4,328 karma · joined September 27, 2019
No what you are presenting is an argument for services that meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization. It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than enough people that don't need or want that.
It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday rock the stock market.
In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and you might find it too difficult to use. However not everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven to be a good alternative for users. It's potentially the same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative and enough users for meaningful interaction.
It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the layperson. (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)
> I find Lemmy frustrating to use
Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same can be true for other people as well.
Just randomly clicking around I see that subreddits with ~50k users already qualify for Reddits top 5% largest subreddits.
If you randomly browse subreddits of that size you will notice that for many of them the newest threads are at least days old. So in reality the amount of active subreddits, let's say subreddits that get at least one thread per day or more, is probably in the realm of a few thousand.
Reddit is, first and foremost, content driven. The content itself comes entirely from the communities. To be more precise: from a very small group of people inside those communities.
Most reddit users just read, include users that only occasionaly comment in threads and you get a bucket that represents like what, 4/5 of the whole userbase?
This means that you do not have to make many people angry to render the site useless for the overwhelming majority of people that go to the site. Reddit rests upon the labor of a small number of people: Users that post and/or create useful content and moderators.
Now a site like youtube is very similar but has one [2] very significant difference: The people producing the content have a monetary incentive, making it very unlikely that a majority of them will stop or move away. Reddit, as a company, however brings almost nothing to the table, it's just that it used to be frictionless and now everyone happens to be there. And they are working hard to kill the "frictionless" part.
[1]: The recent AMA with spez was a nice demonstration of how out of touch they are with reddit users
[2]: Actually it's two, hosting video content on a large scale is actually hard
It's truly baffling. The editor for comments is buggy, regularly posts comments twice, can't handle copy/paste properly, "there was a problem" and "you broke reddit" error messages on refresh are a common occurence, and just opening a thread takes more than 5 seconds on average. The video player does not work most of the time.
Then I saw the official reddit app, and it manages to be low quality in all kinds of places the website redesign managed to miss. Being on the mobile web version constantly nags you to download the official reddit app, and the nagging popup causes the position you were in the comments to be reset, for extra annoyance.
Without old.reddit or 3rd party clients I find Reddit unusable.
The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people that do not have it).
It is more like a "shortcut" when it comes to ear training, but ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal when it comes to the things a musician actually does.
Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the real world.
Also noteworthy that there are disadvantages to perfect pitch (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already linked.
Why wouldn't you be able to do that with a CLI editor?
The value is: everyone is there. So many users are on it due to "soft peer pressure", not because they value a site like Twitter/Facebook specifically. People who want to "push their brand" are also on there because they have to mostly, not out of some special love for the site.
There is no shortage of others who would be able to replace Twitter if it actually went offline in an hour, the hard part for social media ist getting the majority of users.
In other words: why would anyone support Twitter now? After so many years of clearly establishing itself as something you simply use for free and registered on because you "have to".
Twitter is a big mass that has gained a lot of momentum over the years, and at this point it is very hard to change trajectory or the way anyone uses or perceives that site.
Twitter needs those people more than those people need Twitter.
NFTs and the guys pushing them were only out to hurt artists and exploit them, and nothing else. If they weren't out to scam them, they were out there just stealing the art.
It was not "a nice idea" and the fact that people still try to tie them to "but what about the artists" narrative is a disgrace. I'm sorry, but there is no "but" here.
Yes something for artists would be nice, everyone agrees. NFTs were never that, not even a little bit. It was not "an attempt to provide artists with revenue", it was an attempt to use artists for revenue.
You make a difference between what you say, and the people cheering for NFTs, but the whole "yeah but what if it works" or "yeah but wouldn't it be nice if..." angle is exactly the type of crowbar all the cryptocurrency/NFT scammers used and still use to stay relevant.
I can confirm this experience, on 2 occasions when I looked up a very specific (and definitely not common) domain, they were suddenly reserved by GoDaddy and sold for a premium price. Not hundreds, but like 50-150 instead of 12.
I can't prove it, of course, but after hearing about those problems with GoDaddy multiple times it just seems too convenient for them to be a coincidence.
Are we? I know it is a fashionable thing to say, but I am personally fascinated by the relatively low number of accidents given how omnipresent cars are.
For germany it's ~5 dead / 100000 motorized vehicles, and ~4 dead / 100000 inhabitants. [1]
More anecdotal: Growing up I lived near a pretty busy street and never personally witnessed an accident there.
Makes me think that we are actually pretty good at driving, even on average.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
What's the problem with critique? I mean we know Musk does not like it in any way, shape, or form, he has made that oh so very clear. But complaining about Twitter is not officially against Twitter rules (yet).
Also, we are not even on Twitter here, are we?
The good VR games are really good, games like HL Alyx. But after almost 10 years of VR usage I still can't name more than 3-7 pieces of VR Software (games included) I would put into the "worth it" category. Anything else is just very short lived, feel like tech demos. Fun? Sure, but ultimately worse than regular software/games. Gimmicky overhead, so to speak.
Hence why my VR setup is collecting dust most of the time.
Seeing Facebook's vision for VR, which is just rebuilding products we had as far back as 2003 (Second Life) and even 2014 (VR Chat), but worse and riddled with ads and darkpatterns, is what has made me lose even more of my interest. I have to add that I was an Oculus owner in the past, I am now an Index owner, but what Facebook does is still relevant because they are the "VR believers", pouring the most money into it.
In short: There is just nothing interesting happening, my VR setup is collecting dust. Demoing it to my friends is basically the only thing I do with it nowadays but they lost interest too. I don't agree that it's a hardware problem, for me it's a software problem. Also: too much "vision", too little actual determined (software) projects.
A strong claim that still lacks any strong proof. Especially once you start defining the term "child abuser".
According to actual child protection organisations [1] encrypted communications play a very minor role in distribution and is barely relevant, and the biggest factor is not detection, but the lack of proper resources to actually investigate cases and leads. There is no shortage of hard leads to investigate.
It is also rarely acknowledged that are very large percentage of abusers are from the victims social circle and often family members [2]. Meanwhile the whole surveillance fetishists very much try to keep up the false image of children being kidnapped by strangers and such.
The whole idea that child abusers are incredibly hard to catch and are oh so well hidden is a fairy tale. It is also important to differentiate between 1st and second grade child abusers, those who actively abuse the child, and those who "only" encourage it by sharing/purchasing the results of the abuse (I'm sure there is a significant overlap, but I do not know).
So is there a cost? Sure. But let's not pretend that it is even the lowest hanging fruit, or that the people building these services and asking for them are even interested in actually improving the situation, otherwise they would throw their weight behind one of the dozens of other more effective ways to actually improve child protection instead of screaming for a perpetual noise machine that even further drains the already very scarce resources of child protection services.
[1]: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/massenueberwachung-das-sagen-ki...
Same for people that are already talking about using it for medical diagnoses and such, without ever having seen a single proper independent and peer reviewed study when it comes to chatgpts accuracies in specific fields (and that is ignoring all the other potential short term and long term problems when it comes to even considering something like that).
However I assume all that is needed for them to start interacting is some relevant feedback. Example: First train the dog to have a positive association with a sound, then show them that this sound is produced if they interact with the TV.
In the article they do this, but go one step further, the game dispenses treats if they are correct. I'm sure a dog will learn the game easily once you clear the initial hurdle.
> When the dogs succeed, the console dispenses treats.
> You see, this is where <buzzword> could be used to improve everything.
> Super smart people are doing amazing things with <buzzword>, there are thousands of applications (no I won't name any). You should invest now!
But it's not, the opposite actually. Any kind of serious typing requires a proper keyboard. If you have to carry a tablet, which is essentially just a screen, and a keyboard, you might as well just take a laptop and gain the ability to take advantage of a general computing device.
I mean, those two things are not mutually exclusive at all. The people quitting voluntarily and the people that would have been and are being laid off don't have to overlap that much.
Absolutely, still there is "normal web latency" slow, "regular website" slow and then there is "reddit redesign" (and other popular sites) slow. Taking the latter as an example, it is easy to check how much faster it could be by using old.reddit.com instead.
For that type of slowness I have very little understanding, it's just a regression.