For me, it was politics that sank Reddit. I was banned from a half dozen news forums for criticism of the IDF in Gaza at the beginning of what most people now acknowledge to be an ethnic cleansing. I reported every account calling for murder and genocide of Palestinians, which is against the Reddit TOS. They permanently banned me for “report abuse” for doing their jobs for them. They have obviously shown that there’s no freedom of speech, even when you follow the rules, if it goes against the feelings of the administration and the unelected moderators. Fiefdoms ruled by angry internet trolls shouldn’t get an IPO.

I’ve never used Mastodon, but from what I’ve heard it’s an entirely different ballgame where you basically need to go where the people are. e.g. artists seeking commission work need more rather than less people, and if you want to follow a particular someone, you go to where they are not the other way around.

And if their servers have anywhere close to the level of technical glitches that we do here on Lemmy… well it is quite off-putting, especially to non technically minded people.

Probably an unpopular opinion here, but honestly I’d rather just everyone migrate to lemmy and mastodon and leave reddit and twitter broke and empty husks. A low quality federated platform is still better than a mediocre centralized one.

Every dumb move sends a wave of people over to the Lemmyverse, and some of those people stay, building on the community here

People having to get used to people is common. If they can get used to their uncle talking about how the earth is flat I’m sure they they can get used to people on Lemmy.

I don’t recommend lemmy because I don’t have conversations about social media sites with people.

Yeah, way better to stay on Facebook and Nextdoor and deal with actual literal fascists.

90% of the kind of content you’re talking about can be removed by blocking a couple of domains and a handful of users. I believe that they’ve been defederated from most of the larger instances. You will run into a lot of hot takes on lemmy but that’s not too different from reddit.

I think there’s a few reasons why they may be more prominent on lemmy, though. Communities like r/politics took a while to stabilize and had a large and active moderation team that helped remove the most extreme material, and the community itself was large enough that it was representative of a large swath of the US population. Hot takes would often get downvoted into invisibility, which frustrates people who use forums for trolling, and karma could be used to restrict posting. AFAIK those are not qualities or capabilities currently found on lemmy. I haven’t really read the docs - I prefer to just be a user here - but I have seen discussions that indicate that downvotes don’t get tracked as well as suggestions they be removed altogether.

Also, a new technology - especially one associated with sectors of the FOSS community and anti-centralization - are by their nature going to attract an initial user base that skews in certain directions. I think it was Eric Raymond who observed that hackers, politically, tend to be either socialists or libertarians with very little in between. ESR was being a bit tongue in cheek and the hacker culture back then was different than it is now - or rather computer culture as a whole has expanded so much that the old school hacker types form a much smaller percentage.

I think the most problematic part about lemmy which will ultimately limit its adoption is the chaos that comes in from having dozens of communities across dozens of instances that all cover the same topics. It makes discovery much more challenging than it is on Reddit, and it doesn’t help that many of the clients can make it challenging to identify which topics are actually the most used. One of my favorite clients keeps defaulting to ordering by a most recently created timestamp or something - I’m not really sure. It doesn’t have the support to sort or filter by number of users (although it displays the metric).

The other issue is that I end up having to remain on All rather than just my subscriptions because there’s so few users, so I end up with a ton of random anime, for instance, which I can’t effectively block because they’re all posted in new subs that crop up all the time, and I can’t block using wildcards (which would help a lot).

I do hope that between the lemmy devs and the app devs, they can address those issues.

No it does not indeed.:-|

It’s worth noting that Reddit changed too, permanently, both in terms of ease of use (not only 3rd-party apps, but also the mobile and desktop browser routes too) and in how many content creators simply left - who knows what they are even doing now (reading books, touching grass, some came here ofc). Even many niche subs over there are empty, dead, or one may consider them dying from lack of interesting content (though those people still there I expect would be resistant to admit that).

And it will be interesting to see how that changes further, the moment they get their IPO and thus can finally kill off old-Reddit, which still allows you to block ads iirc? That will drive additional content creators away. Perhaps they will come here - despite how we are not ready for that.

Anyway, the old Reddit is just flat gone, for many people, and there is no going “back”, ever, even if you wanted to, it’s not there to return to, especially after the IPO changes it still further.

Really? It was more work to find and occasionally add communities than it was to spend months-years to accumulate subs for your frontpage and block subs for all? I browse all on lemmy and find new communities that way. Or by links and referrals for newer ones.

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It lacks diversity.

I think what you really mean is that you don’t feel like you fit in here.

Or 3

Surely we now have the technology

I was told reddit has already been scraped for AI and all sorts of stuff. There is very little new value to sell.

Yeah, people don’t really care about decentralisation nor federation. People want an easy experience where everyone is

Regular people didn’t know or care wtf reddit was for quite a while also and there absolutely is a building friction between people and corporate social media. We’re in the early stages for now, but stuff like Activitypub is not going away.

Even my most alternative, vegan, communist friends agree with me when I pitch the fediverse and then flock to capitalist social media like moths anyway. It’s disheartening.

Reddit’s been running ads for a while and has never turned a profit

Man, and it works great. It is waaaaay more common to find good answers to a question from a bunch of randoms on the Internet than trying to get an actual answer from a random website. Sometimes you find bs but you can usually quite quickly filter it out, and it gives a good basis from which to then continue to search on the topic.

I’m trying out Kagi a little bit, and it has a federation search mode of some kind. I tried it for a search and it gave me results from Lemmy.

I don’t know yet how Kagi compares to Google in terms of results quality, I barely used it so far. It’s pretty expensive though.

To me it’s a sign of how out of whack the stock market is right now. Lemmy created the Reddit experience at a fraction of the cost. Yet Reddit spends millions a year doing it.

Imagine reddit causing The Great Depression 2.

Some huge validation. It’s not profitability. It’s does it make sense. Many companies forgo profit for growth. That’s common. Wework never made sense at its valuation to me.

Same with Resdit. What is reddits path to profitability ? What value does it create? With their admins and mods being dipshits. It’s a liability to a company and not an asset. I would never buy from a company advertising on Reddit.

It has no profit, no path to profit and most the users are bots. If advertisers paid attention, they’d realize it’s with next to nothing

And then everyone clapped

Nonstop “this”

Thanks for the gold

I asked Bard whether they could make a bastardization of rogersimon10 post and it made this:

Ah, the 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost. A pocket rocket some called it, a ticking time bomb I preferred. Owned one myself, sunshine yellow with a dent shaped like a screaming Muppet (courtesy of a rogue shopping cart). Let me tell you, that car was less a vehicle and more a high-octane game of Russian roulette with pistons.

Every morning was a gamble. Would she purr to life like a hungover kitten, or unleash a symphony of coughs, bangs, and the ominous "Check Engine" light disco? One day, the radio spontaneously switched to polka, which, let's be honest, is only two steps away from a thermonuclear detonation in a Fiesta's internal combustion fiesta.

Speaking of fiestas, the fuel gauge was as reliable as a politician's promise. One minute it was brimming, the next it was flashing "Bone Dry, Mate," even if I'd just filled it. Learned to carry a jerrycan like a Prohibition-era bootlegger, never knowing when the engine's thirst would strike.

But oh, the things that little lemon could do! On a good day, that turbocharged engine was like a caffeinated hummingbird on steroids. Weaving through traffic, leaving Audis in the dust (until their turbos spooled up, of course). Handling? Razor sharp, unless you hit a pebble, then it was suddenly a drunken ballerina on roller skates.

Comfort? Ha! The seats were about as plush as a park bench, and the suspension was tuned for "Feel Every Pebble in the County." But hey, it kept you awake, which was essential considering the constant fear of spontaneous combustion.

In the end, I sold the Fiesta to a circus clown for a fistful of juggling pins and a lifetime supply of those tiny, uncomfortable hats. He seemed thrilled, probably because the polka radio was a bonus feature for him.

So, would I recommend a 2012 Fiesta EcoBoost? Only if you enjoy existential dread, questionable fuel efficiency, and the thrill of living life on the edge (of a breakdown). Otherwise, stick to something safer, like a heavily sedated hamster. You'll thank me later.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with a tow truck and a very suspicious mechanic who keeps asking about "jumper cables." Wish me luck.

P.S. Don't forget the jumper cables. Seriously. You'll thank me later.

Scraped data isn’t legal to resell, scraping isn’t even legal in the first place.

Just because you can scrape the data doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.

Companies like MS, Google, OpenAI, FB they make money by selling the usage of their LLM services to other companies who then they use that service to make their own products.

If it came to light that MS/Google/OAI/FB were using illegal training data for their LLMs, it would get all those other companies hit in the crossfire.

So these companies have to do a shit tonne of diligence to assure their investors and clients that their LLMs are purely trained on legally obtained data and are safe to use.

And you know what is a super easy way to assure them of that?

If they literally own the original data themselves

Exactly. Why is this being upvoted?

They just started charging for API usage so isn’t it already not open?

Not legally / free.

And yes, that very very much matters if you intend to actually sell the service to companies that they themselves dont want to get hit in the crossfire of potential lawsuits for building their products on top of stolen info.

So if you can own the data itself (via buying reddit), you now have an ENORMOUS quantity of prime training data that you’re investors and potential customers know is legally clean, because you literally own it.

I am looking forward to the hilarity of it for a while though.

“Cooking bot, i have found this cucumber i need to use before it gets bad. What can i do with it?”

“Shove it up your rectum”

Could lead to a lot of interesting lawsuits and let a lot of MBA bros look rather stupid.

Most LLMs have tonnes of NSFW data in their training.

Typically, if this wants to be blocked, a secondary RAG or LORA is run overtop to act as a filtering mechanism to catch, block, and regenerate explicit responses.

Furthermore, output allowed lexicon is a whole thing.

Unfiltered LLMs without these layers added on are actually quite explicit and very much capable of generating extremely NSFW output by default.

Me? Never. Idk how to even turn on my Mac.

Short selling, Wallstreet thing for making money when the stock. It kinda works like borrowing a stock and immediately selling it, then we it’s time to return the stock you borrowed you buy a replacement and if the price has gone down you keep the profit.

shorting means to bet against a stock. instead of buying a stock and waiting for it to grow over a long period and selling it for more money (long position), you borrow the stock from somebody, sell it, then buy it back (for a lower price) after a short amount of time to give back to whom you borrowed it from. (short position). If the stock price rapidly drops in that time, you gain money.

If this sounds like a perversion of what investing was supposed to be, yeah welcome to wall street

I love how xvideos comes before x/shitter 😁

Reddit is niche when it comes to social media. It caters to a particular group of people and has its own style of both content and engagement, just like Facebook or Tiktok have their own styles. I would argue reddit is, in some ways, more like an old school forum with a fresh coat of paint. It requires more effort from the user to engage with than some other social media platforms. The content can be a lot “heavier” and it’s not centered around people and/or personalities. To be clear thats something I liked about Reddit but I don’t think it really resonates as much with the average user.

Site visits are just one metric and, while it’s an interesting metric, it doesn’t say much without a lot more context. OK, so a lot of people end up visiting Reddit. Why? Is it intentional? Is it because every third Google result is a reddit post? If so, is it driving further engagement? If not, then that benchmark is worth little. If it is driving further engagement, then something else is wrong.

What’s Reddit?

Only if their DMM enables options. There are many stocks without options. In that case, the only alternative would be to borrow shares from your broker and sell those shares instead. You’d then have an actual short position that could be recalled by the lender.

Either ways, I’d probably not touch it. I wouldn’t want the theta burn or the risk of getting recalled while price actions tries to figure out a direction.

Well I guess I fully set myself up for that one lol

Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?