lvxferre

joined 4 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You're talking about your thread about Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete, right? It's still in the modlog for me, even in private mode. I don't think that they removed the entry.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Don't feel discouraged by the Karen above, that should've stayed in Reddit alongside their peers. Thoughtful contribution is often verbose, and there's nothing wrong with it.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Lunix sucks so much that it got stuck into the version 2 for years.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Neither, but if I must choose it's probably slightly more like muscle than like cartilage. If prepared properly it's really soft and a bit chewy, distantly reminding me meat from stews.

(That reminds me a local pub that prepares some fucking amazing breaded and deep-fried tripe. Definitively not doing it at home - it spills and bubbles the oil like crazy.)

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

A compiler does it "good enough", but AI = god in a bottle, thus it'll do it "perfectly". And for perfection you need to edit the raw metal using butterflies and cosmic rays, it'll be the only real programmer to ever appear. Pressures like time and focus will stop existing. Why? Because AI = god, QED.

...or at least that's the sort of crap that those Silicon Valley muppets believe in. The content itself doesn't make sense, but why that pile of nonsense is uttered does - a fringe religious-like belief increasingly common among them.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn't exist makes me feel stupid.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 years ago (6 children)

In my opinion, the migration is sensible because:

  1. You need to know a topic decently enough to be able to moderate a community about it. And yet it's unreasonable to expect the admins of lemmy.ml - a community about free/open source and privacy - to know about anime.
  2. There's no inherent reason why this comm is the largest anime comm in Lemmy. It's simply that this comm is three years old, from a time when "Lemmy" was mostly just lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, there was no other place in Lemmy to discuss anime.
  3. Lemmy as a whole benefits from redirecting traffic from larger instances to smaller ones. Specially instances unrelated to politics and tech. In fact, lemmy.ml's admins asked users to use other instances not too long ago.
[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

For me it says "admins". I don't know if it's because I'm a mod of a few other lemmy.ml comms, or if it's because of the different backend versions (SJW uses 0.18.5, lemmy.ml uses 0.19.1).

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 20 points 2 years ago (3 children)

For context, I encourage people to check this discussion in the "join Lemmy" site github. Have in mind that both of the Lemmy developers in that discussion are also admins of the lemmy.ml instance, and they clearly disagree if the instance in question should be considered as "hosting CSAM" or not.

[–] lvxferre@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago

It's the Sex update! They actually released it! The mad devs!

 

Credits to the idea go to BarqsHasBite.

 

Users are already planning protest art. I personally wouldn't encourage people to join because it's more traffic for Reddit, but that's just me.

On other news, apparently requesting a subreddit now requires a 28d old account with 100+ karma.

EDIT: it's on again, since 20min ago:
The only two recognisable things are the "fuck spez" and nationalists spamming some government flag.

EDIT 2: better view:
I think that the meaning of the sentence in German up there should be rather obvious. It's on-topic.

 

Two IMO on-point excerpts of the article:

The highest-ranked replies are very critical of the post. “What good is our feedback when reddit seems perfectly happy to ignore all of it?” wrote one user. “What’s the point?” Another pointed out that Huffman called mods “landed gentry.” “Show, don’t tell,” wrote another user — to which the admin replied, “Agreed.”

“A beginning of what?” replied one user. “This solves nothing, and just wastes everybody’s time.”

Reddit's administration is sounding more and more like an abusive SO trying to gaslight you into staying in the relationship. "Baby I'll listen to you, I swear."

 

It's a script attested from 2200~1700 years old inscriptions found in Central Asia, between what's today Kazakhstan and Afghanistan (both included). Discovered in the 1950s, but now freshly discovered inscriptions from Tajikistan (the Almosi inscriptions) encouraged people to take a further look at the decipherment, alongside older inscriptions (such as the Dašt-i Nāwur trilingual; written in Greek, Bactrian, and the unknown script).

This is specially interesting for those interested on Tocharian studies, as the language being deciphered might be potentially spoken by Tocharian speakers who migrated south.

6
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by lvxferre@lemmy.ml to c/snoocalypse@lemmy.ml
 

The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:

  • a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
  • the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
  • that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
  • the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
  • the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.

The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.

EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.

Reddit is a dead site running

from July 10, 2023

Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote

"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:

If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.

From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.

But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.

I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.

Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.

Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!

Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.

There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.

This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.

A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.

 

Excerpts from the link:

Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:

  • Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
  • Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
  • Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
  • Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.

Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\

  • Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
  • Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
  • Earn xx gold and karma each month
  • Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
  • NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program

Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's ~~broken browser for a single site~~ "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.

The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.

Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.

The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)

The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.

 

Here's the list of highlights from the article, as it's a good TL;DR:

  • The Reddit app-pocalyse is here: Apollo, Sync, and BaconReader go dark
  • How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history
  • Reddit will remove mods of private communities unless they reopen
  • Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview
  • Why disabled users joined the Reddit blackout
  • Apollo’s Christian Selig explains his fight with Reddit — and why users revolted
  • A developer says Reddit could charge him $20 million a year to keep his app working
 

Caution is advised when watching this video, as not all linguists buy the idea of zero morphemes/phonemes/etc.; for some the zero is just a neat theoretical trick, as it simplifies some descriptions. And some outright avoid the concept.

Even then, I feel like this video should be fairly informative and enjoyable for people in general.

 

King Charles speaks with a rather posh Received Pronunciation, much like Queen Elizabeth II did. In the meantime, William and Harry use a more Standard Southern British pronunciation.

The changes described by Lindsey can be summed up as:

  • PRICE - [aɪ] vs. [ɑɪ]
  • DRESS - [e] vs. [ɛ]
  • CHOICE - [ɔɪ] vs. [oɪ]
  • SQUARE - [ɛə] vs. [ɛ:]
  • HAPPY - [ɪ] vs. [i]
  • [ɫ] vocalisation, colouring nearby vowels - negligible vs. noticeable
  • word ending /t/ - [t] vs. [ʔ]
  • /t/ flapping into [ɾ] - rare vs. more frequent
  • /t/ before front high vowel affricating into [ts] - actually attested for both sides
  • unstressed syllable elision - King Charles did this quite a bit before rising to the throne, but William does it all the time
  • rising intonation on statements (uptalk) - almost non-existent in RP, fairly common in SSB
  • /θ/ as [f] - avoided in RP, present in SSB
  • word ending /k/ as [k'] - avoided [?] vs. common

Personal observation: the changes in the vowel sets remind me in spirit the Great Vowel Shift, as it seems that DRESS lowering is pressing PRICE to go back, and in turn PRICE is forcing CHOICE to raise.

 

Imagine the following situation: some lost lemming posts a random beans fact in a comm that you moderate. It sparks a cool discussion, but it's completely off-topic. In this situation, what do you do?

If you remove the post, you're being that annoying mod telling users to stop having fun. But if you keep the post there, you're encouraging people to post even more off-topic in the comm. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Because of that, I think that it would be cool if we had the ability to migrate posts from one comm to another. This could be done in two steps:

  • mods can "kick" a discussion out of their comms. Those discussions end in a specific comm called c/off-topic, c/general, or whatever the admins of that instance (yup) decide.
  • mods can also "adopt" discussions from c/off-topic and bring to their comms.

I feel like this would be the best of both worlds - it's less disruptive to community, but it still allows users to discuss their random junk.

For reference, Ruqqus had a similar feature, with the +general guild being mostly off-topic stuff. It worked fairly well IMO. 4chan also does something similar to the first step, with the /trash/ board.

 

I'm sharing this old article because it's useful to contrast the situation back then (protests against hate speech) and now (protests due to the APIcalypse).

Here are a few highlights:

  • Back then, the admins were already eager to shift their discourse back and forth, depending on the convenience. Reddit was always about free speech, then it never was.
  • Former CEO Yishan Wong's "[shutting down subreddits] won't become a regular occurrence"
  • If you try to follow the link sourcing the quote above, you'll notice that most Reddit blog official communications towards users are gone. Instead you'll find a blog clearly geared towards investors, vulture capital, and corporate.

Any other old piece of news that you guys feel like sharing, that can be contextualised to show Reddit going downhill?

 

Archive link for the mod statement. From the statement itself:

Anyway, here are some things to keep in mind:

  • Gore and pornography are still not allowed in /r/PICS.
  • Remain civil toward one another.
  • Do not violate the site-wide rules.
  • This link directs back to this comment.
  • It is normal to experience special feelings while looking at John Oliver.
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