I'm getting massive ~2009 'blog house' vibes from this selection.

With cheap earbuds, I found myself turning my phone volume almost all the way up when listening to podcasts on the train to work. With the SE215s I was comfortable on the lowest volume level. They’re such an investment in protecting my hearing that I’ll actually just wear them with nothing playing just for the peaceful quiet it brings.

My colleagues all wear Airpods all day long for endless Zoom meetings, and never stop complaining about them. I've never had an issue with my SE215s. Truly the most satisfying money I've ever spent.

It sounds like the music experience on Plex isn't first class, so I'll give a Subsonic flavor a spin first. Forget paying $120/yr to rent music for the rest of my life.

As a long-suffering user of Google Play Music, it was truly the least awful of all the terrible music streaming choices out there. YouTube Music is an insult by comparison. It is deliberately designed to funnel you into a paid subscription at every turn.

I'll be moving to a self-hosted solution like Plex or Subsonic once I get the time to set one up. This is just one of the final nails in the coffin of my relationship with Google.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be to be enrolled in university right now. All of the "extracurricular" aspects that are now cancelled were what got me through my time there. It sounds like you've got the right approach figured out to surviving this. Discipline and socializing are key.

Previously:

Titanic

The learning curve of climbing makes it so much fun. From one novice climber to another, stick with it! You'll be sending routes you previously thought impossible in no time.

The site appears to be down. Here's the Google cached copy.

You've got a nice, cozy camp set up. What's your plan for getting food while you're out there?

Someone else I know who lives off grid has a solar fridge that acts as a thermal battery.

Just wrapping up a two-week self-quarantine after being exposed to a COVID positive housemate. Full on quarantine, where you don't leave the house for any reason was grueling compared to the mere social distancing of the last six months. If this year has taught me anything, it's that social contact is a completely vital resource.

This sucks. Don't share this.

Is it any wonder that the rank and file treat members of the community the way they do when attitudes like this pervade their leadership? The system is rotten from top to bottom, not just a few "bad apples."

It's very interesting that the administration has actually issued an eviction moratorium this time. As opposed to several weeks ago when it was widely misreported that they had, but had merely instructed officials to "consider" a moratorium.

It seems like you've identified a problem that Hubski hasn't grown much in its 10 year lifespan. My experience is that there is never enough content (posts & comments) on the site each day. I'm not sure how showing users even less content (comments from new users) is supposed to address this.

The digital marketing growth hacker types like to image a funnel that tracks a user in their journey towards a desired endpoint. Some percentage of users drop off or fail to stick around at each level of the funnel. This makes the higher levels of the funnel the most important places to influence behavior, because you have more users to work with. The experiment here seems to be fiddling with the Retention of users who have already found hubski and registered an account in the Acquisition and Activation levels.

I have no insight into this site's actual traffic numbers or how many new visitors check it out, but that is where the focus should be to grow this community. More potential friends need to be browsing the front page so they can be compelled to register some day. It's hard to see names that we know and recognize leave the site, but attrition is natural. Without a consistent source of new members, this site will inevitably shrink into a devoted core. At that point there probably isn't critical mass to keep a site like this alive, and the remaining few will probably transition to a group chat or other private discussion to keep in touch.

I love this site because of the serendipitous nature of the content and people here. Without that new energy, I may as well just subscribe to the kleinbl00 newsletter and move on.

The anarcho-punk roots of Chumbawamba are blindingly obvious to anyone who listened to the rest of that album, beyond just the title track. The rest of their 30 year discography makes it even more clear where they stand on the issues.