They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

There’s more than just that to it.

I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.

Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.

Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.

I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.

I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.

These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.

But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.

How is Sleeping Dogs on the Deck? I played it a bit a few years ago on desktop, so it might be worth downloading onto the Deck so I can restart and take it in. I remember being really engrossed in the world. I think I ended up not playing it because I started Saints Row 2 and that game grabbed my attention like nothing else. I was particularly nostalgic for the classic early 2000s GTA games, so SR2 was like an undiscovered fourth one.

Have you played the MediEvil games?

I picked up Dinkum. I thought maybe it will be the Minecrafty Animal Crossing-like that I hoped would be made one day. I didn't play it yet, but it looks like what I want out of a Deck game (besides the Deck<->Switch thing). I also got Necesse, a game with similar themes.

I picked up The Rewinder as well, which looks like my idea of a quintessential indie game.

Besides, after a decade of only buying things on deep [1] after they're out of the zeitgeist, I think it's about time I play things that are a bit earlier in their lifecycle. Especially indie stuff, where the money isn't going to some exec's yacht polish.

While I bought it some time ago, I finally got around to playing Grim Fandango Remastered, which has been delightful on the Deck. I love how the game was conceived for a totally different type of machine than what I'm playing it on.

[1] it appears this community auto-removes the word for "reduction in price". I guess there's good reasons for that, but this is a Steam Sale thread lol

The only gesture it still needs is swiping a comment right to left to collapse the entire comment thread

I actually found this because I was following a guide that needed Process Explorer to find out which damn program was catching my controller before DS4Windows was.

It was Firefox, specifically the Stable Diffusion WebUI for some reason.

Was a surprisingly fun way to tank my productivity on Monday.

Honestly, the fact that you mentioned it having a definite end was a huge factor in making me click on that link.

I’m sorry if this goes against some instance/community rule and if so please just tell me - but where does one find reliable ROM packs? I only ever used EmuParadise back in the day (as I still do - but don’t tell anyone!)

I do feel like that about Apollo. It’s crazy how different the Fediverse feels via a UI that copies Apollo pretty closely, I feel like I just dropped into a gaggle of tiny subs. Sure most features are missing, but the progress is so fast.

I still am pretty bummed about losing the old site. I’ve spent so long there. But I was hopping sites before and it’s now wrong to start doing that again. Complacency is how we get apps like Instagram, which are more ads than pictures of friends (which is all I want out of that platform)

I use Windows with an audio interface on my PC, and I think that caused some audio routing issues when it came to remote play. I haven’t tried it again, might have been fixed

Might be a bit on the Zoomery side of cultural conversation compared to the rest of this thread, but the duo Her’s were tragically killed in a road accident while on tour in the US. They made songs that were cheesy but still emotionally resonant, which is a hard balance to hit.

Their music would blow up even more online in the years following their death, I know there was a lot of of TikTok buzz around them during the pandemic, when a bunch of bedroom pop artists were gaining a ton of traction. While I hate that platform, it can be pretty good for promoting music naturally when people aren’t gaming the system (which they’re doing all the time - fuck TikTok). I think some of their famous songs are still considered TikTok clichés, but I wouldn’t really know.

I didn’t even know they were dead until this year.

There’s always this conspiracy of labels preferring to promote artists who are dead because they can pocket more money from dead artists, and I think about that when one of their songs pop up.

Are there any plans at all for a traditional app? I understand that there is an appeal to keeping things completely free from any App Store shenanigans, a certain freedom that comes with web apps over native apps.

Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.

My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.

Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).

I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.

The weird part for me isn’t that the corrections are online. It’s that the whole book isn’t a searchable help page with all the errata patched away.