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 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?

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.

• Time to first response
• Resolution time
• Customer support costs

It's key to note that customer satisfaction with response is not among the metrics the CEO is highlighting. It seems that the role of customer support is increasingly to frustrate customers away from pursuing issues, rather than reaching a mutually-satisfying resolution. I consider most customer support chatbots as a tactic towards that: they're not going to offer any significant assistance and exist simply to waste my time, so of course the imaginary "time to resolution" is going to be minimal. If they're going to make it a hassle then I'll just open up a credit card dispute.

For reference, that's 31.5% of all House Republicans. Another way to see it is that 68.5% of House Republicans, which are generally the most extreme breed of Republican, are supportive of US military aid to Ukraine. I'm pleasantly surprised to find support for Ukraine remaining that high.

I'm just grateful to see that just when folks were beginning to doubt if Lemmy could actually serve as a Reddit alternative, we've been able to prove that we're equally if not more adept at insular slapfighting over petty bullshit and assuming the worst about others' intentions.

Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.

ok

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; “only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy,” 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes.

Having trouble reconciling why these polls are always overwhelmingly in favor of continuing protests when users are apparently opposed to them. Craziest thing.

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'm not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don't have control over them, friendo.

You can't just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there's no overcoming business decisions.

Thank you for posting this. I was beginning to become concerned that I'd need to visit Reddit for my fill of disingenuous whataboutism, but this gives me hope that we can cultivate a culture of bad-faith posting right here in the fediverse.

I see we've unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I'm disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

• Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
• The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

It's reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they're cowardly acquiescing when it's not our neck in the noose.

That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

• I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the "main" instance.
• Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I'll sign up there and check it out.
• Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
• Oh hey, now I'm probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this behavior is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn't work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:

Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn't the standard way you're thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of "cached" listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that's stored permanently and kept up to date individually.

For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you'd have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:

Deimos's comments by new: 948, 238, 153
Deimos's comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
Deimos's comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the "new" list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.

One of the problems with this system (which is probably what's causing @phedre's issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets "pushed off the end". The comment still exists, but you won't be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it's no longer in that listing.

Deleting comments also doesn't cause previously "pushed off" ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.

And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.

All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.

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.

The other significant factor is that even their recently-slashed valuation was based on some degree of projected user growth. If you're trying to IPO and your growth has flattened, it's bad bad news. If your engagement numbers are actively moving backwards, that's catastrophic.

Looking at posts per minute seems like a great way to judge the effect though. I anticipate Reddit, Inc. will attempt to downplay the effect by focusing on numbers that take engagement out of the picture, like Monthly Average Users. If you touch the site once in the month, even by absent-mindedly clicking on a Google result, you'd get counted in that for June. And they wouldn't report the July numbers until August because, golly it's an incomplete month. And by then, their hope is that the world will have moved on.

Internally, I'm sure there aware of the impact. But externally, I believe they'll cherrypick favorable metrics to try and control the narrative for the investing & advertising communities.

This is my issue with the article.

Headline: Here's what we know about EG.5 so far

Body: Apparently not much. We uhh, know the name of it? Severity, how contagious it may be, symptoms, breakthrough rate...like umm, anything??

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.

OP may come across a little alarmist, but it's really easy for online communities to become Nazi bars if the admins aren't carefully weeding out the ne'er-do-wells. Especially in places with open signups. Taking a hands-off approach and simply hoping that everyone is going to be a mature adult and behave themselves is effectively voting to surrender the site to assholes.

And yeah, they follow "the rules", and free speech and all that, until they don't. The thing to keep in mind is that these are not folks who, as a community, are interested in engaging in good-faith discussion. They are looking for a platform to spread disinformation and troll the libz, and any platform that facilitates it is also complicit.

They're moving to a paid API as a prank.

I'm surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I've curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.

I suspect they've fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.

I'm starting to come around to the idea that kbin/Lemmy doesn't need to experience massive amounts of user growth in order to succeed, and I'm not certain that we'd even want anything approaching the userbase that Reddit has. Similar to how not every city needs to be NYC, and some people prefer living in a smaller city.

I suppose there's a happy medium between "wow this place is dead" and "the cacophony of voices makes posting here feel like shouting into the void" that we're shooting for.