ago is to not open up about your frustrations because you’re only going to make yourself a target.

I recently paid £90 for a three month Hinge X subscription and even after two weeks of near-constant use, I’ve had zero new matches. I’m starting to think that my Hinge profile may be shadowbanned and that Match Group actually scammed me.

On two online dating subreddits I posted screenshots of my profile and asked for advice. One was given a very harsh and rude response by a power tripping cuck of a moderator and was swiftly removed for reasons I don’t understand. Apparently I didn’t fully read the Great Text Wall of China he erected on the stickied thread. No use arguing with him because I feel like he’s one of those pricks who will just ban and modmail mute me. The other one got downvoted with no reply whatsoever.

Bad experiences with the Reddit community aside, I’ve been frustrated with women and how they treated me, but even I look at a lot of incel forums and their misogynist rhetoric with disgust.

The most I got involved with the manosphere was posting in r/TheRedPill a decade ago. I left that community because it was becoming increasingly toxic, and when I found out about the beliefs of some of their biggest influencers (i.e. Roosh V being an advocate for legalizing spousal rape), I felt like I wanted nothing more to do with them.

I have an anecdote about this very subject.

My ex tried to get back together with me after a 2.5 year on/off relationship where there was no intimacy and I’m pretty sure she had no intentions of ever putting out. The reason I didn’t trust her was that she straight-up ghosted me and cut me out of my life twice before, and the last time we broke up, I had the choice of either salvaging a vacation to Santorini into a five day solo trip or end up £1k out of pocket.

I was kind to her, I listened to her, I agreed to meet with her for a meal. We talked as if we didn’t have a two year absence hanging between us.

When it came time to pay the bill, I insisted we split it. Her face immediately dropped and the whole mood changed.

She blocked me afterwards.

Nothing. I theorize that the good people who looked at Spez with disgust left Reddit. I’d rather not have the power tripping cucks who made Reddit bad come here

A couple of years ago i would say that a month of tinder gold or whatever isn’t the worst idea ever. Right now it totally is. It still probably maybe helps, but it’s just not worth the money. You can swipe more and get seen more and that might still be true, but your subscription doesn’t change the fact that the women you like get thousands of likes and you just go under or are lucky as fuck

I think it’s more like the online dating space has been enshittified by one company buying out most of its competition and then jacking up prices. Hinge are owned by Match Group, who also own Match.com, Tinder, POF, Okcupid, The League and a few others. All of these are now overglorified Tinder clones that adopted the same ‘swipe left/right to match’ formula.

Also I suspect there may be some kind of shadowban on my account. Apparently this is a thing frequently mentioned on /r/SwipeHelper, /r/HingeApp and /r/OnlineDating, and the only way people have gotten past it is fully deleting their accounts, waiting a few months and then registering afresh. If that is the case and my profile is being obfuscated for whatever reason (maybe because I recently reactivated it after going dormant), then that would make Hinge X blatant false advertising.

If i were you i would shoot my shot at karaoke, and just do dating apps on the side

I mean… I would, but I don’t really approach women that I find attractive (mainly fear of rejection, or worse, or I know for a fact that they’re not single), and the only attention I seem to get is from gay guys and the occasional lady old enough to be my grandma. As I’m not into either, it can make me uncomfortable at times.

The main group chat I’m in mainly consists of middle-aged men and women. I’m also friends with two DJs who host evenings at various pubs which I often attend. Some of our regulars either already are professional singers, or have the talent to be.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a good singer and when people say I’ve got a good voice, I feel like they’re either being nice, or they’re drunk and easily impressed. I’ve definitely improved compared to when I first started doing this, to the point where I don’t quite hate the sound of my own voice anymore and there are some go-to songs that I can sing somewhat well. I really do want to take professional singing lessons and improve my voice to the point where I could be like a siren. Maybe that would have been a better investment than a dating app.

Probably the best compliment I got was when I went to a Central Bristol pub for a Christmas karaoke eve. The place was packed and about half the pub was cordoned off for a pre-booked work Christmas party. I sung Poison Arrow by ABC (one of my go-to songs) and on a part of the second verse which I legitimately belted out loudly, I audibly heard one of the guys in the work crowd go “Fuck me…” in astonishment. I left that place soon after, both because they were inundated with requests, and to get away from an Aussie lady who I met previously, she was living in a homeless shelter and was spending her eves scrounging off other guys in that place.

I have Asperger’s, so it’s a big struggle for me in general.

A few days ago, I spent £89.99 on a three month subscription to Hinge X. This is something I’ve been contemplating for a while because I’m a 32-year-old virgin, have been single for the past two years (my previous ex basically led me on and used me for my money in what I can best describe as a 2.5 year on/off intimacy-free relationship), and I thought that in desperate enough to actually pay for a dating app.

Lo and behold, after sending well over a hundred likes with written prompts which I put genuine thought into, no new matches. And I’ve been keeping a mostly intricate log of this shit because if you’re blowing the equivalent of 3 WoW subscriptions on a rejection simulator, you may as well keep tabs on whether it works.

I’m about 80% convinced that I either overwhelmingly give women the ick, or Hinge is a scam.

My social life is only a bit better. Work is quite solitary for me, and I mainly hang out with a friend group on Thursday evenings and weekends that do pub karaoke.

My ex wanted to get back together with me. We went for food, I insisted on splitting the bill. She blocked me afterwards.

Hinge also sucks, to the point where calling it ‘the dating app designed to be deleted’ is blatant false advertising.

“If you want minge, don’t use Hinge” would’ve been a more accurate slogan.

I wouldn’t say I switched because Lemmy isn’t perfect and lacks a lot of the smaller communities that Reddit still retains, but:

1. API apocalypse. I didn’t like Reddit’s upper management at the best of times, but Spez showed how much of a money-grubbing snake he was.

2. Power mods. Many of them are sociopathic basement dwelling assholes who will banhammer you for breaking hidden rule #273, and then cry ‘harassment’ to the admins when you call them out. To be honest, the only silver lining to come out of the API purge was watching iBleeedOrange and AwkwardTheTurtle finally piss of Spez enough to get the banhammer. Fuck those guys.

3. Bots. Aside from automoderator being used to effectively censor and shadowban ‘bad words’ on a lot of subs, the fact that 95% of the chat requests I get are from spam accounts and e-girls mindlessly spamming their OnlyFans to every user in existence should say it all.

Any point & click adventure game, especially old Sierra series like King’s Quest. They have so many bullshit mechanics designed to trip the player up and cause an immediate Game Over.