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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • I mean, keeping them local is easy - if anything much easier. I like the idea of summoning them, maybe a mod summoning and banishing them to have them watch a community

    And bots shouldn’t be acting like humans, they should be doing things only they could or should do. Like haiku bot, n-word bot, things like tallying votes for AITA, or even tracking nominations and building best of communities

    They were misused on Reddit, but we can do more with them here. Probably starting a goodbot that messages admins so they can stay ahead of the inevitable bot explosion



  • That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

    Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

    Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”


  • As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

    So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

    100s means you asked for metadata

    200s mean it went ok

    300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

    400s mean you messed up

    500s mean I messed up

    So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

    418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot



  • I like karma - gamification is fun, humans like watching number go up

    I think the answer is to localize it. Maybe community/server based, maybe make it bleed off with time, maybe do all of these and use statistics to come up with a way to make the metric useful somehow

    What we don’t need is karma done badly, and there’s a lot of far more important things to worry about first - I think we should put it way on the back burner and wait for an elegant proposal for how to handle it






  • Hahahaha…he didn’t start Tesla or spaceX

    He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as “co-founders” and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

    There’s speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

    Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I’d still be singing his praises… Except he hasn’t.

    He’s not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

    Every time he’s tried to start something, it failed - he can’t build a team to save his life.

    He’s good at hype and having money, I used to say “he’s a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up… That’s not the worst thing to be”.

    Now? He’s convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They’re driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

    I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could’ve done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn’t have done it from scratch


  • Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

    The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

    But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

    Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

    When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work


  • My theory is he’s heard Musk brag about how he’s made Twitter profitable, and only lost bots and scammers - the users and advertisers all came crawling back (without releasing numbers)

    No way that’s true, but every owner of social media seems to have paid attention. They want to believe it - there’s growing pressure to turn a profit now, so when someone tells you “the users might get mad, but they’ll come crawling back if you stand firm” they pay attention

    It’s pretty easy to convince someone of something so convenient


  • I was using wefwef, it looks nice but it’s slow and has awkward UX. Every time I want to reply or vote, I have to take a second to think about which way to swipe

    I think you’re into something about not complete or not good - I was hoping to be one of the firsts, but building a solid foundation takes time - I could’ve gotten something out there a week ago, but I’ve got big plans - I want to build discovery and sorting into the app, I want to be able to pull from multiple servers at once, and I want users new to Lemmy to have their hands held as they pick a server. And obviously, it has to feel responsive

    To do that I had to build a data store and coax high performance libraries to play nice. I was pulling posts and had the account switching working on day 1, but I didn’t even start on posting until a couple days ago - and only after I made drafts that would reload when you go back

    It’s easy to build something rough, fast, or inefficient Building something polished means working on the foundations, building it up, and doing and redoing things as you consider what feels “right”

    Give Flemmy a shot in a few days if you’re on Android (more like a couple weeks on iphone). It’s still early days and there will be bugs and missing features, but, now that the groundwork is solid, it’s moving fast


  • Totally agree - when the server was quiet and empty it was one thing, but the server isn’t quiet or empty anymore.

    It’s annoying seeing memes reposted by bots (people can do that just fine all on their own), but I’ve seen stuff like AITA threads - the OP isn’t even here to read it… Is the idea to judge people behind their backs?

    I found it extra upsetting because I’m hoping the Lemmy version will be more like AITA using to be - it turned from “who is the problem here” to “did you have the right to do this”



  • On the plus side, I’m about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.

    Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track

    The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I’m terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I’ve fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa… That should count for something, right?