Tretiak

Trust me, there will come a day when commercialism finds itself upon Lemmy and makes a tempting pitch to the website administrators, the same as has happened to Reddit. I'm very conservative with the causes I donate to and I understand that people want the freedom, and breath of fresh air that that nostalgia provides. But too many users aren't willing to pay for it, or expect some other user will front the money. I have no problem regularly donating to fund the upkeep of the site to keep things within the median of expectations, but I hope others would be willing to as well.

... pornographic mobile game ads

... What? Jesus.

... and forward thinking.

Let me go ahead and stop you right there.

Only a surprise to the people foolish enough to buy the device in the first place.

100% with that. In fact I was listening to the Darknet Diaries ('highly' recommend their show/podcast if you're a techie) episode with Samy Kamkar from back in the day (1, 2), and he echoed the same sentiment. A lot of his exploits he's done, he's tried taking to the vendors only to have them make legal threats against him for his actions. So the next best thing was... you guessed it... essentially doing a controlled release of it into the wild.

I remember I used to fuck with and annoy the shit out of all the users on r/politics. I would make sure I commented something like "Biden 2020 WOO!," and see my comment escalated all the way to the top of the thread. Then I'd wait about 24/48 hours, go back and edit it to something, like praising Donald Trump, and the comments I got back where hilarious. People demanding I get banned for it. People asking how my comment got to the top of the page. People claiming I was a bot account that paid for upvotes. It was hilarious to watch in real time.

I randomly got banned there just the other day for using a VPN connection to log into my account. Now the last one I had has become permanently suspended.

Can we please get a badge/flair added for this?

Wish I could've had the same honors bestowed upon me, but I've already had multiple accounts banned there for going against the grain of the hivemind.

I almost don't want them to succeed, so the exodus can continue to happen. Then again, I don't want this place overrun with their overwhelmingly idiot userbase.

Can't spell goat without the "oat."

What's even more upsetting are the people who can write comments like yours, without irony. Why is it anybody who points out the causes of the conflict, gets decried as a Russian asset? Nobody here has explicitly said what Russia did wasn't illegal or immoral, because it is. But what people like you don't understand, is that events like this don't happen in isolation. These moves are highly interactive and very dangerous. You can't ignorantly just point to one in a vacuum and say, "'that's' imperialism!"

Were people like you making similar protestations when the west backed the Maidan coup, which overthrew the democratically elected President (Yanukovych) in Ukraine? Were you criticizing the US for encouraging Ukraine to ignore and break its peace treaty that was agreed to with Russia, under the Minsk Accords? Were you criticizing the west for it's media blackout of the continued shelling and massacring of Russian speaking citizens in eastern Ukraine (i.e. Donbass and Luhansk), while they were crying for Russia's help? Of course you weren't. You have no idea what I'm even talking about. Because you for, this conflict began with Russia moving into Ukraine. You only know what the MSM propaganda in the west tells you you're supposed to believe. I fully understand Putin when he called the US "The Empire of Lies." And people like you ignorantly fall for the bait. Every single time. Without fail. You're a successful product of the American ideological and propaganda system. You haven't seen past the dense fog of propaganda that's deployed to keep you ignorant. It's why the hidden is deliberately and intentionally hidden from you and they don't want you finding out about it.

Why does hating western hypocrisy on the home front make me a Putin shill? Why is politics a 'team sport' that I'm betraying, because I call out the warmongering of my own team?

Yeah, I’m aware of its history and biases.

Nothing should be really uncritically and without a skeptical eye. But to suggest it isn’t informative despite its ideological leanings, when you can directly compare it to examples that are ideological trash, is stretching things. There’s no such thing as an unbiased point of view, but there are less prejudiced points of view.