megopie @ megopie @beehaw.org

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2

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506

Joined

2 yr. ago

It would be nice if it was on an open protocol rather than a proprietary platform, but it is what it is.

Admittedly the only projects I’ve ever used it with were games or mods for games, but I’ve never had issue finding what I need using the search function, it’s got an ok set of search boolean, and with that I can pretty easily skim all the channels or with in a specific channel for certain things or discussions.

It could have been that the discord server you interacted with choose to lay it’s self out poorly. Discord does have some questionable UI choices, particularly around settings. But as a chat/call system it works pretty damn well.

It’s also a matter of retention rate. I might make a new account on a forum and make one post or comment, but what are the chances I come back to the forum or build community there after I close out the page?

With discord, previous communities you’ve interacted with are stickied to the side and thus get totally forgotten about less easily.

The main reason projects use it is because a plurality of people already have a discord account, and you don’t need to keep making a new account for every new forum or wiki you want to comment on, read, or post to. I don’t think this is just an issue of “critical mass” ether. Lot of people don’t really want to be handing information to every project they interact with, nor do people want to learn 30 different UIs and quirks.

It’s nature as a chat/call system first has it’s benefits in the form of printed community discussion. People feel like they’re part of a community more easily than on traditional forums and wikis, it’s just more conversational.

It’s far from a good wiki or forum, in fact it is basically non-functional as a wiki, but, as a forum and tech support line, it does work, largely buoyed by the good search function.

It’s open ended enough in it’s functionality, and enough people already know how to use plugins and bots for it, that a lot of it’s short comings can be paved over or overlooked.

It’s bloated and messy and the back end is… yah, and it’s UI and formatting are not well suited for certain tasks. But the average person is far more likely to actually use it. With a single link anyone who already has a discord account can get access to a community, post, comment, and search previous comments and questions. Not to mention that it’s easier to keep track of projects you’re interested in if they’re all centralized on a single platform.

This video is such garbage. Like, the left is not celebrating this attack? Like what?

What a ridiculous position to group together an entire half of the political discourse on the internet and claim that everyone in that half has the same position.

I mean, perhaps the article chooses a bad example but there are plenty of other examples that are decidedly non-western. Such as the Vietnamese settlement of the the Mekong delta and the displacement of numerous other groups that lived there. Or the Japanese displacement of Ainu people (pre western influence). Hell The Bantu peoples migrating out of what is today Cameroon to settle huge swaths of sub-saharan Africa (not well understood but there is abundant evidence that this migration was sudden, dramatic and highly disruptive, and we know that huge amounts of native groups in many areas were ether displaced or eliminated.)

And so so so many more.

Because interests in that award show is waning along and they needed a headline to get attention back in it.

More resources are being devoted to “capturing value” and “marketing” than to actually providing the goods and services that people want and need. Companies have found it easier to manipulate people than to server the public interest.

Ok, let me put it this way, it is not serving the purpose as intended by the accepted system.

The theory in economics by which the market and private companies are justified is that they will compete and produce products and fractionalizing quality in regards to cost, there by maximizing utility.

The problem is that most of their actual decisions are no longer moderated by this logic. they are moderated by systems of internal corporate dynamics, monopoly, and rent seeking.

There is a purpose to their actions, but it is not to maximize utility. It is to maximize the amount of resources and influence that a corporate structure controls.

Perhaps that is maximizing utility for the corporate structure, but it violates what I feel is the social contract; something to the effect of “groups are issued the status of limited liability, there by becoming firms or companies, by the public on the understanding that the set of rules they operate with in will maximize utility for the public.”

Ergo, from my perspective, it is useless, because it is serving the interest of an artificial construct and not the public at large.

The definition of bloat is to “swell or inflate as with liquid or gas”, so using it to refer an excessive usage of resources (like water) to maintain a server farm seems as accurate a usage as in regards to code. Or to the “inflation” of sales numbers and targets by using LLM hype also seems appropriate. Honestly it seems like the article is using a very flexible adjective to tie together a lot of related phenomenon.

They’re expressing a frustration that is similar across a wide variety topics. Namely with wasteful and unnecessary usage of time, effort, and resources to expand systems and create “stuff” that serves no purpose.

Honestly it’s sound more and more like Netanyahu let this happen, if not created the circumstances for it to happen, just to create a rally round the flag effect because his goose was cooked legally and electorally

This kind of thing depends a lot on the part of the US and the time the development was built.

Stuff built to serve suburban communities, built since 1960, and particularly in the “sun belt” are way more likely to be built with the assumption everyone will drive and thus walkability is an after thought.

It’s changing but a lot of new development in places like Florida, Arizona and Texas are still being built like this.

It may be different now, but when IOS first added PiP is was super inconsistent with the YouTube app, it worked one week, then the app updated and it didn’t work, then the next week it worked if you were logged in, then only with premium, then only if you were not logged in, then it would exit out of it it the first time you opened it but not the second time you opened PiP

It was just… a mess and it almost felt like there was some back and fourth going on between Apple and Google over how it was implemented.

Thanks, I’ll look in to that.

No, I’m just bad at proof reading and a clumsy typer/ not the best with written grammar

I used to pay for premium just because it was the simplest way to watch ad free on my phone (IOS so Vanced was not an option), and being able to download videos to watch later on a flight was nice.

But then they wouldn’t let you do Picture in Picture from the app, which, like, fine. Annoying but I’ll just play it in the background and just listen to the audio.

But then they started forcing the tiktok clone onto the home page and subscriptions page. I really do not like the dopamine disinformation vortex. So I deleted the app and just started watching them through the website, which actually enabled Picture in Picture and let me hide the shorts shelf (for 30 days before I have to click the X again.)

Now I’ve just stopped paying for it and just watch YouTube in the Firefox Focus IOS browser which completely blocks YouTube ads in my experience. It won’t let me do Picture in Picture or play audio in the background on their website, but I’ve noticed embedded YouTube videos on other websites will.

So now I’m looking in to using other front ends so I can have complete normal functionality without having to watch adds or pay them money and have their stupid tik tok clone shoved down my throat.

Good job Google, you managed to completely alienate someone who was paying you cash. Now I’m the definition of a free rider on your service.

Because innovation is their passion, and clearly e-mail needed to be innovated on.

2 weeks from now “Elon musk plans to lock the ability to like and retweet behind subscription”

It’s not that surprising, I think it shows the huge disconnect between what these institutions think the do for people and what they really do.

They assumed they were providing moral/spiritual guidance but in reality most people were coming to them because they were the only affordable source of community in the area. Another example of a point of community organizing would be something like a board game/table top store, but those are often expensive to participate in as they have a lot of over head that needs to be payed for. Churches of course were not free to run but they had a huge leg up by being tax exempt, not to mention had a lot of people willing to work for them for low wages out of passion for the topic. So they could get by on small volunteer donations.

So churches could survive in areas where something like a mall, or game store, a book shop or some other type of focused community couldn’t due to there not being enough people with the means to participate.

Now though, the effective monopoly that kept these churches popular has been broken, as anyone with a cellphone can go on to the internet and participate in community that way. Is it the same quality of experience? Is something being lost through purely digital community? Maybe, maybe not, but theses religious institutions have become so divorced from the interests and needs of their constituents that even a pale imitation has been able to absorb their audience in less than a couple decades.