Six verified Reddit employees discussing the current atmosphere at the company. Featuring "First the company needs to get rid of Steve", "It's garbage", and actively hoping to be laid off.

Quote:But first the board needs to get rid of [spez] because he's an idiot.

Quote:I'm actually jealous of all of our laid off employees. We still have to deal with a hot mess.

Reddit CEO praises Elon Musk’s cost-cutting as protests rock the platform

Quote:In an interview Thursday with NBC News, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman praised Musk’s aggressive cost-cutting and layoffs at Twitter, and said he had chatted “a handful of times” with Musk on the subject of running an internet platform. 

Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.

“Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

(06-21-2023, 09:29 PM)huckleton Wrote: i honestly think the health of any given platform can be loosely measured by how much metaposting there is

@DominicHillsun@lemmy.world Wrote:Can you guys shut up about Reddit?
I know this is on everyones minds, but talking the same shit over and over again isn't going to make new users stay on Lemmy.

This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like

Quote:One of Meta’s top executives showed employees a preview of the company’s upcoming Twitter competitor during a companywide meeting today that was watched by The Verge.

The new standalone app will be based on Instagram and integrate with ActivityPub, the decentralized social media protocol. That will theoretically allow users of the new app to take their accounts and followers with them to other apps that support ActivityPub, including Mastodon.

Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings”

Eugen Rochko, creator of Mastodon Wrote:I think it’s important to understand what [Facebook is] working on and how it fits with what we’re doing. Even if an NDA is required, knowing is better than not knowing.

Quote:Like email, XMPP was a federated protocol: multiple servers could talk together through a protocol and each user would connect to one particular server through a client. That user could then communicate with any user on any server using any client. Which is still how ActivityPub and thus the Fediverse work.

In 2006, Google talk became XMPP compatible. Of course, reality was a bit less shiny. First of all, despites collaborating to develop the XMPP standard, Google was doing its own closed implementation that nobody could review. It turns out they were not always respecting the protocol they were developing. They were not implementing everything. This forced XMPP development to be slowed down, to adapt.

And because there were far more Google talk users than "true XMPP" users, there was little room for "not caring about Google talk users". Newcomers discovering XMPP and not being Google talk users themselves had very frustrating experience because most of their contact were Google Talk users. A typical XMPP roster was mainly composed of Google Talk users with a few geeks.

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore.

Meanwhile, two years ago...

There have been many reports lately that Facebook is blocking links to https://joinmastodon.org

Quote:If you are still on Facebook, please keep spreading the word about Mastodon and the Fediverse.

If https://joinmastodon.org doesn't work, try posting a link to a reliable instance people can join. There are so many instances, Facebook cannot block all of them from being mentioned.

That Facebook are even doing this implies the Fediverse is on their radar, which is quite an achievement in itself!

(06-26-2023, 03:53 AM)brilokuloj Wrote: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

(06-27-2023, 02:01 AM)huckleton Wrote: im collecting concrete reasons like these to describe this distaste [for google]

Killed by Google

Quote:Killed by Google is the Google Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Google in the Google Cemetery.

Project: Google Be Gone

Quote:Earlier this year I was arbitrarily locked out of one of my developer accounts with no way to retrieve it, and that gave me the push I needed to switch to an alternative email provider.

Here recently, talk about two recent lawsuits against Google by the United States government, as well as my own recent discoveries about how Google identifies users through CAPTCHA and warnings from Google that I needed to DO something with my Google Drive files all encouraged me to revisit the subject and see what else I can do.

Goodbye, Google+, You'll be Missed, At Least By RPG Fans

Quote:The shutdown may have disastrous effects on the roleplaying game community and designers. While the rest of the world seemed to overlook Google+, the RPG community made the platform its home. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are games which wouldn’t have been made and success stories which would not exist without it. Now, people are mourning while scrambling to find a new place with the same vibrancy and foment, with not a small amount of freaking out about how the new, Google+-less world looks for design and sales.

The Google Plus Role-playing Blog Directory: to get an idea of just how extensive that community was

Why I gave up (on YouTube): my own story

Quote:If your video gets demonetized, they apparently plan to take the money you earned from that video OUT OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT.

Videos now cannot have ANY swears in their intro. Previously, we were allowed “the usage of moderate profanity (e.g., shit and bitch) in the first 30 seconds”.

This applies retroactively to all videos made before the policy change.

Holy shit, they’ve invented an infinite money generator! Every video that was allowed to say “shit” in the intro is now a gotcha!

YouTube's new TOS allows chargebacks against future earnings for past violations. (safereddit link)

Quote:Seems like it can only get worse; it's in a corporate decomposition stage where the product is about as good as it gets but $ growth is expected for investors. So now it's cut and restrict the product to get people to pay and add more ads.

Assigned Male at Google

Quote:unfortunately, this is (somehow) even worse than it sounds. a somewhat reasonable thing to do would be to guess people's genders probabilistically, like a weighted average of the known-gender distributions of all the videos you watch. say, "this user is 60% likely to be male, 30% likely to be female, and 10% likely to be User Specified" or whatever. still a wild thing to do, but at least it would mean the Imagined Data would still be like kinda meaningful.

youtube does not do this. it just, assigns you a gender. (it does this, of course, so it can know which gender-targeted ads to show you.) in the above example, this hypothetical user would be Assigned Male at Google, just taking whichever of the strict boxes al-Gorithm deems the most likely.

what this means is that if you're, for example, a youtuber who makes videos that appeal to an audience that's around 60% male, everyone whose gender youtube doesn't know who watches your videos (and other videos that appeal to that 60% male demographic) is Assigned Male at Google.

okkk that's all I got for right now, I'm making the forum's wysiwyg editor so mad.

I brought this one up at the dinner table last night because it shocked me that much. From Minecraft's tech lead:

Quote:So Long, and Thanks for All the Feedback (safereddit link)

As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to rule and moderation changes across many subreddits. Because of these changes, we no longer feel that Reddit is an appropriate place to post official content or refer our players to.

We want to thank you for all the feedback and discussion you've participated in in past changelog threads. You are of course welcome to post unofficial update threads going forward, and if you want to reach the team with feedback about the game, please visit our feedback site at feedback.minecraft.net or contact us on one of our official social media channels.

I can't even begin to imagine how the site is going to recover from this. Every time I think that we're going to hit the period of people acting like "OK, we can go back now", more people leave, influential people, and they move onto forums or other self-hosted platforms.

The shift to forums has been very interesting. My wife actually made the jump well before I did, back around the time that Twitter first started shitting the bed, which was when I chose to move to Tumblr instead. It took me a while to get to here, I guess because I was certain that everyone would get tired of independent living eventually, and we'd all sadly crawl our way back onto the various platforms we're addicted to ... (I've tried and failed, in the past, to get people onto this very same forum.)

I think we're finally seeing a genuine shift. I have to wonder where things will go from here.

(06-26-2023, 03:53 AM)brilokuloj Wrote: This is what Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor looks like

Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings”

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

https://merveilles.town/@zens/110615113004365373

Quote:someone just used React.js as an example of facebook “playing nice” and well.. i was able to interact with the react engineers on twitter years ago. they were quite shockingly open with the fact they intended react to be an embrace extend extinguish strategy aimed at the web as a whole, in tandem with react native.

the long term vision was to have react native, painting directly to something like webgl or webgpu, then get rid of the rest of the web platform. super surprised they admitted it.

it sounds VERY ambitious but the way i frowned after reading this. like, thinking about every single react-based large app (reddit. twitter. paypal. facebook. pinterest. adobe. discord.) and imagining what would happen if all of them disappeared from the web overnight and became landing pages that told you to go download their app. i wonder if some people would genuinely stop using web browsers as a result.

That's very interesting (and terrifying). I can mark React as the moment I started really resenting modern web development, but I always figured it was just me being a stick in the mud that people were making new technology. But ever since React it's felt like things turned into a series of "new and definitive" systems that go defunct in a week.

That thread covers the same thing, even:

Quote:they are never as helpful as they claim to be, add an overhead of complexity, create needless barriers and limitations. and then in as little as 2 years the framework is obsolete and your app stops working, unless you rewrite it again in the new version or a different framework.