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Meh, to be fair, communism gave us all the likes of Mastodon and Lemmy, whereas capitalism gave us all Twitter/X and Reddit so… it’s not like I’m knocking the politics even, so much as the extremely annoying manner in which those thoughts are handled, sometimes.
Imagine a Karen who regardless of actual right vs. wrong, thinks they are right, but more importantly just enjoys slamming it into people’s faces. Like, if you really think that you are correct, why work so hard to convince people of that “fact” - you catch more flies with honey than vinegar - and who exactly are you trying to convince bully even?
Likewise even a factually correct endpoint can be made into part of an incorrect statement if arrived at via a false chain of logical deduction - i.e., even a stopped watch is right twice a day, but that doesn’t mean that you should trust the watch from then on!? A statement that includes a logical fallacy, even if deployed in order to defend a true statement, is still false, even if the underlying fact also happened to be true.
And if there is anything I am learning from the internet, it is that trolling exists, yet not everyone is a troll, and it improves my mental sanity >95% to block such. I used to be proud of never blocking anyone, ever. I grew up though, in seeing how others refuse to grow.:-D
You might try an experiment and make an account somewhere, and see how different some posts and their complement of comments look, in terms of which instances you may choose to block, and also which individuals may have blocked your instance in return…
Well *I* don’t, thus keep in mind that I may be summarizing here the reasons that others do incorrectly &/or unfairly, but from what I understand people are saying:
(1) often when people get extremely argumentative (aka bat shit insane crazy trolling) it is from there. Who wants to talk to someone who is rude, condescending, and doesn’t listen in the slightest to your POV before loudly proclaiming how very wrong you are, even while using logical fallacies (such as strawman) as they do so?:-P Counterpoint: that can happen on any sufficiently large instance e.g. lemmy.world too? Though it does seem to happen more often on lemmy.ml for whatever reason.
(2) it may be relevant (tbh I’m not entirely sure how though?) that it leans fairly hardcore to what many people e.g. in the USA would consider an extreme leftist viewpoint, as in so far to the left that it may even become uncomfortable to someone living in a society that leans more rightwards even if the person in it considers themselves an “extreme leftist” in relation to that center point. Along these lines, are “memes” merely political propaganda that happens to be drawn in a cartoonish form? (Though this is an argument pertaining to merely a community, not an entire instance.)
There are several closed group options or other closed source ones that aim to be just like Reddit in practice but not exactly it in theory. Ironically the Reddit alternatives sub on Reddit is probably the best place to get such a list 😜.
I enjoyed Squabbles for a bit - it was described at the time as toxically non-toxic as in very much anti-hate speech, though I don’t know how it’s fared recently. At the end of the day though it’s just one guy’s project, and while he’s no Huffman, still the entire thing turns around him, very unlike the Fediverse that can become anything we want it to be.
If you do remain on Lemmy, learn which things to block bc that will improve your experience substantially. Just blocking lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net improved mine 95%, and ironically some people (not me) also block Lemmy.ml. You will come to find what works for you, I am just saying that the experience varies enormously depending on that one factor!
Why wait? Jump now! Hehe, okay so only you know your schedule, it’s mostly just a funny phrase (but also: don’t sleep on it forever - you don’t want to be surprised one day when it disappears overnight with no notice).
For me, it’s not just emptiness - it’s the site being devoid of content anymore. Like look at r/firefox after the mods left (I forgot which communities got ousted vs. who left voluntarily, but either way that community packed up and followed them iirc). It is all just the most basic of questions “how do I…?”, often with later edits “I should not have bothered asking, these people will just yell at you”. Just about every post has 1 or 0 upvotes (though more uncommon spikes above 10 do exist, and even rare ones with hundreds), but the titles of the popular posts are all things that are extremely common knowledge - “Mozilla says Apple’s new browser rules are “as painful as possible” for Firefox”, “YouTube is loading slower for users with ad blockers yet again”, “Will Firefox survive in the browser market?”, “Chrome wants to track me? Bye. I use Firefox …”, “Google settles $5 billion privacy lawsuit over tracking people using ‘incognito mode’ (Re: Switch to Firefox ASAP).” These are things that I constantly hear about on Lemmy.
And even more than that, I dread speaking there after Rexit - the trolls omg the trolls… it’s just not fun. Then again, I tended to make posts advertising useful alternatives to Reddit, so you could argue that I brought that upon myself? :-P (edit: although in a community that calls itself by the name r/RedditAlternatives, THAT was the POINT of the discussion that we were TRYING to have there!!)
Yeah Lemmy got much better with v0.19, while Kbin has barely improved visibly at all it seems so I just gave up on it for now.
I still suffer the issue, on both mobile and desktop browser, that literally every time I come back, to pretty much anywhere I have to login again - I cleared cookies a few times but that didn’t seem to help. Most instances seem to have that, though I may have an odd selection of them (Kbin, Discus.Online, and StarTrek.website), and there are the occasional days where I have to attempt to make every comment at least twice for it to stick (but at least now if it doesn’t go through, you notice, unlike previously where it disappeared into the void invisibly, though I only had Kbin experience back then).
I haven’t bothered to research the apps yet - security, stability, ads vs. no, etc. - so all that I’m saying is for the vanilla browsing experience.
Also people report that the creation of new accounts from the mobile browser is barely if at all functional. I haven’t tried that myself, but it does seem like the experience varies enormously depending on which method of interface someone is using - and that’s going to be off-putting to a migration event, like if something doesn’t work it would be better to put up a sign saying “this (often?) doesn’t work on a mobile, just go to a desktop computer for this task”. Caveat: assuming the desire is to bring in more people who are less technically minded, for the sake of e.g. content creation.
And this doesn’t even begin to cover the modding concerns:-).
Thank you, that’s helpful to know:-). Kbin had MANY issues and that was the closest I’d seen.
It seems to confirm that what is holding Mastodon back isn’t technical at all but just the design - i.e. like if people are on X then that’s where most other people want to be, similar to Windows where it is not technologically superior, just the default for some reason.
Remember the defamation lawsuit where spez lied about what the third-party app dev said, so the dev released the recording of the call proving it?
Also, the other time that happened as well? If you bought the company for a few million, $5 might be all you end up left with! (I hope!:-) 😂
In short: fuck spez.
No it does not indeed.:-|
It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).
And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.
Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.
I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.
And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.
There is a bunch of straw-man-esque argumentation going on here - e.g. I never said that we were “forced” to read anything - as well as a “shift the conversation” move as well. What I said was that (1) I found the results of this study to not be novel, and (2) the website did force me to hunt around for where to click to dismiss their full-page ad in order to continue reading the text on the page. Since you are neither stating that the results of this study ARE novel, nor are you denying that those advertisements exist, I conclude that you actually in fact agree with me, despite decrying so vehemently that you do not. I will further point out that I never “forced” you to read my comment either, I simply put it out there on this site (Lemmy) for all to see, and moreover, I did not put a full-page banner blocking you from continue to use Lemmy in order to get past it? So really, what is the point of arguing further - isn’t there enough to do in the world that would be a better use of both of our time? :-P e.g., perhaps you will write open-source code to replace Google with, and if so I very much look forward to seeing how that pans out! :-)
I came across as very rude, but… is this really even something for which there was the slightest shadow of doubt? I mean if a study were to be done proving that “water is wet”, and then an article written about that, and then a full-page feature ad asking me to subscribe to that newsletter slapped in front of it, how am I supposed to conclude anything other than that this was a waste of resources… and of our time for being asked to read it?
In science, a paper must usually pass the novelty test - if a study has already been done before, then it does not rise to the standard to appear in a high-quality, high-impact journal. High school studies or elementary school projects proving that magnetism exists or that plants need water to grow or some such do not quality - which is not to say that they are not CRUCIALLY important for getting young minds interested in how the world works, which itself is a crucial component (motivation) for funneling kids into STEM fields; but it is to say that such a project does not (usually) rise to the status of being worthy of a truly international/global report?
People all over the entire English-speaking world were given this article to read. Sorry/not sorry, but I am outright offended at seeing what it contained. No solutions, no laying the groundwork for future studies like “this will a good metric by which to measure this phenomena moving forward”, nothing beyond “we looked, and found what everyone who has ever used Google in the past 5 years already knows”… and btw which the CEO himself has already openly admitted (in the past I would have offered to dig up the article I am referring to, EXCEPT GOOGLE DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE!!!).
To clarify, I am not opposed to REAL studies being done on this effect. But an “investigation” should go even the tiniest fraction of a step beyond what is already known, or else it is merely clickbait to talk about imho. Whereas if the scientists who did this did not realize that the CEO of Google himself has already admitted that it is broken - which was at the time of the Reddit protests so has been quite awhile now already - then… perhaps they should read more, about the subject that they are trying to educate us about?
I haven’t read their paper but… the idea that vaccines can prevent against diseases without harmful side effects is also “not common knowledge” fwiw (the level of basic science literacy in most of the Western world is abysmal), and if reviewers rejected the paper then there is a good chance that there is a reason for that.
If you are interested in this topic, here is an excellent (imho) summary video from 6 years ago, which around 9:30 talks about this identical topic. Enjoy! :-) Beware though, from someone who has been down that road: it will make you sad, and the more you learn along these lines, the less hope it will leave you that anything will ever be okay again:-(. I cannot emphasize this enough: I am nowhere close to kidding here.
Which is something that a manager decided to implement, and not allow the programmers proper time to do full testing before rolling it out?
Face it, there’s no way for managers to weasel out of the blame for this, b/c the buck has to stop somewhere.:-) We simply hold leaders to a higher standard than mere workers, especially if they pay themselves more every hour than a programmer makes in a month (I have not looked into what the pay gap is specifically for Capcom though, this is just programming in general).
I mean, that’s how they want to be, so whatever, they can enjoy it.
But that’s not how *I* want to be - and I resented having it thrust upon me without consent, in the form of being able to make an informed choice. They do not clearly state how they are, yet they are that way, hence the disconnect.
Like any authoritarian regime, they have drunk their own cool-aid and they seem to both not acknowledge it whilst simultaneously also flaunting it proudly - i.e. how they are looks to be by design, not ignorance or whatever.
And ofc the obligatory caveat that not all people on those servers are that way - e.g. you were there, until you weren’t anymore:-P. But it does form a trend. And I for one would rather that people be able to make an informed choice. Like someone go there if they want, but don’t you come here and tell me how to be.
Yes an echo chamber provides value to them in terms of an emotional reinforcement, though it’s dangerous b/c what gets reinforced becomes thereby divorced from logic. i.e., “might makes right”, which works so long as you ignore the alternative that “the pen (Reason) is mightier than the sword (Might)” - i.e. the value is purely local amongst themselves, who choose to refuse to see outside.
Even so, the code for the Fediverse came from the guy who started lemmygrad.ml iirc, and it was freely offered to the world not in spite of but b/c of that belief in communistic philosophical principles. In contrast, Reddit and most other alternatives started here in the USA - like squabbles to name one (looks to now be renamed to squabblr or something?) - did not offer their sourcecode freely, and instead tried to monetize their user base, and this too not in spite of but b/c of their own beliefs in capitalistic principles.
As long as they are honest about it though, I’m fine with them. The problem is that they are not, nor are they respectful to others… so I ban them and move on with my life. I am not kidding: if I could not have banned them, I would have left the Fediverse entirely - they are that annoying. So being able to easily improve my Fediverse experience by 95% with 1-2 instance blocks (lemmygrad.ml is often blocked by default, and many others though seemingly fewer likewise also block hexbear.net) is wonderful!:-)