There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc… profit).

• Elon Musk, probably

Regexps are awesome! And also not at the same time:-P. 🎉 Congrats👏!:-)

A study on astroturfing on Reddit, written in the style of Reddit by an astroturfer - oh the delicious irony? :-P

Damn you for making me watch that. All the way to the end and beyond. In one pass. And for becoming better for having watched it.

I hear that, but also…

Well, I was doing the same, but noticed that even in the niche subs, the conversations seemed to be getting more and more… juvenile? Like prior to the Snoopacolypse (as you called it, and I love it! The term not the event in case that needs any clarification:-P), it was a point of pride for me that I had never blocked anyone in my life - whereas now I don’t think twice before doing that bc who has time to waste on someone not engaging in good faith!? Especially if they lack enough self awareness to even realize that fact about themselves while they are doing it. (Tbf, possibly watching Innuendo Studios’ analysis of GamerGate that uses many tactics of the Alt Right in America had something to do with my changing views as well:-).

Ymmv ofc, bc different subs means entirely different people & thus experiences interacting with them, but I’m just saying that rather than stick with the subset of that community that remained after Rexit, I eventually just find myself going or even wanting to go there less and less, instead enjoying engaging here more, even at the expense of not being able to talk about those matters. I haven’t posted there for months, nor even commented for a month, and barely go once a week to read. Bc I use Kbin and the mobile browser experience here is so horrible to write a comment, I find myself not commenting here often either - but when I do I have much more fun doing so, not having to be anywhere near as defensive as that other place that shall not be named.

I hope you find something that works best for you as well, wherever that may be.

That’s a good point but I thought it was different servers, like one had “telemetry” directly in the name? Unfortunately I really don’t recall bc it’s been too long and I didn’t have time to finish delving in the first place, nor since. I don’t want to spread misinformation so let me know if you think I might be doing that. Mostly I’m saying that if Blockada chose to mark their checks home as “bad”, enough to block them upon a default installation of that app, then they surely had some reason to do so, even if ultimately it turns out to be harmless.

On a scale of 1 to 10 for severity, this might be just like a 1, but that’s still not 0, and some people just prefer to stay away from an app that has demonstrably chosen to ignore user consent. Even if they clearly state that they felt they had good reasons for doing so.

I doubt it is just that - the sending of such info is enabled by default for one, and even after disabling it, for several years now Firefox has continued to connect to the server regardless. I have not personally delved into the source code to verify just how “friendly” such a check is, which has already been asked to be halted, but ad blocking software such as Blockada (Android) has decided to mark it as “bad”.

If this feature was opt-in only, and functioned respectfully, it would be an entirely different matter, but as it is, user consent seems to be at least partly ignored. I am sure that those stats are useful to the developers… but that is not and will never be the point, for many people.

You’re g-damn right.

(Can’t get the image to show up properly but here is the exact scenario you described: image location :-P

Put on the hat to convert to your Heisenberg form, though then the game ends bc who could beat that move? :-P

Jon Stewart is a national treasure.

Fwiw, I believe that happened bc you dared to comment on a post that was since removed by a mod from a magazine hosted on another instance. Now, that whole post is “gone”, so Notifications cannot reach it, but it is “not gone” in the sense that Notifications cannot properly realize that it’s gone. And it has poisoned your whole notifications system, to the point that you cannot even read other notifications from other posts.

The good news is that it only affects one “page” of your Notifications, so as you continue to operate, it will eventually fall behind to page 2, and thereby still prevent you from seeing any Notification from that whole entire page, but from then on at least you will get new notifications from page 1. Until it happens again, ofc, and the cycle continues. I have ceased recommending anyone to come to KBin as a result of this extremely frustrating bug, along with the other highly frustrating ones like constantly logging you out, and barely being able to type out a comment on mobile. Hopefully it gets better.:-|

Then you are definitely adding more to this conversation than me: actual evidence trumps mere armchair theorizing every time:-).

There is nothing new under the sun it seems, and so many people are so very short-sighted, that your story makes perfect sense, unfortunately.

You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a “free” one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won’t happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.

Hehe, I wonder if some technology like Tor could help here, distributing the work across many servers instead of each one having to do all the work entirely by itself? One day, if someone wants to build it, that may come, but it will not be me, nor today it seems:-P.

Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren’t being merged in and deployed.

Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.

The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.

TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors’ proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.

Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin’s main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn’t exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.

Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).

And I hope the person you asked responds with such - I was definitely going off on a whole other tangent here.:-)

Or both:-)

Most people yes, but those who feel like their rights extend well up into your nose make a disproportionate amount of noise far out of proportion to hundreds of others who are more neutral, and b/c of how human psychology works, maybe also more than ten or so people who are weakly positive.

I guess I am saying: do not underestimate the human need to create an echo chamber for emotional validation:-D.

I thought I might leave Reddit entirely, but then I realized this as well. So I have taken to posting some things exclusively here, some very few things also there, and when I do post there I post here first then just share the link.

On the other hand, keeping in mind that my “here” is Kbin not Lemmy, I’ve more or less ceased most of my encouragement to try to get people to join b/c of all the bugs that have been present - some of which seem fixed now but overall the set of features present in Kbin is very much behind Lemmy, which is itself enormously behind Reddit still. It makes sense: people were “hopeful” about Kbin/Lemmy, but to actually realize that hope has been slow going. And that too makes sense: Ernst has had family issues that MUST take priority, although it has greatly slowed down integrations of fixes that others have offered into the main code, for a time. And too there is the fact that Kbin, like many Lemmy instances, has been under DDOS attack. These things take time to develop even under the most ideal circumstances, and all the more so in the face of such challenges. Overall, Kbin is still alpha version software at this point.

And even Lemmy is still just a beta version. e.g. just to name one example: you still cannot migrate from one instance to another across the Fediverse, so whatever instance you choose to join is basically a permanent decision - like if you ask all your friends to come with you from Reddit and then jump ship yet again, you risk alienating them by leaving them behind as you hop around looking for the greenest grass. Joining instances here is nothing at all like casually joining subs on Reddit - they will need to learn all about that, and what it means, and how to curate their experiences here, etc.

In comparison, for now at least old-reddit or even new-reddit on a mobile browser with ad-blocking meets many people’s needs, especially with “everyone” more or less remaining behind on Reddit, and it is a tough sell to try to tell them to give all that up for an objectively worse UI/UX experience (the cost-to-benefit tradeoff is worthwhile to us, but is it to them?). At this point, those with the “early adopter” mindset are already here, and more importantly the content creators have already made their choices too. (Though if Reddit kills off old-reddit, that could change things in a BIG way)

I am not saying that there would be no value in such outreach initiatives, just that they have already happened and yet here we are. At this point it may be worth looking into the reasons why people who already know about Lemmy/Kbin have not chosen to come here. And on some level we just need to be okay with the fact that we are likely going to be small for a long time, especially as the code continues to be developed to help it catch up.

Unless Threads causes things to change much more quickly… which it very well could.

(edit: added UI/UX)

Okay I hear you - so self-centeredness may still be present, as is selfishness, purely short-term thinking, loads and loads and loads of toxicity, etc., but it is not only each one of those, but all of them combined that leads to that enshittification effect.

I once had a guy beg me to block him. I was trying to train new mods and felt the need to literally screenshot his request (sent via DM) b/c it was barely believable otherwise - he simply could not stop himself from being toxic to others on the sub. Ofc such people exist in the world, but at some point, it becomes the fault of the systems themselves if they both allow all-comers yet cause the absolute best stuff to become buried amidst a flood of posts sorted by New, plus even Hot has such a heavy newness component, etc. i.e., requiring moderation in the first place + doing everything possible to “increase engagement” (for the sake of enshittification advertising profits, e.g. you get the privilege of watching moar ads by clicking on or scrolling through posts, not writing out meaningful responses), while also limiting pinned posts to strictly 2 slots, plus making megathreads super-complicated to try to set up in the first place without access to a 3rd party bot written for that purpose (then charging communities who already donated their programming time to make that + computing time & access to run that for the privilege of being able to use it) e.g. the latest megathread cannot simply include a link to the previous megathread that it replaces, + other things too like virtually hiding the sidebar/About section (on the official Android mobile app anyway) with tiny fonts and making it disappear as you scroll. => Everything basically feeds forward to reinforce the doomscrolling effect and toxic commenting - to turn Reddit into the next 4chan/Discord? - while taking Reddit away from its forum board origins.

And all b/c the guy in charge worships at the feet of Elon, not even realizing that what at best would have worked for those circumstances (e.g. a public company transitioning into private, rather than a private one wanting to get an IPO to become public; and yes, highly debatable that Musk’s efforts may work even for that other company:-D) will not necessarily work for Reddit.

Though as you said, a lot of this is independent of the specific company & product itself, and relates more to trends that occur purely b/c of human nature. It reminds me of computers trying to fend off viruses: you can’t just exist in a soup of code that you feel absolutely safe running without any protections, b/c it is too vulnerable to selfish, self-centered, short-sighted counter-purposes that can destroy you. And biological cells are an even better and more complex example, as they also fight off cancerous states of being - ones own cells that have been perverted, twisting the purpose to now grow in a selfish, self-centered, purely short-sighted manner rather than working for the health of the overall body. Our immune systems protect us from all of that and more, including literal dirt that we don’t want floating in our bloodstreams, and that reinforces your point: fluff spreads unless you have a system in place to counteract it. It seems like that is literally a physical rule of the universe, that also applies in virtual as well.

So I guess in this analogy, Huffman is like HIV then (!?:-P), in that greatly diminishing the capabilities of the “immune system” (moderation) - not just recently here with the protests but for the past several years worth of changes to Reddit that continually pushed towards “engagement” but at the expense of thinking/reading before speaking - has lead to the result of modern-day Reddit as it is now compared to what it used to be. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step after all, and it should be no surprise that after taking a bunch of steps towards a particular goal, that we they have now reached it.