blivet

Reddit’s value has never been in the “average redditor” or the “popular subs”. The real value is in the niche tail of communities and the fact that they have such a massive amount of people that even if “only” 10% of their users were decent people, it still meant that they had enough decent people to talk with something to contribute.

Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.

Yes, the whole thing is especially frustrating because the app was quite nice. Harriette did a really good job really quickly.

I think governmental organizations should do the same. It’s absurd that FEMA or whoever essentially has to rely of Elon’s goodwill.

Yes, that’s pretty much where I’m at.

If the quality of AI-generated content degrades to the point where it’s useless that is also fine with me.

So in order for data to be useful to AIs, AI-generated content will have to be flagged as such. Sounds good to me.

I was thinking pretty much the same thing. He’s got the sensibility of a teenage boy. He thinks things like the letter X and the color black are totally cool, and he thinks naming his company “Space-Sex” and one of its spacecraft “Big Fuckin’ Rocket” is the height of humor.

Palm Pilots seemed so futuristic back then.

Up to a point. Google+ was invite only for so long that by the time it became available to the general public no one cared anymore. When people signed in with their new accounts they couldn’t find anyone they knew, and they never came back.

Really stupid on Google’s part, because they launched at a time when people were angry with Facebook for selling private user data, and a lot of users probably would have moved to G+ if they had been able to.

Yes, I signed in out of curiosity, and I was completely disoriented because there was no feed of just the people I followed. I kept clicking around, thinking I was missing something obvious.

That’s just privacy protection. I own a few domains, and none of the whois information points to me personally.

Yes, the name of the company, the logo, and the idea of “tweets” are all a charming evocation of a world filled with brief messages. Twitter has problems, but branding isn’t one of them.

I think we are in the midst of a worldwide epidemic of mental illness, and even the wealthiest and most powerful are not immune.

Yeah, for an app that’s only a month old it’s really nice.

I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren’t even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old “Internet for Dummies” sorts of books back in the 90s, but I’ve never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.

I agree. The information should be easily available if they are interested, but end users shouldn’t be required to know about the underlying mechanics of the fediverse simply in order to create an account and browse.

to the people who read all the things it’s tedious but doable, for the rest it’s “Which one is the RIGHT choice?” and just stay at the door

Exactly. I’m a programmer and I do server administration on a small scale, but when I went to sign up for Mastodon my first reaction was, “How the hell am I supposed to know what instance I want my account to be on?” and I left. After a couple of weeks of absorbing random bits of information about how federation works I went back and completed the account creation process, but I really doubt that the average user who just wants to sign up for a service and use it is going to get past that step.

I haven’t had live TV in years and it’s quite shocking to see what the average user deals with. Junk TV + ads that play 30% of the time is absolutely insane.

Yeah, I’ve had the same experience. We don’t have live TV, and when we occasionally hang out with friends or family who do I’m always flabbergasted at the frequency and length of ad breaks nowadays, and similarly amazed that despite a nearly endless list of channels there never seems to be anything I actively want to watch.

Yeah, I’m old enough to have grown up buying vinyl records. I want to buy a physical copy of the music I like.

The idea of depending on a streaming service to keep something available has always mades me uncomfortable, and given the recent removal of content from some of the studios’ services, it looks like my gut feeling was correct.

It’s really hard to fathom how Google’s decision makers don’t understand that in addition to being confusing, their failure to settle on one messaging app makes them look stupid and flaky in the eyes of average users. This isn’t some niche app for specialists that Google can get away with killing because the user base is relatively small. The general public uses instant messaging all day every day, and after having Google pull the football away two or three times, they’re just going to decide to use something that’s going to stick around instead.