punchroast

The Youth Olympics, first held in 2010, are under way in Dakar, Senegal right now – the first Olympic sporting event ever to be hosted on the continent. More than 2,500 teenage athletes from 205 nations are taking part.

a mathematically perfect meal for the gods

cross-posted from: feddit.org/post/37870004

reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait (“Am I The Asshole?”) because company shareholders want to see “engagement numbers” go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that’s “engagement”. but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the “Asshole”, so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the “don’t make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow” idea.

@Unca if this gives you a boner, you belong in Gitmo.

Getting a ban from lemmy.ml is a badge of honour that many like to collect.

@maexchen1 Und dann? Was mach ich damit? Sketchy Firmen meine Onlinebanking-Zugangsdaten geben? Vorab-Überweisung und drei Tage länger auf meine Bestellung warten? Oder nur bei einem der drei Shops bestellen, die SEPA-Lastschriften anbieten?

Saw a post saying some shitty Christian lemmy instance was spamming bullshit on one of their latest posts, I said something along the lines of “probably Russians”. Come to find out my comment was removed and I was banned… then to find out they effectively have a CCP agent running town… lol.

I’ve seen people mention they were a garbage instance, now I know why! They said I broke rule 1 … this might just be the app I’m using but they don’t even have any fucking rules to look at lmao.

Glad they did the work for me and made it easy to avoid them.

@davidgerard I know nothing about Lori Huang or what she'd likely do with her half of the money, but it would be funny if the first thing she did was have lunch with MacKenzie Scott.

Prep for Birmingham Fetish Weekend is well underway here.

I do need to edit the class I'm teaching there so I'm not rushing through too much info and instead focusing on the true 101 info and allowing folks to really take that in.
I'm an info-dumper by nature and also as a learner I like that, so whittling it down is going to be a challenge!

reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

Reddit got bad long before they restricted API access. That's what was the final drop for many people, but it wasn't the beginning at all.

I agree that growing would be a benefit for Lemmy though. While I wouldn't dismiss the dangers of a growing community entirely, we can just defederate from or block problematic parts in theory. So I wouldn't say we're in quite the same danger as centralized platforms.

@prolrage
The Board of Peace hasn't failed, because it was never intended to end anything. It was set up to further enrich 47 and his cronies by selling real estate made possible by the destruction and genocide in Palestine. Did anyone expect anything else?

@tante He should let AI lawyers handle his defence.

the subs i was involved would add mods via the ‘who is the least offensive and the most popular’ criteria… which let to awful mods, because those folks were ones who had no idea how to mod and basically were like ‘if someone doesn’t like it, it’s bad’. which basically led to them not moderating on rules or principles, but purely on their own personal preferences.

it’s amazing how many communities were so great, and then immediately some new mod would come up and start banning all the previous users and posts they didn’t personally like. oh, and if the mod was friends with a abusive user? they had free reign or would grant them mod. sometimes it was so bad and egregious users would revolt, or other mods would have to remove the new mod. one sub I was on had a well-known rapist who was never banned because they had done the mods personal IRL favors, basically to secure their hunting ground and anytime a new victim posted about how this person drugged them, the mods would immediately remove it and cover it up and deny it, and then when another use posted the police report(s) that person was banned… this rapist user would also regularly go on rants about how men are all rapists and rape is terrible and try to report others for ‘rapey’ comments… and the rapist in question was a poly woman, so you had the whole ‘women can’t rape anyone’ ‘she’s so progressive, she can’t rape people’ nonsense come up and that was the ‘line’ one of the mods defending this person would claim.

reddit worked when mods kept apart from the users and didn’t have personal relationships with the users. but people are shitty and can’t help themselves. for all the good stuff that came from those subreddits, they all had dark sides full of shitty awful people who were using the community to exploit and abuse other people IRL.