This could easily be done with AI. For a week or so, that is.

A “reply guy” (wikipedia) is someone who responds to posts/comments in an annoying (usually smug/condescending) way, like what you think of when you think of a “redditor”. Big platforms like Reddit like reply-guys because they generate engagement (often someone telling the reply-guy to f-off) it’s also not a behavior that an algorithm can recognize, so human mods/admins are needed to curb it.

Over time, if Reply-guys are not banned they tend to make the overall ecosystem too exhausting to participate in, and (authentic, desireable) engagement declines.

I think it has potential to be better in a way Reddit can never be, but the two biggest instances do so little moderation their userbase might as well be “people banned from too many subredits”.

I assumed the killer feature of Lemmy would be “zero reply guys” but instance owners seem willing to tolerate them in the interests of faux-engagement. But the irony is this sort of “engagement” actually scares new users away.

This is a really interesting chart. A lot of N64 games were $70 and even $80 at launch which is upwards of $150 today. Just crazy.

I was just thinking the same thing. It’s rare that the bullshit from tech companies is so quickly identified packaged and labeled like that (even if we are still calling it “AI”).

I agree! Don’t run your mouth in public then complain when someone asks you how do you know the thing you’re running your mouth about is true. If in 2034 someone who has never seen snow wants more evidence than some idiot on the Internet’s feelings on the topic then asking is totally justified.

I think it’s totally reasonable to ask for a source about a historical claim if something hasn’t been true for over a decade?

EDIT: My source for this opinion is here

The average Joe or Jane have no idea about ad blocking possibilities. They think ads are just the normal price you pay for surfing the web.

Actually about a third of all users have an adblocker installed. Adblocking has been mainstream for a while, no doubt why Google finally stopped pretending they were OK with it.

What you’ve expressed is not pessimism it’s cynicism.

Dude SAME. I find it extremely hard to believe that Google would astroturf Lemmy but it really does feel like all of a sudden in the past ~month a bunch of vague or minor complaints being repeated over and over in every thread.

The difference is that Lemmy is not centralized. So it can’t really be over-populated. If an instance is poorly modded and doesn’t have that vibe you like you can find one that does. The more people using Lemmy the more options there will be, it’s the opposite of Reddit.

I quit because contributing my labor made me complicit.

I get not wanting to grow the userbase of lemmy.world which is already kinda bloated but there is basically infinite space for new instances to be added.

And unlike last time there won’t be an easy way for mods to point users towards Lemmy.

(Copied from the thread on /c/Quark’s)

I quit as the top mod of /r/StarTrek in 2021 in protest against Reddit’s platforming of vaccine disinformation subreddits. Then in 2023 during the API protest, myself and several of the remaining mods (including mods from /r/Risa and /r/DaystromInstitute) started StarTrek.website.

The consensus I’ve seen on Lemmy has been largely “we don’t need to spread the word about our open platforms because Reddit will do something stupid again and there will be another protest and Lemmy will be promoted there”. So I hope we can take this as a lesson that we can’t rely on platforms being shitty in order to switch society over to open standards. We need to do our best to make Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed good as well as known.

Those are great drives but I would not want one of those in the room where I sleep haha