As discussed here:

Honestly they do it so consistently that i’m starting to wonder if they have a choice.

A common way to do things for tech startups is that they get venture capital funds, use them to run the business at a loss hoping to acquire market dominance, and then use market dominance to turn a profit. I think a lot of tech startups that we know are currently in phase 2, meaning they’ve thrown money out the window for years and are now trying to recoup their investments.

Also, Reddit wants to go public and Twitter already is. This is relevant because investors are animals, all they see is short-term profit, and they use their voting power to make the company behave that way.

There’s a common thread between both my theories: it’s shareholder capitalism. I say this as a lifelong shareholder myself, shareholders ruin everything.

This is a thing that annoys me and it's not just Microsoft doing this: there's never a "No" button, it's always "Not now" or "Maybe later". As if i'm going to reconsider. As if it's an honest offer worth thinking about and not a pop-up.

Yeah i've learned not to trust this kind of simmetrical worldview, even when it makes me feel smart for being above it.

The internet can amplify incredibly marginal phenomenons. Like, how many incels can there possibly be? Yet you hear about them all the time

I thought the comments section would be filled with vapes.

Guys, i think vapes are a good candidate for something that hindsight will show us was dangerous, and i think images of teens smoking Juul will age as poorly as kids drinking beer.

Physical buttons. Sometimes an app or the OS itself will fuck up and not show you the home or back button for example.

I would miss headphone jacks but any phone worth buying still comes with those... for now

Maybe i'm already half asleep, but i love this comment that starts out on topic then drifts into a unrelated rant written in the most entertaining way.

Surely "speed of sound" must be an exaggeration, i don't see the object reaching mach 1 and then stopping within such a short distance.

Plus they happened to be in a hospital, so chances of survival are maximized.

A lot has been said about Call of Duty MWII, but if your theory is correct then we'll have to say that, of all things, its plot was prescient. And i'm not ready for that

Thanks for sharing your knowledge of ancient Hindu scripture, SexualPolytope.

As a moderator, i find it satisfying to clean my little corner of the internet.

We all see spam an scams when we use social media, and there's not much that you can do about it, maybe report it to admins if you have a minute. For the most part, you're powerless.

But on my fenced area of the internet, i actually get to do something about it. If your bot reposts content on r/shittyfoodporn to farm karma, i will pluck it out like a snail from my salad and kill it. Removing bad content is as satisfying as popping a pimple, it gives me the same joy as a retired dad meticulously cleaning his garden.

The less enjoyable part is when i have to interfere with the users themselves. Mildly saucy fanart will get posted to r/zootopia and i have to decide if it's over or under the line, and it feels bad to remove a post that somebody legitimately just wanted to share.

And if everyone does that, eventually there will be a main community that emerges and the other ones die.

Misleading headline: if you read the article and watch the video, he actually blames school shootings on the lack of moral education, with merely a reference to evolution teaching as an example of amoral atheism in the classroom.

So it's not a cartoonish slogan, it's actually a fairly standard fascist talking point.

And people say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’ Because we’ve taught a whole generation, a couple generations now of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.

Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i'm a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

But yes, it's worth remembering that it's not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn't want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say "gimp" is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i've never heard before in my life.

I felt a duty to not only place pixels but also coordinate efforts. Picking the design, updating the design, spreading information so the people placing pixels know what's going on, advertising, talking to other communities...

I don't remember them very well but i'm pretty sure i've had 4 hour nights for the entire duration. For place 2023 i spent most of my waking time in Discord calls.

And all this for a game that can be emotionally devastating. Getting overrun by a streamer feels shockingly similar to having big kids trample your sand castle, it's this little thing that you built together getting destroyed by stronger people and they're mocking you relentlessly.

It's true that such a bill was introduced, but wacky bills are introduced all the time. This is proposed legislation, they haven't even voted on it yet, and it's extremely unlikely to pass.

But i think it's also true that you can tell where legislator's minds are based on what wacky bills they introduce.

c/shittyfoodporn

I suspect a lot of yall should say this:

There is nothing worse than seeing my own flaws reflected in someone. Like, if they're a lazy neckbeard who talks about niche media and old-sci-fi while contributing nothing to society.

Especially the flaws i had when i was younger. I die a bit every time i see an unaware selfish arrogant teenager.

Oh my god, this is how 17yo me discovered what Steam is. I was forced to install it and i was SO mad.

Still using Steam 13 years later.

On the one hand, this is true, you gotta vote for the lesser of two evils.

But also, there are only two candidates.

So now it's this shitty situation where US voters just have to vote Biden no matter what, he can do anything and there will never be consequences electorally. And i really feel like there should be consequences for supporting a genocide.

I waste time every day watching YouTube shorts.

The way it's designed, you can see a little bit of the next short, and the curiosity will get me, i'm always really tempted to scroll and find out what the next one is.

I wouldn't intentionally waste time like this, which is why i haven't installed TikTok; but i do watch YouTube every day, and so shorts come get me where i am. And honestly, it's a garbage experience. Part of me thinks i would probably have more fun on TikTok because their algorithm is better. Shorts keeps giving me these channels that edit bits of podcats, often MrBeast and Joe Rogan, and there's loads of channels doing this so i keep seeing it no matter how many i block. What content i do enjoy is drowned out by a lot of trash content like that, and would probably be better in long form anyway.

This is comical because Israel is the attacker, and has been for its entire existence. Their goal is to conquer and ethnically cleanse more territory in order to create an enthnostate.

Hamas only exists as a reaction to israeli colonialism. That's litterally the only reason for their existence.

So, to be precise:

• Israel is finishing a war they did not start

Maybe not in the narrow sense, but the colonial efforts of Israel are responsible for the broader conflict lasting since the 50's, which the current conflict is a chapter of.

• There is literally no way around it

It's not necessary for Israel to conquer Gaza. It would be enough to just not expand their territory and respect human rights and international law, which they never did at any point in 70 years, leading to the current situation where there are no good options anymore.

• The terror attack was the proof that restraint didn’t do anything

The terror attack is a consequence of lack of restraint. (i wouldn't normally word it like that, i'm just using the same words for rhetoric effect)

I wonder if they're old enough to have been there. For people within a pretty narrow age range, it could be interesting to react the way they saw adults react around them, except they're adults now.

I wouldn't have much to contribute, i just remember people talking about something i didn't undersatnd but retrospectively seems to have been 9/11

Found the answer:

But the stigma regarding Android phones is mostly an American phenomenon, at least to the degree to which it affects purchase habits. Worldwide, per the same Statcounter report, Androids represent the significant majority of all smartphones, holding a 71% share of sales compared with Apple’s 28%.

I'm not the one with 'Reddit' in my username.

The difference should be the size, but not all of us would know

I only install what i need so i haven't actually installed a lot of apps. The copout answer is Firefox, but if i'm taking the prompt seriously it would be Simple Keyboard or Floris Board, they're highly customizeable keyboards that i really enjoy and i have a hard time deciding which to leave installed.

Just in general though, browsing F-Droid feels so good. I'm in a much simpler mindset where i'll think "oh that's neat i want to try it", which is how i used to feel about tech. Browsing PlayStore makes me think "that's neat, but what's the catch? How are they going to scam me/harvest my data? I'm not installing this"

Same reason there's no fascist party: the two main parties contain a broader range of the political spectrum than in most countries.

From there the question is does the moderate or radical wing of the party gain more influence. The far-right has won the Republican party years ago while progressives still haven't gained that much ground in the Democratic party.

I think when they say 'illegal content' they mean, like, drugs and terrorism. Piracy probably ranks pretty low on the list.

Now yes the definition of piracy technically fits in the definition of 'illegal content', but just because two definitions intersect doesn't mean you will get the logical consequences. The word of the rules is one thing, the rules in practice is another, so i think you can get away with a lot regardless of instance.

Besides, do the rules apply to the instance where you have your account, or to the instance where you're posting/commenting? I genuinely don't know

All of this is cuckoo. I don't know what it is about the audiophile market that makes it full of stuff like this. Them calling it "proprietary", being vage about "minerals and fluids" involved and assuring us that their techniques "took years to develop", is red flag language that i've heard over and over again.

Also this article is written like crap.

I wonder how similar Lemmy is to Wikipedia in terms of storage/bandwith requirements? It's text and pictures in both cases, but there may be nuances that i'm not aware of as a noob

Also streamers were a lot more influential on place 22 and 23 than they were in 17. Streamers are external to the website, don't particularly have a dog in the race other than themselves, are encouraged to create spectacle, and the kind of personality that makes you a big streamer is not conducive to being a good neighbor in a competitive pixel art game. So while i hesitate to say that there was anything about Reddit in particular that made Place 2017 a good event, i do think the presence of streamers made 22 and 23 much worse.

My dudes, the fact that cryptos are fundamentally fucked and unusable by design is nothing to do with politics, it's to do with technology. You don't get to brush it off as "oh they're just being woke", it's a business decision necessitated by the fact that it's really annoying to get paid in crypto.

There's a lot to say about this, but in this case specifically, the value of all major coins fluctuates massively, so if you accept them as payment then you have to look at it as getting paid with a speculative asset. It's like getting paid with a barrel of oil hoping that the price will go up. I guess some businesses would be willing to make that bet, but maybe not a 501c like Wikimedia.

And the reason the prices fluctuate is because miners validators and holders straight up want it to, they want the price to fluctuate because they want to speculate and get rich, not actually use it as a currency. Even if normies were to require payment in stablecoins, enthusiasts don't tend to use those because the price fluctuation is part of the point.

We could have a thread about it

This is my answer. There's like a 1% chance that someone i know would find out and i'm not taking it

Has everything been done

As if originality was a requirement

I am 30 years old and no achievements whatsoever. Nothing i've made has my name on it, none of it made me happy, and i got paid for very little of it.

A lot of people are deeply insecure like i am, but the difference is i have the financial privilege to not have to get out of my comfort zone, so i never did. I made a locked safe box for myself that nothing ever pushed me out of.

I'm not even rich enough to help people that much, at least not when i don't have an income. So i don't even have that satisfaction.

But a lot of torrent users have appreciated me over the years so that's nice

Yeah, my answer to "has the Reddit exodus killed the former Lemmy culture" is "what culture lmao"

Not that i was on Lemmy before, but i was on Mastodon before Elon bought Twitter and it was a ghost town.

Question answered OP, this will be your daily life until the sweet relief of death

I feel like AI companies have been scraping Reddit for their datasets already since the beginning and without permission. In fact, unless there's been a regulation change that i'm not aware of, i'm not sure why they would have Reddit "sign away" the data when they can just scrape it.

Also dubious if the current form of AI has a future. They seem like they should revolutionize every sector when you look at their capacities, but in practice their applications might be more limited than we thought?

Anyway, if Reddit does go public i will be deleting my account within the hour. The only reason i haven't yet is that i've been a moderator of the same subreddit for eight years and it's the only thing that's been consistent in my life in that time, i'm kind of attached. The reason i will is i didn't sign up to create value for shareholders, i signed up to create value for a community.