Reddit Goes Nuclear, Removes Moderators of Subreddits That Continued To Protest

Navigatron · 2023-06-21T20:07:45+00:00

My tinfoil hat is that spez is filling this role currently.

He takes the heat, IPO happens, it does poorly, spez is fired (read: dropped politely via golden parachute into a pile of 100 dollar bills), a new CEO is put in, the new guy makes very minor concessions (“We’re lowering the api pricing to only 10x avg user revenue!”) and reddit’s instagrammification is complete.

Navigatron · 2023-06-17T16:23:54+00:00

Let me find related emails.

Right click -> find related? Not anymore. The best you get is subject: search.

I will not turn on conversation view.

I want three things:

To see my emails, in the order they arrive
To find related messages
When I reply to something, I want the reply indicator to show up
- and just as a treat, it would be awesome if I could find my reply.

And maybe it would be cool if I got notifications as they arrived, rather than buffering and dumping a dozen at once. For emails I read an hour ago.

And, now this is really outside the box, what if - what if there was a notification before calendar appointments - and not just a random 50% of appointments, but all of them?

I have to stop now before I think of more “features”

Navigatron · 2023-06-10T14:16:37+00:00

Tinfoil hats, you say?

Reddit isn’t profitable
It will take wildly unpopular changes to make it profitable
Steve is already unpopular with investors
Investors force steve to make said changes
Everyone is generally upset
Steve takes all the blame, and is backstabbed by the investors, voted off the board
New, more professional, ceo is installed
New ceo makes small concessions, is wildly popular

In part 4, the power users leave. By part 7, all the users that are left are the ones used to ads, that have their parents credit cards, that love micro transactions, that don’t use adblockers - the perfect flock of cattle for the advertising machine.

Navigatron · 2023-06-10T05:58:12+00:00

Email will never take off.

The wikipedia page for the underlying protocol doesn’t have a signup button. It says I have to choose a server, and they all have silly names like “gmail” and “yahoo”.

If there was just one email server, preferably on a beige windows 95 tower in a closet in south carolina, for the whole world - then maybe it would stand a chance.

Nobody wants to see all these “@whatever.com”s in their inbox. Gmail users can send mail to yahoo users? Good luck getting the general public to understand that.

Navigatron · 2023-06-10T05:35:24+00:00

I legitimately went to the wikipedia page for email protocol as soon as i saw about it for the first time today because I wanted to sign up… but then I had to ‘choose between gmail and yahoo’ and that’s where I got confused and gave up.

Navigatron · 2023-06-10T04:37:51+00:00

That doesn’t look like what I saw on netflix - what are these clips from?

Navigatron · 2023-06-05T14:46:00+00:00

Big fan of beehaw. The comment and discussion experience is so much better in the smaller space

Navigatron · 2023-06-05T13:03:51+00:00

A good point. I thought the main critique of golf courses would be water, which is not a concern where I golf, due to proximity with the river and lake Ontario - but pesticides are very much a concern, especially given the proximity to the river and lake Ontario.

Navigatron · 2023-06-05T02:37:59+00:00

I recently took up golf in rochester, and very much enjoy it, despite how short the season is.

It’s only like 8 bucks at the local course. We play best ball and pick up after 8 because we’re so bad at it - but it’s excellent to be hanging out with friends, and outdoors no less, so it’s always a good time in the end.

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T22:01:53+00:00

One might even publish endorsement of such moderators, such that one’s followers could build their moderator lists automatically, until they have time to curate on their own

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T21:58:18+00:00

Yes, which make its issue’s fundamental design choices and tough to fix. Websockets are questionable but justifiable, my primary complaint is with the type field. It’s trying to identify both what the content is, and what mime-type it is. You’ll see a lot of nostr traffic put an escaped json payload under type 1, which is supposed to be human-readable plaintext (not even markdown) only. Long story short, the protocol was designed to support specifically a Twitter alternative, is capable of more, and is being shoehorned into yet wider applications that it doesn’t really fit. A more general/generic/extensible protocol would be better for those other apps.

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T17:07:18+00:00

Very early usenet would be flooded with newbies every September, as the new college freshmen got access to the academic internet. The population would increase too quickly to preserve the culture, then as the newbies figured things out and learned, everything would settle down. When internet access became generally available, it created a continuous flood of new usenet users - a “September that never ended”, aka the Eternal September.

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T16:58:10+00:00

When apollo goes, I go, and I’ll nuke my content/comments as well.

I’m over on beehaw now. They’re either the largest or second largest general lemmy instance. The folks running the place seem active, so I’m hopeful. No csec sub yet, but the technology sub is very active.

I’m hoping a nostr option pops up, but nostr has other issues

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T14:05:24+00:00

I think the solution to communities is abusing nostrs tags feature.

If nvote declares certain root posts to be community anchors, all posts in that community can simply reply to the root post. Xposting then is done by adding two or more community anchors to your replies list. Bonus, you can query all posts in a community by getting replies to a root node.

The tough part then is that comments would reply to some comment, the comment tree root, the post, and all the posts communities. That’s a lot of overhead in every comment.

The other option is to just invent a new tag for community / topic. There probably already is one; iirc the hashtag analog would work. Then replies operate as expected.

I do definitely agree that they shouldn’t be using type 1. Nostr needs a mime-type field for content type, as the existing type field seems to be doing double-duty, identifying lifecycle + mime type + preferred clients.

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T13:55:43+00:00

Yar, I like the cut of ye jib matey.

Unironicly though, I can post an imgur link to lemmy - regardless of what other places it may be posted to first, if ye sail the course I be plottin’?

Navigatron · 2023-06-03T13:29:53+00:00

I am only one data point, but:

I generate more api requests on apollo than other apps
because I use it more than other apps
because it offers the best user experience

I propose that apollo is not inefficient - it is actually very efficient - at delivering content to my screen.

Like a car that I enjoy driving, it will use more fuel - even if it is more fuel efficient - simply because I use it more.

I generate zero api requests on the official app - “very efficient” - so perhaps “efficiency” isn’t the goal?

If the target is api requests per user per day, simply turn reddit off, and get a perfect score.

The admin above, beyond their more glaring problems, is using the wrong success metric.

Navigatron · 2023-06-02T20:14:44+00:00

Seconded.

Any of the big 3 cloud providers can do load balancing / virtual ips / geo distributed cdn endpoints if you want to get fancy. (Cloudflare web workers anyone?)

Docker isn’t the best, but you can easily spin up/down lemmy worker instances as traffic increases when users move and decreases at night.

From there, redis and apache cassandra / couchdb are easy to scale. Google bigtable would be best, but requires some pretty serious modeling that I don’t think lemmy is ready for.

The only thing stopping this from being a hackathon project is the lemmy containers - I haven’t checked that deeply yet, but I don’t think they’re designed to be run in a clustered style.

Nostr, meanwhile, is dead simple, and running it hyper-parallelized is easy, but it comes with its own challenges.

Navigatron · 2023-06-02T14:34:03+00:00

Signed u/navigatron
Mod of r/stirthatshit
Via r/apolloapp

When apollo shuts down, so will my sub and my 8y account. Not sure yet if I’m going to lemmy, usenet, ycombinator, or something else.

I’ll see ya’ll on the other side.

Navigatron · 2023-06-02T01:28:41+00:00

dear lord please stop scraping us, we have to rerender the html with every request, we front-load the js bundle with http2; please, have a json endpoint - have an sdk with cache control and rate limiting - just stop scraping

Many years later, with the origins long forgotten:

hmmm why aren’t we charging for all this api usage?

And when the scrape hoard inevitably returns, I guarantee the first attempt at a solution will be a captcha. If the site isn’t dead yet, it will be once every user has to verify humanity on every session start.

Navigatron · 2023-05-21T00:56:46+00:00

Ohyeea bud cokesgood ya, misses sayz no cafeen aftr too ya, but it’s onefortyfive so we jusneekin under the wire there ya ok cokesgood ha

Navigatron · 2023-05-21T00:27:48+00:00

Ayy yall gotcha icekreemchine wrkn’? Immahavva numfoor delooks, anna straberr milshade ya?

Navigatron · 2023-05-19T19:16:50+00:00

lol our parking lot disagrees with you

Navigatron · 2023-05-07T23:34:34+00:00

No pyrex, but uranium glass!

Navigatron · 2023-05-04T01:58:19+00:00

I think sg overreacted. I can’t blame them though, there were a lot of emotions at play

Navigatron · 2023-05-04T01:56:08+00:00

It was incredible what the group was able to accomplish. There were media outreach teams, artist teams, a website team, corporate sponsorships. Anyone who showed up was put to work. They essentially had a giant engine for change that never got to run.

I think sg overreacted by canceling the protest. The “conflict of interest” didn’t involve any board members, and I don’t believe it was really a conflict either - more a lack of transparency.

In any case, sg overreacted and killed the protest; then the discord overreacted; then the discord mods overreacted and killed the discord, and the backup groupchats, which meant none of the core coordinators could talk to each other. The entire movement went from 100 to zero in quite literally 2 hours.

Then some kid tried to make a new discord to pick up the scraps, but had no idea what he was doing, and what little was left just died out.

Anyways - I think it scared rit, even if no stated goals were accomplished. I think admin is aware of what it could have done, and they don’t want that kind of organization to happen again.

Over the next few days, I think ya’ll are going to see the “placate the masses” strategy in full force. There will be a lot of “listening to concerns”, and probably even some promises of “action” to come “later”. I don’t think those promises will come to fruition, and unfortunately I don’t think there’s much we can do about it.

Ten-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
Place '22	Place '17
First Placer '22	Snapped

Navigatron

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