blivet

blivet, hace 6 meses

Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

Yeah, I don't use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.

blivet, hace 11 meses

I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren't even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old "Internet for Dummies" sorts of books back in the 90s, but I've never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.

blivet, hace 11 meses

I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.

blivet, hace 11 meses

Not really. There is some discussion of "emotionally sticky nodes", but they aren't really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it's actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like "nodes" it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you're talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.

blivet, hace 11 meses

I started routinely deleting my comments anyhow after someone creeped me out by searching through my history for ammunition to use in an argument. I just deleted the five or six recent ones I hadn’t done yet, and that was that. I’ve kept my account because it might come in handy at some point, but I’ve only been on Reddit once in the past few weeks.

blivet, hace 11 meses

Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I've been around since the earliest days of the web. It's kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student's pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.

The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.

blivet, hace 11 meses

I've noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That's probably the smart way to do it.

In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn't remember what a lot of them were.

blivet, hace 1 año

When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@fhristianselig) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this

Yeah, Reddit singled his app out to be cut off first. So petty.

blivet, hace 1 año

Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership loses any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.

blivet, hace 1 año

It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.

It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.

blivet, hace 1 año

It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.

blivet, hace 1 año

I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.