lvxferre

joined 3 years ago
MODERATOR OF
0
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Ladies, gentlemen, and cherished non-binary folks: it has been a serious joy to moderate this community for you.

Based on the general input from an earlier thread, I'm closing this community down; I apologise for rushing this decision but it's for the best.


I'll also use the opportunity to publicly release the modlog of this community, showing at least which actions were taken by myself:

I can't show the other usernames because this would be allegedly "doxxing".

I'm doing so because I believe that transparency is essential to nurture a healthy and friendly community. I also encourage people here to check the mod logs of other lemmy.ml communities.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Thank you. I'll consider it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Do you have other accounts with more activity, specially in this community?

 

I wish to stop being a moderator in lemmy.ml. However, I don't know what to do with this community; the last time I asked for new mods nobody showed interest. So I'd like the help of other members of the community to decide it.

Here are a few options:

  • Migrate this community. Frankly I don't care about Reddit nowadays, but I'm still willing to mod a comm about it in another instance. So if users tell me "migrate SNOOcalypse to [instance]!", I'll seriously consider it.
  • Recruiting new mods. If you wish to be a mod, please tell me so in this thread. I'll check if you'd be a good mod, recruit you, step down myself, and you're free to moderate it as you wish.
  • Closing down this comm. There are a few other comms about Reddit across the Lemmy/Kbinverse, so we'd use those instead. If neither of the alternatives above is viable/feasible, this is likely what's going to happen.
  • Something else. Then please do tell me. As long as it doesn't boil down to "negligently leave this comm active but unmoderated", I'll consider it.

I'm planning to step down 19/February/2024.

So, what do you think that should be done?

 
[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

  • the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
  • the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
  • the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
  • the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It's a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Calcium chloride exists, it's CaCl₂. You need two chloride anions for each calcium cation. [see note*]

It's safe to eat as long as food grade. In fact it's used in cheesemaking. It's salty and bitter. It's also used to dehydrate stuff in laboratory, since it absorbs water like there's no tomorrow.

It doesn't behave like metallic calcium at all. Just like sodium chloride (aka table salt) doesn't behave like metallic sodium (warning: loud noise).

*Note: technically CaCl (one chlorine) exists, as a diatomic molecule. Rarely found in stars, you won't find it in Earth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Another important detail is that Digg v4 pissed off most of the userbase, so the impact was pretty much immediate. Reddit APIcalypse pissed off only power users instead; the impact will only come off later (sadly likely past IPO).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

No, but simply looking for something and then remembering that it doesn't exist makes me feel stupid.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

In my opinion, the migration is sensible because:

  1. You need to know a topic decently enough to be able to moderate a community about it. And yet it's unreasonable to expect the admins of lemmy.ml - a community about free/open source and privacy - to know about anime.
  2. There's no inherent reason why this comm is the largest anime comm in Lemmy. It's simply that this comm is three years old, from a time when "Lemmy" was mostly just lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml, there was no other place in Lemmy to discuss anime.
  3. Lemmy as a whole benefits from redirecting traffic from larger instances to smaller ones. Specially instances unrelated to politics and tech. In fact, lemmy.ml's admins asked users to use other instances not too long ago.
[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For context, I encourage people to check this discussion in the "join Lemmy" site github. Have in mind that both of the Lemmy developers in that discussion are also admins of the lemmy.ml instance, and they clearly disagree if the instance in question should be considered as "hosting CSAM" or not.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (2 children)

PEBKAC

Every time that I see this acronym I'm tempted to pronounce it as ['rʲefkas], then I remember "ah, it isn't Cyrillic".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

At the very least, I'd recommend you:

  • gloves - because you'll get really close to that gross shit. You don't want to touch it.
  • a sponge - it doesn't need to be new; your old kitchen sponge is enough, just don't use it again in the kitchen. Use the yellow side to spread the cleaning agent, and the green side to remove obnoxious grime stuck to something. (Do it gently, and only with a really old sponge, to avoid scratching the surface.)
  • a bucket - mostly to mix some soap and water.
  • a dry rag - mostly for finishing/drying. A cringey old shirt that you won't be using again is usually enough.
  • toilet brush - don't use the sponge to clean inside the toilet bowl; you'll be spreading the bacteria from your shit and piss to the rest of the restroom.

Everyone has the cleaning agents that they swear upon, so look for something that works for you. For me it's

  • alcohol vinegar - to get rid of that brown crust in the sink (water in my city is hard as a brick) and around the shower drain. I usually apply it, wait a few minutes, then use the sponge to scrub it a bit. Then I remove the vinegar with the rag.
  • bleach - exclusively used inside the toilet bowl. I squish some bleach there, then scrub it with the toilet brush, then flush it off, making sure that there's no bleach behind.
  • disinfecting agent - I squish a bit of that inside the toilet bowl and just leave it there. It smells good, and it gets rid of the bacteria.
  • an ammonium-based cleaning agent - I squish it on obvious grime on the walls (except the above), then scrub it with the sponge.
  • soap and water - to "wash" the walls with the sponge.
  • plain water with some disinfecting agent - to rinse it. Then I just remove the excess water with the rag and let the restroom to dry naturally (with closed doors otherwise my cats will step on the bathroom, step outside, and now I got to clean the bathroom again plus the corridor and furniture).

Important detail: do not mix any two of the cleaning agents that I've mentioned. Specially not ammonium and bleach.

For reference, the disinfecting agent that I use is called "pinho sol", but I have no idea if it's sold outside Brazil. You probably have some similar product wherever you live.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not even a body pillow, Anon is a master tulpamancer and made a tulpa of some MLP character.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

In response to such critiques [concerning the decline of quality], Reddit spokesperson Rathschmidt said he did not “know of an industry benchmark for scoring content quality”.

My sides went into orbit. It's a Reddit spokesperson acting like the worst of the Reddit userbase: being passive aggressive and using appeal to ignorance, at the same time.

 

If you're paywalled, check this archive link.

What the article calls "corporate trolls" is simply astroturfing. It became rampant in Reddit; as the walled garden was unwalled, more of the organic grass has been replaced.

 

Disclaimer: I like the Fediverse, Lemmy, and the concept of federation, I've been here for two years, and I feel grateful towards people working on this platform - devs and admins and mods and everyone else. As such, I hope that what I'm voicing is interpreted as constructive criticism and food for discussion.

TL;DR: I'll list some issues with Lemmy, how they relate to Reddit, and a few proposals on what should be done to address them.

The issues

When you're posting/commenting you're supposed to acknowledge and follow up to three independent sets of rules: of the comm, of the comm's instance, and of your instance. This is a burden for good users, and yet another excuse for bad users to ignore the rules.

There are also up to three groups of rule enforcers, in any situation: two admin teams and a mod team. If any of those goes rogue (greedy pigboy or powerjanny style), you got a problem.

Usually the ones enforcing the rules - the mods - are the group that, by design, lacks access to user info like IPs. So they either play whack-a-mole with old trolls under new accounts, or they rely on assumptions (i.e. stupidity) to keep control of their comms.

Your feed depends on which instances yours is federated with. So you either deal with the fact that you won't get content that you'd otherwise want, or you register into multiple instances to check multiple, partially overlapping feeds. One by one.

Federated instances mirroring content from each other causes sync issues (got removed from A, but not B? You'll still see it in B), storage issues (raising the requirements for people to create their own instances), and it's a big liability (cue to CP being posted to LW, and every single admin team removing it from their own instances).

The biggest instance (by MAU) is as large as the seven following instances combined. This sort of demographic concentration is bound to defeat the advantages of a federation (sharing the burden, sharing the power) without alleviating its cons (added complexity).

The top 10 instances is mostly populated by general purpose instances, doing redundant efforts to provide the same content to the users.

What do those issues have to do with each other?

Look at Reddit.

  • Users want their own Reddit communities, but they can't build new "Reddit instances". So they create their communities as "vassals" (subreddits) of the single Reddit instance.
  • Since you always post in the same Reddit instance as you registered to, there are no federation woes like "I want content from instance A, but I'm in instance B and they don't federate", or "admins of my instance vs. admins of the instance where I'm posting".
  • Reddit cannot rely on other instances to provide content for its users. As such, it hosts all its content in a single, general-purpose instance.

I believe that, once you apply those three aspects of Reddit to a federation, you get the issues that I mentioned.

In other words those issues are born from trying to replicate a non-federation into a federation.

So, what should be done in your opinion?

I'm no coder, nor I want to pretend to be one, and I'm aware that some of those might not be viable. Still, if I had to propose something...

First of all, a change of paradigm: we (users: including mods, admins, developers, everyone) should see Lemmy first and foremost as a federation of forums and advertise it as such. Similarities with Reddit should be only secondary.

People who code in Rust would do an amazing job if they focused on instance creation and management. Ideally, it should be feasible even for a tech-illiterate granny running a potato computer to spin up her own instance.

I think that content mirroring needs to go away, with the users pulling the content straight from the instances where it's created.

Interface developers should expect users to have 2+ accounts, and to log into all their accounts at the same time. The resulting feed should be a combination of the feed of those instances; handle this through the interface/front-end. And when the user is posting/commenting, ideally they should be able to choose which account to use, on a per-community basis.

Desktop users should be encouraged to migrate from "my instance's website" to instance-agnostic front-ends, such as Alexandrite and Slemmy. [This doesn't affect mobile users, I believe.]

We should be contributing more to specific-purpose instances (for example: mander.xyz, ani.social, etc.), at the detriment of general-purpose instances (for example: lemmy.world). Perhaps, at the start even migrate our comms to those instances.

Eventually [in the far, far future] I think that the concept of subreddit-like communities should be deprecated, with communities becoming simple sub-forums of the instance where they're hosted.

By default, admins should focus mostly on the activity inside their own instances. Let the behaviour of their users in other instances up to those admins; a dog with two owners ends either overfed or starved.

When possible/reasonable, admins should be moderating more communities in their own instances.

 

Excerpt:

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.

 

The name of the game is Six Cats Under. It can be played online, and it's rather quick to play.

Backstory: you're the ghost of a recently deceased crazy cat lady. Your job is to free your cats from your home, because now you can't feed them, and you don't want them to starve.

All cats have their own personalities and names. For example Baroness is grumpy, Fredrick only cares about food, Mr. Spock likes to scratch furniture, etc. (Source: click on the cat and the ghost will say it.) This is relevant for gameplay because you need to make her cats interact in a certain way to open the door.

I'll provide the solution of the puzzle in the comments, but please try the game before using it. Otherwise you'll lose all those nice tidbits of narration from the ghost.

 

Left: 2yo, right: 15yo. Still the same ticklish weirdo, who thinks that the clothespin basket is a toybox.

0
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:

  • a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
  • the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
  • that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
  • the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
  • the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.

The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.

EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.

Reddit is a dead site running

from July 10, 2023

Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote

"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:

If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.

From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.

But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.

I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.

Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.

Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!

Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.

There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.

This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.

A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.

 

Excerpts from the link:

Fake internet points are finally worth something!
Now redditors can earn real money for their contributions to the Reddit community, based on the karma and gold they've been given.
How it works:

  • Redditors give gold to posts, comments, or other contributions they think are really worth something.
  • Eligible contributors that earn enough karma and gold can cash out their earnings for real money.
  • Contributors apply to the program to see if they're eligible.
  • Top contributors make top dollar. The more karma and gold contributors earn, the more money they can receive.

Not just anyone can be a contributor. To join and stay in the program, contributors need to meet a few requirements:\

  • Be over 18 and live in the U.S.
  • Only Safe for Work contributions qualify
  • Earn xx gold and karma each month
  • Provide verification information. You must have at least 10 gold and 100 karma to begin verification.
  • NSFW accounts aren't eligible for the Contributors Program

Here's my take on this. Since this is from the latest version of Reddit's ~~broken browser for a single site~~ "official app", it's likely a recent development, triggered by recent changes in the platform. Reddit Inc. is likely worried about contributors leaving due to the app-pocalypse, and is trying to counter it by throwing them some spare cash.

And I'm going to be honest: holy fuck this sounds like a Bad Idea®. For three reasons.

The first one is demographics; since 47% of the users are Americans, and 21% of them are 10-19yo, it's safe to say that ~60% of the users are ineligible, and thus will only contribute for free.

Will they? People often don't mind contributing for free, as long as the others are in the same page. The picture changes once you get at least someone making money out of it - odds are that those 60% will disengage further.

The second reason is that Reddit Inc. is disregarding the fluff principle. If the money threshold is the number of upvotes and awards that someone gets per period of time, why would the person bother with high quality content? Or even quality content at all - it's easy to make up for lack of quality with quantity. For example, setting up a simple bot to scrape the top posts and repost them. (Is Reddit expecting the mods to delete those reposts? OH WAIT)

The third and final reason is who you expect to give awards to those people, before they feel pissed and discouraged and leave the program, breaking even further their trust in the platform. Who would even buy Reddit gold on first place? The Reddit community has been outright mocking Reddit gold for years, and the suckers actually buying it were the ones who were the most engaged and emotionally attached to the platform, to the point that they're willing to "help" it. (As if corporations need help, but whatever.) It would be a shame if Reddit happened to piss off exactly that demographic... like it did.

 

I just deep-fried and filled a batch of the thing above. They turned out delicious, so I'm sharing here.

Here's a link for the recipe for the dough; I followed it closely, the only thing was that I subbed the butter with veg oil. The recipe yielded ~20 of them, but this depends a lot on the size that you cut them.

Recipe for the custard filling:

  • 300g sweetened condensed milk
  • 300g 20% fat milk cream
  • 300g whole milk
  • 2 eggs
  • vanilla essence
  • [optional] 1/2 tsp cornstarch

Just mix everything together until homogeneous, then heat it on low fire, while stirring constantly, until it thickens. I didn't use the cornstarch because I wanted it slightly runnier, but do add it if you like a thicker custard.

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