SirEDCaLot

From the bottom up...

Whatever you say asshole.
A moron like you has no idea on how arguments should work.
Your self righteous infographic is just arrogant.
I know how to argue far better than you do.
I get in many arguments and I almost always win them.
You talk about disagreement, but your pyramid only works when both people are arguing in good faith.
You say that attacking the central point of an argument is the most effective, but often the stated central point is not the central point at all, especially with emotion based positions. For example, a more conservative person arguing against liberal changes will state specific objections to these changes, but arguing those objections is futile if the real underlying objection is simple fear of change.

Jokes aside-this pyramid is right on the money.

This exactly. I've been a redditor on one account or another for over a decade. For a very long time, read it was 100% of my social media and online community time. That seemed safe because Reddit had always been run in a user-friendly manner.
But then somebody gave Spez a microphone and he managed to destroy 10+ years of community trust and good will in like 3 weeks. Every single thing he says doubles down, reiterates that he doesn't give a shit what the users want.

So it's time to diversify. This right here is my very first post on Lemmy, never would have bothered with it if not for Spez. But now I am more carefully considering where I invest my time and discussion, and what networks I want to see grow.

With any luck, this decentralized stuff is going to be the answer to enshittification.

This has been promised for literally years. But it shows how out of touch they are- they think people are closing their subs and leaving over mod tools and if they make the shitty ad infested non accessible official reddit app have mod tools everyone will be happy.

People aren't leaving because of fucking mod tools. People are leaving because of lack of respect. People are leaving because Reddit said the quiet part out loud- that we are only there to provide them content and ad impressions and what we actually want doesn't matter one bit to them. That thousands or millions of users expressing anger is "noise" to be ignored.

Tell your users their strong opinions are 'noise' and those users will go be noisy elsewhere.

That's easy.
Reopen the sub and put a sticky post with info on how to join kbin/lemmy and encouraging users to give it a try and join the fediverse alternative sub you've created.

Then if you post any content- do it on the fediverse, and if you post it to Reddit just make it a link post to the fediverse page that has the content. Optionally disable comments or filter them.

The wording of these threat messages gets more hilarious by the day.
Mods have a position of trust- so do admins and company management. We trust them to maintain a non-evil platform, and in exchange we give them content and ad impressions. That applies to all users not just mods.

As I see it, they just altered the deal.

No more is it 'we provide a platform, you are welcome to grow your communities on it with minimal interference', now it's 'you'll run your communities as we tell you to for our benefit, and if you run your community in a way we don't like we will take said community away from you'.
If that had been the offered bargain from the beginning, many if not most of the Reddit communities would have chosen a different home.

A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what's missing is defederation policy.

Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you're on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I'm on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there's a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.

Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that's due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That's their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).

//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will 'live' on your instance, and thus be under your instance's rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don't today intend to create any communities, it's good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.

Honestly AirBnB used to be cool but now it kinda sucks.

Even though there's now a 'total price' option, booking a basic hotel is still less painful. There's cleaning fees and a lot of hosts have stupid requirements like you have to do the laundry or take out the trash or whatever. If I'm paying hotel level fees I want hotel level service. Plus every now and then you hear about one of these places having cameras in the unit. Fuck that.

100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.

While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.

I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.

I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.

I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further

Amen to that.

'We DGAF if the mods are abusing the community that's only there because it has a good name. As long as the clicks keep happening, it's all good. But the second they cause US a problem, we'll squash them'.

I don't think Reddit has done one single thing in the last week that doesn't reek of 'we don't care about our users'.

Or maybe power grids are teetering because utilities raked in profit for the last two decades by ignoring upgrades that would obviously be necessary... Just a thought :)

My utility sells $400 Wi-Fi touchscreen thermostats for like $25, the catch being you let them turn your AC down/off when grid load peaks. A few truckloads of thermostats are cheaper than grid upgrades, so they do the thermostats and kick the can down the road more.

Hell yes. Desktop web interface is solid. Jerboa on Android is solid. Now I'm just working on breaking the habit of typing old.reddit.com while waiting for things during the day...

Good to see that 'we'll be in touch' quote being printed at the end of every article.

I think you might have a setting wrong. When I join a community on another server I see all of the posts including past ones.

Salt and/or butter with a little pepper and garlic powder. Or pesto, mmmm. Plenty of shit other than tomato that can go on pasta.

I think this was probably the correct ruling.

If you are considering race as part of a college admissions, then you are NECESSARILY racist. You're not picking the best applicants, you're picking the best applications of a race mix you want.

Now, I'll be the first to say that certain minorities are under-represented in colleges. But that's not necessarily the fault of the admissions process. If the admissions process truly is race-blind, as it should be, then we should be asking why fewer people of whatever race are showing up as competitive candidates. And that brings us to the REAL problems- that a lot of minority applicants come from poor neighborhoods with bad primary education, crap high schools full of gangs and drugs, and few resources like books and computers and other opportunities to excel. And THAT is the problem we should be fixing.

A pox upon both houses. Both sides are hypocritical as hell. And both sides fucking suck.
Unfortunately the American electorate is too afraid of change to do anything about it, and/or too lazy to vote in primaries in significant numbers, and/or the opposing party puts forward stupid candidates that have no change.
Thus Congress has like a 18% approval rating, but a 80+% re-election rate.

And in most cases, I'd argue that's because candidates insist on pushing stupid wedge issues. The Democrat down south is going to go anti-gun which makes them unelectable. The Republican up north is going to go anti-abortion or anti-LGBT which makes them unelectable in a blue state. And rather than set those wedge issues aside and recognize that there's FAR more important things at stake, we keep squabbling over bullshit rather than actually making progress.

Another thing to add, if you put a semicolon instead of a comma, on Android at least it will stop and pop up a prompt that you can hit continue for it to keep dialing the rest of the digits.

Whole thing seems pretty short sighted.

At least the dude is honest though- 'we used to consider CentOS valuable, we no longer see value in that'.

What this all is really doing though is introducing a lot of uncertainty into the RH ecosystem, and pushing people toward other distros. And that will make RH the only fish in the small and shrinking pond. Because let's be honest- 99.9% of the people running CentOS and the like were never gonna buy RHEL to begin with.

Agreed. I feel like someday this incident is going to be taught to MBA students as a 'what not to do'.

I'd do a few things.

First, make signing up computationally expensive. Some javascript that would have to run client side, like a crypto miner or something, and deliver proof to the server that some significant amount of CPU power was used.

Second, some type of CAPTCHA. ReCaptcha with the settings turned up a bit is a good way to go.

Third, IP address reputation checks. Check IP addresses for known spam servers, it's the same thing email servers do. There's realtime blacklists you can query against. If the client IP is on them, don't allow registration but only allow application to register.

A lot of the value isn't technical, it's social. Each instance can set their own rules for acceptable conduct and what sort of content they want or don't want. That's one of the most valuable parts of decentralization, an instance like Beehaw can try to be an open and inclusive space and thus have a longer list of rules, while another instance can be more permissive and allow NSFW and more offensive speech. And thus the two can coexist in the same network with the same namespace.

The problem with this question is your friends, if whatever you decide on isn't something your friends have or are willing to get, then it's not useful for you. Signal offers probably the best mix of adoption and security. It however misses a few notable features, for example the iOS client has no way to back up or restore your messages. I'm a big fan of matrix, which seems very extensible and has good security, but if you are in a sensitive application like an authoritarian country, it wouldn't be my choice. All the messages are stored on the server and while they are encrypted it's still not what I would use for a chat I never want to see in court.

Agree 100% on the critical mass. Last week I would visit a day later and sort by new, and there'd be maybe a page of stuff since my last visit. Now I am back to sorting by top day, because going through new would take hours.

I think it's not just more users that are here, but that the users who are here are invested now. It's no longer just a fun toy to hack around with, it's potentially a new home so we are starting to decorate :-)

We're not going to get the same numbers as Reddit, and that's a good thing. I don't want already users to leave. I want the smart ones to leave and come here. The ones who have something to say, the ones who can engage in discussion and debate, the type of people who made up reddit's early user base. The idiots who just want to scroll memes and TikTok style low effort videos all day and can't have a respectful conversation to save their own life, Reddit can have them. They install apps without question and don't use ad blockers so maybe Reddit can make some money of them. Best of luck with it.

Agree. But it's not kids, it's stupid people of all ages. Same thing happened with Reddit and with the Internet as a whole. Used to be you had to be a little smart to know you wanted to be on the Internet and figure out how to get it working. Then same was true of forums and IRC. Then same was true of Reddit. But then Reddit changed formats trying to be a TikTok style quick content scroll app, so idiots who just want to scroll started using the site and quality of discussions went down. I hope Lemmy grows but I hope the sign up process stays as it is, to weed out the extra stupid.

Exactly. The effects are not going to be instant though. I still use Reddit everyday. But they have lost my trust. I am now actively looking for other places and other networks. Hopefully Lemmy ends up being the answer. If it does, then my use of Reddit will drop sharply in the next month or two. Who knows, maybe then reddits board of directors will realize that Spez just killed their golden goose.

This is absolutely true, and this is how the internet was back in the old days before Big tech and megaplatforms. People would set up little servers on their cable modems using spare laptops. It was experimental, it was imperfect, but it was ours. One side effect of this, was that you had to be at least a little bit smart to get yourself connected to it. Even if that just meant knowing that connecting to it was something that you wanted to do. That weeded out a lot of idiots who contribute low quality discussion. Also, because there is no giant company with a financial incentive to get everybody to use it as much as possible, things were built for raw functionality rather than trying to make them easy for people to get addicted to in 30 seconds. That naturally makes them more usable for anybody with an IQ over 90.

Also, no advertisements. No sponsored posts.

I think Reddit quality has been declining for some time.

There are two factors at work I believe. One, once something goes mainstream, you get a much broader set of the population on the platform, and much like real life, the idiots seem to be louder. More importantly though, updates to the platform deprioritized serious conversation in favor of mindless scrolling. Look at the new website, or at the official app. They are not conducive to in-depth conversation. They keep trying to distract you with posts from other communities that you don't even subscribe to, the goal is obviously to get you to keep clicking clicking clicking rather than spending a bunch of time on one page composing a well thought out reply.

And that shows. Really high quality in-depth conversations on issues of importance used to be far more common for me on Reddit. Today they are much less frequent, fewer people seem interested in real discussion or debate. And there's much more of the attitude of 'you disagree with me there for you're wrong fuck you'.

I think the recent protest and beginning of migration are going to make that even more prevalent. I think many of the smarter people who enjoy in-depth discussion and post quality comments are going to migrate to Lemmy or Kbin leaving Reddit full of idiots. I think that will actually be good for Reddit as a company, at least in the short-term, because idiots don't use ad blockers and they install the official app without thinking. It is of course killing their golden goose, but their actions suggest they have decided they prefer to do without that goose's continued services.

I think you and @Screak42 hit the nail on the head.
There was never going to be a mass exodus, not without an established competitor (as Reddit was to Digg back in the day).

Trust has been broken. That's like a boat that now has a tiny hole in it- it may not sink now, but that doesn't mean it's not sinking.

That said- I don't think there will be a mass move. I think the more passionate old school people will migrate away, which will leave less content for the newer folks. The site will certainly get a lot less interesting. And this will hurt them in the long run. But like most mismanagement, it'll look good for the next quarter or two.

Exactly. There may be a piece of knowledge that a person should already have, but not asking the question just means continuing to be ignorant.

I've always liked the saying 'there's no such thing as stupid questions, only people too stupid to ask and fix their own ignorance'

Absolutely.

I think there's two issues.
One is that Google's search has gotten a LOT less useful over the last few years. I blame enshittification- it used to just search for whatever you typed in, now there's a lot of 'you typed X but we think you might mean Y' type stuff that produces tons of irrelevant results. You can turn on Verbatim mode and that helps a little but it's still not 'just search for what I fucking typed in and not something else'.
The real advent of enshittification was when Google+ the social network came out- they removed + as a search operator and now you have to enclose something in quotes for 'must include'. It's been going downhill since then.

The other is that Google is either losing an arms race or simply not trying to weed out SEO spam sites. So you ask a question like 'error 0x0000001b blue screen' and you get pages and pages of 'how to solve error 0x0000001b [FIXED]' that are just 'error 0x0000001b is a common error lots of people have, it can be caused by many things, to fix it reboot your computer and if that doesn't work try safe mode and if that doesn't work try OfficialDriverFixRegistryCleanupUtility.exe number one free recommended utility to solve all system problems' (only spread out over 3 pages).
Or you get a bunch of 10 minute videos that illustrate a 20 second fix.
No thanks.

Agreed. Big tech platforms make it easy for everyone to participate. But while we gained simplicity, we lost control and independence and creativity. Every website isn't supposed to look the same. And our expression and activity isn't supposed to just be grist for the data mill.

I remember fondly the days of early broadband, when tons of people would run a server on an old laptop for an IRC bot or a shoutcast stream or whatever. We need that back. I hear about people doing that with Lemmy instances and Matrix homeservers and the like and it makes my heart sing.

Twitter and reddit won't implode. But hopefully they keep all the users who just want to mindlessly scroll through low effort content and the smarter ones join the fediverse.

Lemmy is different than Reddit, and that's a good thing. I don't need to replicate Reddit. My problem is just the muscle memory habit of opening a tab and typing in o l d . And hitting enter when it autocompletes

Agree that rationality is not a safe assumption. None of this has been rational- it feels like Spez is having a temper tantrum (as would a small child) and those around him are desperately trying to channel it into professional-ish actions.
Also makes sense if Spez is Ellen Pao 2.0- board decides unpopular changes need to be made, so they pay Spez extra to do 120% of what they want and be the fall guy. He goes nuts for a while, then resigns, and is replaced with some suit who looks good on TV and has a bit of social media cred. That guy then says all the right things to the community and walks back 20% of the changes.
This probably all pushes the IPO back a year or so, but if they think they can increase revenue in that time, it makes some sense.

At this point though I wouldn't put anything past Reddit.
I have to think someone there is smart enough to know if they block fediverse links that's a huge escalation that makes them OBVIOUSLY the 'bad guys' even in the eyes of people who DGAF about the API nonsense.
From the POV of a 3rd party observer, it COULD be argued that Reddit is just dumping freeloaders, a bunch of the users don't like it and want shit for free, and it's a stupid forum drama squabble.
But as soon as they start actively suppressing competitors, that becomes a lot harder to see as anything other than 'actively stopping their users who want to leave from leaving'.

Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.

It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.

Didn't mean to imply that LGBT is not an important issue. Not at all. Just that it's something that one side feels more strongly about than the other.

To an Evangelical (usually conservative), persecuting LGBT people is good policy and good for the country. To a Liberal (and to many like myself, FWIW), persecuting LGBT people is a civil rights violation that makes a person unelectable.

To a Liberal, gun control is good policy that will save lives. To a gun owner (usually conservative) gun control is a civil rights violation, an unconstitutional violation of the Bill of Rights that makes a person unelectable just as much as if they suggested needing a license to exercise free speech.

So what I'm suggesting-- if the GOP stopped trying to persecute LGBT folks, or the Democrats gave up gun control, either one of them would GREATLY increase their appeal especially to moderates and people on the other side of the aisle but who are fed up with their own party.

Put differently--- if a bunch of politicians came to you and said 'we'll stop trying to take away LGBT rights, but in exchange you stop trying to take away gun rights', would you agree to that?

First- understand that everyone goes through this, everybody has an answer for you, but the answer that worked for them may not work for you. There's no right or wrong answer. A lot of people say 'the way to get over someone is to get under someone' personally I've never subscribed to that sort of thinking. It leads to unhealthy rebound relationships IMHO.

The only thing that will really fix this is time. So there is no magic bullet. There are things you can do to help though or pass the time faster. The biggest one is find ways to not ruminate. Focus your attention on other things, ideally useful things. Take some time to improve yourself in fun ways. Hit the gym is an obvious one, but I generally recommend take up a hobby or learn an instrument or take a class. Basically learn some fun new skill and focus your attention on that. It serves as a distraction from your grief, but also a source of engagement and a little happiness.
It WILL get better.

Remember this is a business issue for Reddit- by removing your content, you are making their database less valuable. You should assume the edit and delete system is actively hostile to this sort of activity.

To that end, I don't suggest deleting at all. Deleting a lot of comments is a big red flag. As is any kind of automated activity like doing one every 5 seconds.

I would also suggest, if you want to devalue the database as quickly as possible, don't bother doing all of your comments. Do the ones that are most popular. And don't delete them, edit them. Whatever edits you put in should be coherent sentences so a spelling and grammar check would not flag them. And don't do one every 5 seconds, do one every 5 minutes.

I agree with this 100%. That affects both the types of interactions, and the types of users.

When Reddit really took off 12 or so years ago, it was primarily a forum for discussion. I loved it because there would be in-depth, respectful, quality discussions on almost every page. I spent hours debating science and politics and technology and relationships and other things of substance with other intelligent respectful open-minded people.

For a few years now, Reddit has been trying to become a quick content scroll app- bombarding the user with page after page of memes and videos and low effort crap that only holds attention for 12 seconds but results in another page load and thus another ad impression. In 'new reddit' and the apps, there's very little focus on discussion or comments. Just quick content to flip through.

And that affects the discussions on Reddit (quality discussions are now the exception rather than the norm) and also the people who join and stay at the site. There's a lot more animosity, assumption of bad faith, etc.

But I also think that because Lemmy's design DOESN'T push people into quick content, but IS focused on discussions, that trend can reverse. People who want quick content will quickly grow bored here and leave. And we can keep the discussions respectful and open-minded.

I also think that the 'welcome to lemmy' posts should talk more about community and culture; what sort of interactions users should and shouldn't expect here. That should include an explicit warning that if you're going to start arguments and assume everyone else is an idiot, this probably isn't for you, but if you want to have good respectful discussions this is your new home.

I have heard they are filtering out 'fuck Spez' posts. This will probably get filtered also. I would suggest add a bunch of other stuff, like make a a list of sentences that support this point and pick three or four of them to put in each post so that doesn't immediately show up in a filter