UPS is being UPS here.
They're abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn't pay.
The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the 'debt', or the new packages that keep showing up.
Back as a young fella, striking out in the dating market a bunch ...
"Just be yourself!"
No, honestly, that was the problem last time - I was looking for something a little more granular and actionable.
This is one of those helpful and encouraging things that people say without necessarily really thinking it through. Deep down in intent, they're right - you can't fake your way to healthy relationships, being insincere or putting on a performance of being someone you're not isn't going anywhere genuine down the road. Absolutely correct, absolutely great advice - but it's never given in sufficient complexity and depth to be useful.
None of those grown-ups were like "Ah yes, definitely be sincere about who you are - but also don't spend a whole date monologuing about the book you just read or your favourite video game."
That you can be genuine and sincere about who you are, while still using your social skills and putting your best foot forward socially just ... didn't occur. At the time, my understanding was that it was a hard binary - either I was 100% me at 100% volume and whatever came out of my mouth was definitely the best thing I could say, or I was stifling myself and being 'fake' in order to build an equally-fake relationship.
It took a friend's brother taking me aside to make it 'click' - he was holding a can or a bottle and was like "So the whole object is all 'real you' yeah? But any time you're talking to someone is like right now - you can only see the side that's facing you. It's all you, it's all honest, but you still want to show them the best side, the best angle, of the whole thing. Don't sprint straight to showing them all of your worst angle just because that's what's on your mind that day."
Worth noting they're not just 'discontinuing' coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.
This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it's not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.
Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.
Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.
The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project" as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn't 'for men', the term wasn't about men specifically, and it didn't start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.
Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don't think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the "true definition" is doing either camp any favours. The "involuntary" part of the label isn't trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply "celibate, but not voluntarily celibate".
One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn't care why someone was an incel, ie "it's OK if you're celibate because you're into horses, but that's illegal" that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.
I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
I think that in light of this, it's even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.
lmao that is such a good descriptor of what's going on there. Elon figured he could make money from racists wanting to be racist around normal people.
And no one is surprised.
Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that "free speech" was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on 'free speech' when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.
I think it's worth addressing that "the right people" are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.
The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can't just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or ... etc.
Like so many of those sorts of decisions, Digg leadership ultimately assumed - incorrectly, to be sure - that their users would "get over it" in time.
They'd had minor revolts over the 2.0 and 3.0 redesigns, they'd had sitewide discontent several times during the 3.0 era due to changes in the content algorithm ... Digg had weathered several storms by that point, and I think site management simply assumed they would continue that trend.
There's a perennial issue I think for Authorities in that sort of position where you're exposed to so much baseless griping and complaining from the extremely-vocal minority that you need to gain some ability to filter out negativity and criticism, or you're crippled by it. You cannot make everyone happy and only the unhappy people will bother to express themselves, so you learn to filter out the discontent and focus on the theory, on the goals. Many times you genuinely know better than this or that upset user, and you take solace from that. But from that position, it's so easy to then also block out the more important negative feedback, the necessary criticisms, under the assumption that 'you know better' - because that's how it went the last ten, hundred, thousand, times this sort of thing came up.
Which is IMO a lot of what happened to the whole of Upstairs staff at Reddit. They got so used to users complaining and users being upset about this or that little thing that they had to develop a certain amount of resistance to that feedback - but they've reached a point where they're so resistant to all feedback about their site that they wound up losing touch with the site and its users.
I think a huge part of where Reddit went wrong and will continue to is not having and/or listening to people on staff who are skilled and qualified at simply understanding site users and site user culture. So much of their current issues could have been avoided if they had a person in a leadership position, an equal at the C Suite table, whose whole and total responsibility was understanding the users and speaking 'for' them accurately - representing them as if they're stakeholders in the company.
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
I recognize this cycle from the early days of reddit~!
There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.
Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.
Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on 'rival' platforms.