Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.

Open Street Map is legitimate. In bicycling communities, Strava is the gold standard app for tracking rides, and it uses Open Street Maps on the backend. It’s always super accurate for me, even for fairly obscure bike trails off the beaten path.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

I can start. By far, my favorite earned this month was “Get Up, Mr. Bubbles” in Rocket League. I’ve been playing Rocket League for years now. I’m not very good at the game, but it’s the perfect “easy to learn, hard to master” type of game with short matches great for people with limited free time. I got the platinum years ago, but I still play all the time because the gameplay is so much fun.

For this specific DLC trophy, you have to score an Aerial goal on a specific map: Aquadome. Scoring Aerial goals is difficult: You have to launch your car high into the air, hit the ball at the perfect angle, and hope it heads right for the goal. Across hundreds of games over the years, I only had 4 aerial goals, none of which were on that map. While playing a week or two ago though, the ball ricocheted high above the goal, so I decided to go for the aerial. Somehow, I connected and scored. Teammates and opponents both started spamming “Wow” into the chat, and the trophy popped. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but it was pretty cool to earn one of the DLC trophies I assumed would forever stay locked. According to PSN Profiles, there’s now a nearly 3 year gap between my first trophy and my last. It’s only a silver trophy, but it’s one of the rarer silvers in the game with only 9.9% achieving it on PSN Profiles.