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.
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.
I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:
Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article
There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.
It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.
free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.
This is community-evaluated content, and downvotes are a tool used for evaluation. So I think they make sense.
That being said, I don’t believe they should be public by default. People are nuts these days, especially online, and I don’t want to catch an online stalker or some nazi sliding aggro into my DMs because I downvoted their post.
Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.
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 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:
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 can do you one better with a Tampermonkey script that will replace every reference to his name on every webpage to either “the biggest twat on the planet” or “this dipshit”, depending on which works better syntactically.
// ==UserScript==
// @name Text Replace
// @version 0.1
// @description Text Replace
// @author SiameseDream
// @include *
// @grant none
// @namespace beepboop
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
'use strict';
var replaceArry = [
[/ Elon Musk/gi,' the biggest twat on the planet'],
[/Elon Musk/gi,'The biggest twat on the planet'],
[/ Mr. Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
[/ Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
[/Mr. Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
[/Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
// etc.
];
var numTerms = replaceArry.length;
var txtWalker = document.createTreeWalker (
document.body,
NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
{ acceptNode: function (node) {
//-- Skip whitespace-only nodes
if (node.nodeValue.trim() )
return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;
return NodeFilter.FILTER_SKIP;
}
},
false
);
var txtNode = null;
while (txtNode = txtWalker.nextNode () ) {
var oldTxt = txtNode.nodeValue;
for (var J = 0; J < numTerms; J++) {
oldTxt = oldTxt.replace (replaceArry[J][0], replaceArry[J][1]);
}
txtNode.nodeValue = oldTxt;
}
})();
In practice it looks like this
Doubtlessly true, but by the same token I suspect they’re running better than ever without Elon around to “help”. Their employees certainly seem to think so.
there’s a special place in heaven for kanban lovers that’s what i always say
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.
This shit just feels like more work.
What if they miss their standup? Are the admins going to assign moderators tasks in Jira next? What if they don’t agree on the story points, should the moderators still consider themselves committed to the work this sprint?
Also, how much will the feedback from these conversations weigh in on the moderators’ quarterly performance reviews?
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:
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”.
It’s shocking to see how bad they’ve become at what used to be their core function. I mean their brand name became the verb for looking something up on the internet. Now it just returns a useless mix of advertising, blogspam, AI spam, and sometimes-useful reddit results.
I’m also not quite happy with the search experience due to them constantly moving UI components around randomly. First they started shuffling around the order of the search tabs (All, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) erratically, and now they’ve also decided to also start including what they believe may be related search terms there as well, sometimes.
I’m really curious what rank-and-file reddit employees think about Steve Huffman and this whole affair. The guy has singlehandedly taken a match to their equity and I can’t imagine that would prompt a positive response.
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.