Comment by amiga386

Comment by amiga386 17 hours ago

25 replies

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> There’s a website (I won’t link to it) that has kept on running a survey of the worst places in the UK for years and years

I will, it's ChavTowns.

https://web.archive.org/web/20061013053524/http://www.chavto...

Still running as https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/

Also the owner is giving up on it as of the start of this year -- mainly because nobody visits the site; churnalists just freeboot it and they rank higher on google. https://www.ilivehere.co.uk/top-10-worst-places-to-live-in-e...

lodovic 13 hours ago

Now that's an interesting trend. It's no longer feasible to have an independent web site, because nobody will visit it because you don't have the page rank. Journalists that do find your site copy your data and may add a link (that noone vists). Their pagerank is much higher, so they get all search engine links and all the ads, for your content.

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  • tonyedgecombe 3 hours ago

    Between that, Google reposting your content and AI's hoovering up everything in site it hardly seems worth publishing online anymore.

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  • debesyla 10 hours ago

    We have this situation in lithuanian web for a two decades now.

    Once the big news networks (DELFI.lt, 15min.lt, lrytas.lt, alfa.lt and few others) bought out the largest blogs and connected them to their own domains, there isn't much of an independent web left. Owners of the websites back then gladly sold out (and I would have done it too), because it seemed like a great idea to sell your work back in the 2008-ish for real profit, an unique chance (imagine monetising your content when you have only 3 mil. theoretical consumers! There isn't much lithuanian speakers) and especially during the economic crisis.

    Then the other blogs were attached to the networks by the generous offers of "let us publish and we will give backlinks, maybe" + "we will just copy it because we know that you won't bother taking us to court, it's too small of a country, you know".

    So now whatever you google, you get mostly these results: 7 big network sites and subsites, 2 auto-translated AI slop generated by someone in other side of the planet, 0.9 of business pages and 0.1 something actually personal.

    No wonder that almost all content creators moved to social networks by the 2015-ish. They still are there.

    I wonder what will change this. A web apocalypse? Mass demand of in-person, non-online "content"? I wonder...

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qingcharles 12 hours ago

Yikes, I spent 15 years living in one of the Top 10 and my summers in another one. I probably agree, though. The rot was showing in most of those by the late 80s and they went very swiftly downhill after that.

To counter those depressing places, these towns and villages seem lovely:

https://www.thetimes.com/best-places-to-live/location-guide/...

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  • tonyedgecombe 3 hours ago

    I can't see the list because of the paywall but my guess is they are all medium sized market towns. Large enough to have the facilities you need but not so big that they become impersonal.

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lifestyleguru 14 hours ago

> organisations who despite their name, do not give a flying ** about their social housing stock

> and run-down decaying towns in the whole country

You cannot simultaneously have landlords living in Spain and well maintained local housing. Both are expensive. Pick only one. There exists a sweet spot when people are desperate enough to live in a place and pay every rent for any housing, but the sugar coating has washed off.

PS. How could they miss Bedford in the ranking?!

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  • harvey9 12 hours ago

    The social housing stock is run by corporate landlords with UK offices. It's still poorly maintained anyway.

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  • anovikov 10 hours ago

    Not sure how living in Spain is expensive compared to UK. Cheaper living, lower taxes.

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    • lifestyleguru 9 hours ago

      "Expat's cost of living" is different from "native's cost of living".

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mvdtnz 16 hours ago

That author on Slough,

> Ricky Gervais encapsulated its brutalist new town grim with ‘The Office’ before giving up and writing lame punching-down anti-woke “gags” for the educationally subnormal

That's a very strange reading on Gervais' post-The Office career. After The Office he did things like Extras, a sitcom about extras on TV and film sets, Derek, an emotional series about a well-meaning care worker who thinks it's more important to be kind than popular, and After Life, a series about a man who loses his wife young and how he deals with grief.

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  • arrowsmith 15 hours ago

    He also did The Invention of Lying, which, 16 years since I watched it in the cinema, is still the answer I give without hesitation to "what's the worst movie you've ever seen?"

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    • HideousKojima 14 hours ago

      For me that has to be High Life. Pitched to me as "Robert Pattinson has to to take care of a baby in space", in reality it was basically a side plot to "serial killers and rapists are stuck on a spaceship together" and all that implies.

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      • stavros 5 hours ago

        Yeah I don't know, you're selling it well. I kind of want to watch that.

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  • abraae 15 hours ago

    Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

    It isn't fit for humans now,

    There isn't grass to graze a cow.

    Swarm over, Death!

    John Betjeman (1906 - 1984)

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  • Apocryphon 16 hours ago

    There’s also his standup career of being extra atheist as if the world has never seen a famous lapsed Christian Brit

    Reply View 9 replies
    • labrador 15 hours ago

      I concluded Noah's Arc was bollocks when I was 8 so I don't know why he goes on about it at his age

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      • mckn1ght 15 hours ago

        Because people in power of a similar age still go on about how they think it’s true?

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        • graemep 11 hours ago

          Who?

          I know there is the odd biblical literalist in power in the US, but have never come across one in the UK. The biggest group of Christians in the UK are Anglicans (who are not usually biblical literalists, although there are evangelical groups within it that might be) and Catholics (church firmly against Biblical literalism, although there might be odd individuals).

          I think the reason atheists argue with Bibilical literalists is that its easy. It is somehting of a straw man: you pick a sub-group that is easy to debunk/discredit and then discredit the whole group by association. This has always been a problem: St Augustine talked about the damage done by people who interpreted the scriptures as contradicting what is known to be true in the 4th century.

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      • arrowsmith 9 hours ago

        Because it was edgy and transgressive when he was doing it 15 years ago.

        Nowadays not so much.

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        • notahacker 8 hours ago

          To be honest, like most of his subsequent attempts to be edgy and transgressive, it wasn't really 15 years ago either. His entire career as a standup and Twitter commentator feels like an extension of the Brent "I don't live by The Rules you know" persona

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      • mvdtnz 11 hours ago

        Have you not been following the news this week? A tremendous number of people still put a huge amount of stock into their silly superstitions.

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      • hkt 15 hours ago

        There's good money in it, I expect.

        Plus, there's no harm in making a career (or a joke) out of being vaguely anti-nonsense.

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        • harvey9 12 hours ago

          Charlie Hebdo's publishers might disagree.

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    • Chris2048 6 hours ago

      > lapsed Christian Brit

      I don't think he is a lapsed Christian though?

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