If you’re looking for an alternative, I’ve had luck with subscene.com
I don’t really know what the best or most popular website is because this one has never really led me astray. That said, I don’t need to use them too often, so your mileage may vary.
I’m a fairly hardcore/radical determinist, and tend to agree that individuals shouldn’t be held morally responsible for actions, any more than a hammer is morally responsible for driving a nail. However, that does not mean people should be free from consequence. There are plenty of reasons - even as a hardcore determinist - to hold people to account for their actions, either as a social corrective mechanism, public safety, deterrent, or personal sanity.
As for getting their actions to align with your morals, that’s a more complicated question that depends on the type of person they are.
People who like bad movies have been conditioned by consumerism to not appreciate art. They believe spectacle, humour, and a tight plot are ‘good enough’, and they don’t value thoughtfulness, novelty, beauty, or abrasiveness nearly enough. Film is more than a way to fill time and have fun. Film is more than an explosion, a laugh, and a happy ending.
On an unrelated note: Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favourite movies.
I think you’ve correctly identified a problem, but misidentified the solution.
It’s true that there are many redundant communities of which everyone would be better served if there were an easy way to group them together. The solution, however, is not to reduce the number of instances, but rather to provide more tools for instances to group communities together. You want communities to be spread across many instances because this maximizes user control - it’s kind of the entire point? But of course, the lack of grouping makes it very difficult to try to centralize discussion, which is important for the community to grow. This service is still a work in progress, so these kinds of things - I hope - will come in time, as both the technology and culture develops.
tl;dr: centralized control bad, centralized discussion good, the current system does a bad job of reconciling these two positions
Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.
I added that to sort of admit my own hypocrisy; I tried to exaggerate my opinion a bit for the sake of spurring discussion. I mostly believe what I said, but my real thoughts are much messier and less well thought out.
What drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer? What drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the thing that drives the hammer?
Doesn’t that imply that people have the ability to change their behavior?
My answer changes depending on your meaning but:
Of course. My brain is constantly updating and improving itself. I’m just not ultimately in control of how that process happens. Though that does not mean that I should stop living. I can still experience and enjoy my life, and ‘choose’ to improve it. It’s just that the I that made that choice is a consequence of my brain calculating optimal paths based on a myriad of factors: genetics, culture, circumstance, biological drives, personal history, drugs, etc.
By determined, I mean it follows a logical set of rules, not that it is set on a specific action. The idea would be that it was determined to make all those choices because everything else is also following the rules of the universe. Just as it was determined that they play in traffic, so was it determined for me to tell them to stop, just as it was determined for them to listen. They didn’t choose to change their mind, they were always going to change their mind.
We are constantly making and updating our choices in response to new information. Just because the brain decided upon one course of action at one point in time does not preclude it from changing course in the future. That’s just a new choice. All available information is taken into consideration at all points in time.
I believe consciousness is a result of processes of the brain, and the brain is a very complex machine. It’s hard to say anything too concretely beyond that because I don’t really understand how it works. I live as though the brain and my consciousness are in perfect sync, but I’m unsure how true that is.