OpenStars @ OpenStars @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

Firefox's answer, at the bottom of the article, smells like pure BS to me. Disabling an extension with something like a full browser-modal pop-up to warn users of the possibility of an untrustworthy Extension? Sure, fine, whatever, and maybe make that warning capable to be disabled by default, but why make the decision for us - silently - that Extensions are not to be trusted? Do we trust the website that asks if we pwetty please should allow the showing of ads, or maybe the malware provider that please should just disable all security Extensions and allow their malicious code to run, if you would be so kind?

I can think of one use for this: to disable malware to substitute clicking on a link to install your Extension of choice with one of their choice instead - although isn't the Extensions store already treated specially by default anyway?

Otherwise, I don't favor taking control away from the users. Especially if users cannot disable this new "feature". There is far too much potential for misuse of this.

Which will fragment the Chrome & Chromium-alternative market further, if people cannot trust Firefox anymore.

Which will slow development of alternatives to Chrome.

Which only benefits Google.

Is the goal of social media to inform, or be popular?

Social Media-ites: "Yes".

:-P

Or just doing squats and doesn't even realize there is a tiny man behind him:-P

Always has been, unfortunately. But now with a new bonus added: climate change can kill us all, yay!:-D /s

If only they would... although now that you asked them to do that, they will come here just out of spite:-).

That is the saddest part of all for me: mods pour in their hearts to build up a place, and in return? Well, you said it:

Mostly we just got yelled at for “censorship” when someone was banned for being an ass or totally off-topic.

The love is not returned, nor was it ever going to be - nor was that the point of offering in any case, really. So now it is time to turn to planting different seeds that are more likely to yield better results. :-) So long as Huffman was ultimately in control, that was never going to be fully possible over there, b/c you'd be constantly fighting that system. The same one that kept doing things to hide the sidebar, hide the "Rules" for each community, encourage posting to an extreme degree and yet discourage searching by making it difficult to perform and the results pathetic afterwards anyway: you can't turn away the tide when it has the full force of the entire ocean behind it.

Over here, things are not as refined atm as within the walled garden, but we like it better that way:-P. Here, we are truly free:-).

Absolutely. I am not really one of those, although I tried to do my part, and yet there needs to be a minimum amount to really be self-sustaining.

Also, the software is REALLY buggy. I am on Kbin, and 100% of the time when you want to upvote or boost some comment or thread, it asks you to re-login if you do that after spending a minute reading and/or typing - i.e. it only remembers who you are for a few seconds. Also my Notifications have been busted for WEEKS now, b/c anytime you comment on a post that is later removed by a mod from elsewhere on the Federiverse, the notification will be poisoned and can literally never go away, nor even be visited, nor can you visit any other notifications (update that I just found out yesterday: that are on the same page), so basically you will forever receive continually-new notifications that you cannot visit, i.e. it is the entire Notifications system that becomes unusable, not just that single one. Oh yeah, and afaik, moderation tools are literally non-existent on Kbin.

Lemmy is much more advanced, even having several mobile apps (which iirc Kbin has none yet nor will it ever in the future until it opens up its API publicly) but either way I can really empathize why people, especially non-technically minded ones, would (even should?) STRONGLY hesitate to come here. Like for one thing, I already would like to move my account from Kbin to Lemmy, but account migration isn't a thing. I am not going to go around and ask every person that DMs me to now shift over to use a new account, after having just done that for Reddit. And then do it again, if I don't like the new instance? And again, and again, and again, and again?

Fuck spez yes but... now what? This place isn't ready for the masses just yet. Especially Kbin. Though people are starting to work on it, and that will change, soon(-ish).

Right now, Lemmy/Kbin is good to replace doom-scrolling with meme-scrolling. And for communities where enough people were willing to migrate, it may even be a full replacement for a niche sub-Reddit, but I understand why 99% of people are remaining behind. Can we really blame them? I mean yes, obviously, but also, can we, really? It is ultimately their choice what to do with their lives.

The problem, as I understand it, is that a company has no legal responsibility to NOT kill people. It's ONLY task is to make money... and this is what Huffman, and more importantly even those controlling his strings behind him, are trying to do. If a few fathers, mothers, children, and maybe several adjoining households all burn up in flames as a result of bad advice given on the website, that only matters insofar as it can legally be tied back to them. Hence, the guy doing the testing of train wheels was literally FIRED for doing his job properly, as his managers were all trying to look good for their own bosses without bothering to actually BE good, b/c that takes a lot more investment.

And there are so very, VERY many stories like that. One that sticks in my mind is a famous tax prep company that predated upon returning soldiers and college students, which eventually was caught for their intentional predatory tactics (which they outright bragged about in internal company communications, looking down on those suckers who trusted them) and faced major consequences, but the thing is: the CEO that did it moved to some tropical location in the world (Greece if I am not mistaken), and then like a decade passed before the system could catch up to "punish" the corporation. So retirees who trusted their life savings to a variety of investments including that company with a solid reputation were burned, but the actual guy who did it was long gone. So long as people like Huffman, Bezos, Musk, Eisner and the like are playing with OUR money, OUR time & vounteer efforts, OUR knowledge, etc., they seem to feel very free to gamble (others not so much: not every company is evil, but some are, and the lack of justice to reign them in is very damaging to society). The risk for them is only very slight - what? they won't make money as quickly as they otherwise would, leaving their investments sitting in a bank to earn interest? - and the consequences for failure, even for literal crimes, are virtually nill, whenever those can fall onto some OTHER, future CEO, rather than themselves.

And in this case, if someone burns down their house while tinkering, that is not Reddit's fault, the lawyers will argue. Technically that is even true. More to the point, it is simply not a priority for them, any longer: having built up that reputation, they are now switching focus to exclusively looking to monetize it, prior promises be damned, and to the detriment of future visitors trusting in the old reputation.

I do not own a home or did anything related so I never bothered to visit your sub, but I can see where you provided a service, and want to thank you for that. For while it lasted, it was a good thing to have offered. Now... fuck spez, but I hope you find your way forward. You deserve peace after what Reddit put you through:-). Yes, people may literally die, but that will always be true in a large variety of ways (of old age if nothing else - sorry if I seem flippant but to clarify I am seriously saying that there is only so much any one person can do about that aspect that is part of the nature of the universe itself), and there is literally nothing you can do about it now: I hope you can find a way to leave that behind, and move forward to do other things. Which I see in the other comment that you will - excellent!:-P

Then I must say thank you once again for your service!!! :-D This time looking forward rather than backwards, as the need now (for Lemmy and even more so Kbin) is more technical than social, so it makes absolutely perfect sense to pivot, to use a different approach to meet that different need.

I would wish for you that you feel no guilt at all over what you were forced to leave behind: the way I see it (upon reflection, now I mean, not that I foresaw it or anything:-D), Reddit was always bound to fall, b/c it was always beholden to corporate interests, which means it was always going to be sold off in an IPO, which was thus always going to end up in the hands of some kind of Musk or Eisner or Bezos or some such, eventually - that is just a given, these days, unfortunately it seems:-(.

So it was fun while it lasted, but now it is time to build something more permanent and stable, to last for the future. I cannot do that myself right now, but you can and you will be, and that fills me with pride that more kind-hearted people are stepping up to answer that call!:-D The funny part is that moderation is needed far less here than it ever was on Reddit, so I hope you know what I mean when I say that "Reddit has died; long may Reddit yet live" (b/c that gives a place for the trolls to go, hopefully bothering us less over here!:-P although that state will not last forever ofc... yet Lemmy and hopefully eventually Kbin will be better able to handle it, as you and others continue to take it forward)

Traffic stats actually went UP during those 2 days and in the next month or two after that time! Much of that was likely from the bots used to shred all the data whilst removing it, but they still counted as "traffic".

As you say, the only way forward would be to move. But to where? 99% of people in my small gaming sub refused to come here, and with all the bugs now (I'm on Kbin, there seem many more here than on Lemmy tho), I can hardly blame them: this place is not ready for them.

Anyway, the point was not to hurt Reddit, the point was to be okay. In part by getting Huffman to either back down, or getting the board members behind him to ask him to step down or forcibly remove him, neither of which happened, so now... we move, b/c that is all that is left to us to do. Even if 99% of the community remains behind. :-(

money

short-term profits, ftfy

It is not. The mere fact that someone is likely to get some info wrong is not a fact that is in question, only the likelihood of its occurrence is, and quite frankly neither you nor I are qualified to know how often such posts were submitted and rejected, but I have a hunch that the former mods of those exact subs just might?

It reminds me of the story where a guy was fired b/c he refused to lie and state that the train wheels were okay when in fact they were overheating (this was in the USA but probably similar stories happen in most countries, so really is much more broadly applicable). This was back in February of this year iirc. Now we know that many people have died as a result of derailments since then - and potentially worse yet, some will suffer illnesses for an entire lifetime and extremely possibly (even likely, even certain if I am not mistaken) for another generation or few from now, as a result of the carcinogens released into those areas.

Again, for emphasis: NOW we know that, but even back THEN, it still would have been a true fact that "train derailments are more likely than they were in the past, b/c of the reduction in safety controls". We did not need to wait for people to die to be able to believe that, it was always true, and imagine a wonderful world where nobody at all had to die, b/c having seen the reduction in safety controls, someone acted and placed new controls in place that prevented it.

The fact here is that info obtained from Reddit is less "safe" than it used to be. Hopefully nobody has to die to prove that conclusively. Ofc all info on the internet should be subjected to scrutiny, but not everyone is so cautious, and moreover, "transitions" especially can be harsh, i.e. from a resource (e.g. a particular sub) that had developed an EARNED reputation for providing only safe info, to now where the sub has the same name, but has a totally different internal structure, with fewer to no safety controls inside.

That is my two cents anyway, fwiw.

Good for you! I was mod of a tiny gaming sub, and 99% of its members did not care the least tiny bit about Reddit. They will when it comes for old-Reddit, but the "first they came for..." argument did not manage to penetrate their shells, especially as they were involved in multiple subs and those all stayed behind intact as well. So like 4 of us started a new community here... where we have maybe 1 post a week instead of 1 per hour. Even that much is inordinately complicated by all the bugs on Kbin/Lemmy, where 80% of the time when you want to upvote or boost it asks you to re-login (actually it's 100% after a certain threshold of time is reached, or 0% if you instantly do it without taking time to read or write anything first, but that is not normal behavior!), and my notifications have been permanently busted for weeks now due to a bug where if you comment on a post that a mod later removes, the notification of someone responding to you has no way to ever be removed or even seen, ever again. So what I am saying is... I really cannot even so much recommend that they come here, just yet? I am a techie person and can patiently deal with these things, but most of them are not, and won't.

But you cannot control them. You can only control yourself. Which you did? Thus, good for you! YOU at least did the right thing. Maybe others will follow your lead, especially as the software gets better (Kbin in particular is more in its infancy than Lemmy - like iirc it even has zero moderation tools right now!?), or maybe they will not, but that again is on them. You at least showed them the way.

Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are "better" to take advantage of, while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations! (edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).

You deserve peace, and maybe you'll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing "canned" results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit's own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.

But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which "facts" can take a backseat to that human connection... which can get some people killed in the process.:-(

So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don't know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).

When asked for comment, Reddit's director of corporate, policy, and safety communications, Gina Antonini, said via email:

Sounds like none of my problem, tho it sure would suck to be you, bi!ches! (essentially)

"Reddit" is dead. It remains to be seen what, if anything, will replace it. e.g. where did those exact mods go, who were mentioned in the article? A Fediverse location, if they can stand all the bugs here? Or nowhere, if they were too shaken to want to devote their time to some other place? Or will they go back even, seeing 95% of their communities refusing to leave Reddit (until it literally kills them of botulism ofc)? Only time will tell...

nottheonion

I mean... you are not wrong, but to put on my debate hat (for the funsies:-D) I suppose the counter-argument is that since they made it so that the ga(t)cha system is itself irrelevant (at least, in the earlier days of the game, before Power Creep became rampant), they seemed to feel like that was the way to keep the game "balanced". It might also go over better in Japan than the more Western world where people might less like this idea of something that is unattainable. Oh, and one REALLY crucial detail is that you can straight-up exchange irl cash for any particular character that you want (well, any OLDER one, while the absolute newest ones are only available by the gambling approach that offers no such guarantees). Those sales only come every so often each year, but with them you can have your guarantee - and e.g. if you pull your desired character in the meantime, then you can select someone else, whoever you want in the list. Also iirc (some of?) the paid banners offer a "guaranteed 5-star", though it lacks GI's system where (eventually) it is the particular 5-star that you pulled for. There is also a second, subscription system where you pay to support the game each month and get increased basically stamina-style rewards, and you select 7 characters where you are guaranteed to get one of those.

So there is a "pity", technically, just not available at all for F2P, and instead comes in the form of a P2W purchase opportunity.

I heard that GI was really bad, but also that was like several years ago, and it has been cleaned up significantly since then. And some banners much worse than others - particularly weapons ones iirc? - where like you get this 5-star weapon and then nobody who can use it. Ofc this is biased, listening to the stories of people who decided to leave it, rather than stay and git gud:-).

It does look gorgeous though, which is kinda weird for a mobile game imho but so long as processing power can keep up...

Leia was a senator, so she very much tried the inside reform route until the literal last possible moment when the entire Senate was disbanded. That's what led to her capture then, I believe:-).

The only live service game I have and likely will ever allow myself to play is Another Eden, ostensibly a mobile gacha but unlike any others in that genre (and yet... not entirely if you know what I mean:-D - it is less predatory than any modern game that allows in-app purchases that I've ever even heard of but that aspect is not entirely absent from it). It hits the JRPG nostalgia feel for being a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and Cross, made by some of the same developers actually, and the artwork and music especially are just gorgeous.:-D

And ironically, many people complain bitterly that they want it to be more like GI, with a pity system. Never mind that the gacha can be irrelevant here as you can do everything purely with the free characters (and more effort, especially JP-style i.e. heavy grinding), the FOMO salt is real, and I see now that games are just giving the people what they want, regardless of whether that's good for them or not. On the one hand it keeps further game development going, and people are free to spend how they please, while on the other there are horror stories of people dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars (I think even USD $ currency), while having little to show for it in the end.

Predatory is predatory, and while on the one hand I'd love to check out GI someday, on the other I just don't think I could stand the gacha elements in it. It warps and twists EVERYTHING it touches, e.g. increasing pressure to make waifu/husbando portraits that objectify both women and men in it, and leads to content that looks visually appealing but in Another Eden at least, has not been tested and is not "fun" to play.

The funny part is that originally I had to choose between GI and AE, and I am so glad that I went the way that I did. Although probably better to avoid any such gacha at all in the future.:-|

Tbf, it seems like the current "mass-AI-generated propaganda and disinformation" has actual humans behind it i.e. state-sponsored disinformation as part of modern warfare, as opposed to just sheer random BS pooped out of an algorithm designed to maximize short-term profits for the person trying to use enough buzzwords to get their algorithm bought out by someone dumb enough to fall for their pitch and short-sighted enough to not realize the wider implications... or worse yet, if they realize, who simply does not care.

It reminds me of the story behind the USA tax preparation software companies who intentionally went on a campaign to confuse military veterans and students (seriously!? what kind of evil mfers...!?), and while they got caught and even punished & fined, it was something like a decade later and ofc the original CEO and also the next one etc. had long since received their fat bonus checks, leaving the company holding the bag (liability). Thus it was "a smart move", so long as you entirely disregard ethics. What was presented as a "free gift", to generate good PR for the company, was in reality predating upon people that they deemed would be highly trusting or at least minimally likely to sue them... and they were correct. Now, watching interviews of these tech-bros, I get the same vibe as in like who cares so long as I get mine.