To my knowledge, there had been an understanding that scientists were being fairly conservative with their statements of how bad things were going to get, and how fast it was going to happen.

I know of two primary drivers for this (which I am somewhat oversimplifying for brevity):

1. Scientists really didn't want to get it wrong by saying X will definitely happen by year Y, and then be wrong, thus giving ammunition to climate deniers and vested interests running counter-PR such as oil companies.

2. Scientists didn't want to paint a picture of unstoppable, inevitable doom that no person could possibly imagine a way for them to fix, or contribute towards fixing, thus leading to the mindset of 'if there's no way to stop it why even try?'.

I would be highly unsurprised. Spez has shown in the past he isn't above screwing with things in the background.

He's said he plans to change things so subreddit users can vote mods out - specifically aimed at the mods who are keeping subreddits dark. Certainly there's no room for anything to go wrong with the voting system that he has direct control over which also happens to have no external oversight or means of 3rd party verification.

You can't win u/spez, if you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

I do. Reddit was this awesome super/meta community of darn near any specific, niche, rare subject you could think of - and that thing would have a community of its own in a subreddit.

The amount of utility, the breadth of concentrated access to subject matter experience on anything, was utterly unmatched anywhere else.

This is, in my view, the dying of that resource, that super-community, and there isn't going to be anything that can replace it quickly. That will hurt in the short and medium term.

On the other side of things, it will lead to a diaspora of sorts, with other communities such as this one (kbin), various instances of the Fediverse, Tildes and others seeing a significant period of growth, and, probably, an infusion of resources to speed and improve development for the better.

It sucks right now, but I do have hopes for what will come from the ashes.

I... had not thought of the situation from that perspective.

On the one hand, I want to look at this and say 'conspiracy theory'... but on the other hand I could potentially see this being possible.

On the third hand, when in doubt, apply Hanlon's Razor: don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Linux Mint reporting in. I've been running it on all my machines for... over 6 years now, not sure how much longer than 6 though. Did not look back, I can do everything I want without issue.

I, too, enjoy having an OS that doesn't fsck with me.

What kind of boot is that? Some kind of chainsaw gear?