• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.

    It’s different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.

    They know that they can’t operate their own asshole instances for long because they’ll get defederated, and they don’t want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.

    Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user’s instance has open sign up.

    It’s getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they’re a little sus to me. It’s easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.


  • It’s not being mainstream that causes enshittification by itself, it’s corporate control.

    That’s the beauty of federation, there is no easy way for a single entity to become dominant.

    I’m not saying it’s impossible for the fediverse to enshittify, but it seems to me that it probably won’t. We’ve already shown that we’re resistant to corporate “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategies.


  • Sure, but then that’s an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.

    The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.

    And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.

    The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don’t die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself “The homepage of the internet.” The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.

    Reddit is still dying however. There’s been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they’re harder to access, now they’re doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won’t last forever as a culturally relevant site.



  • Dark patterns work, they have the data.

    See, the field of UI/UX design is very concerned with how to make the actions a user wants easier, how to streamline common actions and clearly communicate what each item does. To that end they’ve studied how apps get used with user interaction data. You can track with statistics whether cartain actions get taken more or less often with each change, and it’s very clear that the more numerous & obscure the steps are in between a user and a task, the fewer users will complete it.

    Of course this doesn’t tell you what a user wants, only what they do. To understand what they want you need to couple this process with user reports and complaints to see where the pain points are. The UI has to balance how many steps an action takes with how cluttered the interface is. Some actions must be prioritised.

    However, a company doesn’t need data to know what it wants users to do, and it’s a very simple step to take all this data and understanding and flip it on its head, to stop users doing what they want, and on average it makes a difference. It might not stop you, but it might stop your grandparents, or Dave from accounting. That’s the problem.

    So the short answer is, they hope to reduce adoption of alternative app sources.

    I know the EU is taking steps to make this sort of thing illegal, but it’s difficult to prove. I also got a letter from a consumer advocacy board in my country warning about dark patterns, so it seems like attention is starting to build on this issue.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneWendy Carlos rule
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    3 days ago

    I think a lot of the people currently freaking out about it have been, either individually or collectively, throwing red flags their entire life that say, “I am dangerous to anyone who does not conform to cis-hetero-normative culture,” and trans people have wisely avoided them where possible and stayed in the closet where not.

    One of my close friends’ parents don’t know they’re trans because they know for a fact how badly they would react. They’re conservatives and they’re transphobic. It’s stopping my friend from transitioning.

    Now trans people are in the news and those same transphobic people are wondering where they’ve all come from and they’re reacting in exactly the hostile way that the trans people who avoided them had predicted.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLOCK EM UP
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    3 days ago

    By making broad general assumptions and also missing the entire point? If you want to point out irony or what sounds like is better characterised as hypocrisy, it helps to actually understand the position you are criticising. Then you can critique it correctly and not just throw out banal, meaningless whataboutism, which is what you did.

    I take it from your general attitude that you’re not actually curious to understand what the problem we have with the police is. Is that accurate?








  • Personally I have a very small yt channel that I haven’t uploaded to for months. I’m making stuff again, and my plan is to start uploading things to peertube early and then to yt, and I will tell people in my videos that they can find my videos early there.

    I doubt I’ll make a huge difference from me personally, but I’m sure if more creators did this it would start to. There needs to be a bridge between the platforms.

    The thing is, they’d have to do it for the sake of creating an alternative space, and not for like patreon benefits or something. I guess the peertube videos could be unlisted and there be links from patreon, and then they go public after the yt one does? I don’t even know if peertube has this functionality.

    But again, this would have to be done because the creator believes in federation as a long term solution. It certainly would benefit creators personally to have a backup they’re more in charge of. The difficulty is they don’t seem to know it’s a viable option.



  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.nettoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldLOCK EM UP
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    3 days ago

    “Yet you participate in society.”

    Edit: in case anyone wants to understand, which this person doesn’t seem to, the problem with “you hate the cops yet you call them” is twofold:

    1. A lot of us don’t call the cops. They’re useless at getting anything stopped or fixed, they tend not to care when it’s reported and often will only make your life worse. However, sometimes due to how the law and money work, sometimes we have to call them. Which leads directly into…
    2. The cops have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. That means that anyone trying to get justice in any other way than that sanctioned by the state will be in trouble with the state. The police’s monopopy alienates us from our own means of defending ourselves. We have to beg for scraps of justice from the table of our masters.


  • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneStreaming Rule
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    4 days ago

    I cannot describe how good it was when I first launched Stremio and discovered you could find virtually anything, from the extremely recent, still in cinemas, to old historical stuff. I just watched Furiosa, then rolled that into Fury Road, then went back and watched the original Mad Max franchise, all from the same interface. It was almost as easy as it would have been on a regular streaming service, and I never had any question in my mind that it would all be available.


  • I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.

    One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.

    Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years, and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as well)

    David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.

    Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.

    Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.

    Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.