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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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501–510 of 795 posts

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit.

> there's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might as well stay on Reddit It will end up like Reddit. But right now it isn't, and that's good enough to make a play for the users. Given a choice between that and choosing a server, signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for another server, signing up... (I haven…

I think we do largely agree here. However, I think it should be noted that the current migration is largely driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of users that don't really care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive opportunity.

I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not great - there are also serious performance concerns, and in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't think that's going to persist for too long. I think some kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world) will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be in time, though.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#502
post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

> What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile? These companies need/want to start making money. Either due to investors wanting a return on their investment (Reddit IPO, Amazon buying Twitch), or poor decisions which have lead to lots of debt (Elon buying Twitter). Companies can't get free/cheap loans any more since interest rates are high. Many of these social me…

Inflation and rising interest rates sure seem like they can explain so much of the puzzle... especially timing.

But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site - yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.

I don’t think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest, including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots between us as fast as they can.

I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market value for mega sites with bots between users. We’re getting bots everywhere, not because time’s up and bots were the best idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so clearly underpaid for Twitter.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's different? IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.

ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms? I think there were many options at the time. Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim. Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks. I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't hav…

In 1988, IRC's competition was a VAX program called RELAY that ran on BITNET, not the internet.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in you…

I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?

I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.

I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech.

We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a polished experience day one. It’s going to turn a lot of people off, but I’m not sure there’s anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech could be key to the people controlling the future of social media.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#505
Just at first glance, and maybe there's a better way to get this data (I guess not anymore with the API changes!), but if you just look at upvotes on popular posts it seems like nothing has changed in terms of how many people are engaged with the site. At a glance, I doubt the blackouts have had any impact on their DAU or concurrency. New subreddits will likely form to replace the permanently blacked out ones, but just like Twitter, all these addicts aren't going to leave, they'll just have a worse experience but carry on. After all, the good fight against the evil Reddit corporation... is taking place almost entirely on Reddit.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Federated services will never become mainstream That's kind of the point Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative. A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone. > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. For a technically inclined person on…

> you sound an awful lot like a luddite. I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites. > A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone. That might be true if you only ever want to read technical things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But that's not why Reddit is va…

> I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of luddites.

No, it's an observation.

You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way.

Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like saying someone won't be able to operate in society without knowing how to read or write cursive.

Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use technologies, how they think about them, it all changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that it would.

As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that idea. Hence the luddite comparison.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a Garolite Bed. Get a sheet about 1 to 2mm thick. Yes, that is PCB material. It is fantastic! Use the smaller sized office clamps to hold it in place. These can be placed on a few sides. Check that they do not collide with your printhead. Then, prep it with a light ScotchBrite scrub. Just enough to see the light abrasive marks and a bit of texture in the surface. Finish with high purity isopropyl and a dry cloth…

Some notes about my setup: Ender 3 v2 (textured glass bed), added a CR Touch, swapped out the bronze for a hardened steel nozzle, and installed Klipper firmware. I have PLA, PLA+, and PETG, I dried the PETG at I think 140F (convection oven) for 6ish hours, and then was finally able to print a Benchy boat if I set my first layer print speed to 5-10mm/s. I tried to print something that had small shapes on the first lay…

You have a damaged feed path somehow.

There is a PTFE tube in there that's supposed to help guide the filament and it is damaged. If you can't do a cold pull nothing will work because the shape of the filament will change inside the feed path and it will bind up.

Some hot ends do not have the PTFE tube, but they have metal parts that must be mated together precisely in order for the polymer to flow through. If there are gaps the polymer flows into those forms little nuggets and it can't work.

If I were you I would replace your hot end, and make sure your feed path is factory spec all the way through and try again. Clean the feeder gears, make sure you got nice Boden tube on there, the whole thing.

Pet polymers take on water very slowly. And many plas will work whether they're wet or dry. I do not believe that's your problem. If you've got super aggressive Snap Crackle Pop when purging some material through maybe. But I would look elsewhere first.

If I were you, I would also get a known setup that just prints a 1-in cube. And work that until it's perfect.

The Telltale here is the curling up around the nozzle and the clogging. Your machine can't sustain a flow rate. Once the filament is moving it's okay but once it stops part of it is solidifying in there and preventing movement from then on.

Once you get it all working, if you have replaced your hot end, you can then compare that one to the one you have now and probably fix it.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#508
I can’t take the protesters seriously. Of course they’re not a homogeneous group, but among the protesters, I’m seeing way too many pro-capitalists who are actually just middle class and who are protesting against exactly what a good capitalist would do.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#509
post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Is there a way to get RSS feeds the way you can with Reddit?

Yes, just click on the little RSS icon next to communities, it's just right off the sorting selection icon next to the (?).

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#510
post #98
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

“…but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself”

Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally doesn’t care about them at all.

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