Comment by drooopy
15 hours ago
Recently I went through the list of all of the subs that I follow and 80% of them were all cat related.
15 hours ago
Recently I went through the list of all of the subs that I follow and 80% of them were all cat related.
Do you think it’s always been that way?
I have gone through a slow attrition of “serious” subs over the years as they’ve all slowly become toxic. I pretty much just have goofy, fun stuff or niche interests left at this point.
That’s a healthy way to use Reddit. Everything else is mostly rage bait.
It’s why I had to give up Reddit entirely.
Impossible to follow any topic without it devolving into political flame wars.
I have stopped visiting Reddit after they dropped support for old.reddit.com. I use lemmy.world now. I did notice an increase in cat posts on Reddit before I quit
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The cat bongos thing linked above has a pinned announcement about how if you have the wrong politics, you're not allowed to enjoy cat bongos. lmao
Maybe it's just a natural process? The Facebook algorithm figured out 10+ years ago the best way to get clicks was to piss people off.
> Impossible to follow any topic without it devolving into political flame wars.
But have you considered how that is Donald Trump/Joe Biden's fault?
/s in case it isn't obvious.
That's how I've treated it too, if a sub has gone from making me happy to making me angry, it's gone, and "cute picture of cats" seems to be more resistant.
Cat picture pollution arrived around 2005 with Facebook. Directly driving it was the new idea of a cellphone camera. AOL and the era before it didn't have the cat picture pollution problem because they didn't have the technology to post them.
Some of the earliest photos after the photograph was invented are of people’s cats.
It is not pollution when it is the desirable outcome.
It isn't like the relevant environment — the set of Internet forums — somehow predates human influence; it is nothing but the sum of human influence.
Cat pictures at least add joy and mirth, and are driven by real people without outside motivation.
If anything is pollution in that environment / context, is is the rise of content driven by surveillance capitalism and political corruption.
At this point (at the risk of turning a measure into a target), might we be able to gauge the natural-ness of a forum by the number of cat pics?
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I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of all subreddits are cat related.
Get rid of the other 20%.
I've been blocking subs in RES for years now, it's over 7000 last I checked and most I see on /r/all now is cat content. It's GLORIOUS
I don't think I've ever visited /r/all, it seems like a terrible place.
I agree, but for a long time it was the only way to discover new niche subs
fyi: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd6EjvCDRRWlkHjEYvSfOkA
I never understood the extreme love for cats. I considered getting one for my daughter but the toxoplasmosis alone makes cat ownership an immediate nope and that’s before the cat piss/poop you can immediately smell in a house with cats in them.
Cats spent the last 4000 years or so evolving to be more adorable to humans. The reasons we love cats are rooted in our basic cognitive functions, which cats are abusing. I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
I know it’s sexist, but I don’t trust men who like cats more than dogs.
> I am not taking a piss when I say that people who don't like cats are more likely to be neurodivergent.
“Dog people” heavily outnumber “cat people” almost always in polls. Like 44% to 18% in this one https://ygo-assets-websites-editorial-emea.yougov.net/docume...
Your neurodivergence argument holds up, just not in the way you think it does.
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I prefer animals that shit in a box to animals that eat their own shit and barf it up and eat it again.
Plus it’s probably the toxoplasmosis that brainwashes us to love those furry little things.
> Plus it’s probably the toxoplasmosis that brainwashes us to love those furry little things.
Elsecomment I mentioned a recent article. Scientists Find a Surprising Link Between Cats And Happiness Across 93 Countries - https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-a-surprising-li...
> "What we found is that countries with more cats tended to report higher levels of happiness, while countries with higher exposure to Toxoplasma gondii tended to report lower levels of happiness," say the study authors in a press release.
The paper itself is https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0357911
The main thing I don’t like about cats is that they feel like they don’t really like their owners but more just tolerate them
I don't know what cats you've interacted with, but my cats literally use me as furniture and cry at me when they can't.
To me that’s a feature, not a bug .
That’s what I like about cats. I don’t need some dog staring at me constantly looking for direction, my cat has his own agenda that sometimes includes sitting by me.
I similarly prefer romantic partners with their own stuff going on outside of me vs someone who devotes their entire existence to me and needs to be directed.
Not in mine!
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