@Kingu Not fair, the Hutts were successful criminals, not Palpatine’s pawns.

@root but my point was that I only "know" Rebecca Ford in the sense that she appears on my screen sometimes

which is the same sense that I know the disgraced god of fire and war or Eleanor Nightingale

“Two Games With The Same Name Released At The Same Time, So They Decided To Work Together”: that’s the cute game-dev story you might need in these otherwise shitty game-dev times. https://aftermath.site/two-games-with-the-same-name-released-at-the-same-time-so-they-decided-to-work-together/

@gnate ALSO: yeah I thought that about the bearings so that's a good thing, I was just surprised how enthusiastically it keeps going the first few minutes in particular, right? I was like, "is this not actually fully off?" and unplugged it and yeah it was fully off xD

Happy almost 100th birthday to the black blob! I remember seeing ol' blobby, aka the world's longest running science experiment, in the Michie Building a few times when I was at #UniversityofQueensland #UQ back in the distant mists of time while I was studying what at that time was called an English Degree, (who know what it's called now, if anything - probably long since axed). https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-08/queensland-pitch-drop-experiment/107337784

Here's a recession indicator I'm watching closely. Pawn shops.

EZCORP $EZPW just reported $403 million in pawn loans outstanding worldwide, up 31% from a year ago.

At its existing U.S. stores, balances rose 13%.

FirstCash grew U.S. pawn loans 14%, its 13th straight quarter of double-digit growth at existing stores.

When people pawn their stuff to get by, late payments come next. A recession isn't far behind.

@stux One coworker's keyboard was so utterly disgusting that the one next to him started cleaning it while he was away. Eventually there were at least 5 of us getting supplies, throwing things away, attacking the insides with compressed gas, the works.

I think we should have been given PPE for that venture

@wadbot fun fact: when the bot was taking these screenshots the audio was just nonstop a man screaming

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.

There was a quiet exodus during the_donald era. That whole time from 2016 - 2020 was very strange. Nobody talks about it. Except for the minority of us from the before times.

For reddit corporate there was a serendipitous confluence of events.

• Right wing US politics trolls caused a quiet exodus.
• A pandemic happened causing everyone to be stuck at home doomscrolling.
• Reddit was doing a relaunch, with a new site design and official app.
• They were preparing to IPO.

Basically reddit corporate got a free reset. One that Digg could have only dreamed of. Much of the old unprofitable userbase left. Ragebaiting trolls overran the platform. Fresh userbases flooded into the site. Social media psychological manipulation/addiction mechanisms had a field day on those unsuspecting doomscrollers.

You old timers ever notice how reddit’s demise is a perpetually sliding window? You can tell when someone started using reddit based on when they think it was good and when it went bad.

Most users today talk about relaunch/redesign era as the good times. They think only relatively recently has it turned bad. None them have any clue about the pre-2020 era because they had no clue about reddit before.

All that being said. I don’t think it’s only commercialization that killed it. The type of users killed it too. That isn’t mutually exclusive from userbase size.

Commercialization relies on engagement tricks like ragebait. That requires users who will engage with that too. The old reddit userbase was more skeptical and cognizant of commercialization tactics. The userbase today doesn’t hate it. Some even seem to relish in it.

They like the tabloid posts. They like the emotional clickbait. They like to gossip. They like the drama.

@root ArenaNet, Digital Extremes, and Valve are three points that uniquely identify my plane of existence

The *why* for his use of Country Music is fascinating itself. Most composers then (and now) were represented by ASCAP. As they started demanding that radio stations pay royalties for the music they played, the radio industry declined and founded a competing rights group called BMI. The ASCAP/BMI wars ended the Big Band era and brought in Country and Rock music. It's a good read.

@jalefkowit

@MHowell lol, I should see what it's putting out.

@PhoenixSerenity I got husband a pair of banana (short)pants but they shrank lol

@ai6yr so the big question is how did he die? Did he fall out of like a hospital window like so many of Putin‘s “BFFs”

@richardgunther I have that on my bucket list. I've never had one!

@PhoenixSerenity I have an affinity for most purposefully terrible art.

the Chinese spy sent to seduce me: let me pour you another glass...
me [4 hours in, mouth full of delicious saag paneer]: so what the community is currently trying to figure out is, is this simply a new form of Gear 5 Luffy? or is it a new Nika "monkey-king" Zoan form? or is it the devil fruit itself taking over after his heart stopped? and is chapter 1199 going to reveal the contents of Biblo's ancient treasure chest? you gonna eat that last pakora?
spy: no, but-

In my area there are several venues that have notes up saying they refuse to take AI-generated posters.

Three AI-generated posters were put up recently and all were quickly taken down. All three events returned later with posters designed by local artist/designers, with the person named on each poster.

All the events are run by people I know, who are nice and I'm sure meant no harm. But the action of refusal raised awareness and made them then hire artists. Call that a double-win!

#GenAI