I am not American, but Austrian. I earn way more money than I spend each month, causing my bank balance to rise over time; I am not going to say exactly how much I have, but €1000 (which is about the same as $1000) is no problem for me to afford when I need it.

While it's better than the alternative, it still doesn't make me very happy because this only helps fulfill the bottom two levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I wish I could easily earn less money, but have more free time to travel and pursue hobbies, but the system of wage labor is not flexible enough to cover the needs of someone like me.

no, it's a feature, not a bug, that we can have more than one community for discussing the same topic here; makes it harder to censor

No but there might still be something in my comment history that someone could use against me.

I would love it because there are subreddits I use a lot on reddit that don't have an active equivalent on lemmy at all.

I only found out about it less than a month ago, also from a lemmy comment.

I sometimes think my teen years were traumatic, which they were, but compared to everyone sent to Élan I definitely had it good.

The fact that it was eventually closed down because of online activism makes me an even stronger supporter of a free and open Internet.

Ketchup effect is known outside your family. Some years ago, the then head of government of my country used the term in the context of COVID-19 vaccines. I can't quickly find sources in English, but: https://kurier.at/freizeit/trending/ketchup-effekt-mcdonalds-scherzt-ueber-kurz-sager/401206246

It was bad enough to have to get through the world of children and especially teenagers once. I have zero desire to ever watch and accompany someone else having to go through that hell.

I think the line is easy to draw: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

I oppose most censorship, but I do not oppose moderation. If you don't want to see certain people speaking freely, you shouldn't have to, but you shouldn't be allowed to keep them from speaking freely to each other.

Sometimes.

You mention the specific example of Israel which is literally the most complicated conflict in the entire world. Most people are already aware that it is happening, all the arguments on both sides of that are very well known, there is not really anything novel that can still be said about it. So protests about it (on any side) are not going to have a lot of effect.

Point taken. The point was mainly that the escalations (to which Israel responds with airstrikes or invasions) happen every few years. Most of the time, people in other parts of the world don't really hear about what's going on there in the media. The times when we do are probably because such an escalation happens (e.g. now).

Your links don't work for me by the way, I can see in the source code what you meant to link to, but they don't display as links for me.

Most posts I come across on lemmy/reddit, I do not vote on at all. I upvote when it is the same thing I was going to say, or when it is extraordinarily insightful or otherwise something more people need to see. I downvote when it is plainly objectively wrong or doesn't add to the discussion at all. The vast majority of posts and comments are neither of those. For example, I haven't voted on anything in this thread.

I liked the old structure of phpBB-style message boards where posts were just sorted chronologically and if there was a voting system, it didn't affect sorting. I found those a lot more engaging and they facilitate actual back-and-forth debate rather than naturally turning into one-sided circlejerks. I am not sure they can scale to current numbers of Internet users though; we would have to test in practice how to make that structure work nowadays.

Stack Exchange already has a system where if you downvote, you lose one reputation point, a small deterrent against downvoting.

Politicians being younger than me.