“Noone should have to use xHamster”

It’s a bit more complicated than that. OnlyFans gives me findom or financial exploitation vibes.

I’d also say they don’t exactly have a squeaky-clean reputation either. CEASE have raised concerns about young women being exploited by their audience. They’ve also come under fire for their leniency towards accounts that repeatedly post illegal content.

Do not get me wrong, I’m not defending the seedy practices of the porn industry, especially with all the crap that went down with GirlsDoPorn. But if I can’t even meet with ladies on a dating app because I only see hordes of fake spam profiles marketing porn to me, then it’s a sign that social media has been truly enshittified with content that doesn’t even belong on a lot of these platforms.

When I refer to amateur stuff, I’m thinking more like the earlier days of Reddit’s seedy side. The only NSFW sub that I think explicity bans OF models due to wanting to uphold that exhibitionist spirit is r/gonewild.

A lot of it has disappeared because PH removed all videos that weren’t posted from verified accounts back in December 2020.

EDIT: Example of what I mean by how much OF has ruined mainstream social media.

I went on Facebook earlier this eve. I saw a video from Bentellect show up on my reels, a content creator with 17M total followers across all his socials. About 60% of his videos are him reacting to people’s online posts. The other 40% (the ones that the algorithms are actually promoting) are ones of him and his girlfriend in their underwear picking outfits out for each other and doing some silly fake catwalk poses on a treadmill. And of course, each of these videos begins with her strutting past the camera, full view of her huge panty-clad arse.

Check profile, click link to Instagram, oh look, a LinkMe URL, which takes me to a profile where about 90% of the page is taken up by links to their separate OnlyFans pages, and about 5% of the page has a few puny buttons linking to Ben’s Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch and X pages. And of course most of her videos are pay-to-view with some requring as much as a $100 tip.

This seems to be something he’s done ever since he started dating an ex-pornstar, which I assume was rather recently based on his post history.

I’m not exactly mourning this guy’s death. Not only because of his financial support for the US Republicans, but because OnlyFans has single-handedly ruined the online pornography and greater social media landscape.

You can’t go on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Tumblr, X, any dating app, or even Reddit anymore without seeing how much e-girls have astroturfed and spammed the absolute shit out of these platforms. And the way they get past content guidelines (which should’ve had them banhammered outside of Reddit) is with an allmylinks or linktree URL in their bio where half the links are trying to lull you into paying $20/month to see their nudes. Then you have models like Bonnie Blue who have genuinely gained infamy from doing it with over a thousand guys in a single day, in the kind of publicity stunt that has shown just how low the bar has fallen.

Amateur porn used to be about exhibitionism. Now it’s all shot with professional grade studio setups and you don’t get any kind of interaction or engagement unless you bankroll a model’s influencer lifestyle. We’ve genuinely commodified female interaction as a society and made bank off of findom. That I think is more damaging to society than the lack of ID & age verification checks on porn sites, and why I think the Dead Internet Theory held a lot of weight years before the rise and wide adoption of generative AI…

On top of that, it’s simply poor value for money. We rag on the television and film industries for the amount of competing streaming platforms they’ve created which have all-but-reversed the money consumers saved on cable packages, yet we simultaneously celebrate OF and its ability to let you subscribe to a single creator for twice the price as a Netflix-of-porn streaming service like Pornhub Premium or Xvideos Red. And it’s not as if porn isn’t freely available all over the internet…

You had us in the first half, not gonna lie!

It’s satire. Gingrich didn’t even write the OG article…

Cortical Labs are the ones who pulled this off. They already have biological computers running on 800,000 lab-grown neurons available for ~$35,000 (just going on what a quick Google search told me) and are planning to open up a cloud computing service with its own API soon.

This makes me feel uneasy. Imagine if reincarnation were a thing and you get brought back into this world, and your purpose is to learn how to play DOOM.

I use Firefox because Google killed Manifest v2 support and (with it) uBlock Origin. Unfortunately they seem to be heading towards the AI slop route.

Yes, Edge and Brave exist but one is maintained by Microslop and will likely also follow in Google’s footsteps, and the other I don’t particularly trust because they have a homophobe as CEO and did some crypto token shit with their ad system.

A bunch of y’all would have been ragging on Blender 10 years ago. Ragging on Krita. In 2012 acting like gaming in Linux was doomed. In 2015 acting like Kdenlive would never reduce crashes and improve functionality. Acted like Darktable would never be competitive with Lightroom. Godot would be no good for anything more than 2d sidescrollers and never compete with Unity 5. A bunch of do nothing fence sitters. Firefox and GIMP developers contribute more to the good of humanity than anyone crying about them in this thread

The last time I used Linux as a desktop OS was around 2008. Back then the state of FOSS was absolutely dire.

I used to have a shitty Packard Bell PC at home which was weirdly partitioned, 20GB dedicated to the C:\ partition and 100GB dedicated to D:. An asshole “friend” at school goaded me into pirating Norton PartitionMagic and using it to merge the two partitions and pretty much totalled my Windows installation. As I didn’t have a backup CD I had to use Ubuntu for a few months.

The only game I genuinely got working on Linux was World of Warcraft and even installing that was a pain. WC3 was supposedly “Platinum” on Wine’s AppDB but would often freeze and didn’t support using the mouse to move the camera. Some versions also couldn’t connect online.

Fastfoward to today and gaming on Linux has evolved by leaps and bounds, in large part thanks to Valve. The only games you genuinely can’t get running are those with kernel level anticheat software.

As someone who recently started getting into digital art, I’m genuinely shocked at how good Krita is.

This is a raster graphics editor that could could potentially rival the likes of Photoshop, Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro in terms of features. GIMP by comparison is dogshit.

Can’t tell if the UK’s Electoral Commission did this concept better or worse…

Literally Spez right now…

(I’d post the uncensored image but IIRC Lemmy World is German-based and have strict laws against Nazi iconography)

He’s wilfully given the data of users who have criticized Trump and ICE, AND he looks like a spitting image of Tintin…

Kamala lost because it was obvious from the beginning that she was a bad candidate whose only hope of becoming President was to be parachuted into the role via the 25th Amendment once Biden’s mental state truly deteriorated. Unfortunately for her and the DNC, Biden’s condition declined right as a key presidential debate rolled around, and his declining cognitive health became so utterly apparent that not even Reddit’s tyrannical cabal of power mods could cover it up anymore.

Before that debate, even merely suggesting that Biden was senile would have gotten you labelled a Nazi and banned from at least a dozen subreddits.

THAT is why she lost to a convicted felon.

Why does he look like Steve Carrell playing a sociopathic big tech asshole?

Kids back in the eighties were coding in BASIC, running command line prompts and using home computers like the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC 464 and Commodore 64. The most I did in terms of coursework for my IT classes during my secondary school days was make a personal webpage about my hobbies & interests using Microsoft Frontpage. Sixth form (where I did A Level Computing, basically 11th & 12th Grade equivalents) was even worse, It was 2010 and they were still fucking teaching us Visual Basic 6 and the Waterfall Model of system development!

Something like an introduction to unix and programming should be mandatory. They seem to think that kids need to “learn to use a computer and the internet.” It’s a fucking point-and-click interface. What is there to learn? The software industry is very skilled at making it all so easy that a chimpanzee can use it.

This may be infuriating or sad for you to read, but very young kids who have been brought up on smartphones, TikTok and YouTube Kids these days can’t even do basic shit like this. Like, I’ve genuinely heard about kids starting kindergarten and reception who cannot even turn pages on a book and try to swipe left/right on them like they’re a touchscreen. Some even struggle to work with a physical keyboard or a gamepad that actually has tactile inputs.

The only other group where I’ve personally seen such ineptitude with technology is in old people. I used to work in customer support for a major right-wing British newspaper, and it was mainly things like website account access issues, basic tablet/smartphone tech support, and promotion enquiries I dealt with. I genuinely hated that job for a lot of reasons, but a big part of it is that trying to guide a senile 75+ year old pensioner through a basic password reset or explain how to redeem an e-voucher.

My dad is 80 years old and as the younger autistic one in the family who got economically screwed and is still living with my parents, I’m left with having to continually explain how to do basic email or phone tasks to him.

We didn’t have graphing calculators in school. The most we used were scientific ones which had sine, cosine, factorials, that kind of stuff.

This may be the millennial in me talking but I’ve generally found schools to be fucking dire when it comes to implementing technology in the classroom.

During Year 10 (equivalent to 9th Grade for any Yanks here), our school enrolled in a government programme to start using PDAs in the classroom. So they offered every kid in our year a Pocket LOOX 720 at a heavily subsidized price.

They were never used in lessons.

Pupils instead used them as music/video playback devices and to play games, since it was 2007, smartphones weren’t yet a thing and YouTube was just in its infancy.

Maybe things have improved since I left secondary school.

The Machiavellian part of me thinks Ring screwed up by not raising the stakes. Search Party and the way they advertised it makes you go "awww’ when you see the golden retriever and then “wait, WHAT?” when they show all their Ring doorbells going full surveillance mode in locating the missing dog.

A lengthier ad showing a pedophile being tracked down and arrested by law enforcement mid-abduction, their victim rescued, then the nonce being served justice may have had a more positive response.

I mean, “think of the children” has been the perfect strawman argument to justify mass surveillance, after all…

Now this is a name change I can get behind!

Eww, Voat and Ruqqus.

Oh no!

Anyway…