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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.







  • what is it with the US always having the dumbest of the dumb?

    I would gently suggest that Reddit-style hot takes might be better suited remaining on Reddit.

    As far as the actual data goes, the Pew Research organization did a survey on attitudes toward climate change by country back in 2019. The main takeaways:

    • Yep, the US lags behind most of Europe in regards to attitudes around climate change. However the disparity is more of shades of gray rather than the dramatic binary situation you described. There are deniers in every single country listed, and even Germany reported a full 27% of their population not considering climate change a serious threat. Sweden had 30%

    • On a longitudinal level, concerns about climate change have increased everywhere, including the US. Between 2013 & 2018, the proportion of US respondents who considered climate change a major threat increased 20%.

    • Unsurprisingly, there’s a major partisan gap in the US. 83% of left-leaning respondents considered it a major threat, whereas only 27% of right-leaning ones did.


  • 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.