A billboard in downtown San Francisco
i.imgur.com
illah
1 Post – 21 Comments
Joined 1 years ago
People here trying to make this about masking bad business decisions etc don’t live in Oakland. I live here, it’s really bad right now.
I was joking with a friend that a lot of Oakland feels like a bad 80s dystopia film…like you know those scenes with hobos warming themselves around a burning oil drum, stripped and burned out cars everywhere, piles of trash, drug addicts and prostitutes wandering around, etc? That’s literally real life in a large part of east Oakland. Like I’ve swear to god seen a half dozen girls at one intersection twerking in the middle of the street on the yellow lines, and one block over is a 5 block long encampment (16th and international/ 12th st).
Like this shit is on Google street view! It’s not hard to find. Follow this road all the way down to Fruitvale ave, it’s like a solid mile of a 3rd world refugee camp.
This is the way. Though despite all that I started to keep my Reddit browsing a secret as the average person considers a “redditor” a pretty negative thing to be.
Tbh kinda glad in that sense that the API fiasco revealed the true colors of the company and gave me a very clear reason to leave. It hadn’t felt “good” in a long time and now I know why.
I’ve never modded but have been on Reddit 15yrs 11mo as of the Apollo shutdown. At this point I’m in the 16yr club. It’s wild how badly they are acting toward mods.
Frankly I’m not a mod lover or hater, with the exception of AskHistory. It was so clear how the mods there truly made the community. Haters will say they had a heavy hand, but it kept the quality remarkably high.
I’m middle age so I’ve seen a full decade of forum shitposting and flamwars before Reddit even existed. The fact that Reddit can’t see the value of the community that build “their platform” is beyond tonedeaf, it’s just straight up arrogant.
I’m sure Reddit will stay far bigger than lemmy for a long time, but that’s fine. Maybe better. The old forums were microscopic by modern social media standards but in hindsight the conversations with active users were more real and not just some random username that might as well have been anon.
I even went to the trouble of putting mine in a mini snes style case with functional power and reset buttons. Still have it ready to go…in the garage 😅
The weird thing is rebellious shock-jock type folks like this would have rebelled against conservatives a generation ago, but these days “the system” is perceived as the left. Something to keep in mind when trying to make sense of the world.
I still use the original sport band from 2015 on a 7th gen watch, and it fit the 4/5 gen before that. Unless the gold band was non removable from the watch I don’t see the issue.
Also the fact that this was never publicly available means these were gifts to celebs for PR, ain’t nobody losing any money on this.
Besides the usual hammer, power drill, basic hand tools, duct tape, etc, what are a few tools or items everyone should consider having around the house?
It’s for Intercom per a follow up billboard down the road, thought it was an activist billboard at first.
I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
I had a minor debate here re: Usenet, where OP said we basically had an “easy to use” internet 30+ years ago, and AOL won by blanketing people with CDs.
I’m a techie who first got online with a 2400baud modem and I am fully aware that nothing I do can be extrapolated to the general population. Now that I work in the field, designing for “normies” is how and why services grow. The winners are the most usable services, not the most ideologically righteous ones.
(Also normies is a ridiculous elitist term, users of lemmy and mastodon are not special or smart…in this moment in time we’re primarily idealists with strong opinions on centralized tech that most people couldn’t care less about lol)
But you gotta admit Usenet was super niche and was never ever on its way to becoming a thing usable by people from all walks of life. This is why AOL became a thing…and folks like us similarly criticized it as a commercial walled garden!
While that was true about AOL and also true about the web today, going back to clunky services only techies can use isn’t the answer, and the current state of the fediverse is pretty clunky. But I have high hopes for how this space will evolve.
Only in SF are the billboards for data platforms and AI enterprise services haha
Also Sweden’s population is about the size of Los Angeles county. Every time I see Scandinavia held up as something to aspire to folks should remember how small and historically homogenous these countries are.
Comparing the US to the EU as a whole is a much more accurate way to look at things, with us states being akin to eu member countries.
+1
Tbh I felt Reddit was getting less interesting and more of a habit, Apollo was the last straw. Lemmy is small and a much less active, but more random. Prob good to reduce the mindless scrolling.
Most of my family have to this day never even heard of Usenet, but they all have Instagram and Facebook accounts. The scale of Usenet “popularity” isn’t even remotely in the ballpark of the modern social web/apps. There are more people on meta apps than people who even had access to the internet when Usenet was relevant.
How much do you know about the inner workings of an internal combustion engine, yet do you still drive?
It’s a good thing imo that we’ve abstracted away the complexity of tech to make it more usable. It was a pain in the ass before (so says one of the “old” techies on lemmy haha)
The contrast to this is knowing how to use the tool well and the difference between a $50 and $500 tool. Sometimes the cheapest version of a tool wielded badly is a lot more expensive than a pro with the high end version. Not to mention filling up a garage with things used only once years ago!
That looked like a coffee mug with grapes on it to me haha but shoulda known a band that iconically 90s would be on here!
So true, a lot of smart people where I work seem to buy the whole “all human knowledge” aspect of GPT models 😬
I feel reasonably confident that there are just as many languages spoken in just Los Angeles county, if there are any parallels to NYC:
My take on this is not that this is the default early adopter demographic (bereal, TikTok, etc…cmon old dudes don’t act like we are “leading the charge”). But, there’s a good chunk of older tech oriented folks that see a glimmer of hope in the fediverse bringing back some bits of the “old web” imo.
While most of the people like me don’t love meta or Twitter it was kinda good enough, but Reddit was kind of a last straw. I was there when all these companies were born and at the time we were all teen and 20-something early adopters (believe it or not even Facebook used to be cool!) and we’ve watched them all slowly degrade. Very young folks prob don’t care as they don’t really use any of these services, but us old nerds want to avoid the pitfalls of the Web 2.0 era.
Web3 and the crypto-decentralization efforts were really ham fisted…I think most experienced techies saw through all the BS and recognized how wildly inefficient it all was, not to mention outright scammy in many cases. Fediverse is unproven but I think it has potential, and I think many of us older techies feel that way.