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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 17, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A group chat that has competent people who are tied in with various industries and specialties in various fields.

These are mostly in private Discords now. Its been one of the worst things to happen to the internet in the last decade, as much as I like Discord personally. Trying to find the answer to even a simple question on anything on the open internet is 90% scammers, click bait, and people that make you scroll past 10+ ads for the answer to a yes-or-no question.

Yeah. There used to exist forums with competent moderation that allowed quality, technical, high level discussion among members and yet random onlookers could view the discussion, and many of them were indexed by search engines so you could find them when needed as well.

Reddit sort of replaced this but shit the bed because

A) Useful subs get overwhelmed by casuals and Eternal September kicks in

B) Useful subs go private to avoid the above and can't be accessed or indexed or searched OR

C) Powermods capture the useful sub and turn it into an ideological echo chamber.

Wikipedia could probably step up and fill a massive gap here, but there's signs it is ideologically captured a swell.

I am not satisified with AI 'replacing' the open internet that we had, even if it manages to match the general quality.