I recently listened to a delightful pair of Behind the Bastards episodes (a podcast I can’t possibly recommend enough) about Jack Welch, the darling of the modern C-suite and those aspiring to such.
The way he shaped modern capitalism to the detriment of all is terrifying. But the hilarious aside is much he was like Trump, Musk, Zuckbot, spez and all the rest. A raging little boy who has been dealt some insignificant slight, generally imagined, who wants to burn down the world as a result.
But, since this was entirely in the pre-Internet era, and he was mostly a darling of the press when interviewed for his pithy anecdotes about how to business, it mostly flew under the radar. The modern hyper toxic tech bro CEO or his presumptively dumber and louder counterparts who have still stumbled into social media is nothing new. They are just airing their dirty laundry in the public square with a much bigger megaphone.
I recall listening to an interview with a psychologist who made a special study of psychopaths, but it was a long while back so I don’t recall the details, except that he noted that most rich corporate types definitely fit the mold.
In a similar vein, I vaguely remember a sociological tract detailing the value of psychopathy in ye olden times (think at the tribal level) as they both want power and are willing to make the hard choices that others might be too empathetic to do.
But their continued existence and proliferation among certain sectors (business, politics, religion) has become a detriment.
One of the jobs that I worked for awhile had a bunch of old timers waiting for their pensions to be ready and newer people who only lasted a few years, with basically nobody in between. The old timers seemed weirdly surprised that everyone who didn’t have the same heritage/grandfathered in incentives and benefits didn’t want to stick around. I got to watch the tail end of the transition from the old engineer-run company that all the old guys talked about, to one run by beancounters who stiffed people on raises, bonuses, and promotions when times were good, and had plenty of layoffs when times dropped to ok. Thanks Jack Welch. I left pretty much right after my 401k match was fully vested.
I guess I’ve been ‘lucky’ to be formerly part of an almost completely outsourced profession (IT) since right around when it was getting outsourced. So it’s all sadly old hat to me… not an endorsement, simply a tired observation.
People don’t and that’s OK because there’s enough people who does care to fragment off and start something new. That’s the whole point of the internet. The reason Reddit got as big as it did was because it had a wide enough net to attract everyone, now they are deciding to focus on just the ones that matter to them and that allows an alternative to exist.
Not really the focus of the article, but I think that /r/place was a neat idea, but hard to produce much with.
I feel like maybe there are forms of collaborative art that might go further, like letting people propose various changes to a chunk of pixels on an artwork and letting people vote on the changes.
I mean, that visualizes the changes, but what I'm saying is that I think that it'd be possible to go further with collaborative art than having a one-pixel-per-person cooldown.
I would not be surprised if this is an experiment to see the effect of killing API on the event. I mean, really, not many accounts have left reddit (a lot have showed up on lemmy/kbin, but a small fraction of reddit), and I remember a lot of complaints of bots in the last place. It’s just 3 months since the last one, so they should get great data on the effect of API charges on their bot access.
The fact that they would be obviously covering it up would be noticeable to people and would cause what they are trying to cover up to become more prominent in the news and on the site.
Engagement is what matters, and that’s driven by habits. The protests were disruptive. The switching of apps is disruptive. I see this more as a way to distract and bring up engagement again.
Is it a good idea? Honestly, if they want to succeed I think they should focus on what has become broken with reddit first
My guess is Reddit is doing this to temporarily raise traffic. It's like rage bait. They know they're pissing people off and protestors will flood the site, but traffic is traffic. If they can demonstrate engagement it must be good enough for the upcoming IPO.
Right? I don't understand why people on the fediverse are getting excited about this. At best, Reddit will have admins to insta-wipe anything objectionable. At worst, Reddit will point to the increased engagement as a sign that the protesters gave up and came back.
It looks like people have created /r/place alternatives. If you like /r/place, could just use one of those and go draw something neat and popularize that. I don't really see what drawing a bunch of images complaining about spez using the service that spez runs is going to accomplish. On the other hand, if people are doing neat things elsewhere, then other people might want to participate.
What made Place special was the rarity. It created a sort of internet time capsule of what was popular or in the collective mind at that point in time. If you wanted to get what was important to you on the board then you had to act with purpose RIGHT NOW because it would be over and gone in a couple of days. Even with all the effort put in it would be erased at the end. Just Dust in the Wind.
I remember, as a kid, once going to a Buddhist sand-painting exhibition at an art museum. They made these huge, beautiful mandalas by carefully shaking colored sand into designs. When they were done, they dumped it out into the ocean. I remember -- being pretty impressed with it -- asking something like "but why would you destroy it", and the Buddhist monk guy said something like "it reminds us not to be too attached to material things".
Don't know if I agreed with the guy, but I think that there is probably a very real perspective out there that ephemerality has intrinsic value.
I'm so lost right now. I was Redditor for 13 years. The last 8 I tried every app until I settled on Joey for politics and news and RIF for sports and entertainment. It was perfect. I could open RIF for college football, basketball and baseball, cricket, music, and various other hobbies. Then, I could find out what horrible shit was happening on Joey. Now, I'm trying to understand fedia, mastodon, and tiff but they are woefully underpopulated so if you post something, it usually just get ignored though I did get into an argument with Charles Stross on Mastodon and probably pissed him off (I love his writing but I think my points were just valid). I miss knowing who is going to create content that I might find enlightening and who I can avoid reading. I know know 2 people IRL who actually reddit and no one who uses anything but Facebook. I don't want to argue with college roommates
Best I can say is, browse All on lemmy and Live Feeds / All on mastodon. You’ll at least see some people and communities you want to follow. You gotta grow it organically here, with no algorithm to help. It’s harder, but it’s better.
This is my one big issue with Lemmy currently. I miss subscribing and just having a good feed. With Lemmy I find that a handful of very active communities end up pushing down the less active ones on a lot of the sorting options. I have to go directly to individual communities instead, which I guess could be considered a good thing for engagement but the UX side of my brain doesn’t like the extra clicks.
You know I get that you don’t see 100s or even 1000s of comments on each post but I’ve found that on lemmy people are actually willing to talk to you and listen. You don’t have to worry no one will see you or reply to you because you don’t have enough upvotes.
Especially on beehaw. The quality of discussion is in most cases significantly better than modern Reddit. It all reminds me very much of the earlier days (16 year old reddit account here).
But honestly that’s been my experience on all Internet forums I’ve been a part of.
In the beginning they’re places with few, but good, discussions, but over time as their gravity exponentially attracts more people the level of quality drops until you have people who get angry at you because they’re on the wrong side of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I always strive to learn new things, and I hope that when I’m completely off the reservation about something and someone tells me I have the good sense to take a step back, learn something new, correct myself, and hopefully improve until next time.
The Internet is full of people to argue with, if that is what you’re looking for.
I once tweeted at a guy who had gotten his name on an editorial about how Apple Pay (and Google Wallet/Pay) would fail as Walmart (IIRC) now had launched their own app-based payment service.
My tweet was just that he completely overlooked that Apple and Google had device level integration and a wider reach, and that Walmarts wallet-thingy thus would be competing with a lesser customer experience and way fewer supported locations.
His response was something along the lines of “boy, you really meet the crazy ones on Twitter”.
I think the fediverse might work out, but on the other side - a bit less social media never hurt anyone.
I agree with you in principle, but speaking from strictly a strategic perspective, /r/place presents a vulnerability that can be exploited without contributing what Reddit really needs to regain its status - content.
In the context of a social media war, this means we can use the space to peel off users who wouldn't have been introduced to the Fediverse otherwise, with no risk of harming ourselves or providing Reddit more than a temporary moment of attention. There's been a concerted effort to remove links to Fediverse resources in many subs, and for a great deal of redditors, they're in the dark about what the Fediverse represents and how much better it is than Reddit.
Plus it's just cool to fuck with Spez, and the Fediverse is so cool in general that I'd love to see what the effect would be if we united against a common enemy.
My fantasies of Fediverse starships aside, let's be honest. Neither of us have any idea what it would do, as it's never been done before. And, at least for me, it would be fun to do, even if we don't need to do it.
I don't really see it as stooping to their level. After all I'm not suggesting we just go scrawl "fuck Spez" all over the place - we're already doing that enough here. But sticking up Lemmy, Kbin and Mastodon logos would be a positive organic social media campaign meant to improve the lives of its viewers - and unlike most advertisements, entirely driven by the desire to help others looking for free non-corporate alternatives.
This certainly seems better than any campaign Meta, Twitter, or Reddit could come up with, so I'd say we would be showing them that we're better by being better.
I think with the amount of things people are planning to draw the canvas is going to look pretty empty if they remove all of them. Plus, if you wrote something like “API” in small letters everywhere on the canvas they’d have a hard time keeping up
I’ve been working with some other people on discord. The plan is to spam the entire canvas with tiny API’s like amogus was last time. We’ve got it down to 4x7 pixels
deleting works like that. when you delete a comment, you delete it from your own instance where you created it, but it is not deleted from all the other instances where it propagated meanwhile.
I believe it's a sync issue between instances. Eventually, his comment should update and show as deleted on the instance you're viewing from. New material seems to sync immediately across most instances, but edits/deletions appear to be lower-priority and take longer. Some mod actions like thread removals also don't appear to sync correctly right away.
At least, that's been my experience, not sure how much truth there is to that. I'm using Kbin, which is also a bit weird with Lemmy content in the first place (for instance, Kbin apparently does not recognized locked threads from other instances, and will still let you comment, though they won't appear on the original instance at all).
It's a limited-time event that Reddit occasionally does where users can all draw on a large, shared board, one pixel at a time. There's a time limit on how often you can draw a single pixel. A lot of subreddits would get together to organize and plan out images for their communities to draw. And since it's a single, shared whiteboard, you have a lot of communities competing with each other over space and vandalizing each other's works. Then usually at the end Reddit will create a full-size PNG of the "completed" work and end the event.
It's usually seen as a melting pot of the communities, where people could get together and interact with groups they probably wouldn't have otherwise. Launching this now, when they're facing so much backlash over a slew of ridiculous policy changes that have forced many users off the platform, is an incredibly delusional move on their part.
There are two things that Reddit wants to do with opening /r/Place again:
1: Trick the users into thinking that Reddit still cares about the community that they've nickeled and dimed off the platform
2: Force more people into using the official app and new web layout, since /r/Place can't be interacted with using third-party apps or old.reddit
Definitely this, they have probably been planning this to pump their engagement numbers up. If I am gonna engage, then I’d better be doing it to give Reddit the middle finger.
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