My main social media app is Mastodon (technically Firefish which I will soon migrate to Iceshrimp… but those details are less relevant)

I consider Lemmy less so of a “social media” and more of a link aggregator/discussion forum… but yeah otherwise I try to use Lemmy a bit too. I still browse Reddit quite a lot, but only for individual communities that don’t have equivalents on Lemmy, and I no longer post there

I never used much social media to begin with tbh… I feel pretty decent about the Fediverse. Despite all the drawbacks (blocklists, fedi drama, etc), I think people collectively managed to make an objectively better social media platforms compared to the previous corporation-dominated ones (at least by my personal metrics)

I… think this question is a bit more complicated for this community. Following are only my personal opinion

Prescribed medication? I think so, I’d rather be physically and mentally healthy rather than have the other alternative. And usually medication (even ones with noted negative effects) are meant do do more good than harm so…

Recreational drugs… the line between this and the above is surprisingly not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe there are active lines of study of using various psychedelic compounds to treat mental disorders or other conditions… Personally I would take medically prescribed psychedelics if I am 1) under medical supervision and 2) based on evidence it would help my mental health (maybe that’s the answer to the question?)

Hard drugs: I don’t see how they can make anyone a better person, and no

I looked at their individual page (https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-patterns.html)…

If deleting the game and starting over from scratch sounds like a horrible idea and a waste of your investment, then the game has Endowed Value for you. The more time and money that you invest in the game, the more value it has over a fresh copy of the game.

So I guess they are referring to is something more transactional… for example, if I spent $100 on a gacha game or loot boxes to get a bunch of ultra-rare SSRs. I’d be pretty compelled to keep playing since I’ve already spent so much money on it.

They are not counting, for example, that I get hooked on some weird roguelike game because I genuinely want to get better at it but can stop any time. And if I lose my save file I would still happily start from scratch again (which, hilariously, a pattern named Infinite Treadmill is marked for both Slay the Spire and Balatro… https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/14/infinite-treadmill.html)

I don’t believe anyone mentioned this yet so… here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing

This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project…

Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos

Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don’t see a way of this problem going away

Not a perfectly relevant xkcd but

(From https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/)

Thanks! I think this is it… because I guess the more important part to this trope is that “hehe this is actually the world that you - dear viewer - lives in”… the high-fantasy part is secondary and depends on the genre I guess.

I… agree. Did get a lot of great recommendations tho!

East Asia; again, never heard anyone refer to “24/7” specifically (ok maybe at more hipster places that try to imitate American businesses?)… There might be a similar idiom for it but I genuinely couldn’t think of any off the top of my head

I have actually never heard anyone say it this way specifically where I grew up… so technically the answer is “no”?

I tried to dug around and found a Reddit post saying this:

“The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term as “twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; constantly”. It lists its first reference to 24/7 to be from a 1983 story in the US magazine Sports Illustrated in which Louisiana State University player Jerry Reynolds describes his jump shot in just such a way: 24-7-365.”

So this might be a fairly new idiom? Which would explain why it’s not really a thing in a lot of cultures… but I assume they have their ways of referring to this.

number of hours and days are the same

Ok akktually Japan has a rather interesting 30-hour day thing in the context of businesses… but jokes aside, the 24-hour, 7-day week system is indeed quite universal

I realized that I had allergies during the height of the pandemic… so the short answer is it gave me way too much unnecessary stress because I was constantly worried whether I got COVID-19.

• Depends… I felt most times it was just “did I finally catch covid or is this just allergy?”, there was once or twice when it got really bad though.
• There was once when I had such a bad allergy that my eyes both flared up and I could barely see… It was bad enough that I reached out to the allergy department of my provider as soon as I was functional & got me into immunotherapy.
• Not meds, but I did 3+ years of immunotherapy: 1+ year of getting allergen injections every week (thankfully still had a car back then), and then once per month of maintenance after I reached the highest dose. Had to stop because of relocation/insurance nonsense… but I think the treatment worked.
• No you’re not being a big baby, please take your health seriously and stay safe & healthy.

Oh god I also do this… See the comment below, I ran history|cut -d " " -f 5|sort|uniq -c|sort -nr|less on my personal laptop, my third most commonly used command (behind ls and cd) is just typing in nothing…

clear because apparently I am too scatterbrained to comprehend more than one full page of text in the terminal