umbraroze

Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private.

But do they have to submit a request if they tell the audience "fuck it, this is now a sub about X, we'll remove everything that's not about X"?

...In fact, fuck any particular topic - if the mods approve of it, every subreddit can actually be about whatever people think it should be about, now that we think about it. If the mods don't do it, will the admins do it? The answer is: Highly unlikely

I was politically ambivalent as a young voter.

Now, I'm pretty much convinced the rich people (and the parties that represent them) are just out there to screw everyone else over. And every single year just adds more evidence to the pile.

I don't think there is any conceivable scenario in which anyone can convince me that free market will magically fix all problems. It's nonsense.

Yeah, I was about to say.

Perl 5 is like Esperanto: borrowed neat features from many languages, somehow kinda vaguely making a bit of sense. Enjoyed some popularity back in the day but is kind of niche nowadays.

PHP is like Volapük: same deal, but without the linguistic competence and failing miserably at being consistent.

Raku (Perl 6) is like Esperanto reformation efforts: Noble and interesting scholarly pursuits, with dozens of fans around the multiverse.

I always liked "not the sharpest bulb in the tree".

(Because it kinda makes sense. Some Christmas lights have pointy bulbs. But nobody picks them for sharpness.)

Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆

Digg's biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That's why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said "go right ahead".

So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.

Now, to Reddit's credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.

Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It's all allowed unless it's blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it's just organic random users.

Now, you don't see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I'm not sure they're interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They're this close to saying "fuck it, it's a free-for-all" and going full Digg publicly.

Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?

I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.

Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn't like got buried really fast.

Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn't care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.

Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I'll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)

So that's what killed Digg. ...that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (...insert comparison to modern Reddit here)

Never mind the old flippediroo of the day and month. What I want to know is why is there a dash in front of the date. I thought the separators went between the things to be separated.

I'm, like, yeah, some of the stuff Mozilla has done has been worrying, but I've seen far worse happen to some other open source projects and their corporate branches.

I'm not worried about Mozilla projects' future. If LibreOffice survived corporate calcification, I see no reason why Mozilla projects wouldn't, if the push comes to a shove. But the thing is, in my opinion, push hasn't come to a shove yet. There's red flags at best, which is a cause for concern, but that's it.

As I've probably said: Without the transgender people (and other queer folk), the autistic people, and the furries, literally none of the modern Internet infrastructure would have gotten built.

Anarchists do believe in board game rules. Just that they think that using house rules everyone agrees on is a great idea.

Free Software is Leftism because it has got us great software and maybe the only bad thing I can say is that release schedules aren't a thing

Open Source is Capitalist Friendly because, ummmmm, extremely shitty Community Editions and putting everything cool in proprietary side, uhhhhh, random license changes to shit that isn't actually OSD compliant, unghhhhhh, need of constant vigilance against license violations.

Like I am happy cheap hardware vendors have adopted OSS components but why are they frequently so shitty about everything

This is a very cute thread. I love turtles and I like them for their vast computer science skills too.