For context, I have gotten a lot of emails either asking why I deactivated my account or just sending me well wishes after the deactivation. This post is more for them than anyone else. If you don't care about random techbro website drama, feel free to skip.
Edit: I do sincerely appreciate all the well wishes and nice messages. Thank you, truly. I had no idea anyone would care about me leaving.
I had been tired of the site for a while. When I joined lobste.rs it was pretty much hacker news but good: people were reasonable and found joy in crafting stuff with computer, instead of trying to make profit at all means possible which is just tiresome to read about.
Well, time seems to have catched up on lobste.rs too since the joy of crafting is gone. Many are instead dickswinging about some new thing they generated which will be unmaintained in couple weeks, or just trying to do what hacker news do: make profit at all means possible.
Discussions are usually: "hey is this tag evil" and bunch of "yes/no" or something else similar.
But what really got me leave was the fucking audacity of some people implicitly proclaiming that ADHD is not a disorder/disability, but a preference. See this thread: https://lobste.rs/s/y4hgjd (Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624234832/https://lobste.rs/s/y4hgjd/please_keep_code_descriptions_simple )
My post was mostly a plea of wanting people to acknowledge people like me who get overwhelmed by huge walls of texts their generator tools love to make. (And some people do too, but they usually have a good reason.)
But then I get someone coaxing me to admit it's a preference and not an accessibility need. Maybe I read into it too much, but definitely felt that way. Had it been one offhand comment that never got many upvotes, meh. But it was clearly liked comment, on lobsters upvote means "I agree" just like on every other site that has upvotes.
Well, I am following the neurotypical preferences 24/7. I have so much bullshit I have to tolerate:
- Walls of texts that have nothing of substance.
- Giving me a huge timeslot to wait for something:
- For example, "I will call you between 9-15" will lead me to either forget the call or get stuck waiting for the call until it happens, having hard time to focus on anything.
- Not understanding my executive dysfunction at all and going "just push through it bro"
- Constant context switching which will fuck me over every time, but I smile and nod through it
- And so on..
I put up with a lot of your shit, neurotypicals.
But when I make one damned fucking plea of please help me out here to work together, I get "that's your preference, fuck you, I'm not going to tolerate it."
And this happened on lobste.rs of all websites. I expected this behavior from hacker news, not lobste.rs. So have your hypetech fantasy land where accessibility does not matter except on paper when it makes you look good and feel the warm fuzzies.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but ADHD can be a disability. Yes, my disability sometimes lets me hyperfocus for three hours and fix up bugs and whatnot. But that same hyperfocus makes me forget to eat, sleep or piss. But productivity is the king, right? Fuck anything else. Yes yes technically ADHD is a disorder but it still affects me in such debiliating ways at times. It definitely is NOT a preference. I did not go to ADHD store and select my preferred brand of not being able to do shit.
I felt betrayed by this site and bunch of it's users for not giving a fuck, even when they often do pretend to give a fuck (check any accessibility posts around linux for example).
Maybe that answers why I left the site then. It's just not fun to use and I felt like I am just bothering everyone with my bullshit "preferences." It made me angry often due to the absolute nonsense being posted there.
It is just not anymore the site I signed up on. And that feels like shit, because I genuinely liked it all. That's why I'm so angry about all of this.
Sad that I had to leave such a nice place behind, but it had not been the nice place I recalled for long time. Or maybe I'm delusional and it was always like this. I'm sure someone will send me email about this and tell me I'm stupid, as is tradition.
Oh well. Life goes on.
ps. "You were on the site just for a year" I had second account I deactivated before for addiction reasons, and before that I had been lurking for quite some time. I sadly still open the site every now and then. Old addictions die hard, but at least I can't comment on anything anymore.