Arotrios

Arotrios, hace 8 meses

Well, borked picture posting on kbin wouldn't load the picture properly and now it won't let me delete the thread, so here it is until I can manage to get this post to delete.

Arotrios, hace 9 meses

They've had issues with CSAM and DDOS attacks - they're probably using Cloudflare to help mitigate that.

Arotrios, hace 9 meses

Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I'd be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.

Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I've personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we've got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.

Arotrios, hace 9 meses

In my experience, they're split between the Mastodon side of the Fediverse and the Lemmy side. On Kbin, which bridges both, and where you can follow users, you end up with a pretty rich feed if you follow enough people and places - I've got about 100 communities subbed and 300+ users and my feed is better than Reddit's ever was.

Another thing to note is that your instance benefits from your discovery - it doesn't start indexing posts from another instance until someone from the first instance subscribes to it. This means a lot of smaller instances get lost in the shuffle, but they're out there - you just have to find them. I've noted that this is much more difficult to do on my Lemmy account than my accounts with other software, so you might benefit from an instance jump if things feel dry on your current account.

Arotrios, hace 9 meses

You're doing awesome @ernest - I can't express how much your hard work has made a difference to the Fediverse. This is the only software that really bridges the Lemmy / Mastodon divide, and given how new it is and the fact that Kbin's uptime is better than lemmy.world - that's remarkably impressive. Take care of your family, and pace yourself - take a break if you need to, but don't feel like you need to quit because folks expect one man to do the unpaid work of multiple admin teams. Step back and delegate if you need to, but don't step down - you're an excellent leader and the current success of Kbin is proof of that.

@downpunxx Kbin is definitely not dead. These are just growing pains. I believe the bug you're encountering is related to domain blocking. Try unblocking any domains on your block list and you should see the commenting bug go away - this may fix the notification issue as well.

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

The only person who could really answer that is @ernest.

While we wait for him to respond on the topic (which may be awhile, as I'm sure he's got his hands full right now given the lemmy CSAM issues), I'd suggest that if you're looking to become mod of a dead magazine, give it life again. Post and fill it up and become a contributing member so that Ernest has something to go on when reassigning permissions. Otherwise he'll have no indication as to your commitment towards the community in question.

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

This is why when a social media site gets past a certain size, the admin team and the moderation need to be clearly defined, and siloed from each other's core responsibilities, so the admin team focuses on running the site and the mod team focuses on making it sing.

Looks like the people actually moderating clearly had a handle on the situation. The admin was clearly overworked and didn't agree with the direction the community was taking, and made a quick decision that was poorly thought out.

The reason admins are admins is because they're good at running machines. You can turn a machine off if it's broken, and change how it runs with the flip of a switch.

A community requires a much different approach, and never, no matter how wise the decision, reacts well to being told how to act. It takes a different skill set to properly moderate and run a community than it does to run a server - in fact most admins I know make notoriously bad moderators (myself included, although I'm no longer an admin).

To be honest, the admin here is acting exactly like your stereotypical libertarian tech-bro computer guy who pays lip service to the left while pocketing the more palatable pieces of the philosophy of the right. I've worked with a lot of them in tech. LGBTQ+ is hard stretch for these guys in general - they'll declare gays have rights but won't march in Pride, use slurs when in like company, and generally see LGBTQ+ as a lifestyle choice and not an inescapable biological state of being.

They don't understand that it's not a switch you can flick on and off.

Just glad I'm on the Fediverse where this particular admin's meltdown doesn't matter too much, but I have a feeling Squabblr's fate is going to be the same as Voat (which was cool for about two weeks before the alt-right overran it).

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

The sun always shines brighter on the day you leave an abusive partner. Welcome to what the internet was like before centralization - a playground of imagination, unfettered thought, and unbridled creativity. Congratulations on becoming part of the renaissance that is the Fediverse and breaking free from the stench of the Spezticle.

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

@ernest - thanks! Glad I could help - you've built a great space here, and I know what a pain it is to deal with spambots.

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

I'm hopeful - we're starting to get a lot of traffic over here from redditfugees. @PoppinKREAM showed up a little while ago, and that's a clear sign that the best content creators are making the move.

Because I like to bag on Reddit, here's what I think is happening:

Supposedly they were taking down /r/place today, in the past that's involved an infrastructure change. They are also getting rid of coins and awards and replacing them with some other bullshit, so that's likely to break the site too. That plus the ongoing API changes and Reddit's history of fractalized spaghetti code plus an angry userbase that includes a lot of anon and 4-chan members...

...well, lemme just say that you couldn't pay me enough to be a Reddit admin right now.

Arotrios, hace 10 meses

We should reject Reddit toxicity in general, tell them they don't have a place here or anywhere.

Wait, so you're saying we should kick out all ex-Redditors?

First they came for the Redditors, and I said nothing
Then they came for the Facebookers, and still I said nothing
Then they came for the Instagramians, and still I said nothing
Then they came for the Twits, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until I vomited
Then they came for the OnlyFans, and I think they're still coming

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

To be fair, Aaron wasn't really heavily involved with Reddit. He was involved with Infogami, which failed and was merged with Reddit. Per this post, he got equity in Reddit as a result, but only worked for a few months on the actual site.

After his death and the media portrayal of him as a martyr for free speech, Reddit started claiming him as "co-founder" much more vocally than they had previously. While technically he had that title, his involvement on Reddit was neither starting the company nor working on it for any extended period of time.

That being said, given what Reddit's become, wherever his spirit roams now, I'm sure he's relieved to have his name off the site.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

Congrats, you get a cookie. Now toddle on kiddo.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

This is like an incel posting on a dating site after calling all women whores.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

The moment I saw this headline this song popped into my head for some reason...

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

JFC I left just in time. This is literally encouraging me to go through the effort of deleting my old reddit accounts. Am I the only one that became notably nauseous when viewing that link? It's like it's been designed by the CCP for kindergartners.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.

Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.

That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.

In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.

I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.

What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.

Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.

But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.

And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

Huffman has always been a narcissist, and notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to people challenging him - the fact he'd go in and edit other users comments critical of him speaks volumes as to both his sensitivity to criticism and the levels to which he'll stoop. I think these tendencies and Reddit's slow turn towards autocracy were exacerbated with the Tencent investment, and has only accelerated as the site attempts to become profitable.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

@iocase With 20 employees, you'll probably want to look at open source solutions unless you have a significant budget available. To get all your employees on Microsoft Dynamics Nav, for instance, would run about $8000 a month.

The drawback of open source solutions is that you'll likely need a dedicated employee to keep the system running and updated, and there's no higher levels of paid support option if they run into problems.

Here's a pretty good article on using Quickbooks as a core and then attaching open source Inventory Management and CRM integrations that you may find useful.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

@Bendersmember Content generation has slowed and from what I can tell, comment participation is way down. Right now, after going through and subscribing to a number of magazines, my kbin feed is more useful and active than reddit ever was, although the audience is clearly smaller (but seriously growing since last week). The quality of the content is better, and it's much easier to filter out the shitposting.

The clearest place to see content drought this is in /r/all - the top posts are all 3 - 15 hours old. Before the blackout, it would refresh in a matter of minutes, not hours.

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

@zcd Boosting everyone in this thread - I'm doing my part!

Arotrios, hace 11 meses

The first rule about test post is that we don't talk about test post. Please ignore.

Arotrios, hace 1 año

I think that while Reddit's user count has been rebounding since the blackout, their level of content submitted has cratered as a result of the admin actions. All of my feeds that didn't participate in the blackout have slowed and/or stalled there. I believe Huffman made everyone rethink about posting there, and as the content dries out, so will the userbase.

Once the third party tools die next month and the ability to sift through the content drought is reduced to the standard Reddit interface, we're going to see a black hole effect that will accelerate the slow heat death of r/all. The content submitters are clearly moving to other platforms, and the explosion of content and users on kbin and lemmy is a testament to this dynamic.

It's clear that admins are re-submitting popular content to try and blunt the fallout, but it speaks to greater failing - Reddit no longer has the trust of its users, and the sense of a coherent, save community space to contribute to has been broken beyond repair.

You can't replace that with AI, but it's pretty funny to watch them try.

Arotrios, hace 1 año

Holy fucking shit I'm dying. That's fucking hilarious.

I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.

We can live stream the battles. We'll call the show Babblebots.

Any devs interested?