Tiktok’s user base is quite large

875 million to over 950 million daily active users (DAU) globally as of Jan 2026.

It is a shame people don’t choose better alternatives though.

TikTok was the better alternative. That’s half the joke. As soon as it caught on, the plutocrats stepped in and seized control

Not unlike how Facebook bought out and gutted Instagram or JP Morgan took over Reddit and cleaned out all the lefties before taking it public.

That’s before you get into the marketing budget that social media needs to build the kind of massive userbase you’re asking for.

How about we abandon ragebait shortform slop/garbage aggregators entirely

In my day, we listened to AM Talk Radio! 16 hours a day, to and from work! None of this prissy little short form phone slop, no sir. It was three hour long shifts of Rush Limbaugh, Don Imus, Doug “The Greaseman” Tracht, and Sean Hannity. I earned my hate honestly, by fiddling with a little dial on my walkman and getting five commercials about cigars and dick pills every eight minutes. I got to hear bad riff tracks about how Japan was taking over our economy produced on a AKAI S900 that had been dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t know these people even had faces until Limbaugh showed up as a talking head for the NFL for a few months.

The very fucking idea that these stupid petulant spoiled woke lib fuck-around find-out kids are getting their news from a five minute long vertical visual display? OOOOOOOOoh it makes me SO MAD! I hate 'dem kids. I hate’m!!!

-13°C weather won’t stop me. I actually like the cold.

One could argue that the currency system itself legitimizes the amassing of enormous wealth into the hands of a tiny minority.

do you have any idea how fucking cold hot is is outside right now?

So crazy that this guy built his career on being Matt Damon adjacent.

The low life expectancy in Egypt seems cherry picked from one search result you found? Seems to be about a single village with data from about a century?

A bit more than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_the_Grain:_A_Deep_History_of_the_Earliest_States

Might as well have been disease.

Animal husbandry is the root cause of a host of common diseases.

And Egypt has always been surrounded by nomadic tribes. Leaving the kingdom must have been so much easier than leaving capitalism today.

Traveling by foot across the wilderness into a civilization you know nothing about - not the language nor the customs nor anyone eager to accept you as a foreign migrant?

Trivial, really. They just used Egypt GPS.

It’s so funny to see this pushed out as a marketing campaign for DuckDuckGo AI and it totally flopped.

Best example, cars. You cannot buy a good car anymore.

India and China produce whole fleets of “dumb” cars. Tata Motors is at the forefront of these dirt cheap little modular vehicles. Low cost, cheap to repair, very ergonomic. Virtually impossible to get in the US, though.

The joke of American capitalism is that it needs these enormous trade firewalls to keep rival industrialized nations from bankrupting their domestic industry.

Emerson 40" is pretty good.

You can still buy new dumb appliances in 2026.

I’ve seen this claim on and off. I had trouble finding any in the wild the last time I went TV shopping. The handful of “dumb” models I have found (Emerson still has models with built in DVD players, ffs!) tend to be on the smaller side and poorer quality. I’ve got a living room that would kinda dwarf a 40" set. Shy of going to a projector system (which… eh, mounting those things can be a real pain and all the new ones are also riddled with AI) I was stuck with different flavors of “Smart” TV for anything 60"+

Ended up just wiring my computer to the HDMI and using the PC/web browser as my primary interface for watching anything. That’s side-skirted a lot of the AI annoyances. But it’s not perfect.

Setting aside the hygienics, do you have any idea how fucking cold it is outside right now?

“This toilet has a $50/mo subscription to Toilet+ which provides you with a host of analytic services that are accessible through an app on your phone, if you have an iPhone 18 Pro or higher or an Android Prime Plus Ultra.”

“I don’t have those phones and I don’t really need these services. Can I just not purchase the subscription?”

“Yeah, sure. But then the toilet won’t flush.”

Excuse me, that was it

You might consider adding a puzzle element to encounters that can lower the effective difficulty with clever maneuvers or strategies.

As an example, fighting in a room with a big chandelier overhead. A player can cut the chandelier at the opportune moment to pin a major adversary, allowing them to coup de grace or simply flaunt their victory to the villain’s face.

Or perhaps fighting in a room full of mirrors that allow a clever player to reflect a gaze attack. Or doing Battleship style combat, where you have to pick the square of a hidden enemy, but you guarantee a hit if you guess correctly.

In general, try introducing non-dice resolutions to the scene - guessing a magic word that disables a key piece of enemy tech, baiting enemies into an area or formation before springing a trap, completing a ritual that can summon a powerful ally by solving a rubric cube.

If all else fails, you can drop some nice loot them. Awand of fireballs or Staff of the Sun or similar high powered magic item, for instance. Doesn’t matter how you roll with these, you’re going to have some fun.

Every museum is a smell museum and every piece of art is scratch-and-sniff if you’re brave enough

I mean, they joke but inertia is Microsoft’s mightest weapon.

Literally just “My computer works now, why would I want to change it?”

Incidentally, getting someone on Linux (or Apple for that matter) to switch to Microsoft is also like pulling teeth.

it was a matter of Chinese control outside of US government control

TikTok was controlled by a private company based out of Singapore, with investments from a host of international funds including both the US and China.

The “China is controlling our internet” narrative was always bullshit fear-mongering, fully disjoined from the actual business structure. What TikTok enjoyed that Facebook and YouTube and Reddit did not was a sufficient distance from US policymakers such that TikTok’s policies weren’t dictated by Western oligarchs.

not bringing it under US billionaires specifically

That’s exactly what Biden (and then Trump)'s forced sale intended. Bring the US branch of TikTok under American control by awarding it to exclusively American financial interests.

When you can attract large foreign investments, the order matters less. You’ll experience more pain by imposing tariffs first and building out infrastructure second. But we’re governed by a party that seems to relish in the pain of their constituents. So this might be more of a feature than a bug.