I imagine it's because it's the simplest, most common type of ball that you commonly see described as such. Like, baseballs and basketballs and soccer balls and beach balls exist, but out of context they're typically called that rather than just "a ball". So, a simple round ball. Giving it a pattern requires some extra thought, and of the solid colors red seems like the most common (think dodgeballs).

I pictured a smooth red rubber ball about the size of a baseball on my kitchen table. The "person" was more of an invisible force, not explicitly male but definitely not female. That might be male bias, or subtly thinking of myself doing it (combined with playing too many physics engine video games where your disembodied self pushes things around).

All of this was pretty vague though, like I didn't really imagine the details of the room or the exact path of the ball other than knowing it would roll off and bounce on the floor.

I genuinely wonder how much of the rise of this kind of belligerent stupidity can be traced back to widespread, low-level lead poisoning decades ago that's starting to manifest in earnest now.

This might be more of a blogosphere-era thing I guess. Even when most people blogging did it for pleasure rather than work, it was always considered polite to "hat tip" (h/t) the source of a given link, if you happened to find it on someone else's site.

When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.

How is this fucker not in prison for discussing the assassination of two House Democrats?

So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.

Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We're all better together. I really hope you reconsider.

Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.

Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.

If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.

I'm all for shitting on Xitter, but this is a pretty bad article. It's written like somebody put it through Google Translate a few times, and doesn't cite any sources for any of its claims. Closest I could find was this Business Insider story on a report by Apptopia, which only says that its downloads in various app stores declined 30%, not its overall userbase.

It's something I started noticing shortly before the API stuff. Bot accounts using ChatGPT to respond to random posts and comments. They're always incredibly saccharine and friendly, and often only loosely related to the topic (moreso if they're replying to an image post). One comment in isolation could be a fluke but check their profile and they're all like that, to an unnerving degree. I imagine they get sold off to spammers once they get enough karma. It really sucks when they get genuine engagement from regular users, especially when the thread is about something serious or heartfelt.