Snowflake Challenge 02026 #11: Wish-Granting Engine

[silveradept]

snowflake_challenge dropped their eleventh challenge, and it's a call-back.

Challenge #11

Grant someone's wish from Challenge #5.

Which, I suppose, makes it less good for people who didn't do #5, the challenge of creating a wishlist. Now, I've gone through and left comments and tried to be helpful on several places already, so this one is already marked completed. Unlike the suggestion in the main post, I'm not going to keep a list of things that I've done here, because that feels a little too much like crossing the admonition about not praying in public. (No, I haven't been a practitioner of that religion for years, but some pieces of advice are still useful, even when they come from that kind of context. And because I'm far too used to, in my school life, having had people give me negative feedback to the order of "stop bragging about yourself," although it usually came in the form of "stop making us look bad" or "couldn't you just be normal for a change?")

If you'd like a refresher, I asked for a divination, a compliment, a comment, or a wish. But there are also plenty of other participants in #5 whose wishes you could try and help with. Many of them are for things like comments and reviews of their creative works, so you may find new things to you that you enjoy, or things that you might recommend to other people to enjoy.

After all, if so many of us are going to complain mightily (and properly) about the way that "engagement"-based algorithms and services almost uniformly default to sending us the worst of things, and the stuff meant to provoke outrage and other negative emotions (and serve us ads), then some part of our pushback against it is to engage in manual recommendation of the things we come across that we find particularly enjoyable. (Also, you're almost certain to find many other Heated Rivalry fans in there - it seems to have pinged pretty hard on much of my reading list, in much the same way that Our Flag Means Death did in the early stages.)

And, of course, if you have the currency to do so, you're not already feeding all of your spare currency into mutual aid groups around you, and you'd like to support Dreamwidth, there is always playing Paid Account Fairy for another user of the site.

Comments

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> After all, if so many of us are going to complain mightily (and properly) about the way that "engagement"-based algorithms and services almost uniformly default to sending us the worst of things, and the stuff meant to provoke outrage and other negative emotions (and serve us ads), then some part of our pushback against it is to engage in manual recommendation of the things we come across that we find particularly enjoyable. <<

Well reasoned.

I also link positive things as leavening for the darker news items, and in some cases, to show people effective ways to make the world a better place.

[teres]

Just as an observation, I wouldn't have minded seeing such a list from you myself, partly out of curiosity, and partly because I'd like seeing you do such good things.

I'd love to donate a paid account, but I'd need to buy a separate bank card just for those transactions, and that's a bit too much trouble for me; hopefully Dreamwidth's payment processor will eventually recognise some European alternative. (Since I mentioned this on a news post, someone paid my other account, so Dreamwidth has received some money because of me anyway.)

As for the rest, I'll probably pick up recommending stuff I liked, so thanks for that! Beyond that, I'm spending a large part of my available time engaging with people on this site and doing things for them, so I think I could mark that one completed if I were to do this challenge. I'll see you for the rest of these posts, then!