As for the ages here, the people most likely to migrate are the long term Reddit users that have had an account using third party apps since 2010 or so (because younger people have only ever known the official app). That self selects for anyone that was old enough to use Reddit in 2010 back when the user base was mostly high school / college / recent college grads. Someone in their late teens / early 20s back then will be in their 30s now.

Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It's not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he's working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that's still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it's impossible to feel stress if you're comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity's existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

In the early days of the pandemic, I got a low-tech version of that: I had one of those electric desk fans that move from left to right and back again to keep a room cool. I took an old wire coat hanger and bent it to attach one part to the fan, and one part to my mouse. As the fan moved, so did my mouse, so I always appeared active in Teams.

Software solutions like powershell scripts are neat, but they can be detected by IT. They can't really detect a hardware solution without a lot of digging though, and as long as I'm still getting my work done, they have no reason to dig.

I quickly stopped caring about it though. Like OP, I go inactive for long periods of time, but fortunately, my manager is smart enough to recognize that my work's still getting done, so he doesn't care at all. Same thing for my direct reports: As long as we continue to meet deadlines, I don't care if they're working 40 hours / week or 10 hours / week.

Yep. The rising interest rates is an enormous part of it, and it's not really getting discussed that much. Basically, the 2010s were a period of historically extreme low interest rates. When you can borrow for cheap as you could during the 2010s, you could easily fund growth via borrowed capital. Money was flowing everywhere. Tech companies in particular could get funding from places like Silicon Valley Bank, so profitability was a secondary concern, with growth as the primary concern. No need to be profitable if you can fund your day-to-day operations with cheaply borrowed money.

In the current environment, things are very different. Cost of capital is much higher now, so borrowing to fund the day-to-day isn't as feasible anymore. Those rising interest rates ultimately led to Silicon Valley Bank's collapse in March: They held a lot of long term US Treasuries on their balance sheet, so they were forced to show huge unrealized losses with rising interest rates because of mark-to-market accounting. That collapse cut off a huge source of funding for Reddit and other tech companies.

The result is predictable: Reddit needs to turn to profitability, and they have to do it fast. It absolutely sucks for long time users, but they no longer have access to the same funding source that kept the place afloat in the 2010s.

Reddit isn't unique in this. Other tech companies show a similar pivot to profitability after funding growth with cheap money in the low interest rate environment of the 2010s. Uber is a good example: Borrow money for cheap to fund operations at a loss for a few years, and all of a sudden, you've gained huge market share because you've undercut the cost that taxis charge. After that money dries up though, you have to raise costs to pivot to profitability. Today, Ubers are often more expensive than the Yellow Cab you may hail from the street, but people are so used to using Uber that they don't compare prices anymore.

It might feel like forever in internet time, but it's only been two and a half weeks since the thing imploded and two weeks since the rescue operation was called off after finding debris from the Titan. Two weeks is lightning fast for a company to formally shut down in response to something like this, especially when you consider that the company's employees have been grieving the death of their CEO/friend during all of this.

Doubt it. It's just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they've only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that's no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn't been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

Open Street Map is legitimate. In bicycling communities, Strava is the gold standard app for tracking rides, and it uses Open Street Maps on the backend. It's always super accurate for me, even for fairly obscure bike trails off the beaten path.

The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn't appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it's a terrible design for people that aren't the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Honestly, the Reddit approach is pretty similar. Reddit had /r/gaming and /r/games, for instance, with the two communities offering pretty much the same content. Same thing with /r/baseball as the large baseball subreddit and /r/MLB as a mostly empty subreddit filled with people who figured baseball would use the same naming convention as /r/NBA or /r/NFL. Eventually, one of the ones wins out. We just have to remember that Lemmy communities have two names before and after the period, so while the initial name can be duplicated, the initial name plus the instance cannot.

It's similar to the early internet where site.com was different from site.org.

The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.

I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I'm sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.

Define "intentionally inflammatory." Reddit was always very left-leaning politically, so I assume the userbase here is similar. I suspect conservative memes/links/etc. would be considered intentionally inflammatory here in a way that leftist memes/links/etc. would not. It's not really possible to define a one-size-fits-all definition: One person's inflammatory is another person's ideal content.

Additionally, define "spamming links." The biggest problem with Lemmy so far is lack of content. If I go to the baseball subreddit, for instance, I see a bunch of highlights from the games that took place last night, a bunch of discussions on World Series odds, a bunch of questions about stats, etc. Over here, none of that exists yet. A few people have tried to build individual communities by posting similar content over here. It probably looks like spamming a bunch of links to MLB's website for highlight videos. However, without someone spamming those links, the community is basically dead with nothing to comment on. We probably need a little spamming at the outset to grow the community to be large enough to sustain itself organically.

Top Day is probably the best sort option so far, but I wouldn't mind something that updates a little more frequently (e.g., Top for the past 4 hours). Additionally, I wouldn't mind adding a decay mechanism that gradually pulls posts lower as time passes. As things stand now, if a post is immediately popular within the same hour it gets posted, it'll remain as the #1 post on Top Day for the next 23 hours before immediately falling off the page altogether the second the post becomes 24 hours old. That leads to stale pages, and if people see the same posts every time they check this place, they'll assume it's a dead community and never come back. By implementing something that more gradually cycles content, if I check the site once at lunch and again a few hours later on my train ride home, I should get different content.

Just as a quick FYI, on the PS4 (and presumably the PS5 too), if you click on any of the hidden trophies, you can press square (I think) to show the description of how to earn it. This wasn't possible in the PS3 era, but it's one of the upgrades they implemented in PS4. That'll save you a Google search.

As for why, as others have mentioned, it's mostly for spoilers or hiding easter eggs that are more fun if you find them naturally rather than going out of your way looking to earn a trophy.

Spotify

Strava

Default alarm clock app

If it weren't for Spotify and Strava for bike rides, I would gladly get rid of my smartphone and replace it with a flip phone. Life was better before the entire internet traveled with you everywhere you go.

I'll be honest: that's a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don't want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that's the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it's called is dead on arrival.

I think it's because a few of the posts appear at the top for everyone, so people keep adding comments to those, which "bumps" them to the top of the feed like it used to work with forums back in their heyday 15-20 years ago.

I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It's mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase "L+ALAE Ratio" to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It's a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don't want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren't high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see "L+" used as shorthand for "L+ALAE" or "L+ALAE+ULAE," though admittedly, I've never seen that specific shorthand used.

The "Top Day" sorting option does this, but posts fall off a cliff rather than falling off gradually. My understanding is that they'll remain on the page from hour 0 to hour 23, but then completely disappear starting in hour 24.

Instead of that, it would be ideal to implement a mathematical formula that pushes pages higher into the rankings with every upvote, comment, or view it gets, but pushes posts lower in the rankings with every additional hour passed. You have to tweak the specific parameters of that formula to get it right, but it essentially forces posts off the page after enough time has passed, while introducing new posts to replace the old. Unlike the "Top Day" sort where things are a step function, the idea with this is to make it gradual so that a popular post falls from #1 overall down to #2, then #3, etc. over the course of a day.

The problem with subscribing to communities at this point is the lack of content. I subscribed to a few different baseball communities, but none of them have anything other than maybe a welcome post or a few gameday posts without any comments. Communities are duplicated on a bunch of different instances too, which makes things a million times harder than it needs to be. I have no idea if one of the half dozen baseball communities I'm in now will make it big, if a new one entirely will make it big, or if they're all doomed to never have content.

Agreed. Something like Top for the last 4 hours would be super easy to implement because Top for the last day already exists (just change 24 hours to 4 hours in the code that fetches comments). However, for those that are used to checking the site multiple times in a day, you don't want to ge served up the same content every time you check. Top for the past 4 hours would seemingly be a decent balance between giving posts that have some type of traction while not giving posts that are stale.

Looks like a huge drop in user counts a few minutes ago too: Down to 75K as of the time I made this comment despite the chart showing a much higher number immediately before that. I'm guessing there's something off when it comes to counting the different instances.

So far, yes, but I don't really have any allegiances to this site and will jump ship to a competitor in a heartbeat if something better comes along. I know some people like the decentralized federation approach here, but I actually see that as the biggest downside to using this site. The value proposition of Reddit in its heyday was that it offered a single landing point for all sorts of discussions that used to be scattered across hundreds of different forums. The decentralized federation approach moves away from that, and while that offers some advantages, it also comes with a lot of disadvantages too.

Defederation works against that though. When I first joined a few weeks ago, a lot of the discussion was taking place on Beehaw. I joined a few communities over there and started to enjoy the experience but in an instant, all of that was blocked because Beehaw decided to defederate from Lemmy.World (and others). That sort of thing will happen more and more in the future. I don't want to have to create a dozen different accounts on a dozen different instances to view the content I want to see: I want a simple interface with everything in one spot.

Reddit offers the "everything in one spot" piece, but they killed the simple interface possible via apps like RIF and replaced it with an abysmal official app.

Lemmy offers the "simple interface" piece with apps like Jerboa, but the federation aspect of it makes it hard to get everything in one spot.

The second a competitor offers both features with a large enough community to allow for meaningful discussion, I'd be happy to make the switch.

That's why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we'll at least have an Android app working again.

Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.

I signed up for Lemmy.World because that was the only one open a few days ago. Does that mean I need to create a separate account on Beehaw to view their stuff now? Why does this stuff have to be so complicated? Is Lemmy actually a viable Reddit alternative or not?

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It's way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don't have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it's not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there's no chance in hell I'm doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I'm using Lemmy via Firefox's mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.

The Titanic fanously sank on its maiden voyage, so that's a little different. The Titan submersible was successful for hundreds of dives before the implosion, which I'm sure gave the team a false sense of security and ultimately led them to ignore all the red flags.