Kinda what I meant by plastics

I’m more worried about the plastic, pesticides, degraded pharmaceuticals and heavy metals myself

I like the game grumps and Lex Fridman. The documentaries are cool, but I have to watch them in a different container or YouTube will start feeding me 30 minute ads or rants that sound reasonable but are super bigoted and flawed when you actually think about it

Reddit meant more to me than anything else I do online, and I committed to leaving it behind even before I found Lemmy… YouTube is barely worth it even without the ads. And I’ve got a whole fediverse of video content to investigate

Delete your history and be very selective in what you watch, and YouTube is pretty decent… At least for a few months. After that, either you stuck to your preferences and end up looping over the same content, or you branched out and now it keeps trying to feed you rants full of dog whistles

I use Firefox and containers along with unlock origin - by using the containers strictly for several narrow interests, YouTube acts like ad free tv for me - perfect background noise

I liked GTA V, but I spent my whole time with rdr2 just being like “everyone loves this game, what am I missing? Maybe if I make it to the next act it’ll open up more”.

It was beautiful, the world felt alive, the mechanics were good, but it’s like instead of making a game with the wonderful foundation they built, they decided they’d rather tell a story than make a game.

I loved the hunting, the bounty quests were kind of ok, the gunfights were ok even if they were so repetitive they felt procedural, but I just couldn’t care about the story they shoved down your throat.

I wanted to build up the settlement and have to run around robbing trains to come up with money, I don’t want to do a 5 minute ride while the characters give exposition through dialogue, fight a few waves of enemies, then ride off - rinse and repeat.

I wanted to grind progression through upgrading weapons and gear, but the upgrades are minimal, new guns are linked to story progression, and while hunting was fun the legendaries were just tedious jumping through hoops

I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.

As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.

Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole

And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)

All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php

Well first off, I like to write essays too, and I really have been enjoying the fact people here are way more willing to engage in longer posts.

I think you’re into something with how humans empathize (kind of interesting to me my first response when someone tells me about an conflict is to try to reconstruct the other person’s perspective). I think there’s definitely a lot to the way people think less critically the more emotional they get

But to round it all off, smaller communities help, but really it’s a matter of self-reinforcing social structures and the ways that social network mechanisms interact with them.

Outrage is the strongest driver for participation - so posts that incite the most outrage will get far more votes and replies in either direction. The outraged position will be far more likely to vote, while people who don’t feel as strongly are less likely to do so to the same extent. That skews the metrics most algorithms use to rank them, and so they get more visibility.

As this goes on, the group will shift - the outraged people only need to be a fraction of the group to seem like they’re the majority, and people put off by it are more than likely going to leave what looks like a total echo chamber (especially if people get nasty or personal)

The outraged group also starts to feel like their position is actually the average of the group (e.g. the silent majority), and they might shift even further, becoming more extreme - as people’s beliefs are relative to their perception of social norms.

This cycle repeats until it becomes so polarized a moderate opinion is seen as extreme, and might be attacked.

It’s a difficult problem to solve - the only easy metrics are going to be votes, comments, and maybe if people stay or leave after viewing. There’s more complex systems that might work - such as using ai to score additional metrics based on content, or (an idea bouncing around in the back of my head for a while) by profiling the users to try to boost consensus opinions to compete with “outrageous” ones. Obviously, this is way more computationally expensive and requires complex code that few will be in a position to understand (even if it were open source). These strategies could also be used to drive engagement or ad conversation at the expense of mental health (something that seems to be at least explored by some social media companies)

But small groups help in a very simple way -only so much media fits on a page. Even if the top comments are pure outrage porn, the other voices won’t be buried

The other solution is moderation (it’s in the name) - effective moderation of the tone and “rules of engagement” can tamp things down. But people generally don’t like to be censored, and it doesn’t scale - moderators are individuals, and too much to go through or dividing it up between larger groups of mods strips the nuance out of the process

My dad likes to send me videos. He sent me one yesterday… It seemed like he was at a harbor by the 8 pixels that got through

He also frequently emails me from his phone. I used to ask him to send videos to my email. Even tried to coach him through the process -surely they must have a share button?

I think iPhones are designed around the idea that “either it just works, or you shouldn’t be doing it at all”.

Even my technical friends seem to forget the fact they understand how all of this works the minute they look at their phone - I had to coach one through uploading a larger video to Google drive and sending me the link. My brother in Christ, we use GitHub together. We use Google meets regularly. We used Dropbox in college. Why are you acting like I told you to put it on a flash drive and mail it to me?

I generally dislike them, but do you really see them enough to bother? My dad texts them to me sometimes, but in general I rarely see them (outside of tongue in cheek usages, like mojo using 🔥 as a file extension)

What you’re describing is polarization within a community transforming it into an echo chamber, driving out much of the community. Sure, truechildfree formed out of people who still wanted a community based around that aspect of themselves, but they’re not the reason for the split - they’re a symptom. For every user that made the journey to truechildfree, there’s probably 3-10 that just unsubbed, and another 5 that just stopped participating

My personal example is AITA. It started off as a group judgement based on the morality of the situation, but in the last few years people have become obsessed with “rights”. I actually got tempbanned for a situation where a douche told a woman that by joining trivia night in a small town bar she was ruining guys night. I responded to someone saying “IDK why your bf wasn’t happy about how you handled it”, and I basically said “yeah, he’s the asshole, but clearly this is extremely important to him, and saying screw you I have every right to be here while he storms out didn’t just ruin his night, it soured the evening for his friends who tried to stop him. That’s not going to make you any friends in your new town, and a little compassion could’ve diffused the situation”. It’s hard to put into words (and that’s just the most salient example, I probably got more negative karma there than everywhere else put together), but the community moved from what’s the right thing to do into what’s your legal rights

As far as I know, there’s no trueAITA - the community just morphed into something I find toxic. The nuance was gone, and it became something very different to the sub I loved participating in. I almost unsubbed, but instead I mostly just would start writing a comment before deleting it and moving on.

I think fractured, smaller communities help with this more than anything. Humans generally adjust their morality based on their peers - and the bigger the community, the more the loudest voices begin to feel like they’re expressing the opinion of the majority.

If 10% of a large community upvotes a certain viewpoint, it takes all of the top slots. It’s a weakness of the popularity-based ranking system - a relatively small voting block easily dominates the discussion. The moderates just ignore it, because they disagree but not enough to actually fight it out

But force people together in a smaller, more diverse group, and they moderate each other. The trick is, you can’t do it through polarization - you can’t fragment a community based on beliefs or you get echo chambers.

You just have to throw people together and make them talk it out. Opinions naturally balance towards the mean when the groups are smaller, and the most cohesive voices dominate when the group becomes large

Sure, because YouTube was bought by Google - their investors already cashed out, so they no longer have the same pressure to grow at all costs

It’s because investors don’t care about profits - they care about the promise of profit growth.

You could make an investment, and normal valuation is like 3-5 years to break even. But if you’re rich already, breaking even does nothing for you - what you care about is what the value of your share of the company is worth in 5-10 years.

They’d rather risk it all and push for 100x ROI - anything from 0-5x is basically the same for them. Only exponential growth will matter for them financially, so at every turn they’ll push for you to take on more debt and reinvest everything in the hopes you become the Google (or get bought by them)

Because we have an absurd monetary system.

Companies also need to “grow or die”, the capital holders don’t want to invest in a sustainable company that turns reliable profits - they want line curve up

Reddit probably took on loans and additional investments to push towards growth plans, like the website redesign or marketing. They might’ve bought fancy office space to look the part, and bought big booths at conventions.

And maybe it all even worked - but the pressure is always going to be “take more loans and try to grow even faster” - not “pay off the principal so your monthly payments go down”. After all, if you double in size, paying off the loan would be trivial

Except the way our systems are set up, you have to keep growing until you can’t - at that point, you pop and deflate into a shell of what you were

That’s the one thing I’ll miss completely. I’m really into consent, and girls posting just to show off does something that porn alone doesn’t

Maybe Lemmy will get there, but I’ve seen nothing like that so far

Well on the plus side, it pushed me over the edge to start making the first 3rd party client.

What do you think of the name flemmy?

Maybe I will! Maybe I spent the last few hours learning new tech and digging through source code to the websockets to play nice so I could make it totally platform agnostic! Maybe I named it flemmy and am on course to overtake jerboa in features with another few days of focus!

You always say you’re proud but never believe in me dad!

If you manage the mods, you’ve only created a second layer of mods.

Hierarchies have been an ideological plague on humanity since Rome - if you want to build a nice thing with clean lines it certainly helps.

If you want to build a community or an ecosystem, anarchy works better. Not no rules, but no rulers

Flatter organizations are more efficient and far more productive - if we shout down shills and move on when a specific group gets too echoey, we’ll be just fine

The strength of federation is (in part) the fact that names are only as special as the server they live on - I’m subbed to 4 gaming groups, so the moment one becomes toxic I’ll drop it.

And moving forward, we already have people experimenting with ways to reconcile similar groups across servers - I think the key is to maximize content delivery and individual control over curation while avoiding locuses of power that can be abused

Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub

Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains

Not Lemmy, but that exists. Libreddit is one of the “mirrors”, individual subs have been cloned in Lemmy too

You can spoof the user-agent, it’s a PITA but not that hard. I did it to use chat gpt with bing, but didn’t bother for Reddit

I recommend libreddit, no commenting and it’s slower, but at least it works on mobile