Because all social platforms and message boards are like living entities:
They have their infancy and grow into something popular (relatively speaking) then your older members either get bored or jaded, often both. The culture of the platform starts to change while more people leave disliking the change than new people discover the platform. Resulting in the platform steadily shrinking in popularity.
Every social network and forum has experienced the same phenomenon.
It's hard to describe the experience now, but Slashdot in the early 2000's was more of a community disguised as a tech blog. Sure the editors selected the stories from the queue, but everyone had a chance to submit something they thought was interesting, and then comment on what got through. Even the site editors would regularly participate in the discussions, and I got the feeling that everyone there (except maybe the trolls) were passionate about technology. It was easy to spend an entire day just going back and forth with someone in the comment sections about whatever the controversy of the day was. It was magical.
Once CmdrTaco sold the site to Dice, they tried to turn it into a business intelligence/job board, which turned off a lot of long-time users (they also tried a site redesign that was functionally useless and had to abandon it after a lot of complaining). Then Dice got tired of it and BizX bought it to add to their trophy case, but haven't done anything meaningful with it. The site has been on autopilot since the acquisition. The 'editors' are faceless interchangeable usernames who just load up a bunch of stories from the queue and let them auto-post throughout the day and almost never show up in the comment threads. The 'community' is barely there, most discussions get less than 50 comments. They turned off anonymous coward posting (unless you're logged in). The user poll hasn't been updated since April. And so on. It also didn't help that Hacker News came along and ate most of their lunch.
Basically, slashdot was hollowed out and the shell is all that's left. But the new owner can put 'COO of Slashdot Media' on his LinkedIn page, which is probably the most important thing.
IMHO people moved to Hacker News. I would guess one of the reasons is better comment system here. Algorithmic ordering of comments based on up/down is important for scaling to thousands of comments. Slashdot had scoring system, but comments were still ordered by time, which makes it less practical.
I find it interesting to read the threads on this topic. There is little discussion of how to fix the problem, mostly conservatives trying to disengenuously argue that the problem is somehow exagerated. This is absurd of course. What's the point of living in a developed nation if we still have large numbers of people living in poverty? The ideal outcome is that there aren't any.
The average wage of McDonalds my entire state is only $12, which means considerable amounts of people are working for less than that. But even at your local wage, that's only $29,000 a year for full time work before taxes, it is still a garbage wage.
I’m not sure I understand this comment. Emojis are a form of communication. Communications can and are evidence used in court. If someone drew pictures related to guns, and then was accused of a gun crime, that evidence would be used. If someone communicated non-verbally to someone by drawing their finger across their throat and then pointing at the person, who later alleged they were attacked by that person, that would be evidence. Emojis are simplified pictograms used as shorthand to communicate, like acronyms or initialisms are simplified representations of multiple words, like someone saying “RIP to you for what you did” could be a threat.
If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If a WhatsApp message was sent with text bolded for emphasis, it shouldn’t be shown to the jury in plain text. So I don’t understand this derisive attitude towards "emoji evidence."
> If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code.
If there was no text/plain alternative, showing the HTML would be acceptable evidence of their crime. Sentencing guidelines for sending mail without a text/plain alternatives aren't established, but I think 1 year for the user and 10 years for the software developer is fair.
Pictographic communication continued into, and separately came about, far more recently than the neolithic era. And history isn't a linear movement of only progress. There is no obvious reason to think the pictographic communication is a degradation of communication.
How is using comic pictograms as one of the many ways we communicate some sort of reversion? We use different vocabularies when talking to different audiences, for instance I speak much more casually with friends than with my boss. We often specifically use vocabulary and word choice to provide context to the nature of the conversation. Like using formal and respectful wording to highlight professionalism, or using casual slang to highlight a joking or lighthearted tone.
As we have moved more informal conversations to written form (texting everyday with friends is a lot more casual than sending paper letter correspondence through the mail to friends), we have added ways to provide tonal context that is lost by not hearing someone’s voice or seeing their body language. Adding “LOL” or “haha” to indicate your statement is meant to be a joking tone, for instance. Emojis are just another way to do that and to reinforce the casual nature of the communication. Someone might use the turtle emoji when messaging their girlfriend about how long they have been waiting in line to give the message a cute playful tone, where they wouldn’t use it when talking about a production slowdown in a message to their coworkers.
Its fine not to like emojis, but it is eyerollingly pretentious to act like it is some indication of the de-evolution of society.
Being reasonable is basicaly the core requirement of civilization. If your culture is incapable of tolerance or variation it's also incapable of growth. It gets locked in a cyclical purity test and collapse.
