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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • A site like Reddit could be run on a skeleton crew of 20-50 people. That’s what Elon Musk is trying to do somewhat with Twitter, slashing unnecessary employees. (Example: How many people are working on lemmy?)

    Look at it from the viewpoint of an executive. “I managed a 5 person team.” makes you sound like a loser. “I managed a 100 person division” makes you sound like a Big Important Person, even if 95 of those jobs were unnecessary.

    Also look at it from the viewpoint of investors. If an investor puts $200M into Reddit, they want Reddit to be spending $100M-$200M on growth. No investor would put $200M into reddit if reddit was going to just run a barebones operation spending $20M per year and then coasting for 10 years off the investment money.






  • I used a custom captcha for my personal WordPress blog. It eliminated all the spam. (Fun fact: The spammers know how to work around most anti-spam WordPress plugins. If you roll your own, they aren’t going to update their spambot for one blog.)

    I also used a custom captcha at work. We couldn’t use 3rd party filters because it was marking our customers’ comments as spam! The custom captcha also eliminated all the spam.

    There’s also a problem with using 3rd party spam services. You have to give them all your data. You also usually have to pay for it, which can be a problem when you’re working for people with a tiny budget.





  • It can’t last. Right now, lemmy/ActivityPub is in the “early adopter” stage of the tech hype cycle. The only people here now are the people who are willing to try out something new. If there are enough “early adopters”, Lemmy will become interesting, and then the normal people will follow. This would lead to an “eternal September” effect of declining quality. Then they’re followed by the spammers and people looking to make a profit.

    If basically feels like reinventing Usenet, with maybe some extra modern features.

    There’s one big weakness. There appears to be some sort of shared blocklist. If people wind up being placed on the list for petty reasons rather than genuine misbehavior, that could become a problem. I.e., the people maintaining the blocklist decide they disagree with X politically, and then X winds up on the blocklist even though they really weren’t abusive. Then people running nodes are going to have to start manually reviewing the blocklist and making exceptions, which most people won’t bother doing.


  • Here’s one way to realize why Reddit should not be taken seriously: Suppose that the head moderator position for r/politics was put up for open auction. How much would it sell for? It would be purchased by someone who was interested in controlling what information people see.

    Subreddits are moderated on a first-come first-serve basis. If you were the first one to squat a name 10 years ago, you get to be the head moderator, even if someone else might do a better job. This is the “landed gentry” comment Reddit’s CEO was referring to.



  • Exactly. Switching from Reddit to Discord is just switching from a website controlled by one evil corporation to one controlled by a different evil corporation. Discord is still in hyper-growth mode, so they aren’t going to be screwing over users yet. Reddit is in “cash out our chips” mode, so screwing over users for profit is the way to do it. In 2-3 years, the investors in Discord will start wanting to see revenue. That’s when they’ll start introducing user-hostile features.