But there is also no need to invoke “freedom of speech” if the things you’re saying are unpopular and many people are offended by it… unless the government is trying to stop you from expressing those things. If people are asking the bouncer to chuck somebody out of the bar, that person might as well invoke the third amendment against quartering soldiers in their house because that’s exactly as irrelevant to the situation as the first.
Yeah, its the tech-aware who have dumped Reddit. Unfortunately part of the magic was that it had grown to the point that if you went looking you could end up talking to anybody from a diesel engine mechanic to a paragliding instructor, not just a bunch of tech nerds. I think this’ll be the sticking point, lemmy/kbin is still 95%+ tech nerds.
I think this wave just gave us enough of a userbase to start establishing the infrastructure for general communities here, not even really specialized ones yet. But those will provide escape areas whenever the next wave occurs.
This is all kinda blind speculation and there will be a formal report eventually, but as a general outline:
-When carbon fiber fails, it tends to fail spectacularly: completely and suddenly. So you can think of it not as “crushing a tin can” but more “smashing a glass lightbulb, but from all sides at once”.
-If we randomly assume they were halfway down (no idea on where they actually were but as a blind guess 50% is a good starting point) that’s about 200 atm of pressure. 1atm = ~15 psi, so thats about 3,000 psi. For comparison, a typical firehose is roughly 100 psi. And that can do serious damage to people: if a badly threaded cover pops off a charged hydrant, there is enough force behind that to break bones. If you were sitting next to the hydrant it’d hit you faster than you could react - you’d only know it after you’d been hit. The water outside the sub is at 30x that pressure.
-Lets assume just as an arbitrary approximation that in the first instant of the carbon fiber failing catastrophically, an area roughly equivalent to a 3ft diameter circle fails (it probably actually fails by buckling in a line then milliseconds later splitting and shattering, but we’re just approximating). This means that the water that flows through is pushed by 30x as much pressure as a firehose, and that pressure is coming in across 200 times as much area as a firehose (which are typically 2.5in diameter), so there are basically 200 of those 30x-power-firehoses coming through at once.
-A 2.5in firehose will do ~300 gpm. 6000 firehoses would be 1.8 million gpm. The internal volume of a 2m diameter/4m long cylinder is about 2,500 gal. That would be completely full of water in 0.001 seconds. Of course in reality water doesn’t hit full speed instantly, fluid flow is far more complex than just multiplying through like this, etc. But this just drives home that we’re talking very very small fractions of a second.
-Yes, compression = heating and when its super fast there isn’t much time for heat transfer so its adiabatic: wikipedia has an example under “adiabatic compression” for 10:1 compression going to about 500dec C (in an engine) and this is more like 200:1. But remember that air has low specific heat capacity and also doesn’t weigh much. The specific heat capacity of water (i.e. humans, plus those 6,000 firehoses worth of water) is ~4x that of air, and the density is ~1000x as much. So if you have equal volumes of air and person, and you heat the air by 4,000 deg C, that contains roughly enough energy to heat the person by 1 deg C. And also refer back to “there isn’t much time for heat transfer”. So chances that this actually matters beyond detailed physics calculations are slim.
Bottom line: completely obliterated by the force of so much water under so much pressure. By the time any water entered the sub it should have been over faster than a human could perceive. No explosions or incineration though, just force.
Also, common misconception: pressure alone doesn’t hurt you. You would not be directly hurt by spending time anywhere from the complete vacuum of space (0atm) to the challenger deep (1,000 atm). Obviously there are other little complications like you can’t breath in 0atm and that’ll kill you quickly, but the pressure itself won’t. Conversely at high pressures oxygen becomes toxic which isn’t great for staying alive, but the pressure itself isn’t the issue. Very rapid and therefore very violent pressure CHANGE, however, can and will kill you in many horrible ways.
The other thing is that they’ve just handled things so incredibly badly. Limited communication largely directed at third-party media sites, erratic rules changes and enforcement, doubling down with heavy-handed admin actions.
I think that even beyond a need for profit they lost sight of why they have substantial value in the first place. The majority of their value came from their community which made “the front page of the internet” a pretty honest claim. Their software isn’t worth billions, but the front page of the internet sure is. They should have had a substantial community engagement department specifically to kiss ass and build relationships with mods (and users via AMAs) so that open lines of communication existed - and they probably should have taken control over key things like inserting an employee as top mod of the top 50 subs (make it standard practice for hitting top 50, offer cool extra services like a visit to HQ and such for the mods so its like they “win” rather than “reddit seizes control” even if that’s what it is).
Instead they stayed way too hands-off and basically treated their community as an afterthought. The poor communication made me feel disrespected as a user, so I can only imagine what its like for the mods who put far more time and effort in and are in the direct line of fire of erratic admin actions. I mean, this isn’t even hard. Just make a vague corporate statement that you’re “very sorry” about all the “confusion” and you’ll be “putting changes on hold an re-evaluating while you work with various parties to come up with solutions”. You make some token concessions and then do 80% of what you were gonna do anyway, 1-2 months later. Its dishonest and shitty but it’s not rocket science to take some of the fuel away from the fire. Like, do they even have a PR department or… did they completely forget that the community even mattered?
Its highly topic dependent:
On political things, speaking for myself, frankly, I learned a few hard lessons over the last 8ish years:
So off the bat my preference is for reasoned discussion, sure. But at the first use of the buzzword-of-the-week (“woke” most prominently right now) you pretty much need to throw all that out on the principal of “you can’t win a chess game against a pigeon”. You can just walk away, sure. But if you’re going to continue to engage you need to be aware that you aren’t actually arguing with the person, you’re performing for an audience and trying to show that the other guys position makes him look stupid, and maybe make him feel stupid too… hopefully if that happens a lot he’ll take a different position (but it’ll be 100% based on feelings, not reason). And this isn’t just online, this is in real life too. I realized that I’m too inclined to just walk away from a stupid argument, which these people view as a “win”. Instead, now I more regularly rudely and publicly make my point and make things socially awkward for everybody. It sucks and I hate it, but they’ll never shut up otherwise and that sucks too so it’s like ripping a bandaid off.
Just trolls. We’ve got one mod, who is also the dev. So moderation is gonna be… not great for a while. Nothing against our mod/dev, it’s just gone from a one-man-job to needs-a-team overnight. And even a properly sized team will need a while to develop tools.
Oh, I’ll be coming back. Under old.reddit, with adblockers, to subs that didn’t blackout, and my comments aren’t going to be exactly… productive. May as well rack up a few bans before deleting the account.
I think it is fairly obvious that the murderer in this story would have benefited greatly from a therapist of some kind, for anger management at the very least.