There are people that do it tastefully and people that are creative and interesting. If they can’t be interesting and descriptive to some extent then they’re probably not people I want to engage with.

And honestly, the titles were so bland they were almost snarky, and I never felt they were justified for the creators I watch. They were so laconic they were often barely informative anyway, because the flavour was gone. I think that’s because the people who have a good sense for editorialising aren’t going around writing aggressively literal titles all the time. The dearrow ecosystem is subject to algorithmic selection too, and it selects for boring.

Oh cool, I might give it another look.

Yeah, it’s possible that wasn’t an option back when I used it. I remember thinking that some sort of default off would be better. At the time I think it was either on by default and toggleable - I always toggled it - or it was just disabled and unwieldy to enable.

Edit: actually even better would be to have a short community written summary that could be more descriptive. Just like a popup or something. I don’t need the title to disappear, just know if the video is worth my time.

The problem I have with dearrow is that it’s editorialising and arbitrary. It’s not like removing ads which can be clearly identified and the user can make personal decisions, like no sponsors but self-promo is fine, or whatever.

No, there is one alternative title and one alternative thumbnail, and that’s it, and often I have serious disagreements with the choices the community makes. There’s a bias towards intervention, so if a title is fine according to me but someone else doesn’t like it, then it gets changed. I found most of my votes were to restore the original title and thumb. Eventually I got tired of it and just uninstalled, and presumably so did other people with the same feeling, so the community continues to skew towards changing every video they encounter.

Also, the thumbnails and titles that creators choose tells me a lot about them, and I get rid of clickbait by not engaging with creators that do clickbait. Also, sometimes it’s not clickbait, just people being creative. It seems like the whole thing is just an exercise in being the fun police by people that don’t understand the creative process.

Where? Is this paradise oasis of helpfulness on the internet? Or is it offline somewhere?

Ah dang, well, thanks anyway.

Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn’t mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn’t take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad “contributions” until they’re sick of everyone’s shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they’re dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it’s hard to tell the difference between a troll who’s trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn’t know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.

Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, “aw… putty… windows…” So I’m like, “Listen, I don’t care if you think I’m sad for using windows, I don’t use linux because it’s too much work” Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don’t know what I’m doing it’s not for me, and I’m like “Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?” Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to “help” me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they’d be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would’ve been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.

Wait wait wait… where do you get these? That sounds amazing lol.

I tried talking about how absolutely horrendous their behaviour was recently, pointing out how completely unhinged and self-defeating it is, and someone actually literally said that this was a good thing because Linux is hard work and they should keep away people that aren’t experts.

And first of all, if that’s right it’s an admission that linux will never succeed, and secondly I agree that’s the effect but I think that’s bad actually.

I honestly think there must be at least some amount of psyops in the community poisoning the discourse for everyone.

Honestly it sounds like someone was paid to do something about adblocking and just like… did something. Like if you were tasked with reducing adblocking, and your first and most obvious idea of “reduce the obnoxious ads” was disallowed because enshittification is mandated, you could say no, which most workers won’t do, or you could just do whatever random bullshit feels like it might work because it’s punitive. Or at least it’s a gesture that shows your boss you’re trying.

Authoritarian systems like capitalist corporations are inherently low-information for exactly this reason. People on the low rungs doing the real work who understand what needs to be done will typically not report problems to their superiors. And when they do, those superiors tend not to listen, because the idea that lower workers know something they don’t threatens their leadership status.

Also our society’s legal system trains us to believe punitive measures must do something even though they don’t.

Also I guess another reason they might wind up at this strategy is that straight up telling users that the problem is their adblock is the fastest way to get adblockers to block your countermeasure, so they think they have to be sneaky.

I guess that’s possible, and a very creepy thought, but more likely they saw the level of general attention on the issue and backed off globally.

I definitely got really awful, unplayably spotty playback that seemed linked to adblock usage. Then I saw an article about it and confirmed I wasn’t going crazy, and that day it stopped happening, so it felt like I was going crazy all over again. It’s like the moment they realised it was going to become a problem and they weren’t as sneaky as they thought, they turned it off. I haven’t had an issue since then.

I think our first family PC had 40MB of storage, and we loaded optical discs into a caddy before inserting them. That was in the late 80s.

Honestly most of that gets eaten up just airlifting my mansion. I’m sick of doing it, but I’m glad I invested early in the airliftable frame kit when I had the place built. The foundations wouldn’t have held up more than one or two moves otherwise, and there’s no way I’m commuting more than 15 mins.

Why have I never considered vertical tabs before? The screen is way too wide for normal pages, you can fit a bunch more information sideways per tab, and way more tabs vertically than horizontally. You could even double-stack them with all the space available.

This is such an obvious change to make.

“Sub” is a generic term from the BBS days, short for “subforum”, “subcommunity”, whatever, so I just use that. I don’t like to use “community” because it’s long and clunky.

You know, I like to think of participating in the fediverse as being part of the construction of what internet culture will become.

It’s literally a chance to be on the ground floor of the next iteration of the internet. Maybe you’ll make something that lasts.

Yes, you don’t get to sit back and passively consume vast swathes of content, but maybe that’s good for your creative process.

I have noticed that a lot of the most irritating and vocal reactionaries come from those two instances, and it’s not improving much. It makes sense - this is an alternative to reddit and the people most likely to leave reddit will include a large number of people who get banned a lot.

If they’re reactionaries, they’re not going to have many instances that are for them specifically - because those instances get defedded - so they will tend to go for the open instances. So those instances get a lot of the worst people.

And if their goal is growth at the expense of quality, then they won’t fix it. They’ll just get worse. The reasons beehaw defederated haven’t changed.

When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. The King isn’t just a powerful man. He is a divine being.

I mean money is just as made up as the divine right of kings, and it will end one day.

To be fair though, “The website doesn’t remember my settings because I don’t let it,” isn’t really a problem the website can solve.

I just had a thought that I’d like to see a plugin that independently remembers whichever cookie-based settings you want it to on a per-site basis and then re-inserts those settings into fresh cookies whenever you visit using some sort of search & replace or markup interpeter. Basically a way to maintain personal control over what data cookies can hold.