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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • crowsby@kbin.socialtoLemmy@lemmy.mlPolitics blocklist
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    1 year ago

    I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:

    Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article

    There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.



  • I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

    • Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
    • The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

    It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.

    That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

    • I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
    • Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
    • Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
    • Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

  • As a starter, you could ask him:

    • How many countries currently have laws making it illegal to be cishet, sometimes punishable by death.
    • In the US, how many states have passed laws making cishet relationships illegal. What year were they repealed?
    • How long did it take for an American president to openly support cishet marriage?

    …but like other folks have talked about, it’s difficult to use logic to get someone out of a position that they did not logic themselves into. You’re arguing with feelings, and so long as he feels oppressed, that’s going to be the truth of his world.


  • This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

    But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

    I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.


  • Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.

    In a similar vein, I’m not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn’t around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You’d first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today’s music apps offer.

    I’d love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying “welp the algorithm” and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one’s algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won’t.


  • I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

    • Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
    • Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
    • Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
    • Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

    What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.




  • Bouncing back and forth between Jerboa / Connect / kBin on mobile web right now. Who knows what it’ll be next week.

    This is a fun period of extremely rapid innovation, with new Fediverse apps getting announced nearly every few days by extremely talented developers. Many of these alpha/beta apps already have a better user experience than the 1st-party Reddit app, and it should get even better from here on out.


  • I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

    This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.





  • OP may come across a little alarmist, but it’s really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren’t carefully weeding out the ne’er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.

    And yeah, they follow “the rules”, and free speech and all that, until they don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.



  • I’m happy to see less plastic involved in it.

    • Filter holder - I use a reusable metal filter
    • Stirring thingy - I have a spoon
    • Scoop - I measure coffee by weight and not volume
    • Funnel - I just like, pour the coffee grounds directly into the Aeropress.

    That being said, the price increase seems ludicrous, especially since they’re packing in so fewer items.

    The nicest thing he can say about it is that it looks nicer, but that’s pretty subjective. I think it looks a little low-budget compared to the dark-tinted ones.


  • That he’s becoming increasingly more catty and loose with the truth by the day speaks to the protest’s effectiveness. Aside from the dropping engagement numbers, the daily deluge of negative press from major media outlets isn’t doing their valuation any favors, and as the person responsible for this decision, he’s feeling the heat more than anyone.

    Also, if they weren’t having any effect, he’d simply maintain the previous party line from before the protests about how the community is free to express itself and protest in any way it sees fit.