Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.
I’ll never forget the dude who said he put that exact face on his credit card, so he’d have to stare down ol’ Ben every time he wanted to waste money on shit.
That is a face that says, “Every dollar today is worth ten in the future, sir.”
Oh, yeah, that’s the new normal, I’m a bit surprised they gave you a whole 100MB to call your own.
The modern Dad pro-move for giving the kids a game console for Christmas is to sneak the box open, set it up, do all the ridiculous downloads and patches then sneak it all back into the box nice and tidy so that the kids can just open it and go on Christmas morning.
Cool it down a bit fellas, everyone on this website isn’t from the same country and doesn’t have the same alcohol rules.
Bond fund here we come, that’s as ensured as you get now, moneybags.
Honestly, I would expect spike traps, those might be deadly indefinitely
He saw them coming from a thousand years away.
Transport Fever 2, because I can ride da choo choos
It’s super chill and relaxing, you just have to ignore the rest of your empire falling into ruin
They’ll have a ton of workers who are hundreds to thousands of miles away, housed elsewhere, with kids in school, who will have to quit rather than somehow go to that office, so yeah.
It has been many, many moons
That’s a bummer, hang in there Mastodon, keep bloomscrollin
Hopefully a massive influx of Twitter jerks doesn’t kill what makes Mastodon a nice place in the first place.
Somebody once remarked that it’s funny how everyone acts like Italians all walk around being Mario Brothers but the Italians just roll with it.
It’s because some Italians were the people who invented Fascism as a formal political movement, and you know damn well how that ended up, so if going “It’s-a me, Giancarlo!” every once in a while gets the world to forget, they’ll take it.
But then this happens, and you have to start talking about spaghetti as much as possible.
Reddit has been dying for a while.
Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.
You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It’s not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.
The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you’re there, but it’s not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It’s really not a competitor. It’s just easy to steal from, because text.
Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don’t know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren’t that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It’s not a recipe for growth.
Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.
Reddit doesn’t have that far to fall, is what I’m saying. There isn’t a mass exodus, though. You’re seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.
I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site’s entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they’ve decided to take an “everyone’s replaceable” attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they’ll pay. It’ll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they’ll pay. I swear I’ll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.
I’m putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.
Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you’re really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. “Social Media Manager”, gotta be code for OF, bro.
That’s how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.
If you’re going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.
I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.
Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It’s still gonna take years for that old man to die.
Fuckin Yahoo isn’t anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.
The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don’t need us, and we’ll never know because we don’t speak the language. So it’s gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.
But don’t be too dismissive about the idea of “mass exodus”. Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren’t that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.
I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn’t worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it’s gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it’s covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone’s face, and they’re fucked.
I just don’t think that is going to make the splash you’d expect.
But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I’d keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.
“Gettin shitty”, my buddy’s personal phrase for getting drunk, probably hoisted from his dad.
A man had to go to the trenches for that line, it is no wonder that it lives on so long.
Thanks to their test performance, I’m slowly saving up for a Makita electric impact I don’t need that badly, so hopefully the quality stays up. $5 in the piggy bank every couple weeks doesn’t buy impact wrenches very fast.
Shit, my man, ever since Craftsman stopped really being Craftsman, all bets are off.
In case anyone is curious, the Lifetime Warranty on Craftsman hand tools is still in effect. You need to walk into a Lowe’s with your broken ratchet, now, but they’ll still swap you another one for free. It just hurts a little trading in your 20-year-old Craftsman ratchet, which is lighter, better built, and shows attention to detail, for a lump of Chinesium that’s just bluntly stamped also-ran stuff. Definitely a downgrade. But the warranty is still there, so that’s something.
Now, shit, who knows? My stuff is still mostly Craftsman, but stuff has been replaced with lesser brands as it fails or gets lost, it’s whatever, now, for hand tools.
I’ve heard good things about Makita, lately. Make sure you follow TorqueTestChannel on Youtube for the real man news, they’ve got a whole setup for testing power tools to see if they’re worth the price.
I think the thing that’s really stopping me from using that is that every time I get curious and go poking around to see what the fuss is, I run into some sort of paywall situation, or maybe it’s just a long queue that you need to join to get access, something like that. All I know is that you can’t just casually fire it up and take it for a spin.
Either I’m finding the wrong thing, or the people who already swear by it paid some fee or got an early access code ages ago. It also doesn’t know when it’s lying, and already got a lawyer in trouble for trying to let ChatGPT do his job, apparently it slapped together a brief, an argument before the court, that referenced a bunch of case law that didn’t actually exist.
No matter what, it’s not so casually accessible as people make it out to be, I don’t know what’s up with that.
Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.