It’s a numbers thing and it’s why empathy tends to diminish as population swells.

Here it feels like community, like one’s opinion is appreciated. Reddit became a place to hope you get acknowledged at all, where swaths of the community came solely waiting to shout others down and win a fight.

Unfortunately, for all of Reddit’s faults, that wasn’t a reddit thing, that was just a glaring, crippling defect inherent to humanity. As numbers increase here, that old familiar reddit apathy and antagonism will return. Just play the game of what would you be willing to do, not just rhetoric, for a random person in your circle of friends vs someone from your town/city vs the world. Psychologists call it psychic numbing.

We’re all going to be foolish from time to time in life, and I sure know I’d sincerely appreciate a kind hand when it’s my turn.

It depends on your net worth. I see Americans wish death on homeless people for lowering property values and insisting they did it to themselves. I see Americans telling student loan debtors who committed the crime of buying the lie and improving themselves being laughed at for their struggles.

Meanwhile a wealthy person can go to a fancy rehab for years of acting like a belligerent, intoxicated asshole, be called brave for it, and have their job with massive salary waiting for them after it all.

Second chances (and third, and fourth…) are for capital holders. Poor people half to walk a tightrope from birth and be both lucky and perfect to improve their station, with plenty of people ready to scold them for trying the moment they fall.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna90336

good thing we put so much effort into saving a billionaire with a deathwish while we let all these poor people die. Good thing so many peasants were more interested in a billionaire’s life than our brothers and sisters the billionaires oppress and exploit out of proud, insatiable, sociopathic greed.

Our civilization doesn’t value human life. It values capital. Capitalism turns us against one another.

These people have already consumed more resources than most people would in 20 lifetimes of reasonable consumption. They are one of the owners of the capitalist exploitation machine.

I know they have people tripping over themselves to save them from their own extreme tourism misadventure because money, but for me at least, it’s depressing as fuck to watch so many regular people, the peasants our global oligarchs oppress, sitting on the edge of their seat rooting for them while not giving a shit about the millions dying of exposure and police harassment in tent cities for the crime of not being good enough capitalists.

Sure, save them if feasable, but I wish the people the billionaires exploited and tossed aside that correctly lose hope and wait under a bridge to die for lack of options got even a tiny fraction of this attention, let alone assistance. Some peasants literally wish death on those struggling people for hurting their property values with their continued existence.

I wasn’t planning on doing any banking through Lemmy.

Really?

The same reason Reddit fucked everyone over, the same reason for mass tent cities in supposedly prosperous nations, the same reason we’re terraforming the planet to be hostile to human life: metastasizing capitalism that entire societies now subsist to stoke the growth of, to its own slow, painful destruction.

An economy is supposed to be a tool to facilitate the distribution of goods and services for the benefit of society. Yet we allow millions to suffer to protect the beloved economy. We were tricked into doing it ass backwards to benefit a few assholes at everyone else’s expense. That’s why data caps, microtransactions, regulatory/governmental capture, our decrepit K-12 system in literal ruin, sub living wages, etc are still a thing. You name a major problem here in the US, and I’ll show you something our hyper capitalist economy either causes, exacerbates, or stokes to keep the peasants at eachother’s throats to stop them from looking up and uniting against the problem.

Capitalism can be heavily, heavily, heavily regulated to be of service to a society. The Nordic nations do it, western Europe did until they caught the US’s insatiable greed disease. But without putting capitalism into a straight jacket, having a maximum income tied to a multiplier of the median wage, making corporations fund the society that provided the infrastructure for their success, and putting the needs of societal systems (utilities, education, social safetynet, etc) above the desires of the business community with the force of law, capitalism is a societal cancer that turns citizens against one another and gluts humanity’s worst impulses exclusively.

And since the American oligarch capitalists captured their regulators completely under Reagan almost a half century ago, the FCC either won’t indicate publically traded ISP greed, or won’t do anything about it. Greed won, and we all lost even though many are deluded into being grateful little capital batteries for their owners.

I’ve seen some here openly despair that leaving reddit didn’t do anything.

Spez, CEO of Reddit and former mod of the r/jailbait subreddit losing his shit very publically for days proves otherwise.

…And it’s also a reminder that the reddit community we loved has already been destroyed by ownership, anyone returning would be returning to a shadow that disdains its own users and works to disempower them with every update. They’re even undeleting user’s deleted posts. If they can’t respect users enough to be able to delete their own content, why enrich them?