tal

tal , 10 months ago to Politics in Trump scraps plans to release 'irrefutable report' claiming election fraud in Georgia

I think that some of it is that most people don't really carefully analyze the sum total what a politician has said or is saying and all the other related material. Which is reasonable -- I mean, I know that this is a politics forum, but for most people, following politics is not a huge part of what they do. It'd be really inefficient, in fact, if they did.

I think that a lot of support for politicians has more to do whether they've made statements that a potential voter agrees with in the very limited material about them that that voter sees. Not just for Trump, but for any politician.

So if you're asking someone about Trump, they're making something of a gut call based on the limited material they see of him.

Honestly, I think that the more-interesting issue here isn't really Trump, but the fact that Trump's tactics have worked fairly well. The problem here isn't really Trump. He's just a symptom of having a political decision process that can be gamed the way he's gamed it. We do not want to encourage politicians who lose an election to have an incentive to make bogus claims that the election was rigged, because part of what we want the political system to do is to permit coming to a consensus as to leadership. That undermines that.

But there's nothing unique about Trump that permits him to do that. If he could do it, then so could another politician. And I would imagine that sooner or later, more people probably will, if they think that it is to their advantage.

That is, I think what probably needs to be fixed is the system.

tal , 10 months ago to Firefox in Twitter Won't Log Out/ Switch Accounts

Some extensions may not be enabled in private window mode. You try disabling all your extensions?

tal , 10 months ago to xkcd in xkcd #1172: Workflow

Emacs itself is actually impressively good at not breaking workflows, given how configurable the package is.

tal , 11 months ago to Fediverse in Besides tech-focused instances, what other subject focused Lemmy/Kbinstances have you found?

cdda.social, for the survival horror roguelike Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Thanks much. Their subreddit only references their Discord. Wasn't aware that they had something up on the Threadiverse,

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in /r/NonCredibleDefense recieves automated notice from the admins to remove its NSFW designation, or else. Mods respond by messaging the admins a bunch of death and porn.

He's remarkably dedicated to this.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in /r/NonCredibleDefense recieves automated notice from the admins to remove its NSFW designation, or else. Mods respond by messaging the admins a bunch of death and porn.

Are you looking at your subs page? That'll just have your subscribed magazines/communities.

https://kbin.social/sub

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in /r/NonCredibleDefense recieves automated notice from the admins to remove its NSFW designation, or else. Mods respond by messaging the admins a bunch of death and porn.

If they're going somewhere else like the Fediverse, I wish that they'd at least sticky a link or something so that people can find it.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it

I assume that he's comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Digg_v4_revolt_and_migration_to_Reddit

In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg's shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

Lemme add a bit more to my above comment.

Social media companies are especially doing this whiplash switch from aiming for growing the userbase to making money. And for them, there is another factor that makes it even more important to use money for growth when it is available -- network effect. Basically, for certain services, the role of the service is to facilitate communication between their users. While it's not quite true that all users are equally-likely to communicate with each other -- an elderly user who only speaks Italian and a schoolboy in Kansas who only speaks English might not have a lot of desire to communicate -- in general, users of the service get their value from the service by communicating with each other and each additional user is one more person with whom a user can communicate. This means that it's much more-desirable to use a service with a large userbase than one with a small one, because you can communicate with others. The value of the service as a whole, if everyone were equally likely to communicate with everyone else, rises roughly as the square of the number of users. That's because the value to each user is proportional to the number of users that they can talk to, and that is true for every user -- multiply one by the other, and the value of the service as a whole is proportional to the square of the userbase size.

Social media work by connecting members of their userbase. So for them, they have a huge incentive to use money for growth whenever they can get a hold of it as far as they can.

The services that are especially likely to respond to capital being cheaply available are companies that have a business model that does this, even moreso than a typical dot-com. And sure enough -- Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube derive their value from connecting members of their userbase, rely on network effect as well as economies of scale. And just as they dive really deeply into spending cheap money to grow when they could, when money ceases to be really cheaply available, so they will have further to swim out when it ceases to be.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in What’s with social media companies trying to destroy themselves recently?

The way a lot of dot-com startups work, they have high fixed costs -- stuff you pay no matter how many users you have, like programmers -- and low marginal costs, stuff you pay based on how many users you have.

That means that it's good to be big, because you can spread those fixed costs over many, many users. One programmer writing software used by five hundred million users can make a lot more money than software used by five users. The resulting effect is called economy of scale.

So the typical model is to take in a lot of investor money, operate at a loss, and lose money while offering a very compelling service to grow the userbase as quickly as possible.

Once you're big enough, you can spread your costs around many users, so it's easier to make money. You switch from growing your userbase to making money from it. Because you aren't trying as hard as possible to draw in new users, the service is probably gonna get worse from a user standpoint.

If money becomes tight, then it's harder to get investor dollars to operate at a loss with to grow userbase.

My understanding is that due to elevated interest rates in the post-COVID-19 situation, it's more-costly to get investment money. So that will tend to push companies from the "growth" phase to the "monetization" phase.

That affects a bunch of companies, including Reddit.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted

You can access content from an account anywhere, but not migrate the account.

tal , 11 months ago to RedditMigration in Fediverse won't replace Reddit as long as Lemmy is the main platform being promoted

Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.

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

Shows up in site searches on Google, as the other response points out.

I don't know about the update frequency.

tal , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in Porn Historically Decides Tech Adoption... Fediverse?

Disagree on blocking them from responding. I think that this change to how the Reddit blocking feature worked was one of the largest errors Reddit made in recent years. Led to people in conversations disagreeing, one user making a statement and then blocking the other so that it looked like the blocking user would get the last word, which prevented the other from responding.

It's also useless to stop someone from doxing you, because they can just create another account and use that. The only way that it would be efficacious in that regard would be if the whole system worked via whitelisting users rather than blacklisting them.

tal , 1 year ago to RedditMigration in I don’t understand people who say they can’t figure out Lemmy or KBin

I like that kbin/lemmy we can choose whatever fucking avatar we want instead of being limited to customizing our snoz or wtf Reddit calls their mascot thing.

"Snoo". It's a space alien.