If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.

So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.

This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.

Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)

That's why kbin should self-upvote by default. If only Michael Scotts are upvoting their own comments, then the Michael Scotts have an inherent advantage in comment visibility.

We're going to hear more from the Michael Scotts and less from the humble Pams.

Thanks for making this. I've been reading it a ton during my "break" from reddit.

One thing I noticed is that multi-part replies aren't captured by the archive. Here's an example with part 2 of a comment missing: https://ask-historians-archive.netlify.app/posts/zpjnpi.html

Anything that can be done about that, such as detecting comment chains where a person replies to their own comment?

Other than that, this is really a superior way to browse askhistorians. There are no moderator comments to skip over, and no threads with 30+ replies that are just a sea of [deleted].

Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?

I'd expect them to be... I don't know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn't finding it.

Processed cheese is highly meltable. To maintain the shape in the picture, wouldn't the middle of the cheese stack have to be cold?

There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren't completely insane.

That time has passed.

Slightly rewriting thousands of pages of text to avoid being buried by Google sounds like a good job for ChatGPT.

Algorithms thwarting other algorithms... smells like justice.

Yeah, if I'd been given a chance to buy Twitch in its first year for $100, I would have said no. I play a lot of video games but watching video game streaming for fun is beyond my comprehension. It was one of my first "No, it's the children who are wrong" moments.

Probably imported, but that doesn't make them less real. The ease of transferring accounts will be a major advantage for this platform.

I've seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it's accurate, Reddit should just... do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They'd be stupid not to.

And honestly, I wouldn't even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.

You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it's your productivity that will suffer, no one else's. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you're not being huge hypocrites and pretending it's community-run.

They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.

Reddit was not going to change its mind.

Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit's revenue and let the apps stay in business.

But it's become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn't an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can't see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.

I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren't over and Reddit is feeling it.