There are a couple subs keeping me on reddit, but for less time, and I'm less engaged. They could be replaced with a modicum of effort.
Financially it seems like Reddit is between a rock and a hard place, and has opted to pick up the rock and bash itself in the head.
> CryptoSnoos NFTs
> Non-fungible, highly collectible, and ready to take off
> Take advantage of this rare opportunity to own a piece of Reddit history—snag a CryptoSnoo NFT built on the Ethereum blockchain and start your collection.
Some time and money well spent there.
the others examples mentioned above are more pertinent.
Of course, it was only this year that I realized reddit even has these snoo avatar things on people's profiles. So maybe I'm wildly off
They were just selling a feature on their website (ability to use an image in some way) with blockchain used as a way to keep transaction and ownership records.
Just like skins and items in the games that aren't securities with a COOL'n'TRENDY way to store database records.
With hacker news, I don’t know… It doesn’t have the same vibe as something like Facebook. We all seem to be interested in the general themes here, conversation leans towards constructive, and there isn’t much noise to filter from signals. I wouldn’t mind finding that elsewhere, but no amount of feed configuring on Reddit or Twitter ever got me where I wanted to be.
Whenever I click a link over to Reddit I get the sense that I really haven’t missed anything since the last time, however many months before.
I don’t just regret walking around for a few months stinking of Old Spice - I regret drinking Apple Cider vinegar, recommending my sister look into nootropic drugs, and arguing with family members based on flimsy political talking points.
BTW was it a reflex that you capitalized it? ;)
Edit: Sorry, I'm on a Nuts device.
Also, I tried to correct the capitalisation but it auto correct again, and I couldn’t be bothered to fix it ;)
Many (myself included) have relied upon Reddit in the past for niche advice or recommendations. My key is to only do so in applying topics I already understand enough to apply safely, so I know whether I’m reading a clever idea or someone talking out their ass.
If you go back to the early 2010s, there was Geekhack. Back then, the hobby was much smaller and you had a lot of stuff done with Model Ms (the default "good keyboard", walkthroughs on how to order the few mechanical boards available from Japan or Taiwan, and the beginnings of group-buy culture. Deskthority emerged a few years later, and developed a bit of its own voice-- more of an EU audience, and these days more oriented around vintage keyboards than new stuff. Their wiki is still probably the deepest resource for some vintage switches and boards.
Meanwhile, there was a weird figure who was fairly large on both communities: "ripster"-- while incredibly knowledgable, a lot of people found his presence chafing. He eventually took the reins of /r/mk and faded away from the other communities.
People in general like playing games and don’t mind paying for them. See: Video game industry is loaded.
"Whales" present the same problem to video game companies as a single large customer has on a small business or a lucrative vertical in large businesses (see Google, Facebook). That outsized revenue stream dictates where the rest of the product goes because nothing brings in close to the same revenue.
I grew up in the 2000s. I've constantly seen people on the internet complaining about its modern state, saying the internet of the 90s was so much better, less spam, filled with smart people, etc. Basically saying that the mass influx of people is what turned the internet into the cesspool it is today.
I of course never got to experience this, so all my life I've only been able to dream about what this is like. But this Lemmy / Fediverse stuff seems promising. A discussion platform that requires technical expertise to engage in (for now) while also being completely decentralized... seems analogous to the early internet for sure.
Am I correct in this assumption? Are these platforms home to high quality discussion and little spam? If so, then I think I'd bite the bullet and try to figure out how to actually set this stuff up on my PC.
There also was no pyramid scheme vibe because advertisement hadn't taken hold as kind of an important part of all things. Paying for hosting and thinking about like becoming viral were not concerns that I recognized then.
It's basically the effect of people interested enough to be already connected on some level in a small group, but not trivial to find and flooded with people. Any group over 200 people losses that charm I think.
The last one I joined was a discord for a smaller podcast with maybe 20 active users and it's lots of fun.
But back in the 90s (and moreso before that), the average Internet user was more technically minded. For instance, everyone on IRC had a basic sense of how NAT affected TCP connection setup and whether a private message or DCC chat would be more appropriate, and who should initiate the DCC chat. They had a sense of what a T1 line was and had a better mental model of how pieces connected together. Nowadays, the average user doesn't have to navigate technical issues and can only be trusted to know the difference between swiping left and swiping right.
This makes it easy for major services to pimp their own users and make obscene amounts of money.
That said, the dream of the 90s is alive in Lemmy and other new technologies. It would be sad if you didn't explore what's out there.
People were given the sum of human knowledge and instead of becoming more self sufficient they have become more reliant. Take for instance repair cafes, whose goal isn't to repair stuff for people but to teach people that things can be repaired which if you think about it for a bit is mind boggling.
Instead of taking advantage of knowledge and experience humanity has doubled down on denial, hatred, superstition and outright craziness. Witness the response to COVID and current political polarization happening everywhere.
Instead of sharing information, now a search of the Internet find SEO gibberish, scams, fake reviews and all manner of horrors that we never expected possible in the 80s and 90s from the Internet.
Today, you go on the internet and oooo cats... wikipedia lookup "polydactyl", get ads for cat toys, check to see if there are any reviews for cat toys, ... 3 hours later, you forgot what you started to do but the Amazon Prime truck is stopped at your house dropping off 17 boxes of cat stuff. And you don't own a cat.