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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • Most people know this in some capacity, but it’s not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.

    Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.

    I’m not saying you shouldn’t be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you’ll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn’t scale. By the time you realize there’s a shift, it’s too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.

    I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we’ve copied too many of its faults. We’ve already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.

    Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They’re now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that’s compromise.

    I’d like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that’s a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.


  • mke@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Apparently the dump doesn’t include media, though there’s ongoing discussion within wikimedia about changing that. It also seems likely to me that AI scrapers don’t care about externalizing costs onto others if it might mean a competitive advantage (e.g. most recent data, not having to spend time and resources developing dedicated ingestion systems for specific sites).

    I want to stress this: it’s not that “tech bros” are just stupid—even though a lot of them are revoltingly unappreciative of the giants whose sholders they stand on—it’s that they don’t care.


  • No one who uses Mozilla software wants more cloud shit or online services from Mozilla.

    I don’t think that’s unanimous. I’d like to use Firefox Relay, myself, and I’m willing to give thundermail a chance.

    Used to think I’d go full Proton eventually, but leaning more towards a diverse set of service providers, nowadays. It’s also my hope that these services allow Mozilla to depend less on companies like Google, and more on the users they ought to serve, which would be healthier for the org and better for users.






  • mke@programming.devtoTechnology@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 month ago

    Might be nicer if they just didn’t care.

    Check the comment section for the video version of this article by Niccolò, or the comment section of the post on r/browsers, or the replies whenever these issues are mentioned on Twitter, and so on, and you’ll find a bunch of brave people saying stuff like:

    you unintentionally just made me like brave over firefox. now i can switch to a chromium based browser and not even feel bad about it

    Yes i am installing Brave after this advertisment!

    Thanks to this video I deleted Brave then redownloaded it

    These were taken directly from the video. They’re on the mild side. Throw in also some “stop inserting politics (other than mine) into tech” comments, and a few homophobes not even trying to hide it. Rather than not caring, many of them like it a lot, especially the right-wing politics.

    I don’t think every Brave user is a cunt, but fucking hell, are loud cunts seemingly attracted to Brave.

    To folks bothered by this: know that the lead developer of Ladybird is a big fan of Brendan Eich.



  • No need to apologize, I’ll take a late reply over nothing any day. I’m not the fastest replier, myself. That said, I’m sorry, but isn’t that the guy that calls everyone stupid, delusional, and entitled when people (often) point out his mistakes?

    I honestly appreciate the comment from a Firefox dev, believing in good faith that it’s truthful—such insights are often hidden, strewn over comments, old IRC messages, etc.—but I’m definitely wary of taking anything that creator says at face-value. Tech-influencers may have been a mistake.

    …Well, I’ll give it a shot anyway, since you say there’s value in it. Thank you.





  • Thats part of why I try really hard not to let perfect be the enemy of good.

    That’s fair, I hope I didn’t come across as attacking usage of “imperfect” solutions. It’s definitely not my goal, I’m in the “try to use the least bad thing” camp.

    Thank you for taking the time to acknowledge and engage with that context. I spend too much time on the internet and fully understand it’s unsustainable for most—it’s not doing me good, either—so I’m glad I get to share relevant content I’ve accumulated from time to time.