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.

Lemmy is already struggling with many of the same issues as Reddit; poor and / or objectionable moderation or moderators, bots and bot activity, politically motivated disinformation, groupthink, brigading, and censorship.

Scale makes the problems more noticeable because it makes them happen more frequently but it doesn’t create the problems. It’s the same with Commercialization, it’s doesn’t create those problems it simply highlights them.

We know… we were there.

@ajroach42 Carl is kinda the anti-Ender. Well, similar body counts.

@farah Inside you there are two wolves.

Sorry about the transporter accident.

I wonder what the Venn Diagram looks like for these two groups of people:

• Developers for a project with hundreds of dependencies that aren’t quite understood, but hey, it works.

• Developers for a project that used AI to implement code that isn’t quite understood, but hey, it works.

If you’re in one group, but not the other, you don’t get to criticize the other.

If you’re in both groups, I’m not surprised.

@TheBreadmonkey When you read a web page with side-eye, that's called "brow-ing".

Hello Fedi. I am looking for transmasc people/creatures/entities to interview for a bachelor's thesis about testosterone and its effects beyond the biochemical ones, particularly on relationships of all kinds. If you are using or have been using exogenous testosterone, have adult life experiences from before T, and are interested in participating, please send me a message. The interview can be done live on Jitsi or similar (and would take about an hour) or in non-realtime chat on e.g. Signal.

ActivityPub devs as well 🥰

@woozle i'm pretty sure that website's "Final Frontier" channel uses exactly those videos as source for TOS (right now it's going through voyager, though, which seems to come from a DVD rip, it's got clear 480p quality and no ads)

Our noble salaries versus their barbaric hard currency rewards

Oops, my
CYBER GOPHER HOLE
was down. I need to set up a little ping service to warn me.

gopher://cyberhole.online/
#gopher #cyberhole

For clarity, it is more important my function run correctly on BSD derived systems than Linux derived systems

shout out to the lemmy developers for not making us be stuck on the other site

shout out to mastodon devs for making us have a better life than on Twitter

shout out to the pixelfed devs for allowing a actual photography platform to exist

shout out to the peertube devs for helping us not be stuck on youtube until the end of time

ETA: Shout out to the server operators who make the stuff be done

One of the longest running privacy debates in WA state has revolved around the usage of CCTV cameras to solve murders.

For decades murders have been committed possibly in view of red light cameras.

We have an explicit state law saying traffic cameras can only be used for traffic control.

There's been tons of unsolved murders that cops claim the traffic cams could solve.

Here's one such case that actually occured in front of a home I lived in (a few years before).

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/defendant-in-yancy-noll-death-called-lsquoa-student-of-murderrsquo/