As much as I want to agree with you, the people who like TikTok make up a significant amount of the population, and their opinions do matter--arguably more than yours, due to sheer numbers.

Smugly dismissing them doesn't do you any favors except for making you feel good about yourself for a few seconds.

You’d be surprised how many people don’t give a shit about TikTok. It’s just another blip in history like Facebook, Instagram, Vine, MySpace and others before them.

All of those were extremely influential and half of them had enough power to select a president.

Regarding "why care." It's where a shockingly large portion of voters and adults get their "news."

• 43% of US 18-29 year olds regularly get news on TikTok

• Half of US adults get news on TikTok, 1 in 5 US "regularly" do so

• This is 2 points less than Twitter and two points more than Facebook

Data from Pew Research (Sep 2025): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/25/1-in-5-am...

I feel the same way every time I read that someone did something "quietly" in a headline.

Yeah, this is an incredibly common metonym.

Personally, I'm diametrically opposed to the idea of letting Google dictate how web browsers must function, which is what happens if everyone uses Chrome (or a fork) and web developers start targeting features that are only supported by Chrome (and its forks).

The question is not "Is Opera a valid choice instead of Chrome?"

The question is actually "Is Chrome, or anything that's based on it, a valid choice?" and the answer is "no."

> The question is actually "Is Chrome, or anything that's based on it, a valid choice?" and the answer is "no."

yes! and this is what i am interested in. why is the answer "no.", please try to convince me in more detail. i am not interested in "no.", but why is your answer "no"? :-)

e.g. I still have to use Chrome for testing and to use the occasional site that is Chrome-dependent, and I even use the Chrome-based Polypane because it has some really useful features for testing, but when it comes to ordinary browsing non-Chrome is table stakes for me. I'm willing to put up with the completely dysfunctional organization behind Firefox to do that but I'd love to have an alternative.

You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.

Using the example from the article: "K let circle back nxt week bout it . thnks"

I'm not buying your argument. The amount of additional time that it would have taken to write that same message with proper grammar and spelling is minuscule.

typed on a phone, so unlikely to have been at the office.

You have to deliberately turn off autocorrection on most phones

I hare auto correct. It ducks me over all the time.

I'm not sure that's a literal quote from their boss. It seems to be an illustrative example, probably exaggerated.

That depends on your typing ability. My mother only looks up at the end of the sentence to see if she hit all the right keys.

The boss was following Strunk & White's advice to omit needless letters.

You must be referring to the abridged Strnk n Wyt

"Your employability is higher if you get good at doing things that few other people are good at doing."

There, I just condensed the entire article into one sentence.

That's incorrect, though. There needs to be demand for that skill, too.

Yeah, $5 databases is something that maybe I would actually use for some hobby projects, but that one sentence just killed any interest that I had in ever giving this company my money.

Same! Unreal that he keeps digging the whole deeper and deeper. Apparently, he doesn't know how to either keep his mouth shut or humble himself to admit a mistake and ask for forgiveness to those they burned by saying 'free forever'.

Don't cache plugins exist for WordPress? Or, barring that, wouldn't CloudFlare help?

They do, but they aren't very good. PHP is very fast, but unfortunately Wordpress is carefully designed to make it very slow.