Because the unintended consequences of capitalism, due to human psychology, are the destruction of the substrate it relies upon and that humans require for survival (as is so very demonstrable right now), and (again, due to human psychology and our tribal and hierarchical nature) the increasing imbalance of wealth (and therefore power) to a select few (who are generally making the former issue far worse).
It's almost certainly hiding vents or pipes that needed to be routed there. As for the carpeting, somebody no doubt thought it would be cool, or else if for sound dampening.
I think it simply makes sense to leave it up to users to block this if they don't like it. This approach allows for folks to achieve what they want without forcing this decision onto others.
I installed it on Firefox with Greasemonkey. I don't get the dialog asking if I want to set my instance to my home instance, and I have no button in my settings. So, at the moment, the script appears to be inoperative.
Edit: Tried a few more things. I visited several other instances, other than my home instance of lemmy.ca, and still don't get any dialog about setting an instance to my home instance. Greasemonkey shows the script as enabled, but that's it. I'm running Firefox 114.0.2 on Arch Linux.
Edit2: Attempted to post an issue at the referenced Gitlab page, but this page does not exist, and a search for this project was a dead end. I have disabled the script until/unless the authors provide more information as to what is going on.
I was a wee bit surprised (but not really, I guess) when just before the Reddit blackout everyone on Reddit was spamming their relevant Discord links for the relevant subreddit.
I could only think, "That's no better!!"
We'll see if that changes.
To add to that, Discord is an entirely different kind of interaction. Fine if that's what you want, but not fine if you want something a bit more....static.
Not a bad article. A bit light on details and the effects and consequences of Reddit's changes. However, many articles I've seen from other mainstream news organizations were slanted towards the corporate bias and made it sound like the concerns were no big deal.
Because the unintended consequences of capitalism, due to human psychology, are the destruction of the substrate it relies upon and that humans require for survival (as is so very demonstrable right now), and (again, due to human psychology and our tribal and hierarchical nature) the increasing imbalance of wealth (and therefore power) to a select few (who are generally making the former issue far worse).