tal

tal, hace 10 meses

Some extensions may not be enabled in private window mode. You try disabling all your extensions?

tal, hace 11 meses

If they're going somewhere else like the Fediverse, I wish that they'd at least sticky a link or something so that people can find it.

tal, hace 11 meses

Are you looking at your subs page? That'll just have your subscribed magazines/communities.

https://kbin.social/sub

tal, hace 11 meses

He's remarkably dedicated to this.

tal, hace 11 meses

I assume that he's comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Digg_v4_revolt_and_migration_to_Reddit

In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg's shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.

tal, hace 11 meses

The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs -- stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers -- and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.

That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.

So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.

Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.

If money becomes tight, then it's harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.

My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.

That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.

tal, hace 11 meses

Lemme add a bit more to my above comment.

Social media companies are especially doing this whiplash switch from aiming for growing the userbase to making money. And for them, there is another factor that makes it even more important to use money for growth when it is available -- network effect. Basically, for certain services, the role of the service is to facilitate communication between their users. While it's not quite true that all users are equally-likely to communicate with each other -- an elderly user who only speaks Italian and a schoolboy in Kansas who only speaks English might not have a lot of desire to communicate -- in general, users of the service get their value from the service by communicating with each other and each additional user is one more person with whom a user can communicate. This means that it's much more-desirable to use a service with a large userbase than one with a small one, because you can communicate with others. The value of the service as a whole, if everyone were equally likely to communicate with everyone else, rises roughly as the square of the number of users. That's because the value to each user is proportional to the number of users that they can talk to, and that is true for every user -- multiply one by the other, and the value of the service as a whole is proportional to the square of the userbase size.

Social media work by connecting members of their userbase. So for them, they have a huge incentive to use money for growth whenever they can get a hold of it as far as they can.

The services that are especially likely to respond to capital being cheaply available are companies that have a business model that does this, even moreso than a typical dot-com. And sure enough -- Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube derive their value from connecting members of their userbase, rely on network effect as well as economies of scale. And just as they dive really deeply into spending cheap money to grow when they could, when money ceases to be really cheaply available, so they will have further to swim out when it ceases to be.

tal, hace 11 meses

Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.

tal, hace 11 meses

You can access content from an account anywhere, but not migrate the account.

tal, hace 11 meses

https://www.navyband.navy.mil/music/ceremonial-music/bugle-calls/taps.mp3

tal, hace 11 meses

The Navy also had a recording of Taps on YouTube, but what with the ad-blocker changes happening at YouTube right now, figured that the Navy site would be a preferable source.

tal, hace 11 meses

I hope the creator's system is okay. This does not look healthy:

WordPress database error: [Table './brejc8/wpblog_wassup' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed]
SHOW COLUMNS FROM `wpblog_wassup` LIKE 'subsite_id'

WordPress database error: [Table './brejc8/wpblog_wassup' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed]
SHOW COLUMNS FROM `wpblog_wassup` LIKE 'subsite_id'

WordPress database error: [Table './brejc8/wpblog_wassup' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed]
SHOW FULL COLUMNS FROM `wpblog_wassup`

tal, hace 11 meses

Shows up in site searches on Google, as the other response points out.

I don't know about the update frequency.

tal, hace 1 año

Reddit is the old internet.

Ehhh.

I'd timeline it something like this:

Interaction was on non-Web-based systems, mostly distributed

This was mostly pre-2000s and tended to go into decline in the 1990s or 2000s as Web-based platforms focusing on ease of use picked up users. Many of these were distributed.

• Usenet (decline as a discussion forum dating to maybe late 1990s, though lots of pirated information is still transferred via it)
• IRC, peaking around 2003 according to WP
• Email (peaked later, in 2009, according to WP. Obviously still pretty healthy compared to the above two.

Web 2.0

People tend to shift towards interacting with each other on large websites; these tend to later acquire mobile apps to cater to smartphone users.

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Reddit (though a fair number of third-party clients did exist)

If the Fediverse manages to pick up a lot of people, it's probably somewhat-closer to the first phase.

tal, hace 1 año

Disagree on blocking them from responding. I think that this change to how the Reddit blocking feature worked was one of the largest errors Reddit made in recent years. Led to people in conversations disagreeing, one user making a statement and then blocking the other so that it looked like the blocking user would get the last word, which prevented the other from responding.

It's also useless to stop someone from doxing you, because they can just create another account and use that. The only way that it would be efficacious in that regard would be if the whole system worked via whitelisting users rather than blacklisting them.

tal, hace 1 año

Kbin doesn't presently auto-hyperlink the !sub text.

I expect that it will in the future.

tal, hace 1 año

I think that "magazine" is fine. As is "sublemmy". But I kind of am not enthusiastic about having two different words for them, unless there are future plans for them to act very differently.

From a user standpoint, unless he's talking about the internals of the server involved, there isn't really a difference. Saying "sublemmy/magazine" is just verbose and annoying. I'm on Kevin, but I want to be able to refer to magazines/sublemmies in a way approachable to all the people reading the content.

tal, hace 1 año

Whilst I was trying to get a grip on how Lemmy & kbin interact, Lemmy seems to have blocked kbin access.

That was lemmy.ml, not all of Lemmy. Lemmy.ml is an important instance -- one of the larger Lemmy instances, and it is run by the Lemmy devs -- but it's still but one instance among many.

tal, hace 1 año

I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing.

"Snoo". It's a space alien.

tal, hace 1 año

I asked someone who wrote a huge reddit post about it, and they responded with "idk, I just looked at it and didn't get it."

UI labs record a person trying to use something for the first time so they can see what they get stuck on. Like, mouse movements, clicks, even eye-tracking.

Not saying that the Lemmy or kbin devs should be doing that right now, as they've got full plates. Or that Reddit did this. But understanding where and why people get stuck is a big part of working on UIs.

tal, hace 1 año

It might happen, I suppose, but he may be wanting to hedge his bets. Lemmy/kbin don't have the same userbase (yet) and that userbase is an input into what kind of revenue is available for an app author.

tal, hace 1 año

I tried slow-cooking an octopus when one showed up at the seafood counter at my local grocery store and it was fantastic. Prior to that, I'd always considered them rubbery. Now I'd get more if I could find them, but they aren't normally available.

tal, hace 1 año

Plus it goes the other way. If someone only knows German, the English will be a much-worse flood.

Probably needs a PR to add a per-user language filtering setting. Probably a good idea to permit multiple options for multilingual users. I don't believe that it exists today, though clearly the metadata required to do the filtering is available.

tal, hace 1 año

For those of us not familiar with lxd, could you summarize what it's presently mainly used for? It looks to me like it's a container system with a higher level of isolation than lxc, but is it principally interesting for deploying server software in a VPS-per-machine to try to limits the impact of a compromised server? Playing video games from unknown and potentially-untrusted sources? People reselling VPS service?

Skimming the tools page, I'm guessing maybe a little of #1 and a little of #3, but couldn't say for sure.

tal, hace 1 año

Ah, okay. It's apparently a system for managing lxc containers.

Looking at the main page, it apparently targets both individual applications and full containerized systems.

tal, hace 1 año

Python isn't really a fantastic drop-in replacement for them, IMHO, though there is some overlap.

There are a bunch of Unix tools that let one concisely put a lot of logic into a single command line. They lower the bar to throwing a lot of logic into that single line.

Python's whitespace-sensitive and requires newlines. I guess theoretically you could use a HEREDOC or something, but realistically, if you use Python, you're going to go author a throwaway script and then execute it, which raises the bar to just including it in your command lines.

I think that Perl is probably closer to a middle ground between "application-oriented programming languages" and "single command line use". I think that it'd be reasonable to simply use perl -pie as an alternative to awk especially, though having sed's conciseness is still nice.

tal, hace 1 año

Assuming that this is, in fact, not legal and if they have money that can be gone after, I assume that someone may start a class action suit. In theory, they're worth multiple billions, so...

An individual probably doesn't care much about whatever harm is done, as the damage is too small. But this is the kind of thing where a lawyer can walk away with a big payday by aggregating cases of many users and then getting a percentage of any payout.

I am not at all certain that it is not legal, though.

tal, hace 1 año

You might also enjoy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe