This killed nitter.
Fuck.
I guess I'm done with Twitter.
Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet.
This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(
Fuck.
I guess I'm done with Twitter.
Reddit is in Eternal September. Twitter is login-walled. If HN is next, I'll probably be mostly done with the Internet.
This version of the Internet is starting to suck. :(
(More precisely: we're acutely aware that users hate change, and since we do too, it's kind of an easy call.)
Also, the value of HN to YC consists of the community and keeping the community happy is therefore a must.
(Did I say happy? More precisely: as happy as possible under the circumstances)
That's actually a nice way of putting it! Better than the "fix" version, because this is clear on the consequences.
I feel like it might be applied to everything from OS UI design (Windows 11), web platform redesigns (Google's icons) to whatever is going on with social media (the silly enshittification term describes this) and many other things.
Let's say that you are the proud owner of a goose that lays golden eggs. "fixing" would be switching it to a different feed that might make it more productive, or it might make it sick. But this year the trend is to give it a few good kicks to see if that helps.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(I've a slightly more updated set locally, can share those if requested.)
HN could be hit with such a large load too, since we have pretty good and lengthy discussion here, good for AI data training.
Would you believe it a valid tool to keep the community happy?
Since I doubt we would be happy if we can't access the site because some AI decided this was the time to scrape, either.
If the world around HN (including its community) changes, stasis can damage or kill it as well.
Specifically regarding the issue of the original posting:
- HN is already an important data source for large language model training. [1]
- To the best of my knowledge there is no freely downloadable and current data dump of HN. [2]
- The HN-API does not offer all the data that scraping can get. For example, if a post had ever hit the front page or the highest front page position reached, is an interesting data point that is missing.
- The Algolia-HN-API has the same limitations.
In my opinion this will lead to increased usage of the API and increased scraping which all costs money. HN might be forced to find a solution for this.
[1] For example, the RefinedWeb paper lists HN as one of only 12 websites that were excluded. From what I understand, it was excluded because it went into the final dataset unvetted. RefinedWeb was used for the Falcon model.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.01116.pdf
[2] The closest thing is probably the Google BigQuery "bigquery-public-data.hacker_news" dataset. It claims to be updated daily, but really is from late September 2022. Also I could not find the download link which other data sets offered on BigQuery have. Does anyone know if I can download the complete thing anyhow?
https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...
The one thing I see as a future issue is that people are starting to post comments that clearly look like they were manufactured by ChatGPT and friends. Or that could just be the way some people talk and I've spent too long with ChatGPT now and start to smell it everywhere.
I've had that happen even under manual browsing (when logged out). My front-page analytics project hit that limit quickly (within about 30 requests, probably less). Adding in a reasonable delay got around that.
Keep in mind that a lot of Web infrastructure tends over time to operate just at the edge of stability, as capacity costs money.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22930391
[dang]: "Push notifications seem to jack up the nervous system in a way that's good for engagement but not necessarily for users..."
It’s not that I’m opposed to change really. I love good ideas, and being surprised by new and unfamiliar things is usually a joy. Communication via text is hard to improve upon though, and I’m not convinced any major social media platforms have found ways to improve this in any meaningful ways.
I want to read interesting things and discuss them with interesting people. This is hard on most platforms. HN makes it easier than everything else I use.
I believe this eternal loop of change is a trap that impatient people force themselves in. Instead of accustoming and learning the current state, they rush into another one with a change that has unclear implications. As a result, they never get where they are and lose any track of where they were or where they’re heading at. Their only comfort can be found in a constant change.
These few sites are like home to me. One of them I visit with years-long pauses and every time I return it’s the same user experience. That’s invaluable.
I thought that was an odd change for HN. After all, the majority of the value still accrues to the HN owners. In fact, user's that are prepared to pay for an app to access a free website largely comprised of adverts, are typically more valuable than the rest. Those users have money to burn and skin in the game!
So yes, occasionally some new pattern or trend will emerge, but HN adapts to those fairly quickly.
I've been sort of live-blogging the experience on the Fediverse: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/HackerNewsAnalytics>, as well as in some of my HN posts.
My current tack involves looking at sites (as reported in parentheses at the end of each HN front-page post title) and classifying those. With slightly more than 30% of sites categorised, I can classify about 65% of all HN posts.
For the full dataset (17 years), that's roughly:
1 63913 35.73% UNCLASSIFIED
2 22589 12.63% blog
3 15112 8.45% general news
4 13823 7.73% tech news
5 12851 7.18% programming
6 8622 4.82% corporate comm.
7 8459 4.73% academic / science
8 7294 4.08% n/a
9 5324 2.98% business news
10 3803 2.13% general interest
11 2151 1.20% social media
12 2074 1.16% software
13 1613 0.90% technology
14 1463 0.82% video
15 1144 0.64% general info (wiki)
16 1009 0.56% government
17 724 0.40% misc documents
18 720 0.40% law
19 702 0.39% tech discussion
20 620 0.35% science news
The breakdown-by-year analysis is in development, but if anything programming-specific content as increased in prevalence. Political discussion seems not to have (though it rose significantly ~2014). Cryptocurrency and blockchain-specific sites also peaked about that time (I suspect much of that discussion is now mainstream). General news has always been a huge portion of HN discussion, as have individual (and corporate) blogs.
Note again that this isn't about discussion and comments, or even the titles or article contents (I'm thinking of looking at those, it's ... a challenge for me).
But across nearly 200,000 front-page stories, on which nearly half of all HN discussion occurs (based on another API-based study looking at comprehensive posts), the overall trending seems at first blush to be pretty consistent and if anything improving over time.
(As with all preliminary results, I'm hoping I won't have to eat my words here. Though I'm reasonably confident in most of this.)
From the classifications above, the places you might find some that "suffering" would be in general news, genral interest, and social media categories. All but the first of those are single-digit percentages, and a lot of that general-news content is about technology, business, finance, and science, all of which would crowd out the sort of social and political issues which seem to generate strong feelings.
The "UNCLASSIFIED" sites are a wide mix, though most are probably a mix of blogs, corporate / organisational communications, and the like. The mean posts per site is 1.739951, so gains from additional site-categorisation are pretty slim. I have captured a lot of obvious patterns via regexes and string matches, so academic/science and major (or even minor) blogging and social media sites aren't a large fraction.
More recent discussion here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36524001>
It's not practical to list all of them. But we can randomly sample. And large-sample statistics start to apply at about n=30, so let's just grab 30 of those sites at random using `sort -R | head -30`:
1 sfg.io
1 extroverteddeveloper.com
2 letmego.com
1 thestrad.com
2 bombmagazine.org
1 domlaut.com
1 bootstrap.io
1 jumpdriveair.com
2 desmos.com
1 leo32345.com
1 echopen.org
1 schd.ws
1 web3us.com
7 akkartik.name
1 bcardarella.com
1 cancerletter.com
1 platinumgames.com
1 industrytap.com
2 worldoftea.org
1 motion.ai
1 vectorly.io
2 enterprise.google.com
1 lift-heavy.com
1 davidpeter.me
1 panoye.com
3 thestrategybridge.org
2 fontsquirrel.com
1 kettunen.io
1 moogfoundation.org
2 elekslabs.com
I'm looking at some slightly larger samples (60--100) here on my own system, and can actually make some comparisons across samples (to see how much variance there is) which can give some more information on tuning what I would expect to find under the "UNCLASSIFIED" sites.
I've written about this a fair bit over the years if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
* ("good" here meaning "as good as possible under the circumstances")
But may be it will increase your costs a lot.
posts not being able to submit images is a huge part of what makes HN valuable (to me).
once HN needs to handle images, HN falls apart
I wish all the other sites on the Internet would wake up every morning, look at their TODO list and say "Nah, not today."
It's like twitter and reddit but 15 years ago (and by that I mostly mean it's janky and full of bugs. Just like the web was 15 years ago!)
We are oriented to think that way after ~15 years of the algorithmic engagement-maxi world of Twitter. It always looks like there's a lot happening all the time but look deeper and it's a bunch of people offering their weak takes on hot topics to build their brand.
What was the last thing you remember being must-see sfuff on Twitter?
But I do agree with you, being away from the noise has been really freeing for my mind
The Russia circus last weekend made for some pretty good near real-time intrigue. That being said, I don’t care what crazy thing is happening…I’m not creating an account to hear what’s being said on “The Global Town Square ™”
In theory, Twitter should be that real-time news feed from these kind of events, but it doesn't actually work. Signal-to-noise ratio is just very low.
I never cared about algorithmic engagement.
Before (and during) the engagement Twitter:
- has everyone you needed there, centralised
- has search, where you can find people and topics you care about
Mastodon has none of that: you have to know which server to join and how to find people and topics. Centralization always beats distribution in convenience.
It's kinda like the "I don't care about politics" stand. You might not care, but the institutions you interact with every day certainly do.
This is extremely useful
Is that the best way? No clue. But I'm glad to chip in.
(Note: I'm of the opinion that fediverse-style federation in the context of forums is merely a nice-to-have; the web is already naturally federated, and people should not feel bad if they want to save money/tech complexity/administration complexity by settling for ordinary self-hosted forums.)
Is there a reason for this, though? Need to be able to iterate on features quickly? Maybe not being able to tackle various complexities with the total available resources? Or maybe federation is just inherently expensive?
Why couldn't we have an alternative written in a more performant language/runtime with maybe things like lower quality images/videos or something?
Because performance was not a concern when it was designed - or it could be that it was designed for small communities, and therefore not possible to scale-up cheaply. One of the problem is the caching of pictures from the different instances connected (if I remember correctly) which makes the data storage requirements go up very fast
Instead, it feels like the current Fediverse demands that I make a blind choice to entrust not merely a copy of my content but also my whole future identity to whatever of these current instances looks the most stable/trustworthy at first glance, hoping my choice will be good for 1-5-10-15 years. It's stressful, and then I look into self-hosting, and then I put the whole thing off for another week...
AFAICT I would need to set up a whole federated node of my own in order to get that level of identity-control. Serious question: Is there any technical limitation preventing the admin of an instance from just seizing an particular account and permanently impersonating the original owner?
In contrast, I was hoping/expecting some kind of identity backed by a private asymmetric key. Even if signing every single message would be impractical, one could at least use it to prove "The person bob@banana.instance has the same private key that was used to initialize bob@apple.instance."
"bsky.app" works as a web client for the official "bsky.social" instance, but it also works with the instance I self-host (or any other spec-compliant instance). Likewise, 3rd party clients work with the official instance, and also with 3rd party instances.
However, no key-stealing could possibly happen right now in any case because... the PDS ("instance") holds your signing key - the client never even sees it. Having the server hold your signing keys is very user-friendly, but of course not ideal for security and identity self-sovereignty. In general, the security model involves trusting your PDS (just as you trust your mastodon instance admin, or twitter dot com - the improvements are centered around making it easier to jump ship if you change your mind).
Client-signed posting is something that's not even possible right now, but I believe it's somewhere on the roadmap. If it doesn't happen some time soon I'll be implementing it myself. (I'm writing my own PDS software)
But yes, the protocol does have a fair bit of trust of your PDS built in. But that's inevitable for decent UX—imo the crypto craze proved that basically no one wants to (or can) hold their own keys day-to-day. If you want to have a cryptographic protocol that the average person can use, some amount of trust is necessary. The AT Protocol artfully threads the needle and finds a good compromise that is a (large) improvement over the status quo, in my opinion.
Maybe your point of view is outdated?
People love to reinvent the wheel and claim it's a whole new thing. No ideas on the web have really been innovative since the bubble popped. The innovation has all been on delivery and execution (not wanting to discount any of that).
Secondly, signing every message wouldn’t be impractical at all, I don’t think. We’ve had the technology to do this for a long time and it’s very simple. What we don’t have is good key management. For average users, this would have to be something provided by their devices (phone or the Secure Enclave in your Mac or whatever) - managing keys and the web-of-trust shamozzle are the main reasons why encrypted email for everyone never took off.
So as long as both your source and destination support account transfers, you can usually switch and even seamlessly bring along most of your followers without them noticing.
No idea about your admin question. All bets are likely off with a bad admin. If you want actual cryptographically guaranteed communication, that doesn't exist in a usable form (except for Secure Scuttlebutt, and that's reeeeally stretching the "usable" part)
But none of your content goes with, and that's really terrible because it gives a lot of power to petty-kingdom jackass admins.
AT Protocol is heartening because maybe they've got a good solution to that.
(It's technically possible to edit the links in the posts you exported yourself before importing, but technically correct isn't the best kind of "correct")
You can pay for that service, but you have to administer the instance, and it’s not able to reuse the servers RAM for multiple domains; it’s not like email where spam management is built in.
Doesn't federation require admins of both instances to agree to federate?
If so, I could imagine it not scaling for larger instances that could receive 100+ federation requests a day.
Further, you would have to repeat this step each time to encountered a new instance you wished to participate on.
Is my understanding of the federation process correct or have I totally missed the mark? :D
My recommendation was much like MX records for email, so you can use a hosted server under your own identity.
The promise is that one can not only transfer the identity and all personal data across instances of a single service, but also across different services (imagine from mastodon to Lemmy).
Sadly, it never caught on.
This is why I want domains as identities to succeed. I want to own my handle on every platform, but I don’t want to self host.
Decoupling identity from social is a good idea but you can't just migrate the key storage to a single custodian entity. There'd need to be a multiple custodians to ensure the same power imbalances didn't reappear in a different form (e.g. Google owning everyone's logins).
All that is needed is a to create your local identity (e.g. like storing fingerprint biometrics on your laptop) and a clever way to sync between physical devices (e.g. through bluetooth).
We're in this weird situation where people don't want to be responsible for managing their own data/id, but can't trust others to do so for them.
I was toying with an idea/protocol where:
1. You add a TXT/CNAME that points to a trusted "authentication provider".
2. When you try and login to a website that supports the protocol, it checks the DNS record and redirects you to your provider.
3. You then "prove" that you own the domain to the provider - how this is done would be specific to each provider, but one possible method could be by providing a signed message that can be verified vs. a public key stored in a DNS record.
4. The provider redirects you back to the original website with a token.
5. Finally the original website consumes this token by sending it in a request to the provider. The response contains the domain as confirmation of the user's identity.
This approach removes the need for self-hosting as users can point and setup their names with third party providers.
Users can also trivially switch to a different/self-hosted provider by changing the CNAME.
Communities could also allow direct registration by hosting their own provider instance and pointing a wildcard subdomain at it: (i.e. *.users.ycombinator.com).
Users could then sign up to said provider using traditional email/password and claim a single subdomain: (i.e. tlonny.users.ycombinator.com)
Thoughts?
Though what you described is just a regular federated identity workflow, except autodiscovery through DNS (though that is already a thing for some)
Current spec drafts at <https://github.com/WebOfTrust/keri>.
I have been using Twitter more often lately as I really don't care about what they do to their APIs or whatever, and it's honestly improving lately.
Most of the people I followed before were clearly left wing. After Musk takeover a lot of them left the platform. Plus the algorithm now pushed more right-wing content in the home page. I wouldn't mind if it were real people discussing valid talking points. The problems are 1) they are all coming from blue check mark accounts, 2) most of it are clearly misinformation, and 3) you can tell most of these tweets and replies are troll and bot accounts. It's just annoying.
Musk boosting his own tweets in the feed was annoying. Had to unfollow him.
I use Twitter via mobile website, and it breaks more frequently than before.
Overall, it's become like Musk's other product, Tesla. It over promises and under delivers. It's not reliable anymore. As a 2x Toyota owner I cannot stand products that are results of crappy engineering. So there you go.
Edit: one more thing: it used to be that I could go to the trending hashtags and get latest news in a second. It's not the case anymore. Case in point: yesterday France was trending. I saw the tweets and got the impression that some member of minority community has committed mass stabbing or rape again. Because the Twitter results were brigaded by right wing blue check mark accounts spewing anti immigration propaganda. It was not until I read a BBC article that I realized what happened was complete opposite, police executed an immigrant at a traffic stop.
Twitter has lost almost all of its core values under Musk. It's just sad.
The majority use-case requires centralization, which is subject to the network effects that constitute 95% of Twitter's value. Great that it works for you and some others, but it cannot work for most.
The internet is fine. The highly centralized businesses that built themselves on the technology are meeting their inevitable end.
How would smaller companies do better?
For every gmail, how many independent email providers do you think exist out there?
Why would you choose to not pay for the big tech products and then pay for a smaller version?
Smaller companies and ISVs, on the other hand, will be better off if their market is commoditized. They won't have to spend so much to compete in R&D, they just need to find each the best way to serve their (comparatively) small customer base.
If https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_international_trad... is right, the necessary technology for international trade was not available before 4000 BCE (horse riding ~3700 BCE, long-distance sea travel ~2000 BCE).
One is that centralized _business_ has certainly not been the primary organizational mode. You can talk about centralized _government_ (of whatever variety you'd like), but the distinction there is that the centralized government had some sense of itself in an ecosystem - a citizenry, a land, a future, etc. - and businesses do not.
The second is that centralized entities sure wrote a bunch of stuff _down_, but it's hard to say they were the primary organizational mode for any but the last 50-200 years - the reach of serious centralized bureaucracies has only really begun to match their propaganda in the industrial and now computer age. Until extremely recently, the actual effective reach of a centralized bureaucracy was a day's horseback ride - control degrades rapidly as one leaves the core. "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away", as the saying goes.
Edit: With regards to the second note, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott is a solid read.
If you own a company and want it to last through the ages and you aren't literally the only guy in town, never become number one. Aim high, but don't hit the top.
The same can be said for countries and practically any organization or group. You stay an underdog if you do not want to ever fail.
That leads to complacency, corruption, and delusion, ultimately leading to failure.
Everyone and everything from mundane individuals to megacorporations and empires have all fallen from grace once they became top dog. No exceptions.
If you want to last, aim high but don't become top dog.
For most of human history, most businesses were small ma and pa shops operated by a few local people. These days large business chains are the norm. You could say that centralized big business killed the decentralized small ma and pa shops.
I suspect that was the intent.
I suspect the later. We’ve seen billionaires do it countless times.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
I used the 'redirect to nitter' Firefox extension and Android app but it got quite unreliable and nobody else that I know uses nitter at all. I think Nitter users would be a tiny, perhaps even immeasurable minority compared to casual readers that now are incentivized to either log in or fuck off (but... FOMO).
Of anything I suspect Elon saw what happened woth reddit and had a "wait, we should do that!" Moment.
On every large platform, this hasn't been the majority for a long time.
Hah, this might mean that we'd be one step closer to the dead internet (conspiracy) theory actually being reality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
What an interesting concept.
Publicly free content from users devolves to garbage content. I think the Chat GPT effect is they're realizing its easier for companies/entities to generate garbage that is at or exceeding the intelligence of comments by actual people (a low bar). Sure there are pockets of usefulness but this is tiny amongst the firehose of garbage.
If all that is publicly available on social platforms is just garbage nonsense, people will just stop going if any barrier is thrown in front of them. The internet as a technology stack is fine. This is how social media dies (hopefully).
A potential saving grace: I bet within a year or so it will be easy to self-host LLMs that are easy to fine tune and run. Then there will be a few open source tools that you can use yourself, privately, to capture your level of interest while reading, and periodically make a reader/summarize/filter agent.
This is not scary if people can fairly easily run it all themselves, keeping their data private. It would help wade through crap, and there is some irony in using LLMs to have personal filtering and summarization.
Compared to future versions of ChatGPT, Bard, etc. the models that individuals can self host will be much weaker, but I think that they will be strong enough for personal agents and eventually be cheap to run, and affordable to fine tune.
The clock is ticking until you’ll need to decide which internet package you prefer, based on content providers and limited by region.
At least Yahoo will probably come free with the base package.
Those sites never fit my definition of open anyway (free, permissively licensed technology and content). The ones that do are smaller, aren't a monoculture and seem to be pretty untroubled so far. No one wants to scrape the little Mastodon or Lemmy instances or other small community sites I pay attention to.
Big deal if something is a threat to the social media business. The social media business is a cancer which should be destroyed anyway. Go outside and engage in real socializing instead of the depression-spawning, teen-girl-murdering version peddled by Zuckerberg and Musk. It's much better and once you change your habits you'll never look back. Maybe it has something to do with all the vitamin D you get from being outside.
We've BEEN through federated platforms before. We've even been through PROTOCOLS before. They're all horrible. The successor to any platform that currently exists will have slight improvements to what already exists, and that's IF they're able to do so.
I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do have over 30 years of being around social media platforms on the internet.
If Twitter locks out more readers, people will stop posting and move elsewhere. If Reddit ejects the mods that made it successful, communities will evolve elsewhere.
The forest will regrow and different paths will form, routing around the dying patches.
The only time I run into this Fuck You pattern is Instagram refusing to let you replay a video.
They aren't trying to delight you, or make the best product for you.
They're trying to suck as much money out of you as possible. If that means making a worse product, you're gonna get a worse product.
Until this gets beat into the average person's head, we'll keep falling for companies that we think will be different.
Makes this all really easy. It is a big world out there with lots to do, build, see, laugh, love, play.
Fuck em. I just do not need it. Whatever it is, the vast majority of the time.
And then it will magically open back up. (More press)
And that's the story of pretty much every one of the outrageous/bold/brilliant/terrible strategic decisions you've heard of since the Twitter takeover.
What's most amazing is that it works everytime, I'm surprised there isn't an Onion copy/paste article about this each time.
My Twitter usage is down a lot since they killed off 3rd party clients.
Every user hostile move they've made basically halves my usage.
I used to spend way too much time on Twitter, now it's 10 minutes a week and I don't feel like I miss much.
Just a boring echochamber.
Its the twitter equivalent of youtube thumbnail face with 10 million $$$$$$$ in the title.
He is killing engagement and ad income, has to slow the bleed, and is now looking under every rock for some gains, GOTO 1.
I've been meaning to make a Twitter account since I follow a few accounts for some games that I play.
Between Twitter not being owned by a loon anymore and finally a reason to overcome my laziness, why not?
And yes, I know I'm playing right into Twitter's hand. Whatever, I actually like Musk anyway (an unpopular opinion that will no doubt get me flagged around these parts).
Reddit's been circling the drain for years, but today is the day it truly crossed a line for millions of people at once (They killed Apollo and RIF).
Twitter's been getting rapidly worse since Musk bought it, but this is another red line.
We're not even allowed to talk about the influence of bots and astroturfers here. A popular post today was flagged within an hour, just for pointing out that a site claims to sell upvotes on HN.
I don't like it when the tech giants get in sync like this...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36526827
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215015113/https://pastebin....
- Reddit API lockdown
- Twitter account wall
- YouTube increases aggressiveness against Adblock
This is on top of similar behavior from other sites that happened long ago. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
But drastic changes across platforms within 24 hours is unprecedented. This does not bode well.
But that's clearly not sustainable, it's inevitable they'll pivot to monetizing the service - and that's clearly going to make it less attractive than the heavily-subsidized version people have gotten used to.
I guess the ideas is to lock the users in to the degree that the increasing monetization is put up with, and slowly enough there's no "sticker shock" of a previously-free service suddenly having a price.
I'm constantly amazed people are surprised by this, isn't it obvious that tying to a loss-leader service isn't sustainable?
Instead with their VC funding they spent $$$ to introduce things like NFTs and TikTok scrolling, which nobody asked for, but it burned through a lot of cash.
This is actually the most mood-lightening comment I've seen on this matter. A return to the internet of 15 years ago doesn't sound so bad to me. (Of course, the mood darkens again when I remember that it won't really be that, because, e.g., that internet of 15 years ago couldn't handle the bot-spam of today.)
Remember, this is a VC firm that runs the joint. We're paying with our data, and that gives them early/first mover advantage.
It may still be rough around the edges, but to me it feels like the spirit of the old phpBB forums combined with almost 20 years of lessons learned from Reddit.
But to have something pay for it self. I'd rather not lose money on it
I was on a forum, and the kind of language and even topics for discussion were severely restricted, partly because of advertising.
Matrix does better as the rooms are decentalized so can continue even if the creating server drops offline. But user accounts are still only federated.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/14k67qt/l...
Highly sus
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/622
I would not bed with these fellows myself.
Maybe they were abrasive in initially fighting the request to make technical changes to the slur filter, but hey when you ask for free enhancements to open source code you either do the work and provide a pull request or be prepared to be told no.
I empathize with their concern about becoming another Voat or Gab. They want federation but they don’t want a Wild West.
So the word above word is used in lyrics of a music genre with predominantly black musicians. In addition to saying we don't want our software to be used by racists, they also say "we don't want our Software to be used to discuss certain kinds of black music" (arguably a racist stance just by itself). Talk about unintended side effects.
if automation is chosen there will absolutely be situations where perfection is impossible. if human’s unparalleled ability to see nuance is chosen then the cost scales along with the amount of information.
the fact is, if we want a community and we want to keep signal above noise, we will need some form of removal of spam, child porn, racism, etc…
automatic tools can’t nuance as well as humans.
then human mods start nuancing and someone will point at stuff and call it biased.
It did not seem to me a politicized discussion but a technical issue with filtering using hardcoded blacklists that are just too prone to the Scunthorpe Problem. Perhaps because too many people in the USA despise the mere existence of other languages :)
As far as the “popular” list, which is placed below the recommended list, lemmy.ml doesn’t have any special privileges there. It just happens to be the most popular. If something becomes more popular it will go on the top.
The problem with Lemmy is that one gets sent to some place like https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances, is immediately confronted with a ton of weird links like "butts.international" and "badblocks.rocks", what even is this? And about 100000 other servers just named "lemmy", "notlemmy", and "lemmy1". So you click a few at random optimistically, then get hit with login page, or a server error, or an apparently empty test-server. You begin to think you're being pranked, like am I supposed to brute-force click like 50 things to find something that's not a joke? Maybe you go to https://join-lemmy.org/ and it says "After you create an account, you can find communities", so great, it's inaccessible anonymously, the same as twitter. You go to https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ and after 15m of page-loading get a hilariously useless cyberpunk-looking word-soup where you can't click any links, much less search for topics/communities (btw there are 2068431 running instances and somehow butts.international is still front and center in my cyberpunk view)
Finally, by ignoring recommended tooling and just using google-search I found a community relevant to my interests, but it has pretty bad content and a whopping 1 user/day. Another google search trying to find a certain topic, I find one, but it has only 3 total comments, and I could not tell what month/year the posts were added.
So, clearly I don't really know what I'm doing here, but this stuff is ridiculous. As long as we're crawling 2068431 instances why don't we look at the communities it hosts and the volume/recency of traffic? At least filter totally empty stuff and/or make it easier to get all the test instances in a sandbox! Discoverability is so bad that I can barely get to the point where I'm considering usability / content.
Between account walls and search’s indexing problem, it’s become very hard to find small to mid sized active communities on your own. In fact this problem seems to be something people are trying to solve in Reddit communities via related subreddits on the sidebar.
So having gone from using search engine’s to crawl for relevant content that was out there, people are now creating content specifically to end up in Google’s search results - destroying the value search once had. Indicated by what people have done on Reddit, and these discussions about finding alternatives, it seems we are well on our way back to webrings. I welcome this.
This is not true. Communities can be browsed without login on their home instances.
For the short term at least, since discoverability is so broken, I think those who want to advocate for Lemmy will be better served by just linking to content or curating indexes of active communities. It's not that useful to anyone if the focus is always about pretending everything is fine, or presenting prospective users with totally useless machine-generated indexes where we cannot tell the test-servers from production.
i havent' logged into twitter since forever but still have accounts
i need to delete them
Time to go outside and forget that the online world exists.
If we as a society decided to channel these efforts into building infrastructure improvements and homes, I think this would help a lot more. I understand the biggest problems in that respect are legal and cultural, but I can’t help but feel people have tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
What sucks is people flocking like sheeps to centralized platforms that have not their best interests at heart.
Decentralization has been the answer from day 1 but people dont understand shit and make the same mistake over and over again
As long as the site is growing, it doesn't have to be profitable. But when the music stops...
Totally! The internet was better before pay walls / auth walls.
I get why we're here today, and I get that the last phase was just about acquiring an audience, and getting people hooked, and now this part of getting everyone to pay was always the plan, but this part really does suck.
Just feels like all the services lined up to start shitting on users at the same time. Netflix, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, NYT (and all the newspapers really)... you can't watch Amazon Prime without having 300 "buy now" buttons in your face.
This phase of capitalism sucks.
Well, looks like I was only partially right. Most access is still "free", but at the cost of enshittification.
One would almost be tempted to ask for a cheque in the mail like in the old days.
But I guess for publishers it never produced enough revenue to be worth maintaining the integration.
The database has doomed us all! For it is the Seed of all Evil in the hands of the Wicked! ...and arguably the Good, but misguided!
Replace http://twitter.com by http://traittor.net
http://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
to
http://traittor.net/elonmusk/status/1675187969420828672
Is normally bypassing no registered account and limit by day.
Unfortunately it does not work with all the tweets and especially the recent ones
Have fun :)
I'm at least glad that people will start looking into the alternatives.
The next lesson they need to learn is TANSTAAFL. Nothing good can come with an internet where publishers are paid with eyeballs. We need to rescue the idea that "voting with your wallet" is the best and fairest way to have quality content.
Years ago I was brought to twitter compared to Facebook exactly because you could read without being logged in. After a few years it had become a hellish place with lots of flames and arguments, but it still had some value. It became clear that my engagement was mainly to discuss with random people about things knowing they would never change their minds (neither would I) on things like Covid vaccines. It was a huge waste of time, but I found it out that surfing it as non logged would amore allow me to read without being able to reply to the most stupid comments. Some sort of read only Twitter. Now that it has gone, Twitter has irrelevant.
people been saying this for a decade +
you'll be back