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by timbit42 601 days ago
Those people also use the public roads. Are you also turned off from driving on public roads?
2 comments

To be fair, everyone with a commute who had or has to sit in endless traffic is turned off from driving on public roads and wishes there were fewer vehicles or that they were the only one on the road.
Paraphrased, "I was driving home, stuck in traffic, and this thought occurred to me, now I know this is bad, but I thought, if half of everyone in this city died, I'd be home by now." - Paul Reiser
When combined with "You aren't stuck in traffic, you are the traffic", the two quotes sum to "Go kill yourself."
Darker than mine, nice.
They'd need to specifically die in their own homes (or otherwise not on the roads), or else the resulting traffic jams would make your drive home even longer.
"What about..."? Isn't a very convincing form of argument in general and in this case it's particularly specious. When using the public roads, people's unsavory/illegal behaviour with respect to images (for example) isn't something that affects other road users, but if you're using a chat application an innocent user may well see/download content that cannot be unseen and is a crime to download (even innocently).

In that context the decision to avoid a chat application if you feel it is likely to put you at unnecessary risk where there are alternatives that will not is perfectly reasonable.

I don't mind "eccentric" personalities in my online spaces. I hate people trying to restrict online freedom more. To a degree that I think the threat of far-right people is pretty miniscule in comparison, but people allegedly trying to combat them let themselves be driven by fear. And the result is usually as bad as you could expect.

There are a lot of excuses for bad policy with the deflection of "at least I am not a far-right unperson".

A chat application usually cannot put me in any risk at all. Public personas might have different problems here, but the rules of PR aren't that new and these cases build a poor general case.

Fair to have the choice of a supervised chat app as long as people don't try to enforce all chat apps to adhere to arbitrary rules due to the latest outrage or panic over certain people, opinions, politics, bubble tea or whatever can be the source of ire.