FaceDeer

FaceDeer , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in now that i don't have a reddit account, i guess i can tell you guys about secret communities

Yeah, it wasn't a bad place. I'm sure a lot of people would expect it to be full of threads about how century club members were better than the low-karma plebs or discussing tips on how to farm more karma or something, and it was nothing like that. I mainly recall it being a place where people would share tragedies in their lives and commiserate on them, knowing that they had a relatively "private" place to be discussing that sort of thing with people they considered "peers." I just didn't find it to be compelling discussion most of the time.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in now that i don't have a reddit account, i guess i can tell you guys about secret communities

I joined the Century Club and it was just kind of boring. I rarely ever saw a thread I felt compelled to comment on. I suspect it's because there really wasn't much of a common interest behind it. Didn't know about the 10-year club but I suspect it would be similar, perhaps with more of a "aren't kids these days awful" vibe.

FaceDeer , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

What you want never existed in the first place. Not only because of those other subreddits you mention, but because Reddit was not the entire sum total of RPG discussion on the Internet. The RPGNet Forums, TheRPGSite forums, RPG PUB, EN World forums, RPG Codex, and innumerable other smaller forums were scattered all around the Internet. You never saw them or their content because none of them are "federated", and so you thought Reddit was the center of the RPG universe.

We now have an opportunity to restructure how diverse separate fora like that can work. If they were all federated then you'd be able to seamlessly view content from all of them, and communicate back without needing to have a separate login at each and every one of them.

If you really want to continue treating /r/RPG as the center of the universe and ignoring all the other fora, well, these new ones on the Fediverse merely add a few more onto the enormous list you were already unknowingly ignoring.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

Another potential problem with trying to monetize off the back of AI is that AI is such a rapidly developing technology that there's no guarantee that their stashes of data will actually be all that vital. There's been a tendency lately toward training AI with a smaller but more highly refined and curated data set rather than just shoveling vast quantities of text at them, for example.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

From a user point of view? A lot. So far the AI has made itself the champion of the creation of fake. Fake news, fake pictures, fake videos, fake history, fake identity. Do you think that the AI will be used for your own good? Do you think that your private data are farmed for you own good? I don't.

That's addressing whether the mere existence of LLMs is "good" or not. That's not going to be affected by whether someone changes their username every couple of months or whether some particular social media site makes their content annoying to scrape. LLMs exist now, and they're only getting better; attempting to staunch the flow of genies out of the bottle at this stage is futile.

Personally, I'm actually rather pleased that my comments on Reddit over the years are factoring in to how LLMs "think." All that ranting about the quality of Disney's Star Wars movies not only convinced all the people who read it (I assume) but will now also convince our future AI overlords too.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

For some reason Reddit has 2000 employees. That's a huge expense. If I were in charge of Reddit, I think the first thing I'd be doing is conducting those "Exactly what would you say you do here" interviews and figuring out why something that should be a relatively simple and mature forum website needs so many people working on it.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

Also all the people who think Usenet is just an obscure piracy mechanism.

Usenet was the greatest medium for discussion back in the early Internet days, and I'm excited that it's finally being recreated in the form of this Fediverse thing.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

What you're asking for never existed. Reddit had multiple subreddits devoted to those subjects. Forcing there to be only "one true" community for any given subject is antithetical to the whole concept of free association and free speech, there's always going to be people who disagree with how the subject matter has been divided up and how it's being moderated. They'll want to create their own groups.

You're probably wanting something like Reddit's "multireddit" functionality. I know of this issue for Lemmy, with some links to related issues in the comments. Kbin has one here.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

Except that the "for the whole community to come together" part is already provided by the Fediverse, built right in to the foundations. There's no "service" for the next Reddit to provide to these separate forums because they can already freely exchange with each other. They are not fractured.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Any change today?

It can take a long time for a giant to fall.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in While larger, more general communities are thriving on the Fediverse - I'm missing out on the niche communities

I just came across https://ttrpg.network/, a Lemmy instance that's specialized toward tabletop roleplaying games. Haven't explored it much but I suspect we'll be seeing this pattern more in the future - whole instances devoted to a particular topic, with the specialized subgenres being communities on there.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted

The forced distillation of every single position to being somewhere on this "left" to "right" spectrum is the single worst thing to happen to modern political discourse, IMO.

I'm a fan of the "8 Views" test, which tries to position views along four different axes instead of just one. Four is still too few but it's way better than what we've got now.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in PSA: while upvoting exists, to get the "move closer to the top" effect that reddit's upvote had, you need to click boost

I see it as similar to the "save" function on Reddit, except it's public. I've started using it on things that I think I might like to read again later (and so by extension anyone who's "like me" would probably want to read it too).

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Ordinary redditors are feeling the pain as well.

If we build it, they will come.

FaceDeer , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Ordinary redditors are feeling the pain as well.

To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.