Very positively as a concept, and negatively as an industry.

Porn shapes my sexual identity more than I’d like, but that’s just the way it is for most people in my life situation. I think I’m a more discerning consumer of most forms of media than others. I hear people talk, in an often-justifiable panic, about how music streaming is changing music listening habits and therefore music. And it’s perplexing to me that people seriously have streaming algorithms as their primary way of music discovery, that they don’t prefer something more manual. I feel the same way about porn, it’s a surprise to me that so many people just accept whatever’s on PornHub’s front page. To that end, when people say their sexual identity is “shaped by porn” I think people are generally thinking they’re into really brutal maledom, raceplay, and incest play. The former two are absolute turnoffs to me, and the latter is something I’m okay with when it’s a part of something I’d actively look for. But I’m like…would I know I’m a bisexual without porn? Would I know I wanted to be a femboy which is why I lost a lot of weight? And I know I wouldn’t know that I’m into something like gentle femdom or lactation.

I basically only seek out amateur stuff. In a vacuum I like the idea of paying for porn, but I worry about where it’s really going; in theory OnlyFans is better but I know that isn’t completely clean either, neither are porn companies claiming to be ethical. And I dislike that OF models sometimes exacerbate the parasocial nature of it for profit. If I buy porn, I don’t want the vendor pretending it’s anything more than me buying a good, but that sells.

I largely believe the current panic about porn addiction to be overblown, and an attempt to exploit male insecurity to get them to vote right wing. I don’t outright believe it doesn’t exist, but it’s in the same sense video games are addictive, not the way crack cocaine is addictive. It’s known that the people who report porn addiction often don’t actually watch an above average amount, they just have the most shame. I do, however, believe you should be able to masturbate without porn, and that relying on porn over an active sexual imagination is a problem.

I could at least see the logic behind a ban on paid, live-action porn, but anti-porn groups generally include hentai in their bans, so I’m certain it’s the same logic as violent video game bans.

all they can about is riling people up emotionally.

Damn, this shit goes all the way to the places where people signed up for boring policy work and can make a difference?

I get why the whole “colorblind” thing ended, but what we replaced it with is even worse.

Lemmy is a website full of people who are left-populists on paper, but hate the population.

The average Lemmite should never be in charge of anything that their IT degree doesn’t qualify them for.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people who use “thugs and gangsters” as a euphemism for “black people”

I’d bet money the average working class black American hates actual thugs and gangsters more than most though.

Gold

I’m sorry, the notion that the Fediverse has diversity of thought is actually laughable. Not just about politics.

A very specific type of person goes here.

do you think this post is serious

Comic Neue

60% of Lemmy users are that teenager but they’re 35 and still haven’t grown out of it.

So many people here don’t even accept historian consensus that Jesus was a real person

Green Day - Fire, Ready Aim

Monolingual, and yes I envy multilingual people. It’s simply better.

I flunked Spanish and French so I think I just have poor language learning aptitude.

I actually just tested Linux Mint again recently.

Music production holds me back. Didn’t test gaming, but I have faith that it’s more or less the same experience as the Steam Deck, and that would tie into a general sentiment I’ve seen around that gaming is no longer the biggest barrier to Linux adoption.

A. FL Studio runs like shit on WINE for me. Maybe it’s usable on a CPU under ten years old (I’m currently on an FX-8320) because I’ve heard others claim it runs at near-native speeds for them, but on Windows I only have performance issues on a project file that has every reason to be intensive. Even if I switched DAWs to something Linux native I’d still need FL Studio to work so I can open my old project files.

B. Two of my most used VST plugins don’t work, and I didn’t even test all of them so others might not work. One I can’t install because the installer doesn’t work, but the other is a free plugin, and that one’s GUI just doesn’t render (and last time I tested Linux it didn’t render under LMMS either, so it has to be a problem with WineVST.)

It’s just objectively true that a very specific type of person makes up most of Lemmy, which results in the only active communities being either very broad topics, or the handful of interests common to the kind of people who use Lemmy. I don’t fit into any of these.

This you?

Dating apps as a business model are incentivized to not actually be good at matching people so they keep paying the sub fee.

For example, when Match Group (a company that would absolutely be a part of the trust busting wave, might actually be the most blatant monopoly in the US) bought OKCupid, they got rid of a whole host of features that made it easier to find someone who shares interests with you.

And I think Red Pill getting popular is part of the end result of this: they encourage a monolithic view of how humanity and human attraction work.

• Electoral reform. Abolish the electoral college, end first past the post, and make SCOTUS an elected position with term limits, as well as term limiting Congress and instituting universal mail in voting nationwide.

• Top to bottom education reform. Straight up completely change how education works.

• Trust busting wave. Google, EA, Uniliever, Disney, and so many others.

• Crackdowns on elements of social media and dating apps that encourage sensationalism or otherwise harm society. (Dating apps I might go as far as nationalization.)

• Fund third spaces, in a similar manner to how other countries are involved in arts funding.

Subject matter experts would be involved in all of course.

I know there’s like, actual cultural appropriation…but at this point I wish it never entered the cultural conversation at all tbh because I feel like it became weird bioessentialist shit. Like, just actively telling people what they’re allowed to be interested in is based on genetics. Not to mention cases where mixed race people have been assaulted over perceived hair appropriation (the idea that you can tell what race people are by looking at them is monoracist.)

At my most charitable, I think people are forgetting that most people aren’t influencers or public figures?

Hebrew. Notably not a Torah/Old Testament name. It also exists in other Asian languages with different meanings, and is an opposite gender name in most other languages. I’ve never met one personally.

I like the ambiguity it lends me.

Unpopular opinion: y’all call everything you don’t like “reddit” (while the average Lemmy user is a lot of what people who don’t use either dislike about reddit)