It’s an opinion, not a dissertation.

IMO raspberries are much better than strawberries. That’s a subjective opinion and I have absolutely zero evidence to support it. Feel free to disagree.

Been there, done that, didn’t end well. Bumping into delusional people and trying to use facts, gradually made me realize some important things. Took me way too long too, so please take a shortcut in this regard.

You may think it’s a debate, but is it really? Does the other person really play by the same rules? If you’re talking to a delusional conspiracy theorist, you can forget about facts. You’re dealing with an emotional matter, so you can safely skip the facts, and use emotions instead. Besides, they don’t use facts, or appreciate them.

Long ago, I met some people who were using fancy physics terms, but were actually talking about quantum woo. At first, I tried to take them seriously, but eventually realized it’s a waste of time. I realized that these people are far beyond my reach, so I just stayed quiet and moved on.

A few years later, I bumped into someone who claimed that all seedless fruit are GMOs. I tried to explain about selective breeding, and how ancient that technique is. At some point, I told him to check the relevant wikipedia article, to which he replied: “Wikipedia, it’s all lies.” I learned something very important that day. We don’t seem to have much common ground, so where do you even start with a person like that?

Fast forward a few years, it’s COVID time, and the hight of conspiracy season. I started looking into this thing, and read a bunch of studies about conspiratorial thinking and the mostly subclinical mental conditions behind it. I learned, that these people don’t have any use for facts. Those will only make things worse. What they really need is therapy.

It’s true that I enjoy the company of likeminded people, who doesn’t. However, I also speak my mind at places where these thoughts are not necessarily understood or supported. I take risks that may materialize as a torrent of downvotes. Some of those are also 100% justified, because some of my comments can be really dumb. Occasionally, my comment ends up being 50/50 controversial, and sometimes I get downvoted to oblivion.

I guess that’s key detail here. I am subscribed to lots and lots of communities, some of which are nearly dead. I want to keep an eye on several small and special communities that focus on a very narrow niche. You’ll probably never see any of those communities in the All feed.

As you suggested, there’s no other way. I’ve spent enough time browsing all to figure out that I don’t care about 99% of what the hive mind appears to love with a burning passion.

Very rarely I find something worth reading on all, and that’s why I visit that place about once a month. It’s not a completely useless place, but I find very little utility in it.

That’s a fine approach too. You’re essentially using a black list filter, while I’m using a white list.

Maybe not a one in a million rare, but I get the feeling that most people disagree with my approach. Is it 51%, 90%, something else? Who knows.

That’s explains the downvotes, LOL.

It’s unpopular, for sure. Is it really an opinion though?

OP didn’t actually say much about cigarette smell, other than their personal preference about it. If you say that something is good, bad or in between, that would be an opinion. If you say you like or dislike something, that’s a personal preference.

When it comes to communication, I absolutely do train them. Someone who always begs for money, doesn’t get very many responses from me, or very soon.

Someone who uses the wrong communication method, doesn’t get a response very quickly. I have a special arrangement with someone where we’ve agreed to use Slack for all sorts of random asynchronous communication and Signal for urgent stuff that requires an answer very quickly. We’ve made a verbal agreement about this, but some times they still violates the agreement by using Signal for non-urgent stuff. That’s when I ignore that message for a while. If my phone keeps on beeping, I silence Signal notifications for the rest of the day.

So far, training people has worked out pretty well.

They grow up so fast. 😢

And you get a temporary ban if violate the rules. The length of the ban in days is the same as the relevant number in that list. Repeat offenders switch from days to weeks.

The real unpopular opinion is in the comments.

Oh, there’s a flatpak for it. That would have solved the problem very easily. However, the thing is, that many new users try to do things the hard way, or they end up trying to something it isn’t even worth doing.

I recall having issues like that when I tried to do things the wrong way. The forum posts just tell you wow to do something, but they rarely question if it’s the sensible thing to do in the first place. If Standard Notes isn’t in my repositories or if I can’t find a flatpack for it, I would just ditch the whole idea and switch to whatever note app is easily available. If something is not easily available, I just ignore those apps completely. Going through hours of trickery and hackery to build a wobbly tower that will collapse next week is not worth it.

But it is still unpopular, so it belongs right here, now doesn’t it? Being right or wrong isn’t in the definition, so either way is fine.

If it’s wrong, there’s probably a good reason why it’s unpopular. If it’s true, we can have a very interesting discussion.

You can choose to browse all, local or subscribed. My guess is, you don’t spend much time checking the subscribed feed if you end up seeing stuff you don’t care about. It’s true that pretty much everything in the “all” menu is irrelevant stuff I don’t want to see, so I don’t really check that place very often.

If the vegans there can’t take a joke, they aren’t very chill. However, being intentionally offensive and rude shouldn’t be tolerated, even if it’s a chill place.

I see a lot of comments about a particular vegan community. Sounds like people here need something like c/chillVegans where you don’t get kicked out unless you’re a total menace.

“Ambient temperature“ is even vaguer. We should start referring to different things as ambient temperature when talking about hot and/or cold things.