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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • crowsby@kbin.socialtoLemmy@lemmy.mlPolitics blocklist
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    10 months ago

    I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:

    Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article

    There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.






  • This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

    But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

    I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.


  • I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

    • Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
    • Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
    • Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
    • Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

    What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.




  • Tildes, for what it’s worth, is not intended to be a replacement for Reddit. Its creator/admin is trying to purposefully cultivate a very different culture than what you might find on Reddit or Reddit replacements like lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/etc. From their Philosophy page:

    High-quality content and discussions
    Tildes prioritizes quality content and discussion through its mechanics, design, and organization. Fixation on growth and related metrics results in other sites having a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. The priority on Tildes is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don’t have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.

    Limited tolerance, especially for assholes
    Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to “if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”.

    This is a difficult topic, so I want to try to be clear about where on the spectrum Tildes is trying to land. I’m never going to refer to the site as a “safe space” or ban anyone just for occasionally acting like a jerk in an argument—I’d probably have to ban myself fairly quickly. However, it will also never be described as anything like “an absolute free speech site”.

    Personally as an old, I love it. The whole vibe promotes longer, better thought out replies, as opposed to the modern internet where people are more often looking to do quick hit n’ run posts with popular sentiments for easy internet points. I also love the proactive removal of problem posters. Some people are just looking to stir up trouble wherever they go, but don’t fall under a specific rule that might get their account axed. Tildes isn’t afraid to uninvite problematic assholes.

    If its culture is something that resonates with you, feel free to hit me up for an invite while I have some.



  • I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

    This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.




  • OP may come across a little alarmist, but it’s really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren’t carefully weeding out the ne’er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.

    And yeah, they follow “the rules”, and free speech and all that, until they don’t. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.


  • Reddit will continue to highlight Weekly/Monthly Average Users to the press and advertisers, since those metrics won’t take much of a hit. You visit the site once to vote in a poll in favor of continuing the blackouts, you’ll get counted in those.

    Those more granular metrics like session length and especially Total Posts Viewed are what really matter when you’re trying to run ads, and it’s hard to imagine a world in which those did not take a huge hit when most of the major subreddits are either blacked out, or (even better) flooding the front page with repetitive pictures of John Oliver.


  • I’m happy to see less plastic involved in it.

    • Filter holder - I use a reusable metal filter
    • Stirring thingy - I have a spoon
    • Scoop - I measure coffee by weight and not volume
    • Funnel - I just like, pour the coffee grounds directly into the Aeropress.

    That being said, the price increase seems ludicrous, especially since they’re packing in so fewer items.

    The nicest thing he can say about it is that it looks nicer, but that’s pretty subjective. I think it looks a little low-budget compared to the dark-tinted ones.