I don’t agree with this statement. I think “intelligence”, however you define that, has fit pretty cleanly to a Gaussian distribution since the dawn of man. If anything, I think advances in nutrition, preventative healthcare, and access to information has driven pretty significant negative skew. I don’t have anything to back up this claim, but my guess would be that median intelligence has actually increased - it just may not seem as such since the population continues to rise, so the raw number of dummies seems overwhelming.

But hey, who I am to define what’s smart? Maybe an inflatable hot tub, 30 rack of Busch, RAM 1500 on an 84 month note, zero turn mower, DirecTV with Fox News and the funds to pay for it all is the real secret to a happy life. I’m just someone blabbing about nothing with a bunch of Reddit exiles.

oh no there are other answers other than this… how silly :(

I was going to say… the only times I ever used Reddit search, it just prompted me to question why I was wasting my time, then googling “xyz problem statement reddit”

Hey man, I do it all - waiting for it to catch up with me :)

Some that haven’t been mentioned:

Prolonged Sitting Prolonged Loud Headphone Use Off-Label Drug Use (e.g., Ozempic, Wegovy) Sun/Heat/Poor Air Exposure Thiamine/B1 Deficiency via Alcohol Consumption

We know they’re all dangerous (to wildly varying extents), but I don’t think we’ve had enough moments-of-reckoning, like with emphysema and lung cancer following long term smoking.

For me personally, I never saw too many powermod-driven issues on Reddit (not that they didn’t occur, just that I didn’t experience them in the communities in which I participated).

One solution was to create a fork; lots of “r/actual___” or “r/true___” communities were born this way. To Little8Lost’s point, I think this will be even easier on Lemmy.

If I was a VC, I would want a glut of ad-sensitive, lowest common denominator users. Think your Aunt on Facebook, or your sister on VSCO, or your young nephew on TikTok. I don’t think those people are necessarily attracted to the overall community attitude(s) currently on Reddit.

I would never call the ex-Hacker News/Digg Redditors smart. But.

Those users do have certain proclivities that make them EXTREMELY unattractive to investment dollars. Strong interest in anti-mainstream topics, including the 3Ps (Privacy, Piracy, and Pornography) doth not good ROI make. This exodus of users and elimination of features, outside looking in, seems like a misstep. I’d be skeptical.

Assuming you shot this on a phone, it’s NUTS how good mobile cameras / post-processing has gotten in the past couple years. Fantastic pic.

Probably. I write half my comments drunk, so I wouldn’t use them as a basis for ESL learning 🙃

It’s a good catch!! Apologies for any confusion.

I agree wholeheartedly. Whenever some is doing app design, I always tell them - just because the PNG submission recommendation is 1024x1024px, there’s only one time people will ever see it at that res (in the store); after that, it gets scaled down as small as 120x120 for Home Screen use (or 58x58 in settings).

There’s a reason boring, flat vector design wins - fast, universal legibility.

It’s nice art… for anything mass adoption, I always recommend flatter/less detail. No one like FB Buck Alegria, but man does it work for global tech deployments.

This is a really good oversight (see: insight, overview, etc). Honestly, for anyone actually interested in this stuff and what makes the internet tracking/advertising machine tick, take some of the HubSpot Academy’s courses. There’s definitely other courses out there, but the HubSpot ones are all free, and the topics aren’t hard once you get immersed in it.

Plus afterwards you can put the faux-certs on your resume and knife fight with the 20,000,000 other adtech people that just got laid off.

Others have basically captured it, but my read is a massive change in the overall risk profile held by venture capital firms. The time of reckoning has come, and it’s time for everyone’s (or at least VCs’) favourite three letters: ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

The last twenty years, we’ve seen this sort of spray-and-pray model, where 99 bad investments could be offset by 1 “unicorn”. The risk appetite seems to have shifted largely because 1.) there’s a higher volume of early stage concepts (so there’s more bad ideas), and 2.) there’s either fewer unicorns, or the unicorns that mature are ultimately less valuable.

Crunchbase put out a good analysis of the current trend of global venture dollar flow:

The Party’s Still Over: The VC Downturn In 6 Charts

You can read news from various outlets - some say it’s a post-pandemic correction. Some say it’s because labour is too expensive. But the bottom line is that VCs aren’t willing to spend money on “users-in-lieu-of-revenue” like they once were, and I honestly don’t blame them. There were a lot of really, egregiously stupid ideas coming out of SV, and their wax wings melted. sad_trombone.mp4

Adam Kotsko summed this entire phenomena up nicely: