I do not understand how reddit works but I do notice there's lots of people trying to get me to look at their Only Fan thing.
A while back, Reddit replaced Google for times when I need to ask the Internet "why isn't my phone working" or "what is the difference between products X and Y" so if it gets enshittified I'll be sad.
Why the hell is Reddit going public? What's next, Wikipedia? The internet archive? Craigslist (or did they already get acquired by a public company?)
3: Love of money is the root of evil.
I am going to pontificate at the risk (99%) of sounding like an idiot. For a while now, we've been witnessing the end of massive text-based content environments on the internet. Things like Substack, Mastodon, private Slacks, etc. will persist on a smaller scale, as will Unfogged, but no one is going to invest significant money in text blocks written by humans, whereas platforms like TikTok and [whatever the next wave is of visual/gamified content] are going to keep drawing dollars. They will be more nominally international, more automated, and make the distinction between content and advertisement meaningless and antiquated.
That's my abbreviated rant. I can't tell if it's banal or ridiculous.
The thing that's annoying is that Reddit doesn't need any investment. My understanding is that it's reasonably profitable and the exploited volunteer moderators are what's keeping it alive. This is just, well, what Moby said.
"Get investors to buy out your side-hustle" is the new "escape poverty by making it to the NFL".
Which doesn't actually apply here, but was just me musing based off lk's comment.
Co-sign 6. Both Banal and ridiculous. (I still really talk about Nova Kakhovka, which is ridiculous, but not banal.)
2/4: You're not alone
Brereton's most intriguing argument for the demise of Google Search was that savvy users of the platform no longer type instinctive keywords into the search bar and hit "Enter." The best Googlers--the ones looking for actionable or niche information, product reviews, and interesting discussions--know a cheat code to bypass the sea of corporate search results clogging the top third of the screen. "Most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust," Brereton argued, therefore "we resort to using Google, and appending the word 'reddit' to the end of our queries."
Aaron Swartz has been gone for over a decade, wow.
8: I was just going to ask you how the monetization plans are coming. (I also vaguely wonder what incorrigible blog trolls get up to nowadays. Do they just sit and stew? I mostly just sit and stew.)
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" seems relevant to search algorithm enshittification.
12: Fortunately the idea of paperwork is so repulsive to me that it's easier just to stay an impoverished blogger who really isn't terribly impoverished anyway.
I had a nurse practitioner at the oncologist's office for my yearly, non-emergency standard follow up. I was headed into work afterwards, and so I was wearing my current invention, which is ruffles sewn into a compression tanktop, which keeps blouses from laying quite so flat against my skin but puts zero pressure against any of my scars, especially the sides directly under my armpits.
She raved about how great this would be for many post-mastectomy people who are too sensitive for any sort of prosthetic, and how I should make a prototype and patent it, etc, and I cannot explain how hard I recoiled at the idea. Like an ice bath washed over me in repulsion of having to deal with paperwork, and prototypes, and this thing that only works with compatible clothing so people will be surely disappointed that it looks lumpy under jersey fabric, etc etc etc.
I'm just too pure lazy for this fallen world.
emshitenning? defacacation? what about spoliation?
When something small and good gets bought, the first visible action of the new owner is always to make it worse.
I should make a prototype and patent it
There's a song with the lyrics:
The announcer comes on says if you've got ideas I'll file the patent for you
I can immediately remember those (late-80s?) radio commercials.
7: It's not an idea that was original to me.
But, speaking of banal shittification, Duckduckgo owns that
some of our advanced syntax isn't operating 100% correctly on all queries and are actively working on it. It is unfortunately a non-trivial issue given we get our private results from a variety of sources.The syntax is specifically "-" and "+" operators. What I don't understand at all is why the search engines (meaning in this case AIUI basically Bing, but Google is doing this too) don't want to support these operators. Whatever the marginal cost of the additional computing, surely it's outweighed by the fact the user just told you how to make your ads more relevant.
There's a new restaurant opening around here that is a mashup of some foreign words and it is simply impossible to get Google to understand that you really do want to search for that exact set of letters in that order and not some incorrect autocorrect.
Pokey has a workout routine given by his cross country coach. "30 Bicycle" was listed under "core/mobility" days. Pokey didn't believe my explanation of what that probably meant (a candlestick yoga pose where you cycle your legs) and wanted me to google it, but then wouldn't believe that I was asserting it was useless to google because we'd be buried in bicycle links. (That's not necessarily enshittification of google, though. I probably could have gotten it through "core" or "yoga" or something.)
20: The real money is poorly targeted ads sold to people who think they are well targeted.
I've been getting ads on my phone for a Japanese brand of makeup compact. I need a compact like a fish needs a bicycle yoga pose core workout, but the ads remind me of being in Tokyo and that makes me happy, so they can stay. If I find $5 a couple of times, I can probably turn my nostalgia into plastic.
Also, kids these days need core and mobility to run cross-country? In my day we just did fartleks and got our hands stuck in the weight machine.
I was never allowed to use the weight room at high school.
the user just told you how to make your ads more relevant
I don't know how true this is-- my (US) ad stream responds to offline credit card purchases, and TikTok's prediction algorithm is famously greedy for data. I don't know that most people are at all careful about what they type into the search bar. I'm sure they don't ignore queries, but every description I've read of how recommendation works points in the direction of broader profiling. https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/tiktok-fb-in-app-browser-tracking-analysis/
15 -- business is awful but that sounds clever and useful enough to take photos and post to a ?mastectomy group blog? ?Instructables? PatternReview.com !!
You'd probably see someone else selling it if it was popular, would that bother you?
Reddit will have a relevant group.
One plausible hypothesis I saw about charging for data access is that ChatGPT snuck up on all the big content sites, and they realized that their content was effectively going to be monetized by LLMs, so now they want to keep third parties out.
29: It would not bother me at all if someone monetized it! But I may be too lazy to even take the time to share it. The most useful groups would be the non-reconstruction mastectomy FB groups, and even then it's easy for a post to get buried with 0 comments or notice, so it would take some care and managing for it to get traction.
"bicycle" is almost certainly lying on one's back, and doing bicycle motions with the legs with the head elevated, touching the knee with the opposite elbow.
I'm sad about reddit because it is one of the few places where one might find actual people giving advice or reviews and now it's just going to be all review sites. Information was nice while it lasted!
32: So post it up in a couple of places, and if nobody takes up the banner, not your responsibility to optimize your social media penetration or whatever, you've done your part.
Information was nice while it lasted!
Mr. Information was cancelled by Miss Information!
emshitenning? defacacation? what about spoliation?
Being fecesious.
34 is my philosophy on many things.
I think google dropped the plus operator when they launched their (very likely to fail except in the minds of google employees) Google Plus network. Hope it was worth the sacrifice!
34: If I'm parsing your meaning correctly, you're telling me to idly complain about it here and then blame the humanities?
One day enshittification will hit services based on large language models and we'll end up with shatGPT.
google dropped the plus operator
You can still use AND and NOT.
There is now a 7TV emote (needs plug-in, but popular in some regions of Twitch) with the name MeWhenIPurposefullySpreadMisinformationOverTheInternet.
43 is making me feel like I'm very, very old.
Here's an announcement from one of the biggest 3rd party apps, Apollo, announcing that they're shutting down on June 30th. It's very long, if you like things that are very long, AITYD.
I kind of didn't even realize 3rd party apps were involved in Reddit. I just use Firefox to read it. Because I'm a dinosaur.
I'm still a little resentful that "programs" became "apps." I liked the old word.
Ace argues vociferously that websites are apps. It's annoying. It's not actually true.
My son says that Chrome is called "Google."
I think an application is something you use a program for.
I like it when I'm at a cocktail hour where they serve heavy apps. Heavy programs just don't sit in my stomach as well.
The problem with all software being apps is that it turns all software developers into applicators.
Guys. GUYS. Federal Indictment. Holy shit.
More on the general thread, for years I've had DuckDuckGo as my default desktop search but maintained Google for mobile, more as an experiment than anything else (almost all of my "serious" searches are on desktop). Over the last few months, Google now tries to get me to log in every single time I search on mobile*, to the point where I'm ready to just kill it. It's insidious and infuriating.
Supposedly people, including, savvy ones, are using GPT for search instead of Google, which strikes me as literally insane, like using your kid's inflatable hammer as a substitute for your Stanley.
*as well as when I land on pages that Google is paying to ask that question on
53: You can probably plea bargain to something small if you seem sorry.
Flood's starting to recede in Kherson, thank God.
I don't see what God's got to do with it.
I-95 bridge collapse was an inside job, gas tankers can't melt steel beams.