crowsby

Similarly, platforms that default to a massive CREATE AN ACCOUNT box centered on the screen and make you play Where’s Fucking Waldo trying to find the size 8 “Log In” hyperlink.

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

So I do analysis on this type of data as part of my role at an online job board. Based on our data, a couple things stand out:

• Overall job volume is down about 40% year-over-year. So the market in general is a lot tighter.
• The proportion of remote roles is dropping, but slowly. A year ago about 70% of our roles were fully remote; now it’s about 60%.
• The proportion of fully in-office roles has actually remained relatively stagnant, generally floating around 15%-20% at any given time. They’re also very difficult roles to fill because A) they’re limited to actual geographies and B) they are nobody’s first choice
• Between February 2023 and now, the median # of applications we get per role has spiked sharply; particularly with remote roles. These roles unsurprisingly remain jobseekers’ first choice, and since they’re not limited by geography, tend to pull in a_much_ wider talent pool, especially since the overall number and proportion of remote roles continues to shrink.

So what I’m seeing is many of these remote roles becoming supplanted by hybrid roles, which has pros and cons. They’re still limited by the same geographic constraints as in-office roles, since you’re not going to be applying to a hybrid role across the country, after all. So you’ll see less variety of employers. The advantage is that if there is a hybrid role that looks appealing to you, that you’ll be facing a lot less competition than you would for a fully remote role.

That’s what I’ve been thinking. I can’t even recall the last time I heard of anyone I know taking a PCR covid test.

And that makes it challenging trying to manage behavior. I’ve definitely noticed a marked uptick in people I know that have gotten covid in the past couple weeks, but when I try to look at the data to validate my anecdotal experience, it’s difficult to find compared to two years ago. Oregon, for example, has wastewater monitoring, but the page used to convey the data doesn’t work on mobile and is confusing to use at best.

I would caution some patience and suspicion on this story.

• Zillow says that the sale information was a mistake and has since been removed.

• Meanwhile, this headline is sourced from a straight-up clickbait site reposting a story from a news website with a history of mixed factual reporting.

We all get the fun brain chemicals coming out when a big juicy story like this appears and validates our worldviews and we can’t wait to share and amplify it, but spreading misinformation is bad, m’kay?

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they’ve managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it’s both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

I mean I do analytics on site engagement metrics professionally, like as my job that pays me money, and based on that and past instances of r/place, I can make an educated guess that:

• They were desperate to improve July usage numbers because projections were looking shitty after the events of the past month.

• r/place has traditionally been a good way to juice engagement numbers

• They pulled a lever they knew would generate the results they needed

Is it temporary? Sure. But this buys them some time and August’s numbers are August’s problem.

Here’s are the stats from a previous instance of r/place:

Social platform Reddit re-introduced its collaborative social experiment r/Place on April 1, leading to the highest daily active users (DAUs) its mobile app has ever seen

So yeah, they’ll get the juice they need, probably, but the fact that they were compelled to even need to pull that lever says a lot, imo.

I don’t think there’s going to be a good way to know. Semrush is showing a relatively steady decline since January 2023, but I don’t trust third-party tools for that. And I doubt that Reddit would make its first-party analytic data public if it looks bad, so in that case the default move is to either cherrypick or create a metric that appears favorable, a la Elon Musk’s brand new Twitter metric of median picoseconds of verified user screen time per albatross fart or whatever.

From a qualitative standpoint, both the content and general vibe seem markedly worse than a month or two ago. It’s made it easy to stop using it as my default online platform.

But in any case, I don’t think it’s worth it to get too invested in either its success or failure.

there’s a special place in heaven for kanban lovers that’s what i always say

they were banned for not allowing LGBTQ+ content on their community.

This is false. They were banned for maintaining a policy which denies that LGBTQ+ people have a right to exist as they are.

Also, you were totally allowed to make anti-LGBTQ+ content. You were only prohibited from making anything pro- because let me tell you, if you’ve ever tried to get glitter out of an echo chamber, it is a total hassle.

Rule #8: This community does not affirm practiced LGBTQ+ lifestyles, with the exception of the ace/aroace (asexual/aromatic-asexual) lifestyle in certain contexts. However, abuse towards members of the LGBTQ+ community will not be tolerated. Pro-LGBTQ+ content is not allowed; however, sincere questions and discourse about LGTBQ+issues are permitted.

This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.

But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.

I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

HAHAHAHAHA that’s amazing.

If you haven’t seen it, their appearance on The Onion’s Under Cover series (with Oderus RIP) was amazing.

EDIT: And also Get Into My Car by Billy Ocean

Spam bots pursuing an audience shouldn’t be a surprising thing. Even glorious fediverse valhalla is battling with them.

The difference between the Threads & Twitter situations is that I’m inclined to extend a lot more leeway to an engineering team that’s less than two weeks into a new platform, versus one that’s been around nearly two decades and is suddenly dealing with issues because the owner decided to haphazardly fire the teams responsible for maintaining those areas.

I can’t see how the combination of:

• Bot detection network shutting down
• Upvotes being financially incentivized with real money
• Readily-accessible large language models

Can lead to anything other than Reddit becoming increasingly flooded with botted content. Like you mentioned, it won’t happen overnight, but it does seem inevitable.

Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.

In a similar vein, I’m not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn’t around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You’d first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today’s music apps offer.

I’d love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying “welp the algorithm” and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one’s algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won’t.

I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

• Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
• Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
• Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
• Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.