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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

    Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

    i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.


  • This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

    People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

    Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

    All the rest: yup.


  • Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

    Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

    So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

    Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

    So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.



  • Who furthermore wear suits and ties (rather than e.g. t-shirts and sandals) and kiss up to those “above” them, while looking down and calling names the ones “below” - e.g. scientists who studied covid, engineers who made the vaccine, doctors who administered them, even people who received them, etc.

    The closer you get to the top, the more the pyramid has to narrow down. The white poor people have no idea just how much e.g. Donald Trump loathes them, despite being caught on camera saying exactly how much. They think “bc I’m white, I’ll be fine”, and that lunacy affected us all.




  • For those of us who read developer code better than PO/PM “english”, indeed code is the documentation, or at least can be. Ofc when the code is thousands of lines long, split between multiple files, interacts with networked resources that you’ve never heard of, sending signals that do who knows what downstream, upstream, sidestream, flipstream, or whatever… yeah documentation can be important too:-). Also when the code is in some other language that you don’t know quite as well.

    By “testing” I should clarify that I did not necessarily mean things like user or unit testing - though that stuff has its place too - but rather even more foundational “verify that your code does what it is supposed to do” kind of testing:-). One could argue that that is just straight-up “writing code”, but then too writing documentation could be folded into that as well, e.g. having things like human-readable variable names, Pre & Post conditionals for functions and the like, so it all gets a bit fuzzy here.

    And if we are being pedantic, a “quick call?” could save a month or year’s worth of time “writing code”, to ensure that you know what needs / desires to be done. Likewise, updating Jira could save someone else SOO much time, or even yourself down the line when you wonder about something that was never mentioned. So I assume that OP was not taking this all that seriously, and just joking about “yeah, meetings are less fun than writing code”, and we all ofc have to pile on with our further opinions about what’s fun:-).


  • OpenStars@discuss.onlinetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you prefer Reddit or Lemmy?
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    11 months ago

    It depends where you go - e.g. the entire purpose of chapotraphouse is to dunk on people, and the users on that instance constantly crawl out from under their bridge and harass innocent passer-bys in other communities. But if you block a few notable places, which sometimes your instance does for you (I note that yours in particular does not though), then overall the Fediverse can be quite a pleasant place!:-)





  • Tbf, there’s no “right” anymore in the USA - it got eaten up, vomited back out, re-eaten again, with that process repeated a few times, and is now known as the “Alt-Right”, before being subsequently rebranded yet again as “Q”.

    In other words, the old “GOP” (e.g. Mitch McConnell) is virtually dead at this point, or at least barely hanging on by the slimmest of threads, while now long live the “GQP”, that is an entirely different beast.

    And I think I am hearing similarly of the UK as well, with Brexit?

    So if you meant that we need a healthy balance of diverse viewpoints, then I am 100% with you, but if you mean that we need to pollute true scientific facts with the craziest batshit insanity that anyone has ever heard of, then not so much:-). Diversity among viable solutions = good, whereas a literal Civil War b/c the “right” is throwing a temper tantrum = not so much. Even/especially the very people in charge… they are so scared of what is happening, the dissolution of a nation right before all of our eyes, and on their watch too.


  • Fwiw, a lot of us were ready to leave it anyway. Reddit used to be a place for left-leaning people, though I would guess more of the progressive liberal-relative-to-center variety, due to it being started from within the USA (I joined it quite late so not totally sure).

    Its downhill slide was long and convoluted and not evenly distributed across all subs. There were pockets of resistance, and probably some niche communities remain even now that are halfway tolerable. Anything worth doing takes real effort to build, and some people have put in those efforts and held on tenaciously. And, to be very clear, morally as well: e.g. places that try to reach the maximum audience possible to combat misinformation, or suicidal or similar behaviors - those places NEED to be on Reddit, yes and even Twitter/X, and 🤮 Facebook too, to achieve their aims of maximal outreach (at which point they could do dual duty to funnel people to the real places too:-).

    For those of us that want deeper discourse, Reddit was not meeting that need, but Lemmy/Mbin very much does:-). Btw fascinating related article: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb.

    So that’s one category of people, and another is the set of those who just needed to be awakened in order to realize what was going on. Maybe they were busy with children irl or some such and didn’t notice Reddit’s slide. I am glad that we can provide a home to them as well - it enriches us all to have more people here (mostly).


  • I wonder if part of it is that climate change might mean the death of modern human civilization, so could the slim hope of life as a slave seem more preferable than the greater certainty of death as a free agent?

    I cannot fathom that, but then again that’s why I am on the Fediverse rather than on Reddit. :-P



  • It absolutely is imho. Like at some point it was not social media as it became later, following (well, attempting to) the financial success of Facebook and Twitter/X, and instead people could submit long-form answers to questions, rather than merely vomit their feelings into the never-ending stream of others doing the same.

    ^This

    I also choose this guy’s wife

    And my bow

    etc.

    By deprioritizing people finding answers and instead encouraging them to make new posts all on their own to ask the question yet again, over & over, spez tried to make money and enshittified Reddit by taking it away from its original purpose that had given it such a reputation for being great.

    So it’s not “having ads” that destroyed it, but the chasing after ad revenue at all costs that was driving it into the dirt. Even before the protests revealed that starkly to us all that the Reddit we had known and use to love was dead - spez had stolen it, he took our efforts and that ad-bloated, authoritatian-modded corpse was what was leftover. And it wasn’t even bc of profits alone, but greed in chasing short-term profits above all else, including long-term profits. Aka capitalism killed it.



  • OpenStars@discuss.onlinetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
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    1 year ago

    Explained in this post to !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world.

    Supposedly it is a pejorative label applied to authoritarian communists, particularly Marxist–Leninist socialists. I presume it is the “pejorative” part that people do not like, b/c many of the places labelled as tankies by others unabashedly do precisely that!

    icon used on lemmygrad.ml

    I’ve only used the term twice myself, both kinda self-questioning what it even means, but if it is truly pejorative, then I should stop regardless.