I’m afraid to say I did too and it wasn’t until I saw his time-lapse that I was fully convinced. I think it’s the soft, studio ghibli like style. One of the chat GPT models was spruiking it a year or so ago and everybody was posting ‘Ghiblified’ profile pics so now it’s kind of synonymous with low effort AI art (which is such a shame).

I thought so too so I checked. The plague came in many waves (famously the black death was in the 1300s which may be why we were confused) but there was a major plague outbreak in 1665-1666 which is when Newton was doing his work on optics.

The 3rd party app-ocalypse made me create an account here but it was the reddit ads that eventually made me quit the Reddit app. At some point I realised more of my feed was taken up by autoplay video ads than actual content. The slow decline in intelligent conversations really accelerated after they killed the apps too.

So far I like it here, there’s less content and that can be a bit disappointing but it’s probably healthier that I can’t scroll endlessly. It’s also nice to feel like your posts don’t get buried under a torrent of other content the moment you make them.