People who expatriate from their home country typically dont have nice things to say about it. Its scary to me that so many people uncritically accept their opinions as fact.
I was on reddit for well-over a decade too. Seeing it go from being "the front page of internet" to an out and out megaphone for propaganda is depressing. This change changed what reddit is at its core. Originally it was super-easy to see who you were talking to by a quick scan of a user's comment history. No longer. Bots and state-actors rejoice.
So it is more harm reduction than systematic change? Completely reasonable.
I didnt mean to imply this is somehow not enough - Im just a ponderer and wanted to know if there was some general consensus on the issue because the whole endeavor appears impossible in the modern world (we have little power over where our food comes from or how it is produced), something the meme seemed to allude to.
Im not a vegan but I imagine avoiding animal products is a herculean task. For instance, how do vegans account for things like bone meal, blood meal, feather meal, fish meal and even manure. Which are commonly used to fertilize crops?
This is why I couldnt be vegan, cause I would over-consider everything I consume - it is impossible to be truly moral in this hell world. You have my respect for trying though.
I think actions like this, unfortunately, are a necessary evil. It is too easy for moneyed interests to astroturf in a bid to alter public opinion and the us state dept, the billionaire class, and other various actors have very deep pockets. Whether the users in question are themselves the bad actors or just victims of these campaigns, who knows, but if unchallenged it will just metastasize and the internet becomes just like twitter and reddit.
I doubt there is a perfect solution to combat this - but the solution proposed here seems well considered and reasonable to me.
I would start (if you havent already) with an introduction to CS. You can take CS50 for free online - https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2025/.
I dont think they cover much C# (I took the 2020 course and they didnt) but they do introduce you to C, C++, Python, html, etc. They provide github codespaces available for anyone for free, so you can complete the weekly labs and problem sets offered in the course. It really is a good jumping off point.
I initially thought this was the way to go too, but imo theres a problem: the only individuals who could produce high-level unwatermarked content would be those with access to GPU clusters—state actors and corpos, who would undoubtedly use it to manipulate the masses that have been trained to trust the watermark
I think in the best-case scenario, we're just going to have to ride out a couple of very strange years while people adjust to a new reality. Shits gonna get weird
The government out spends the public. Dont expect gun lobbies to side with the people - they know where their bread is buttered.