I am a very “techy person” (in fact Y-Combinator’s Hacker News has been a partial Reddit replacement for me), but like you, I too cringe at Lemmy’s constant stream of shitty star trek memes, repetitive “this is what living with ADHD is like”, and posts with days-old news items from 3rd rate wannabe-journalism sites. I mean a quarter of this site is literally screenshots of Twitter posts.

The obvious answer to the shitty content here would be to stop complaining and just start posting the things I’d want to see. But there’s a sense of futility in throwing good things into what feels like a giant pool of detritus.

Anyway one of the great things about old reddit was that, overall, the site (or rather the reddit hive brain) did a decent job at pushing the good stuff to the top. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, that doesn’t seem to be happening as much here on Lemmy.

This is basically just a skeuomorph.

Them’s hunting eyes.

Wtf is with this site that autoplays a loud video in the middle of the night.

Yeah that’s an absolutely grotesque situation. I’m in Canada though so it’s a bit different.

In practice people also don’t get fired here on a an employer’s whim. Not because it’s not allowed by law but because fired employees can sue for wrongful dismissal, and for most employers it’s not worth the risk, so there’s usually a long HR process for firing someone for poor performance.

Termination with “cause” has special meaning in employment law. It usually means getting fired for theft, fraud, harassment, causing irreparable harm to the company, etc.

One consequence of getting fired with cause is you don’t get severance or most other protections you’re normally entitled to by law. So, the bar for this kind of termination is (rightfully) very high.

Poor performance or even not showing up for work at all generally don’t meet the requirements for “cause”, so I dunno if making it illegal to let people go for anything other than straight up committing illegal or harmful acts makes sense.

Yes, I got a lot out of reddit, and I miss it sometimes. Lemmy doesn’t seem to have enough of the right people yet to generate enough high quality content to compare to reddit.

Y-combinator’s HN has been sort of filling that void for me though.

I gave up trying to make Mastodon work. Two minutes of scrolling and I always end up closing it with an overwhelming feeling of cringe.

Mind you I could never get in to Twitter either. Maybe it’s just the format? It reinforces ego/personal brand over the value of the actual content.

I couldn’t disagree more. The writing is absolute cringe.

For some reason I assumed Asimov would be a good writer, maybe because I read his “Last Question” short story a long time ago and thought it was brilliant.

But Foundation reads like it was written by a teenager. He’s obsessed with describing ghee whiz gadgets and doodads that I couldn’t care less about, the prose is plain and boring, and the themes and characters have not aged well. It feels like I’m watching the Jetsons, except it’s not at all quaint.

I was hoping to be able to look past all this and get lost in the epic scale of the story and universe he purportedly builds, but it just wasn’t there for me.