Homepage is great. I like that you get little snippets from the apps it links through but is more customisable than something like Heimdall which does similar. It’s become my go-to having tried pretty much every other dashboard out there over the years.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.

I’ve been on reddit a long time, over 17 years, and I’m a member of some private subs that happen to have some quite influential users in them. It would be really interesting to open those up to the public to see what reddit influencers are saying in closed spaces, and the amount of gaming etc. that goes on between prominent users you see all across the site.

Admittedly, at least the subs I’m in are relatively quiet these days, but in years gone by they’d basically decide what was going to be popular, who was going to mod which subs etc.

This is almost certainly true. But what I can’t figure out is that Reddit needs Mods for the subs. And surely mods, and potential mods, are more engaged and informed.

There’s always been this implicit understanding that Reddit gets free moderation across the whole site, something other SM sites spend millions if not billions on each year, in exchange for those mods having autonomy, control, and a sense of ownership of the subs they mod. That social contract has completely broken down.

I’d guess mods get into modding for one of two reasons. One is power/influence, which is now seriously diminished, and the other is because they care about the community, and they must now be wondering whether Reddit Inc is the best place to host such a community when it appears to be so hostile to users.

They should make sure all the posts are about the iPhone, the internet phone made by Linksys in the late 90s.

I think it’s a bit more than enjoyment. People felt a sense of ownership in the communities they helped build. And whilst they were always contributing to Reddit inc they still felt some control. Now that Spez has gone full on world’s dumbest capitalist and keeps yelling about companies having to pay for “his” data, data which he didn’t pay for himself, it’s really exposed what’s always been true. That Reddit is just another company, it’s not your friend, it’s not a community.

If the AMA taught us anything, it’s that spez doesn’t actually use reddit. Let alone understand it.

Alternatively, Elon just found out how many people are blocking him.

Having played a bit of Zelda recently, micromanaging weapons. Oh, I’ve got this metal broad sword and I’ve used it to to stab an unarmored fleshy bad guy and oh it’s broken after three stabs.

I get that weapon degradation is a real thing that happens, as they become blunt or potentially fragile, but Zelda BOTW and TOTK take it way too far to the point of it being a real chore. I thought they’d fix it after all the BOTW complaints but TOTK is just as bad.

The best on-boarding experience I’ve ever had was with a remote company. I think it’s more that companies still haven’t adapted properly to remote working, or have paid lip service to it. If a company does it well, it can be excellent, I’d argue better than in-person because it’s more inclusive.

Probably depends on how you define success with these things. The valuation of the company is down a significant amount since it was purchased and recent reports had ad revenue also down a significant amount too. Whether the owner cares about those things is probably up for debate, and evidence would suggest he might be looking for something other than money out of it, like influence, or just a play thing. I’m not sure the owners of Reddit are motivated by the same things, I think they just want to be richer. Time will tell I guess, it’s difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentional acts from the outside.

Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.

Not sure how I’d value mine, I can’t see any comparable ones. But then again my main is over 16 years old so has lots of karma, awards, membership to invite only subs with high profile users, mod permissions etc.

I suspect it’s diminishing returns once you get past a certain account age and karma count if it’s being used to spam or scam. Tempted to sell up and just draw a line under it though, it would feel dirty contributing to reddit after the way they’ve treated the people who actually generate value for them.

I feel like that’s gone a bit under reported. Reddit is basically saying that their current apps aren’t usable for users who need accessibility features, so they’re relaxing rules for apps that have better accessibility features, but those apps can’t be “commercial”.

So basically they don’t want to improve their own apps, and they don’t want to allow people who build apps with good accessibility to make any money, which means the only conclusion is that they put literally zero value on users who require those apps. Or, alternatively, they put zero value on developers of those apps, which makes their decision to charge other developers tens of millions of dollars to use the API almost inconceivably hypocritcal.

I think those are all fair points. Reddit did duplicate communities too, sometimes because some communities wanted to focus on specific elements of the topic they were covering, sometimes because of splits and disagreements, and sometimes just because it happened over time. People tend to find their niche, as do communities, but there will usually be a main one with the most members and activity.

Regarding individual instances, the way Mastodon has tried to manage that is by asking the people running instances to commit to a set of rules, one of which is giving appropriate notice should they wish to shut it down. This has been adhered to for the most part, and instances that don’t voluntarily subscribe to those rules can get degenerated, or more likely just not promoted through the various explorer tools. So long as there’s notice, there’s opportunity to migrate to another instance and copy over data. It would be good to see something similar on Lemmy, if it’s not already there (this is my first day!).