kirk781 @ kirk781 @discuss.tchncs.de

Posts

72

Comments

262

Joined

2 yr. ago

Not a perma ban but still.

Back when I used to be on Reddit much, I got auto banned from r/latestagecapitalism for having too much karma on certain subreddit they disliked. They weren't necessarily political in nature (I think I only frequented couple of political subs then and they were non US in nature) but apparently the concept of not breaking any rules on your sub but still being banned just because I participate in some place they dislike was dubious.

Not related, but I think I was very active on reddit from 2016-2021. I had gone through couple of user IDs then (stupidly forgotten the 2FA mechanism for both and never backed the recovery code :p) and had a decent curated feed. I still sporadically open it but hardly participate / post. The only thing worth keeping me there is old Reddit and RES which makes keyboard navigation a breeze.

If one donates to Soulseek( on their official website a certain amount), they get privileges. If you have privileges, then your downloads will be queued ahead of other users (basically you side step a long queue for downloading).

I use Nicotine, and when I open the client, it shows for a couple of seconds at the bottom/tray No active Soulseek privileges before vanishing. That's the only clue.

In practise, my downloads usually go through normally. The 5 days I had privileges I honestly didn't notice much difference. Some users have an automated script that crawls one's folder whenever you download from them, so as long as one has decent amount of shares, it's alright. (I only have shared 40 odd gigs but it's decent enough).

The chat is useless most of the times. The users troll each other and the unmoderated nature means racism is quite common as well. That being said, there are the odd decent folks as well. I had a decent conversation with a guy once there and he even donated 5 days of Soulseek privileges to me; sadly these type of conversations are forgotten in the cesspool that is the chatroom there.

When I was listening to obscure krautrock bands which were nowhere to be found on Spotify or YT Music, Soulseek came to rescue. Also, funnily, it is easier to get flac from there than 320kbps mp3 of various albums. The former is more ubiquitous there.

I think it's Xiaomi. Either case, that brand does put lots of useless stuff. Other Chinese OEMs do it too. Realme puts obnoxious junk even on its high end GT7 series.

I just searched for it and apparently, Moto pushed this app to some of it's devices via a OTA update. It's ironic because Motorola phones [atleast the midrange ones] have a relatively bloat free reputation.

I use RedReader sporadically for browsing Reddit. I like it's compact UI style and customizability. Even when I had proper paid Boost for Reddit back in the day, somehow, the UI of RedReader made it more intuitive for me to use it.

I think one can technically use Boost still via patching it, but it's a grey area and not worth going after when RedReader exists.

Either case, the official Reddit app has to be purposefully coded to be as unoptimized and useless as possible. The bloat, the wasted white space; it all stands testament to the travesty that is modern software design.

India now has the largest population even though the latest official census data hasn't been done. Either case, unlike China, which has its own local variants of global giants; India usually doesn't. So of course it will be represented in correlation with its growing internet population.

I think there used to be subreddits as well like indianpeoplequora and one dedicated to LinkedIn as well for Indians. Both were fun and frolic usually. The former died out since Quora became a nuthouse in general and most folks abandoned it.

I looked up the original post and it gets worse.

Ideally judiciary should change

What the heck does Judiciary have to do with girls? I think I have an inkling what he wants to say (Indian law in some cases favors the female sex more but that's because conditions forced lawmakers to come up with that way; in some rural areas the plight of females was quite bad and male dominance so much that law had to be slightly biased to provide everyone equality). In some cases, it leads to woman misusing the laws to their own ends (often seen in urban areas) and this guy wants to change the equations.

Eithercase, this is only what I think he might have had in mind because his statements make nothing clear at all. But then, I visited his company page even and the crypto currency laced language dongles my mind.

But in the vast seas of phones, Lineage OS still supports a very small subset. Major players like Google or Samsung are covered but a LOT are skipped.

If one's phone supports Lineage OS, well and good but it's not a fix all

I think even some Chinese OEMs throttle somewhat post 80% (and/or give user the option to limit charging upto that point only). I have a spare entry level Samsung phone. It supports 25 W charging though it gets very slow post 80%. It's not a big deal because the battery capacity is good and with an efficient chipset and 60Hz display, it does way better than my main Realme phone which I need to charge almost twice daily.

Back in the day, malware makers could only dream of collecting as much data as Gemini does.

I am on Boost. It's a one time purchase for Android Atleast. The dev is same behind Boost for Reddit(now deprecated) and it implements a similar UI as the previous Reddit Client.

Of course, as you said, there are many FOSS solutions as well. I have heard good praise for Voyager and I think Atleast couple of more clients like Jerboa also exist on F-Droid.

The official Reddit app is an exercise in travesty. Any third party client for either Android or iOS in the past was better the official solution is even now. It's slow, bloated and UI looks like it's designed for toddlers in mind.

I have Waterfox setup as an alternative browser but it does not have much stuff to differentiate itself from mainstream FF, as you said.

Discord reminds me they are introducing ads to their mobile platform right?

As for the article, one of the reasons for the demise could be that instead of signing up on dozens different forums, users now just do it on Reddit. I don't appreciate it, because Reddit's conversations only focus on newer active threads and even if one replies to older ones, it does NOT bump them. This isn't the case with forums, where usually you can respond to old conversations and it gets bumped up.

Firefox can do so too with TST or one of the other extensions in the store. Sometimes(atleast for me), they introduce slightly more lag when opening the browser but otherwise, they can do much of the job. I use Tree Style Tabs even though I might not be a power user of it (read:not actively using every nitty gritty of the extension).

I think I remember Opera Mini's layout though I didn't much use it. It was a great alternative especially on mobile more than a decade back.

But yes especially after changing ownership, switching browser engines and years down the line; things have changed.

I think I gave their desktop variant a try sometime ago but didn't find it compelling enough. I haven't even used their Android fork. I keep using a Firefox fork only :p.