This article doesn’t go into huge detail about r/pics now only posting sexy photos of John Oliver, but Insider is a decently sized publication - so I assume John Oliver’s got to comment on it at some point.

I think the notion of basically devaluing the platform the CEO wants to make money from is fascinating. Social media sites are run as businesses that sell ad-space to advertisers, and develop infrastructure so people integrate it into their lives. But users can just choose to output garbage and upend the whole thing.

Oh he’s noticed

And he’s posted some pictures to help

This article doesn’t go into huge detail about r/pics now only posting sexy photos of John Oliver, but Insider is a decently sized publication - so I assume John Oliver’s got to comment on it at some point.

I think the notion of basically devaluing the platform the CEO wants to make money from is fascinating. Social media sites are run as businesses that sell ad-space to advertisers, and develop infrastructure so people integrate it into their lives. But users can just choose to output garbage and upend the whole thing.

I learned what sun poisoning is recently and now I keep getting scared when I see suspiciously pink white people out and about during the day. Like dude get back inside you're in danger

I am very white and can confirm, the sun is the enemy

the “i am from russia” was a warning

I asked a taxi driver in Bucharest to take the quickest route to the airport. 10 minutes later we're doing 120kph the wrong way done the street car tracks when another taxi tried to pass us and dude just floors it. Never spoke a word, smoked 9 cigarettes over the 30 minute ride, never took off his sunglasses and blasting opera all the way. I look at it as paying 15€ plús tip to lose all fear of death.

Having lived in Bucharest I can tell you he would have done that even with out you asking

Shout out to the Polish cabbie who my father told to "please go fast" when he misread a clock and thought he was about to miss a flight

I have never seen a human being get to Heathrow Airport so quickly.

My father said it felt like "the fear and exhilaration of piloting a Star Wars ship under pursuit by the Empire"

10/10, beautiful

it NEEDS to be paid for accordingly.

This is so important

Source

unionize unionize unionize

objectively good idea

I am once again reminding everyone that the purpose of these bills is to pave the way for requiring government approval ID verification to use the internet

When you ask government to do the jobs parents should be doing, not only will they objectively do a terrible job, they will use the opportunity to take away more of your privacy and infringe further upon your rights.

Mass censorship and surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children” is a tale as old as time, yet people keep falling for it

literally how many times do sex workers black folks activists and trans ppl have to explain that this shit is fascism nothing these rich corrupt ppl do is going to be good for us nothing they propose will do anything but make our enslavement easier

i feel like every human should max out at one disability or chronic illness. like when i hit adolescence and my brain chemistry went “bipolar time now?” the response should have been an error message like sorry! this slot can only contain one (1) item and has been filled with childhood asthma. i would even allow the possibility that you can overwrite previous disorders like “you have equipped chronic migraines and so no will no longer display symptoms of bipolar disorder.” i just think it should work that way.

Why the fuck did Amazon just send me and this one other guy in our building a free sample package of Coke Zero

Why

Hey guysssss I’d like to take a moment to talk to you all about this new product. Coke

There’s a real explanation! This is actually a SCAM called ‘Brushing’ to raise their ratings on amazon artificially. They create a fake account with a random real address, purchase the item themselves and mail it off and as it goes to a real address, random people get it. 

Then they leave themselves a nice five-star review with the fake account. This sounds like a victimless crime, but this means your information is compromised, they have your account info, and possibly your credit card information, and can lead to people purchasing garbage because they believe the multiple verified five star reviews. 

If you receive a random package you did not order, you should report it immediately to both Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission, change your password, and monitor your cards. You’re free to keep the package though. 

It’s that time of year again.

Monitor your credit and debit cards regularly. Be wary of pop up sites offering deals too good to be true. If you get a package you didn’t order, investigate, be cautious, but US law also allows you to keep anything sent to you without obligation (you know, to prevent scams where people send you something you didn’t ask for and then sue you for an inflated purchase price).

Oh, and shop small / fuck Amazon if you are able.

Amazon is really shitty about helping with this, so if you're in the USA, definitely go to the Fed Trade Commission.

I don't know who we'd report this to over here in the UK, but Amazon UK is shit about this kind of thing too.

I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

I work at a nonprofit, and it is absolutely wild explaining to folks that being part of a program that reduces their energy bill actually helps us get funding to help even more people get energy bill savings.

You aren’t taking resources from anyone by using programs you qualify for. You are making a case for those programs being important enough to continue to exist and (in many cases) grow.

We live in a world so controlled by the idea of resource scarcity that we reason "If I get help, that must be taking help away from someone else!"

UNfriendly reminder to look at disabled people when you’re talking to us or asking questions about us.

Don’t look at our caregivers, don’t look at our partners. Look at us.

Even if we need a caregiver’s help to respond, we still deserve the same respect you’d offer anyone else.

"Today, we received a message from Reddit that our mod team will be replaced if we do not open up the subreddit immediately"

I mean- holy shit? Strikebreaker activity.

This is most certainly not the only subreddit that has gotten this message.

UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.

The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)

Unions work, unionize.

They only just now got air conditioners?!?!?!

Yeah it’s a huge win. Those trucks are death traps on a good day. A bunch of drivers died and more got severely ill last year from heat stroke. The temperature in the back of those vans is usually 10 degrees hotter than outside. It’s terrible, and I’m so proud of my union for how harshly they’re negotiating right now. We’ve got a bunch of smaller consessions already but this one was big.

This round of negotiations is difficult. The UPS Overlords are trying very hard to keep their billions of dollars in three pockets instead of spreading the wealth we (the workers) earned for them during the pandemic’s influx of home delivery. They’re trying to give us as little as possible and spinning the news articles to make it look like they’re super generous. Meanwhile almost everyone in my warehouse is on food stamps cuz we aren’t paid shit.

The UPS Teamsters Union are currently voting on whether or not to go on strike in August, so prepare for that. Stock up on essential supplies, just in case. We’ll let everyone know how to support us when the time comes.

This job is my first time being part of a union and I never wanna go back to not having one. It’s amazing to have so much fighting power.

watching reddit go into a full death spiral is like watching the specifically trans equivalent of the library of alexandria go up in flames

like yes reddit is also the only place on the internet you can get an actual answer to any question in general. but it’s also a huge centralized community database about which surgeons will fuck you over, who takes what insurance, which doctors you can trust, how to write a template therapist’s letter, insurance appeals, peer support, questions that feel too stupid to ask anywhere else, diy guidelines, “hey this is embarrassing but,” finding trans people in your area, explaining why you need PTO without getting way too personal about it, safety tips, et cetera you get the picture

Someone on trans Reddit just bought the url transgender.org and have put out a call for folks to help turn it into a replacement (and more). Here's a link on r/ftm but it's open to everyone

stop saying "gen z brought back bush-era purity politics" i grew up in the bush era and even then people weren't saying that you're a sex addict for having boring marital sexual congress in the same house as your children. this is just plain unhinged

Literally almost every millennial I know has a memory of accidentally walking in on their parents or hearing their parents having sex. It's fucking normal. Human beings have sex. Your parents fuck. Get over it. Being weird about it isn't healthy.

I really loved Robert Evans’s response to this

I walked in on my parents fucking once, I quietly closed the door got some water and watched cartoon network till I fell back asleep. Yall are pussies.

something im noticing is the redditors are just commenting on everything via reblogs with reckless abandon. and its so funny bc thats how youre MEANT to use this fucking website but we've trained ourselves out of it somehow.

I feel like a fucking chimp raised in a lab let out into the wild and just doing shit without understanding wtf is going on because I was raised to click the button to get cookie

Honestly we could use an influx of people actually commenting. The hostility against speaking above a low mutter was starting to get kind of weird. Like yeah tag talk is great but so many of the "hello, newcomers!" posts straight up say to NEVER comment, like...what? It's making this place feel empty and quiet even though the userbase is climbing, and having that as a norm makes it so a disproportionate amount of comments are left by people who either actively want to be annoying or are socially oblivious, instead of people who...want to particulate in their community. I've definitely noticed an increase recently of people constricting discussion to tags in ways that pretty much deadend conversation, like by chattily responding to conversation starters from my tags in their own tags instead of by copying my tags and responding.

Between how super long posts don't get blockquote-constricted into invisibility anymore AND how the new site settings mean people see tags on their posts unless they go out of their way not to instead of the other way around... Why are we living like this. It's lonely! Let's talk to each other!

I’m glad this is the sentiment I’ve been seeing because that’s the way I’ve been doing it and it seems really intuitive and great for discussion.

I love when people comment on the reblog. It lets me easily reblog the cool and interesting things people say. This is how you have a real discussion. You talk in tags we aren't all really conversing.

I have always preferred commenting over tag comments because how do I reply to a tag? But we can talk if people comment, because there's something to reblog and reply to.