I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don’t need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I’d say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I’d say that’s a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.

(Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it’s nice to introduce people who don’t use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don’t know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that’s the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it’s up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that “Reddit moment”.

the brand’s engineers made it next to impossible to open the frame that contains all the parts

VanMoof’s creators fancied their company to be like Apple — creating unique products that would spawn its own ecosystem

Well there we go, nothing to add that.

The attack in space angle was probably just to convince some manager.

The survival in Siberia is completely valid. US retrieves their astronauts in the ocean, but Soviet Russia didn’t/doesn’t have such a worldwide navy, so Siberia it is. It could take days for the cosmonauts to be recovered, so it was expected they might need to defend themselves against wildlife or even hunt.

There’s a whole https://fanaticus.social/ instance for sports

The biggest c/gaming was on beehaw, but that’s defederated. Maybe nobody else wanted to do it again and just stuck to smalller communities based on particular systems.

I just see the term to mean the opposite of specialist, or someone who is passionate about the topic.

In internet terms, it generally means not a geek.

It’s a good distinction, because for geeks, internet is something inherently interesting on a technological and philosophical level. For, well, normies, it’s just an appliance they don’t need to know much about.

Similarly if you go to a car show but don’t really know shit about cars other than they have 4 wheels, you’re a normie in that environment. Your requirements on what a car should be like, are fundamentally different from someone who likes to tweak and tinker.

I wish the term could just mean that without any negative connotations, because I don’t see anything wrong with that distinction.

Ed/add: Nobody can know everything about every topic, so everyone is a normie in some category. Usually without realising it. So that’s just it. Not necessarily an insult, and doesn’t even make much sense as one, I think.

I don’t think it goes away, but it’s just a display issue, you’re subscribed.