Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they're exhibiting to this day isn't new.
That's a pretty good analogy, only he would have to specify that he still considers all women to be whores in his bio to be completely accurate.
Honestly though, it's desperate. I don't even want to know what's become of Accidental Renaissance 'Under New Management', I'm glad the original team are here though
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon
This is the reason I'm still using Twitter. I use Twitter not to tweet about what I did, but to get news from people I follow.
Tech people can move to Mastodon because their circles are moving, but not with common people.
For me, personally, Mastodon is like empty void. No one to follow and I can't interact with people who share same interests because they only exist on Twitter (since the "famous people" isn't moving from Twitter)
The famous people did move over for certain specific groups; app developers are pretty much all on Mastodon now, the WWDC chatter / visionOS experimentation / etc is way more active on there than on Twitter. (Of course if any group ought to be uniquely pissed off at both Twitter and Reddit, it’s app developers)
Reddit migration will succeed for some communities and fail for others. Generic subs can live on with new mods and new subscribers. They're not much different from FB or Twitter. Just mindless content to feed that infinite scroll.
Specialized subs where the community as a whole (or a majority at least) decides to move to a new home will move (or have moved already), because for those the community is what matters, not the venue.
This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn't a blanket ban.
@JohnEdwa The bots should not even hit the limit, otherwise its a hint for any anti-bot detection. Just create lot of small bots staying low on threshold to be detected. Together with an AI, then the missing bot detection utility and some missing moderators, Reddit should become a bigger pile than it is already.
Interesting read. A few years ago I developed, seemingly overnight, an intolerance for red meat. Which sucked cause I really like it. But I developed it while working in the arctic, where there are no ticks (but like trillions of other biting insects). Doctors just did the usual rotation of antibiotics and then said IBS and patted themselves on the back. It was a terrible cop-out, but when living in the arctic you don’t get much choice for doctors. Over time the problem largely tapered off and I’m no longer a firehose an hour after eating meat. I feel for anyone who gets this.
I’m hoping that AI really helps within the field of medicine. Doctors cannot be expected to know every possible cause of every illness – they’re human after all. But I’m hoping that the weird stuff can be detected and at least diagnosed properly.
I’m so mad at Elizabeth Holmes. Any startup in this space will face such an uphill battle.
I feel for you and anyone suffering with a meat allergy, but I dunno how much I’d trust AI for any serious purposes after seeing the garbage it can spit out.
Seriously, I’ve managed to get AI to write me instructions on how to inflate a phone and how to shave alligator hair. Rather that say “I’m sorry, that doesn’t make any sense, but here are some related topics”, instead it literally wrote out actual instructions for that nonsense LOL!
So yeah, I have no reason to trust AI for anything serious, it’s about an ignorant joke of a language model is all it really adds up to.
In a use case like this, AI would be less about a final diagnose and more about getting the doctor or patient pointed in the right direction, especially with rare cases that few doctors are aware of. You no longer need to visit a hundred specialists in the hope of finding the one person who's seen something similar to your case before.
Agree in this case AI is just WebMD symptom checker but with the ability to take in infinite data points and narrow it down with prompting questions and hopefully being able to upload images for further diagnosis.
People still don't understand that AI is an all encompassing term like "tool" and not a single thing.
Just like we use thousands of vastly different and specialized tools, in a decade we'll be surrounded by medical AI, engineering AI, accounting AI, design AI, research AI, life coaching AI, etc.
Right now we have a few LLMs and generative AIs, but that's like having a pen and a spray gun.
Of course you wouldn't ask any of them for a medical diagnosis.
Yeah, I’m not talking about a language model AI. But rather something like the stuff the insurance companies are using to assess risk – they take a lot of data in and cluster them together. Humans are sometimes really bad at recognizing patterns if you don’t have enough data. A pattern that goes: “oh, all these people in this region with this specific digestive problem spatially maps to this insect” is the sort of thing ML should be good at. But where it will be really good is in turning proteins into diagnosis: “if this protein is detected in the blood in an general scan, combined with symptoms, then diagnose X” – right now you only get tested for the things the doctor orders. Even more promising yet: with enough data, the AI should figure out which proteins actually do specific functions in the body, which will advance the research side (see, for example, Alphafold).
you should see what the eczema community put up with. Essentially it’s a community of just talking each other out of committing suicide because of how much pain they live with every day and the entire medical industry has failed them so miserably by dismissing them.
“Try the elimination diet” is the best they are given with absolutely no “why” or extension to find a better solution to allergies than either avoid the triggers (if you’re even lucky enough to find out what they are) or try a life threatening injection if your allergy gets severe.
Then you have the celiac community and what they have to put up with doctors: “eat gluten for 3 weeks without killing yourself so I can diagnose that you actually are intolerant to gluten”. The community has lovingly referred to this now as “the gluten challenge”….. which the medical community went as far as to take offence to the name. I wish empathy was taught as part of the curriculum for being a doctor.
Eczema: For years I was dependent on prescription topical steroids. Then I tried giving up soap. I no longer suffer from eczema.
Briefly went back to using soap during COVID. Had a flare-up within a week. Haven’t used soap since, except in the rare occasion I have something specific on my hands (machine grease or something) I want to get off.
I work in drug development, and have done a lot of work in topical drug development, specifically for skin diseases. Psoriasis gets most of the attention, but there's a lot of work being done on other skin diseases, as well
"Eczema" is kind of a catch-all term for a group of diseases, which is one of the reasons treatment is so difficult. One kind is often mistaken for (or even indistinguishable from) another. The most common, though, is atopic dermatitis (which is hilarious when you look up the etymology).
So that said.... Have you tried JAK inhibitors? Ruxolitinib is one of the best ones, formulated as a cream called Opzelura. It's at least good for flare ups.
Unfortunately, there aren't really any good drugs for preventing it. If you want company on that one, talk to the asthma community.
But.... There is work being done. I've worked on it. I've had companies spend millions on the work. I haven't seen anything very promising, but maybe you can take some comfort that there are frustrated scientists working on it, and pharma companies poised to take all of your money once something is found.
I’m sad because the fediverse wasn’t necessarily equipped to handle the influx of new people or accomodate all the outgoing mods. It should have been a moment to bring everyone over here, but sadly, even now I’m seeing the drop-off of usage of many of my fediverse hangouts. :(
There is truth to this. But, Reddit’s drama also put the spotlight on the fediverse and the need for alternatives to Reddit in general. Personally, I can say I did not even know it existed. Over the last ten-or-so years, Reddit really did develop a monopoly on forums. The progress we have seen with Kbin, lemmy, etc is because of their heavy-handed and poorly executed crackdown on third-party apps.
But still, you are correct that the fediverse was not yet a full-fledged alternative to Reddit in June. Many lemmy clients, such as Memmy or Mlem, were not ready yet. And most promising Kbin client, Artemis, is still in beta as well. Even Kbin itself is still technically a beta (not that I don’t love them both lol). Had all of these been ready in June, then I think the Reddit exodus would have been much more dramatic and impactful.
I think we need to give it a bit more time. After all, Reddit didn’t get huge overnight either. So long as we keep posting and commenting away, and create environments/communities that are welcoming, we should be able to eventually grow into something that can rival Reddit.
Since moving to kbin.social from Reddit I have been 10 times more active in posting because I want the platform to be successful and engaging. It's been a very refreshing change, but it only works if you participate.
We can't fix what happened. The June fiasco brought attention to the Fediverse and it provided a boost. A boost the fediverse wasn't fully equipped for, but a boost nonetheless.
The best thing to do is prepare for the next fiasco. And given "Reddit pays you for updoots" is still incoming, there will be a next fiasco. Make sure bugs are fixed, be able to point to some apps or alternative views that people made, and overall be a smoother transition than what was before.
I have no idea why they are publishing pieces like this, and it’s objectively false. Mastodon had over 60,000 sign-ups in the last week, and my feed is as busy as it ever was. It went from like 4 million when I signed up less than a year ago to over twelve million now.
I think it's because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.
Its not a snake. Its a roundworm that infect snakes usually.
A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.
the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey
arstechnica.com
Popular