Nah, I think that overstates the extent to which our ancestors were the hunter more than the hunted and ignores the social dimension. An early human might have been at risk for predators when they were out alone hunting or gathering but when you're with the group I'd think that's a much smaller threat. Having to deal with social threats from within the group, now, that's ever-present. And still present today!

Also, after reading a book about the evolution of agency that suggests the evolutionary innovation of humans is that we're a goal-seeking system that's able to function as a part of a larger goal-seeking system (collective action)... I wonder how much that can account for existential dread. We have a diffuse drive to be part of something greater than ourselves but it's not always clear what that should be.

This question is so generic I can't help but feel there is a more specific idea behind it. Can you talk about what made you want to ask this, what kind of answers you're expecting?

My kid was conceived via IVF. I literally have a picture of him as a 5-day-old blastocyst. (ok I can't help being pedantic and pointing out that I think it would be more accurate to consider the embryonic disk as the true "here is me when I was little" precursor as the zygote/blastocyst develops not just into the baby but into the whole amniotic sac. But whatever).

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that's a compelling point but I don't think it's as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of "don't go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that's just helping Reddit" has some "But you live in a society, curious" vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you're protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn't go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it's not that impactful if it's a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community's coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there's a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that's pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place's first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they're doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities' size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking "why fuck u/spez ?" and "the only reason I'm still on Reddit is that there aren't any alternatives"

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren't aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the "fuck u/spez" movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren't aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got "Lemmy" as a recommendation in replies and said "interesting I'll check it out" - they legit hadn't heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don't know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that's fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is "which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places", I've come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was "but the admins will just erase it", and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there's stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that's visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that's a compelling point but I don't think it's as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of "don't go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that's just helping Reddit" has some "But you live in a society, curious" vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you're protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn't go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it's not that impactful if it's a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community's coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there's a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that's pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place's first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they're doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities' size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking "why fuck u/spez ?" and "the only reason I'm still on Reddit is that there aren't any alternatives"

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren't aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the "fuck u/spez" movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren't aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got "Lemmy" as a recommendation in replies and said "interesting I'll check it out" - they legit hadn't heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don't know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don't know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that's fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is "which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places", I've come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was "but the admins will just erase it", and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there's stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that's visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

Maybe that's the answer to OP's "is [bribes] actually a thing here"

Yeah, I got into it from the TalkOrigin.org website, and 1) I'd never have gotten into it otherwise, no question, and 2) I think it took years and many, many attempts to go from "huh they refer to a talk.origins 'newsgroup' where all this fun discussion comes from, oh the link does something weird nvm" to "OH HEY I MANAGED TO SIGN UP THIS THING IS REAL WHODATHUNK".

I said that in another comment but I think discoverability is huge. The way people find things out on the internet is by going to their usual internet places or asking questions of a search engine. I don't know how people got onto Usenet in the before times but definitely at the time I got onto it everyone was on the WWW and there were very few ways to even hear about Usenet there, let alone hear something enticing enough to want to check it out. And when you combine that with the technical barrier to entry that's pretty fatal.

I've only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands "minecraft" to be an adjective meaning "that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic", it's adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.

Maybe it's time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age

Any gaming alt you remember fondly and/or that might still be active?

They framed him on a murder charge!

Hi ! I only realized that you'd posted a link after u/btaf45 (@btaf45?) highlighted it. That's a really interesting usenet reader, do you know if there exists a website that highlights groups by activity, or can display the most recent messages from all groups like the main page of a social media aggregator? It seems to me that if reader.usenet.monster can do what it does it should be able to do that too but I don't see that kind of page on that site.

That's a cute grumpy old man take but I don't think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It's true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won't hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it's not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.

Offhand I'd guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other "portals" to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don't mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they'll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?

Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people's recommendations because I don't have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I'm working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don't know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.