crowsby

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

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.

It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.

free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.

Kinda, yeah. I mean I don’t really identify myself as a “retro gamer” but I’ve got an Atari with a bunch of games and a newfangled TV. Every once and again I think it’d be fun to hook it up, but there’s no easy way to get it working without buying some doohickey. In this case if the doohickey is the machine, and it can use the OG controllers & games, that’s certainly appealing. Maybe a steep price for it, but definitely appealing.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

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.

This is my issue with the article.

Headline: Here’s what we know about EG.5 so far

Body: Apparently not much. We uhh, know the name of it? Severity, how contagious it may be, symptoms, breakthrough rate…like umm, anything??

Didn’t do much for me. I tried a few different things and they were mostly a waste of time. I did recently pick up the Sylvania restoration kits and that shit was like night and day difference.

The only trick is that their “3 step” process is bullshit. It’s a lot of sanding and cleaning and sanding and cleaning and before you know it you’ll be on step 12 of 3 and only halfway through. But it works and the difference at night is definitely noticable.

I mean I do analytics on site engagement metrics professionally, like as my job that pays me money, and based on that and past instances of r/place, I can make an educated guess that:

• They were desperate to improve July usage numbers because projections were looking shitty after the events of the past month.

• r/place has traditionally been a good way to juice engagement numbers

• They pulled a lever they knew would generate the results they needed

Is it temporary? Sure. But this buys them some time and August’s numbers are August’s problem.

Here’s are the stats from a previous instance of r/place:

Social platform Reddit re-introduced its collaborative social experiment r/Place on April 1, leading to the highest daily active users (DAUs) its mobile app has ever seen

So yeah, they’ll get the juice they need, probably, but the fact that they were compelled to even need to pull that lever says a lot, imo.

I don’t think there’s going to be a good way to know. Semrush is showing a relatively steady decline since January 2023, but I don’t trust third-party tools for that. And I doubt that Reddit would make its first-party analytic data public if it looks bad, so in that case the default move is to either cherrypick or create a metric that appears favorable, a la Elon Musk’s brand new Twitter metric of median picoseconds of verified user screen time per albatross fart or whatever.

From a qualitative standpoint, both the content and general vibe seem markedly worse than a month or two ago. It’s made it easy to stop using it as my default online platform.

But in any case, I don’t think it’s worth it to get too invested in either its success or failure.

they were banned for not allowing LGBTQ+ content on their community.

This is false. They were banned for maintaining a policy which denies that LGBTQ+ people have a right to exist as they are.

Also, you were totally allowed to make anti-LGBTQ+ content. You were only prohibited from making anything pro- because let me tell you, if you’ve ever tried to get glitter out of an echo chamber, it is a total hassle.

Rule #8: This community does not affirm practiced LGBTQ+ lifestyles, with the exception of the ace/aroace (asexual/aromatic-asexual) lifestyle in certain contexts. However, abuse towards members of the LGBTQ+ community will not be tolerated. Pro-LGBTQ+ content is not allowed; however, sincere questions and discourse about LGTBQ+issues are permitted.

I think we can tag in the Paradox of Tolerance with a side of Nazi Bar on this one.

This type of “they’re intolerant, but polite” shit needs to get nipped in the bud because it metastasizes quickly, and sends out a batsignal to other intolerant groups that this will make a fine home base so long as they hide their power levels.

So they can go a little Westborough, as a treat.

Thank you for posting this. I was beginning to become concerned that I’d need to visit Reddit for my fill of disingenuous whataboutism, but this gives me hope that we can cultivate a culture of bad-faith posting right here in the fediverse.

Spam bots pursuing an audience shouldn’t be a surprising thing. Even glorious fediverse valhalla is battling with them.

The difference between the Threads & Twitter situations is that I’m inclined to extend a lot more leeway to an engineering team that’s less than two weeks into a new platform, versus one that’s been around nearly two decades and is suddenly dealing with issues because the owner decided to haphazardly fire the teams responsible for maintaining those areas.