Something you see frequently on Reddit are subreddits that have developed their own slang, jokes and references. That's part of the reason why Reddit feels like a collection of communities more than one website divided into sections, which is what Tildes look like right now.
The question is, do we want that sort of stuff here?

That's a mouthful but I'm really curious what drives the situation when you go on the Facebook support forum, on popular threads there's tons of people posting absolutely nonsense comments that have nothing to do with the topic, and a lot of them are accounts from Asia... has anyone else noticed this? Are they just spamming to get account visibility?

So I have a few high school friends in Facebook who recently have become more radical (islamophobia, racism, sexism, identitarianism, etc.). As I said in a recent thread I have almost everyone but family blocked on my feed, but sometimes I make it a point to go to their profiles and see what they have posted. It usually is a lot of disinformation, misdirection, and dog whistling. I try to call them out because younger kids in my town look up to people like them and I'm worried they will become a bad influence. I also hope that, even though they will probably not become anarchists (or even run-of-the-mill conservatives) tomorrow, at least they will be a bit more empathetic to other people's pain.

My question is, do you think it is useful to do this? Will their posts or my rebuttals make any difference at all? How do you react in these situations?

More broadly speaking, is it important to have people calling bullshit when other people say blatant lies? Or is it useless and that energy would be better spent somewhere else?
On the one hand even if it is just for signaling to other people (in my particular example, muslims, the LGBTQ community, etc.) that they are not alone it seems like a good thing to do. On the other hand, I'm finding it less and less likely every day that anyone will change their opinion on anything without a massive investment in bots/shills/astroturfers. Or a good psychedelic trip :-D.

I am curious to hear your experiences regarding this and it is something I have discussed in person with other people and I always hear good arguments from both (and more) sides. Hopefully this is the right group/kind of thread and I'm doing the tag thing correctly, it is my first thread here !

On Tildes I don't have any filtered tags yet but I did unsubscribe from ~anime, ~books, ~food, ~games, ~movies, ~sports, and ~tv. Wow I just made that list and realized I cut out most of the fun groups... I'm not sure what that says about me haha. I unsubscribed from all of those because I either don't enjoy those things or if I do, I know what I like and don't have any inclination to discuss them.

Reddit is where I have the most things filtered out. Mostly entire subs from r/all but I have some users blocked too. Like poem_for_your_sprog. Don't get me wrong I like poems in the right context but it throws me off too much when I'm reading an askreddit thread and suddenly find myself reading a poem. A dumb pet peeve.

Facebook it's just random people blocked from showing on the newsfeed.

I have said "not interested" to videos on youtube more times than I would ever care to count. I'm not sure why but they have a really hard time giving me content I want to see. There's usually like 3 videos in the feed I'm down with and the rest is just garbage. They're good about not showing me things I said I'm not interested in but they can't seem to pinpoint what I actually want.

There was a story posted to Hacker News, The Return of the Super-Elite from Jacobin magazine. It was on the front page for a little bit of time. I refreshed and it was on the 2nd page.

5 hours later and it's down to #113, page 4. It has 88 points. The second youngest submission on page 4 is 16 hours old. On page 3, the youngest item is 6 hours old, and has only 7 points. So this article is newer, has a respectable amount of points but within 5 hours has been relegated to page 4, whereas an item that has fewer points and is 1 hour older is sitting on page 3.

edit: the rank keeps dropping, when I first wrote this post it was at #111, then #112, and when I submitted it was at #113, I just refreshed and it's at #114. Other submissions near the range of points and hours are ranking on page 1. On page 5 all items are from 1, 2 or 3 days ago.

I've noticed that any pro-unionization talk seems to disappear much more quickly than other stories.

So let's get our tinfoil hats on and ask is Hacker News suppressing leftist articles or suppressing articles of a certain type altogether?

Or maybe it's just a conspiracy of a bad algorithm for determining where submissions rank?

Hooktube.com used to provide a private way to view youtube vids, blocking ads, bypassing region locks, and also pulling comments and search results via the api. All you had to do was replace the you in a youtube link with hook.

No more. On July 11, this appeared on the changelog:

HookTube no longer uses YouTube api for anything, and most features (channel page, search, related videos, etc) are gone. No choice.

Which was extremely bad, but at least you could still watch videos privately right?

July 16: YouTube api features are back but mp4 <video> is replaced with the standard YT video embed. HookTube is now effectively just a light-weight version of youtube and useless to the 90% of you primarily concerned with denying Google data and seeing videos blocked by your governments.

rest in pieces
It was a good run, 1.5 years. Started as a quickly made addition to the norbot project, and within long the server had to be upgraded several times. Of course YouTube Legal was an inevitability at that point.
Special thanks to the many people who created plugins and extensions for hooktube, /g/, the five people who donated anonymously, and BitChute for working hard on a real YouTube alternative. HookTube will remain operational in the present state for those who only needed it for performance reasons. See you in the next project.

:(

Alternatives include: invidio.us, youtube-dl, the Freetube desktop app, Newpipe for Android, and you’re doomed if you use iOS. ETA: Actually, I just remembered, there’s Media Grabber for the Workflow app. And Invidio mostly works on mobile.