Spyke

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threads is already going great 💀

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If the “hot” and “active” filters continue to work as expected and bots get reasonably moderated or blocked, I don’t even think Lemmy needs a high barrier to entry or petulance. The most important thing is to not optimize any recommendation or sorting algorithm on session duration, ads seen before closing session, and revenue per user.

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Reddit's API protest just got even more NSFW

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Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.

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Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets

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I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.

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Threads Usage Drops By Half From Initial Surge

Not really surprising. All corporate social media follows an initial trend, which steeply drops off after the first few days/weeks. Doesn’t mean Threads is doomed or anything.

Twitter wasn’t really “popular”, especially outside the US (and Japan, if I remember correctly), no matter how much so called “journalists” amplified its content. Even the most favorable estimates (which will be completely wrong, considering how many sock puppets and bots there are on any given platform), put Twitter’s MAU at a quarter of Instagrams’, which itself isn’t even the biggest social network. This speaks volumes to how interested the general population is in a text-first social network, compared to an image centric one.

Instagram’s large user base and the exclusivity/scarcity narrative, which is customary for new social networks forever (Threads was touted as so evil, it was banned in the EU! This was definitely not meant as a cautionary tale but felt very gimmicky to me) will have helped Threads acquire a lot of curious Instagram users, who quickly lost interest in a wall of uninteresting text and returned to their algorithmically presented pictures.

I believe a lot of engagement on Twitter to be completely fake, crediting it in part to bots and in part to an outrage fueling algorithm. When a lot of famous Twitter users migrated to Mastodon a few months back, the first thing they noted has been the much lower engagement, partially due to the smaller user base, but also due to much less bots. A lot of them are still looking for a new home, but cannot get rid of the dopamine hits of a “viral” twitter post and Zucc might just have the stuff for them.

Threads will stay around and probably split or assimilate the negligible small user base of Twitter in time, while truly federated platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy will have trouble on boarding (and retaining) comparable user groups, since they are missing the outrage farming algorithm and the fake engagement.

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I would have expected Meta to have learned by Elons mistakes but I was just asked if I want to subscribe for a blue tick to verify my account to make my followers feelnsafer

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Despite everyone wanting them to fail, this is inaccurate. They've sold as much Quest hardware as Microsoft sells Xboxes in the same time period, and those cost figures include hardware, and ALL their VR software, across multiple different games and apps. They did not spend that much on Horizon Worlds which is their failed second life clone.

Neither Microsoft or Facebook are making relevant money from hardware. All of those headsets (like all those xboxes) have only one purpose: selling software, which the platform owner takes a cut from.

Incidentally: from 2021 to 2022 reality labs both sold less hardware and less software, while growing their costs, probably due to research and development and preproduction for both Quest Pro - which is cancelled already - and Quest 3. Let’s wait and see, what Quest 3 is getting Facebook, but currently reality labs is failing, no matter how much I personally want them to, as well.

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I think the camera size is getting out of hand on iPhone 15 Pro (iPhone 15 leaks)

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The 14P (~200g, if I remember correctly, feels even heavier) is one of the heaviest phones I ever owned, especially compared to my 12 before it, but even compared to my Xs, which already felt heavy at the time. In the past I always agreed with statements of „just make the phone thicker“ for more battery, or to hide the bump. But with the 14P I cannot agree: just make the bump smaller an reduce weight.

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FromSoft newcomers: what advice did you get that was actually useful?

Level vigor. You level your weapon first, your character second (when in doubt: smithing stones over runes). Roll into or past enemies, not backwards in a straight line. If you die multiple times to the same enemy/group of enemies go back and take your time to grind and level with a group of enemies you can best more often than not. When you catch yourself running away from mobs regularly, you are probably under leveled. Talk to everyone multiple times (this one didn’t came naturally for me and literally wrecked the fun I had during my first run).

Specific Elden Ring tips I have given other first timers: Avoid Caelid for as long as possible (easily until after Liurnia and House Caria). Go to the weeping peninsula first, before fighting Margit.

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How did Netflix know I was gay before I did?

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Has this story ever been confirmed by Target directly? As this happened in America and her father was outraged about it, it would have been awfully convenient, to “blame” the algorithm for “discovering”, she was pregnant. It takes quite a data analyst to figure out trends before someone even knows they are pregnant. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out a pattern for someone if they know they are pregnant and are just hiding it from their dad.