Icaria

Very 'inspirational', but as useless as your previous reply.

Finding a romantic partner should come naturally from making friends. Friend may introduce you to a romantic partner, or they could become one.

That's a lovely idea, unfortunately a lot of us are growing old waiting for this bullshit.

I don't agree with everything the guy above you said, but my circumstances are very similar to his.

I have friends, but they don't know anyone they can introduce me to.

Sports are off the table due to both health problems and a lack of interest (do you really want group activities to be full of disinterested guys just there to chat up chicks?), never mind that they're all heavily male-dominated around here.

Local councils put on events, but they are either for children, for mothers, or for seniors.

Everything has been turned into a product to be sold to you, almost every event costs money, and when you do pony up the events are somewhere between borderline scams and actual scams.

...

This is a recurring issue with this subject. Someone offers advice, someone points out why that advice isn't very applicable, and the first person makes no attempt to "adapt and overcome" themselves and either a) offer better advice, or b) admit that they don't have any better suggestions.

Calling it a thirst trap is too innocent. These dating app companies are scum-sucking vampires designed to make most people feel lonely and desperate enough to give them money in perpetuity. People just handed one of the most important and intimate aspects of their lives over to US tech bros, pressured everyone else to do the same, and two whole generations are not just having less sex than their parents, but half of them have never had a long-term relationship as they're approaching 30.

You search for one thing and it starts showing recommendations.

I fail to see how this is a bad thing. Youtube's old default homepage would show scam and content mill recommendations.

One of the servers I’m in literally has a How to Make Friends pinned post for people who might need it.

Out of morbid curiosity, could we see it?

We've got basic conflict resolution tactics written into our rules... not that anyone reads them.

I’ve found that people on local servers tend to be a mix, including other lonely or socially awkward people.

Give it a few more years and you'll realise how much deeper that rabbit hole goes. I'm resigned to the fact that discord isn't even really a gaming platform any more, let alone a social one; most people seem to be trying to use it for scoring drugs or hookups/affairs. Lots of kink stuff, too - it is following the same path as Second Life did. Also goes well beyond lonely and socially awkward; antisocial nutjobs abound.

Just checked on old.reddit. Can still see comments with negative votes.

Thin toilet paper is one thing, just use more layers.

Narrow toilet paper is another. Fuck places that use non-standard width toilet paper.

Ars' quality dropped badly about 10 years ago, around the same time New Scientist went to shit. A lot of their articles are now uncritical regurgitations of press releases. Even the one guy they had doing really detailed investigative pieces on the videogame industry up and left probably 5 years ago.

Also they never followed through on their promise to give us an everything-but-apple RSS feed.

Take beverages with you from home.

You can fill an entire wardrobe with kmart clothes for $100, it's cheaper and more practical than even op shops most of the time. Maybe just don't buy your shoes from there.

Bottle sauces and seasonings can last a long time, and can dramatically improve the diversity and quality of your home cooking. Basic chicken, rice, and greens can be turned into a dozen different dishes depending upon the sauces.

Avoid subscription services like the plague.

There's always a few exceptions, but name brands are rarely worth it.

Basically just an evolution of the same way I used my desktop 20 years ago. Always had this concept of an Internet-connected computer as a dynamic newspaper, windows were individual columns arranged around the page/screen. Used to be a bunch of IRC windows along the bottom of my screen, maybe a couple of MSN windows up the side, and one or two browser windows (substitute one browser window with an email client or RSS reader) taking up the rest of the screen.

Well now everything is javascript. Google had the same idea with Google Wave a few years later, they abandoned it, but the javascript future happened anyway. Bunch of tiny browser windows along the bottom of the screen for discord, two large ones across the top for everything else (webmail, content aggregators like lemmy have largely replaced RSS), and a couple more on a second monitor.

8 windows, ~17 tabs.