Maybe it’s just because there’s less content on Lemmy as of right now, but I remember doomscrolling Reddit, but now I only briefly open Lemmy once or twice a day....
Some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord
Sigh
Legitimately one of the most annoying things out of all of this is how so many tech writers have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to explaining the feelings and behavior of reddit communities. Like they don’t ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what’s going on. I can’t count how many articles I have read that get the facts about this whole situation right but still seem to completely misunderstand it.
They did not “shift” to Discord, they used already established Discord channels in lieu of the subreddit, until the subreddit came back.
Many subs already had parallel discord channels, but users don’t use one or the other, they use both. Because Discord is a fundamentally different kind of platform. It’s exactly the same way that many forums back in the day would also have chat rooms attached. Same community, using two different methods of online communication, at the same time, for different purposes. No one would ever have suggested IRC was equatable to a forum.
All that happened was when the subs closed, users congregated in the Discord to stay connected. It was never going to be a new permanent home. They were not seeking a new home, that’s the critical part. I’ve seen very, very few people suggest Discord as a permanent replacement and if they are it gets shot down. They were simply waiting out the protest on Discord until they could go back to Reddit or, if an alternative showed up, go there. It was a bomb shelter.
but I doubt there will be any one-to-one direct correlation between placing a pixel and putting one more penny in scrooge mcducks dragon hoard
It indicates an ability for the site to attract eyeballs on demand. /r/place started as an experiment, it’s now just a gimmick reddit can pull out at any time to attract traffic. Being able to pull engagement like that is valuable to advertisers and therefore make the site more valuable overall.
But more importantly, I think you’re right in assuming any of us individuals using Reddit right now isn’t swinging any pendulums. That said, the overall point is everything spez is doing right now is about demonstrating Reddit’s value, the potential profit to be made, and its reach. The more people interact with the platform right now, the more active it appears, the more the protests seem irrelevant. “See? No one left. We’re as strong as ever.”
Granted, it’s probably true that reddit’s traffic is not much lower than it was, it’s just not getting the API calls anymore, but those weren’t valuable to them anyway. But at the same time, Reddit’s recent moves clearly indicate they need to keep engagement up right now. It’s all about appearances. Investors and advertisers are likely side eyeing spez a lot after the last few months and they need reassurances the site is OK. Tanking these efforts by users trolling /r/place proves that it isn’t.
Spez is definitely preparing to cash out, there’s no question. Stockholders will likely not want him as CEO at this point. He’s only interested in the sale, not the site anymore.
But to your point, if this is true, then engagement on Reddit right now doesn’t matter much. At this point, there’s nothing users can do to change what happens next. Either Reddit is sold for dollars or pennies, but it will be sold, and Spez will immediately disappear.
We have no control, here. That’s been obvious for years, frankly, but painfully so the last few months. We only had control with admins that actually cared about the long term health of the site, but that time is past. Only thing we can do is keep chugging on here and enjoy the fireworks over there.
I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this...
Yeah I think people are looking for a conspiracy here when this seems like much more of a technical thing. I think the person that put together one of the scripts even acknowledged that comments being “restored” were because the script was bad and needed a delay of some kind? Because Reddit has safeguards against mass deletion or editing in this manner in the event of trolls or compromised accounts and so on.
Like, comments were never meant to be mass deleted in this fashion, and we don’t actually know exactly how reddit handles the requests on their end, so it makes sense some of them got kicked back automatically.
Reddit is doing more than enough terrible shit we can point to at the moment, don’t need to wind this particular thing up into something it isn’t.
Yes, comments are being restored, but what they’re saying is it’s not something they’re doing deliberately. The scripts people were running were basically failing and comments got restored automatically. That message literally encourages you to run them again or try different ones
It’s also basically the /r/startrek community. One of the earliest to migrate, and migrate wholesale.
Course I’m not sure how smart each topic having its own instance is going to be. Feels like that just means the mods you knew from Reddit are now admins of their own neighborhood, answerable to no one, and that could be a good thing…but I can see a lot of ways that creates issues in the future.
I’m not going to defend the price increase, but a lot of comments in here are just aimless hatred of the idea of paying anything, ever.
Pound for pound, YouTube Premium has been a decent deal at $10. Has been. This is pushing it, but there’s a lot of comments that seem absolutely indignant at the idea of paying YouTube period (and by extension the content creators).
There’s got to be some room for nuance here. The internet is plagued by advertising and paywalls, yes, but it can also not exist without them, so we find some middle ground.
LoglineUhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source....
I’m with the others that say it’s a really good episode, until you start picking apart some of the decisions. Pike taking the word of a person who has been suffering hallucinations, with no evidence, then preceding to destroy a massive infrastructure project with no real hesitation…it didn’t feel earned. I know he trust her, and Kirk, but damn that was an extreme leap of faith.
This has been a progressively worsening problem for a good while now.
To be fair to Google, it’s not entirely their fault, there’s a whole industry now that’s entire purpose is to fuck up the results. But even so, Google has absolutelly lost what made it useful. It’s far too concerned with try to curate for you instead of just doing damn search for the words. That helps them get more bullshit and some ads in there.
It will be a Lemmy app made by a developer who previously worked on a popular Reddit app. If it beats sync out of the gate, it will be the first one to do so.
All the other apps have been from new or unknown sources. Boost is a known entity.
It’s 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it’s recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don’t have to...
Two: blocking pasting is probably because password managers and operating systems must be secure when it comes to the clipboard, and clipboard management. Because if that’s not safe, your passwords you are copying and pasting are not safe.
Yes, but it’s not their clipboard, it’s not their browser, it’s not their operating system, why are they breaking basic functionality when my password isn’t their responsibility until I have entered it into their field and sent it to them?
This is the nannying bullshit I can’t stand. They made their shit more difficult to use, not to protect our private information on their servers or saved in their software, but solely because they’re concerned about how I’m using the clipboard on my own device.
but it’s incredible how far they’re able to enforce privacy, down to the hardware level, while still giving devs almost the same level of control over OS features as Android.
I don’t give a shit about devs. I want that control for users. Until they allow users to do what they want, they can get fucked.
Privacy through the use of user restrictions is not acceptable either. It’s my god damn phone, don’t you dare tell me what I can’t do on it “for my protection”.
It’s like saying a security firm is the best in the world at keeping clients safe, because they lock those clients in a vault and don’t let them leave.
Privacy for freedom is not a good trade for those enthusiasts your frustrated with. They will accept Google’s shit because the alternative is getting in a fucking cage.
I think what’s worrying is what the landscape will look like when it’s done. E-sims are a very bad sign for the future. It gives much more granular choices in what phones they permit on the network.
I worry that as long as Apple is out here spouting bullshit about scanning people’s messages to protect them from “nudes”, eventually we’ll reach a place where any phone that isn’t actively monitoring its user will be perceived as doing something criminal and blocked out.
But there are several small projects currently working on a linux-based alternative to iOS and Android. A true 3rd option has been sorely needed for a very long time, but never as much as it is now.
I’ll just point out that I have tracker blocker running on my rooted Android at all times, graph.facebook.com is blocked across all apps on the device, Ive made sure of this. For maybe the 3 or so years I’ve been running it like that, I’ve very, very seldomly found an app that fails if it can’t reach Facebook, though many try.
They’re thinking if they don’t make every last cent today their IPO will be a catastrophe and this will all be for nothing.
This is basically like a old wooden ship trying to outrun a hurricane by jettisoning everything on board that can be lost. Right now, they are not thinking long term in the slightest. It’s solely about stopping that valuation from dropping, and they’ll do anything at all.
Well it doesn’t help when you continually invest in bullshit. If spez had just focused on maintaining the site this whole time instead of throwing money at all kinds of new features and other crap no one asked for, effectively burning cash to morph reddit into a Facebook knockof, how much better off could he have been at this point?
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.
It’s a rant from a veteran social media/blog writer from some of the earliest days of the internet.
It’s a bit repetitive, occasionally overwrought, and very long, so feel free to skip some paragraphs, but if you’ve been around the net for a while, especially if you were here before Facebook, you’ll recognize exactly what they’re describing and know that anger.
That feels like 25 years of shit I’ve never been able to find the words to say.
I would like to share with you a very cool project that develops drivers for correct operation of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. I myself use Surface Pro 6 with these drivers and everything works like a charm (battery life is good, cameras work, stylus, keyboard, touchscreen, screen). The developers are gods. From myself, I...
One of the worst things about Reddit was that you could make a subreddit for anything but peeling away any amount of users from the “main” sub was next to impossible and forget about new user traffic without having the “default” name. Therefore the mods of that sub become the defacto admins of that topic on reddit until they piss off enough people to really get an alternative moving. Many different subreddits were actively fucked up by bad moderation but users kept dog piling in because it had the basic name you would think to search for, i.e. “television” or “videos” or “movies” or what have you. That name is real estate on reddit because no one else can have it, and that keeps horrible mods entrenched.
I think we should encourage several hubs and stop worrying about “splitting” communities. We have the benefit here of letting different communities grow under the same name to avoid that situation where a shitty mod team gets unchallenged ownership. No one else could make a /r/sandiego, so they never shook that real estate free from its horrible mod. Here? That’s not an issue.
For example, one of Lemmy.world’s biggest communities was locked by the head mod and forced to a different instance to join with another community. Without input from the lemmy.world users. It’s still sitting there in the communities list, locked, but high up on subscribers. Meanwhile the instance it was moved to is moderated much more strictly. Admins over there heavily “curate”; remove any post they don’t think are worthy enough to be posted.
I think that community should be unlocked and a new moderator should be allowed to take over, so there’s a different version of that community on a different instance, then people can have a choice between what type of moderation they want to exist under.
The biggest issue for a lot of people is going to be Microsoft forcing all Office 365 users to use Edge all the time. Our sysadmin recently forced me to uninstall Firefox and Chrome from all workstations unless they had an approved use for it. Everything must be through Edge.
Why? “Security” of course. It’s always “security”. Curious
Edit: the point is Microsoft could have worked to provide enterprise customers with ways to manage third party browsers going forward. They could have worked with Google and Mozilla to make that happen. They didn’t. Not really.
It’s that Microsoft continues to make decisions that create rationale for only using them, because that’s their business. “Security” gives them an extremely convenient cover for anticompetitive behavior. Anyone that thinks their C-Suite hasn’t pulled the defender/365 team into a meeting or two to discuss business strategy has far too much faith in a corporation that deserves very little.
After the stability issues with Lemmy were addressed (and they have been, for the most part…) the next thing that needed a revamp was content aggregation. It’s too stale. It’s no wonder they’re pilling on to address it.
IIRC it took quite a while for Reddit to find an algorithm that worked, and it constantly needs tweaking. It will here, as well.
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....
I’d been using mastodon somewhat, and I’d heard of Lemmy before but never actually tried it until the initial announcement of the API changes months ago.
Not to mention the design of those lids is intended to keep the dumpster closed so water won’t collect and animals won’t get in. They’re kind of heavy, so the wind won’t open them. They’re also designed so at that angle, with that wide a swing, it’s not easy to get those lids up at all, almost impossible to open it all the way and leave it open.
That’s why they’re usually built with side windows. They don’t generally want those top lids to open until the truck comes.
That’s actually what I was about to say to the apartment manager comment down there, but for some reason I can’t reply to that person.
If you manage a building and expect average people, not employees, to put their trash into a dumpster, it’s on you to make it easy for them to do that. If you’re not going to, you’ll end up with messes. There are dumpsters built for this purpose.
What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses instead of just turning one’s computer display’s blue lights off or very low in spaces where there are no other sources of blue light than the screen the person is watching? Suppose that the person has perfect visual acuity without eyeglasses. Suppose also that...
I wear blue light filtering glasses for working at my desk. You can order them with varying intensity, and there’s some visible differences with higher strength, but often you don’t really notice the difference after a while.
The idea with them isn’t necessarily to filter out all blue light, it’s to filter out some of it, to hopefully reduce some of the strain over a long period, not necessarily to block all blue light at once. It’s also useful on nights when I’m working before bed, because one thing they have proven is that blue light fucks with sleep cycles.
They’re not safety goggles, they’re more like sun screen. It’s gonna get through, but not as much, and that makes a difference over long time frames.
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
Lemmy is still missing some things I enjoyed from Reddit, things I can’t just snap my fingers and create here by typing a name into the “create community” page.
I’m not bothered by it. The transition will happen in time. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Etc.
LoglineA shuttle accident leads to Spock’s Vulcan DNA being removed by aliens, making him fully human and completely unprepared to face T’Pring’s family during an important ceremonial dinner....
That’s exactly what it is. They have an extremely narrow and boring definition of what Star Trek is “supposed” to be, and revolt against anything that steps outside that, be it comedy, action, whatever.
From the get-go, I’ve been saying the biggest issue with Lemmy as a decentralized platform is there will be no standard of openes or fairness to which all the admins and mods will be held to.
All of the fediverse is meant to coalesce together, but that could only happen so long as the people in charge permitted it. As usual, the technology is sound, but the human element was not taken into account.
With admins and mods on Lemmy doing whatever and shadow banning/defederating to curate how they believe their instance should be (instead of leaving that up to the users), it will be impossible for Lemmy to coalesce. Fediverse will have the illusion of a massive interconnected social network, but in reality it will be a fractured hodgepodge of fiefdoms under the rule of admins using the tools available to them to filter out any and everything, including the very votes the platform is meant to operate on.
Reddit had plenty of problems with extreme or biased moderation, but the centralized nature at least forced them to operate in the same space, where you either deleted shit or you didn’t. Everyone was in the shared version of the same shared site. With fediverse, moderation will be able to fracture that shared reality. The result will be confusion and a platform where visitors will not be seeing the same things to spite looking at the same social network, dependant entirely on the url in their task bar.
Overaction or not, putting distance between your platform and Meta is just the better choice, on principle alone. They have proved their intent time and time again, there’s no reason to willingly associate with them.
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....
It’s been happening in high schools, to the point teens are bullied and pushed out of peer groups if they have Androids. It’s frankly disgusting that apple willingly creates this division to profit off teenagers bullying each other, and they don’t get called out for it enough.
But in the larger picture, it’s definitely going to be more common among the young, because iPhones themselves are ubiquitous among the younger. It’s something the tech space is slowly starting realize: Apple has almost total market dominance among the rising demographic, and this has led to increasing tech illiteracy due to the way Apple designs its software, and inability/refusal to learn anything else. That is a huge problem for the tech industry when the only thing they can do to find customers is dumb their software down to appeal to people that don’t know how to use anything other than iOS
I think you are misunderstanding what the average person does with their phone. The vast majority of people have phones and the vast majority of them are not tech literate enough to go into the app store looking for how to message people. They just use defaults.
I feel like I'm spending less time on social media after switching to Lemmy
Maybe it’s just because there’s less content on Lemmy as of right now, but I remember doomscrolling Reddit, but now I only briefly open Lemmy once or twice a day....
What is Reddit’s CEO Steve Huffman doing? (www.theverge.com)
Censor-ception! Reddit user's post in r/place about admin censorship, is taken down, so they made a 2nd post about the 1st post being taken down, which was also taken down...
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/930912...
Reddit claiming they weren’t recovering deleted posts (lemmy.ml)
I’m not sure if it’s a coincidence, but I raised a case with the ICO in the UK, and today they got back to me asking for all my communication with Reddit. Also today - after a month of silence - Reddit also emailed me with this...
Are there any lemmy instances that work as a single "subreddit"?
And which of them are a better alternative than subscribing to a specific community here at lemmy.world?
TikTok is the most popular news source for 12 to 15-year-olds, says Ofcom (www.theguardian.com)
Google Chrome rolls out new ad privacy controls as it (slowly) bids farewell to cookies (adguard.com)
Google raising price of YouTube Premium to $13.99 per month (9to5google.com)
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x06 "Lost In Translation"
LoglineUhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source....
What's going on with Google's search engine?
It all of a sudden became TERRIBLE and now I can’t find anything? When did this happen? Why did this happen?
What is the hype about Boost?
I’m out of the loop I guess, why is everyone insisting this app will be supreme before it has even been released?
Why do sites disable pasting in password fields?
It’s 2023, why are websites actively preventing pasting into fields like passwords and credit card number boxes? I use a password manager for security, it’s recommended by my employer to use one, and it even avoids human error like accidentally fat-fingering keys, and best of all with the credit card number I don’t have to...
The state of Playstore (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Ads upon ads upon ads
Ally (bank)mobile app fails without connection to graph.facebook.com (lemmy.world)
Not sure if this is a good place for this post or not, but here goes....
Reddit’s only free iOS app icons are ugly now (www.theverge.com)
tl;dr: They locked the original icon behind Reddit Premium.
Here's How Reddit F**ks Advertisers
There’s been a few people who commented this in the past, but as an advertiser on Reddit, I want to share the numbers I see....
Linux for Microsoft Surface devices. It is reality! (upload.wikimedia.org)
I would like to share with you a very cool project that develops drivers for correct operation of Microsoft Surface devices on Linux. I myself use Surface Pro 6 with these drivers and everything works like a charm (battery life is good, cameras work, stylus, keyboard, touchscreen, screen). The developers are gods. From myself, I...
Is Lemmy.World going to do anything about community squatting?
A good example is lemmy.world/c/documentaries...
If you value privacy, ditch Chrome and switch to Firefox now (www.fastcompany.com)
With the number of people concerned about privacy, it is a wonder why chrome is even popular.
PS2’s Two Towers was the coolest way to miss the whole point of the Lord of the Rings (www.polygon.com)
Anyone else missing posts in smaller Lemmy communities because they are overshadowed by the popular ones?
I tend to miss posts in smaller communities, no matter what sorting options I use when I display the “Subscribed” feed on the frontpage....
How familiar were you with the Fediverse before coming here? (kbin.social)
Before the whole Reddit migration I was passively aware of the Fediverse, I thought I somewhat grasped the concept, and had created a Mastodon account, but never really used it....
Lazy Motherfu- (i.imgur.com)
Why did forum signatures fall out of favor?
Talking about those collage images we see after a users post.
Why filter blue light instead of not emitting it in the first place in a situation involving a computer display and a human observer with no other sources of blue light?
What is the natural science reason to wear blue light eyeglasses instead of just turning one’s computer display’s blue lights off or very low in spaces where there are no other sources of blue light than the screen the person is watching? Suppose that the person has perfect visual acuity without eyeglasses. Suppose also that...
Be honest, do you still use reddit?
I used to check the front page at least once every day, and occassionally check specific subreddits. Now I don’t look at reddit unless theres some drama, like mods getting purged, then I’d go there and enjoy the drama. Occasionally there will be questions that only reddit has the answer to so I have to reluctantly use it. I...
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x05 "Charades"
LoglineA shuttle accident leads to Spock’s Vulcan DNA being removed by aliens, making him fully human and completely unprepared to face T’Pring’s family during an important ceremonial dinner....
What's your filter settings on Lemmy? I feel like I miss the big posts and such.
Been loving the fed, but the past few days i’m wondering if my setup is wrong on this site?...
Millennial rule (lemm.ee)
You're So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You: On Meta and Mastodon (tracks.ranea.org)
cross-posted from: kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/173527...
Is having an Android really a deal-breaker for some people?
I asked if people chose iPhone for the blue bubbles elsewhere a couple days ago, and while there was some good discourse on that post, the blue bubbles definitely also came up as a reason....