Reddit’s strength has always been its community

There’s something nobody talks about much when it comes to reddit. It’s that the internet has moved past community. It now revolves around monetized “influencers”. Nobody fosters community for the sake of it anymore.

Reddit has outlived its time. It’s apparent they’ve been trying to evolve with the times but the platform isn’t fundamentally geared towards this coporatized era of the internet. They’ve been trying to pivot the platform into social media style. Users now have profiles with avatars, bio text, followers/subscribers. There’s now a social graph. The big picture with these things is they’re trying to make it into a corporatized social platform like all the rest.

The problem isn’t reddit itself. It’s the internet that isn’t geared towards community anymore.

Influencer is a fancy word for salesman. Instead of going door to door like grandpa did in the old days, they stream directly to your device.

VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.

This is the same kind of framing Google used when they were considered the little guy on your side as opposed to big evil corp.

The internet had a social contract. The reason people put effort into brain dumping good posts is because the internet was a global collaborative knowledge base for everybody.

Of course there were always capitalists who sought to privatize and profit from resources. The source materials were generally part of the big giant digital continuum of knowledge. For the parts that weren’t there we’re anarchists who sought to free that knowledge for anyone who wanted to access it.

AI is bringing about the end of all this as platforms are locking down everything. Old boards and forums had already been shuttering for years as social media was centralizing everything around a few platforms. Now those few platforms are being swallowed up by AI where the collective knowledge of humanity is being put behind paywalls. People no longer want to work directly for the profit of private companies.

Capitalists can only see dollar signs. They care not for the geological epoch scale forces of nature required to form petroleum. All that matters is can it all be sold and how quickly. Nor do they care for environmental damages they cause. In the same way the AI data mining do not care for the digital ecological disaster they are causing.

More over it’s a thought terminating cliche when someone says, “<thing> existed before so why’s it suddenly a problem?”. It seems to be yet another out of the bag of rhetorical tricks that wipes the slate of discourse clean. As if all the arguments against it suddenly need to be explained as if none of it had any validity. Not only that but the OPs are often seemingly disingenuously naive. It provides the OP with a blank slate to continually “just ask questions”. Where every response is “but why?” which forces their interlocutors to keep on elaborating in excruciating detail to the point where they give up trying to explain minutiae. Thus the OP can conclude by default they were correct that it’s not a problem after all because they declare nobody has provided them with answers to their satisfaction.

What are they doing that makes software in the Mac universe that much more memory efficient?

I went from 8GB to 32GB on my laptop. It was second only to going from HDD to SSD. The difference was nowhere near as apparent though. My usage experience went from being able to tell when the kernel was hitting swap space to not having to care at all anymore about the how the kernel is doing with memory management.

The writings been on the all for a long time. Public trackers are as good as dead. People have held on to a cocky attitude that there will always be somebody to take up the mantle but that hasn’t been true in so long. Anti-piracy has been winning by war of attrition.

The interest in bittorrent usage has been on a gradual decline for good decade at least. Try looking for some recent shows these days and you’ll be hard pressed to find many seeders for even popular ones. You’ll still be able to download it eventually but it’s a long way down from the heyday when obscure content was highly available.

These days everyone has streaming subscriptions or is logging in with someones account. The dwindling number of torrenters will download and watch relatively soon after release. Then the torrent dies real quick.

I’m pretty sure to much of the younger generations piracy means getting content from pirate streaming sites more than anything. The decline of PC usage has got to be a big factor too. There just isn’t anymore nerd culture of your PC being your main device much less leaving it running 24/7 with a torrent client. I bet soon enough as gen alpha comes of age, bittorrent will be a forgotten technology of the ancients.

I agree with the sentiment but I think there are key differences in generations. Thus far inaction has been a characteristic. Millennials have been a large enough cohort already to be making waves of change in this world. What has happened is naught but everyone waiting for the big moment when the big bad boomers just sort of go away or something. And then things will magically fix itself.

If there is any cause for much optimism for this generation we would have already been seeing massive changes under way. Instead we have marginal statistical increases in such things as polling progressively or voter turn out. That’s not exactly things to be patting yourself on the back for when you’ve been old enough to vote for 10 - 20 years. Certainly not if one is expecting something drastically different than baby boomers.

Combine that with the individualism which what I think sets the generation apart from the baby boomer. I think this generation is too self-involved that’s why there has been seemingly no collective actions. There’s wasn’t some big giant boomer conspiracy to fuck everyone over for the past 50 years. Though you’d that way with how millennials talk about it. This generation has thus far can barely be assed to accomplish coming out and voting for common interests. That’s simply what the boomers have been doing.

There’s advice I heard several years ago on the topic of political activism. There are local meetings and such out there but nobody shows up. Almost always everyone is sitting at home. The younger generations are waiting for someone to call them and tell them what to do. And it’s true. You have to tell them exactly what to do and keep reminding them.

Not surprisingly that’s how both sides (for real this time) won their respective elections with Obama and Trump. A success of the Obama campaign which is largely overlooked in social media discourse but what they did with younger generations was groundbreaking digital outreach. Then we saw the Republicans do the same in their own way by making the GOP fashionable among younger conservatives.

I think in theory simple check such as edits to the majority of a profile would be enough to detect it.

FYI: reddit orphans content. In other words your posts/comments are undeletable.

I found instances of such late last year by way of search results. I clicked a username to see more posts by that account. The only content on their profile page was a final deletion message about the API changes.

Their post history was discoverable by using “<username> site:reddit.com” on Google. All of their posts/comments still show up under their username instead of the normal [deleted]. Clicking the username takes you to their empty profile page.

So what we know from this now is that reddit has been saving original submissions. Whereas before their claim was that only the last edits are stored. Which is why the deletion scipts became a thing. People took it on good faith that we could delete our posts. At some point they stopped doing that. Or perhaps it was all a lie the whole time. Who knows.

The tech industry is so massive with so much opportunity abound. It’s not been difficult to work for a company with morals.

There’s also some metadynamics to be noted here. It’s basically impossible to talk about these issues online because so many are tech nerds who sold their soul to big tech a long time ago.

You didn’t respond to anything I said but okay.

The thumbnails were going to AWS in order to serve notifications. Which happened to be full sized screenshots. Videos weren’t uploaded to the cloud.

The key collision could let you stream another accounts video but they had to be using the web interface at the same time as you.

The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the “you told us and we listened” jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it’s lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.

It’s an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. ‘We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it’.

Free speech versus civility. Say what you want but don’t think you won’t get punched in the face for being an asshole. On the internet you should absolutely be able to get punched in the face. The virtual version of that is being modded. Which is apparently tantamount to human rights violations these days so mods have had to walk on eggshells. It’s no wonder the old guard have been leaving in droves.

There was never a time in the past when you wouldn’t receive a digital face punching for being an ass. As time went on people started giving up on reddit. Especially mods who cared to foster communities people wanted to use. Mods became glorified bot operators. “Automated customer service lines” as someone else said. And so the trolls have completely run amok on that platform. Usually there is no getting hold of a real human moderator. Other times they’re so checked out they themselves get trolled into banning anyone but the griefers.

Because reddit is largely devoid of expertise by now. This is talking in circles. The point is that the user base well stocked with a healthy breadth of knowledge is able to call out bad posts. We both agree subreddits aren’t working. It is for these reasons. Relying on sole expert moderators doesn’t work.

The user base was supposed to be the main arbiter of such things.

Mods weren’t ever supposed to anybody but janitors. That isn’t in a derogatory tone. The anonymous userbase was the original value proposition of reddit. The expertise came from random nobodies. Usernames didn’t matter on reddit because nobody looked at it. It seems this is long forgotten history from a time when the internet was primarily IT nerds.

By the time mods were becoming somebodies, reddit was past its prime. Once the power structures started forming it was over. As we’re seeing now reddit is hinges on single point of failure. The expertise among the userbase has gradually left the platform long before this API stuff. A long slow process years in the making.

Internet janitors are a dirty but necessary job not unlike the real world. Somebody has to scrub toilets and pick produce. People are a-holes on the internet who need to be put in their place. Reddit has long since become too hoity-toity for that. Now mods are supposed to be experts in their field. Too high to be digital toilet scrubbers. Too scared of “muh free speech” to janitor the Greater Fuckwads anymore. So reddit is an asylum run by the inmates. Expertise can’t be assed to contribute to a dumpster.

On another note. The imgur purge has also contributed to the barren wasteland of reddit content history. So many dead posts.

China is getting too good at chip manufacturing. That scares imperialists.

Didn’t he prove it’s easy to repair? What exactly is the subscription?

There isn’t any “smart” device technology involved. It’s a simple analog design. Off the shelf batteries and a motor. No special tools required. The only problem with the design is a liquid resistant seal.