The EFF has supported the prosecution of Kiwi Farms, but not by using ISP blocks.

They understand that setting a legal precedent like this may cause serious harm to other people in the future (e.g. women).

Once an ISP indicates it’s willing to police content by blocking traffic, more pressure from other quarters will follow, and they won’t all share your views or values. For example, an ISP, under pressure from the attorney general of a state that bans abortions, might decide to interfere with traffic to a site that raises money to help people get abortions, or provides information about self-managed abortions. Having set a precedent in one context, it is very difficult for an ISP to deny it in another, especially when even considering the request takes skill and nuance. We all know how lousy big user-facing platforms like Facebook are at content moderation—and that’s with significant resources. Tier 1 ISPs don’t have the ability or the incentive to build content evaluation teams that are even as effective as those of the giant platforms who know far more about their end users and yet still engage in harmful censorship.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

Not an app, but for the ones interested in following specific hacker news posts, there’s the unofficial Hacker News RSS feeds.

The EFF supported the prosecution of people from Kiwi Farms for their activities, just opposed their website to be taken out at the ISP level. I feel a lot of people jumped on the EFF without reading the full article.

Once an ISP indicates it’s willing to police content by blocking traffic, more pressure from other quarters will follow, and they won’t all share your views or values. For example, an ISP, under pressure from the attorney general of a state that bans abortions, might decide to interfere with traffic to a site that raises money to help people get abortions, or provides information about self-managed abortions. Having set a precedent in one context, it is very difficult for an ISP to deny it in another, especially when even considering the request takes skill and nuance. We all know how lousy big user-facing platforms like Facebook are at content moderation—and that’s with significant resources. Tier 1 ISPs don’t have the ability or the incentive to build content evaluation teams that are even as effective as those of the giant platforms who know far more about their end users and yet still engage in harmful censorship.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

On the design side:

• I like that profiles do not show the total karma count. I feel like that just incentivises mindless posting just to get that counter up (some people love seeing their numbers going up).

• I don’t think the “hot” sorting algorithm is very good yet. A lot of old posts were showing up (haven’t seen those lately, maybe it has been fixed), but the algorithm is still not great.

• Would be nice to auto hide posts that I already upvoted or downvoted. That option exists on Reddit

Same.

I actually feel that my stubbornness has made my life better in this case.

I’ve been to Reddit since, but I no longer feel the need to scroll it. I just use it when I went to find a genuine human recommendation on a topic.

You can still use programming to leverage your current position.

If you work admin in an office and are able to automate a bunch of workflows with some simple scripts, you’ll have more leverage when salary raises start to get discussed.

Will your code be at the level a professional programmer would produce? Probably not, but you’re not competing with one.

Because I refuse to install the Reddit official app.

Mainly not giving out information about me on all these threads that keep cropping up asking age and where you are from.

I drive whichever vehicle doesn’t get my data harvested.

Basically, an RSS feed is a link that gets updated when there’s an update to a website (here’s an example from my medium page). Anytime I post something, it gets updated.

An RSS feed reader is an app that you can use to list out which websites you’re interested in, and pulls up any new articles that get published.

RSS feeds are everywhere, but often hidden beneath the surface. For example, in the youtube page for Reuters you can’t see any link to an RSS feed, but if you right-click and press “inspect page source”, and then Ctrl+f for the word “rss”, you can find the link hidden there: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UChqUTb7kYRX8-EiaN3XFrSQ

Most RSS feed readers would be able to find that hidden link for you (you’d just have to give it the normal youtube page link). This is how I “subscribe” to things, I just have one central app where I get updates on everything I’m interested in following (blogs, news, videos, etc).

If a youtuber has both an Odyssey and a Youtube channel with the same content, I subscribe to the RSS feed from Odyssey.

If a youtuber I’m interested in mirrors their videos somewhere else, I’ll subscribe to that source via RSS. But that’s just to divert traffic from YouTube, not because I have a preference either way regarding community interactions (I never read comments on videos).

True, but I can only pick 3, and Berkshire Hathaway is the top one on the s&p500 that it’s not tech.

If I was going for money and influence across different areas, maybe Google, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway.

I see you like playing life on hard mode.

It’s really hard to recommend something without knowing what you’re interested in. And you only know what you’re interested in once you start exploring.

IT is really vast, and some positions do not require a lot of proper programming (besides some system scripts). My advice is to explore a lot of things, and narrow it down later down the line.

With that in mind, if you never programmed before, I would recommend starting with python. It’s easy to learn, there are a ton of resources out there, and it’s almost the “lingua franca” in a lot of areas (since it’s so popular). I’d say most developers these days are at least familiar with python, so that gives you a lot of options of people you can work with.

The fact that it’s so popular also means that whatever sub-problem you’re trying to solve, most likely there’s already a python library that does it, or some library written in another language that also includes python bindings.

Can’t recommend a specific book (since I’ve learn it a long time ago), I’d start by searching “best python resources site:reddit.com”, and go from there.

EDIT: apparently python can now be used inside Microsoft Excel. This might unlock some entry level positions to automate the admin workflow of a lot of companies (a lot of them heavily rely on Excel).

You’re not going to learn much from a phone app. Specially programming.

“Learning apps” are mostly gamified gimmicks. If you never learned programming, you need a good book explaining the concepts of what you’re trying to learn, a computer, a project, and the internet to search when you get stuck.

I know it’s the boring answer, but this is one of those skills that it’s basically a lot of tinkering, exploration, and nose to the grindstone.

I subscribe to the top submissions on hacker news via RSS: https://hnrss.github.io/

It’s 99% tech, but every once in a while you get an interesting post from a blog about something else. I then subscribe directly to the blogs I want to keep reading.

I’ve just been slowly curating my RSS feed for years. I like the high signal-to-noise ratio it provides me.

SearXNG.

It’s a metasearch engine (aggregates results from several engines and feeds then back to me). It also filters out sites I don’t want, and redirects Reddit to the old interface.

I love blogs, specially from people with niche interests and experiences. I follow them via RSS. So that’s what I read outside of Lemmy / Reddit / Mastodon.

Recently I’ve been following the blog written by an IT guy working in a research station in Antarctica (also has a great domain name).

https://brr.fyi/