Yeah. I kinda get it. It is a red flag and an obvious and agreeable answer. But oh jeeze it’s so boring when every question even remotely along the same lines gets the same replies. I know there’s always gonna be some people who are seeing it for the first time and that’s okay, but there’s kinda like a race to get to post that reply that will always get upvoted a ton even if it’s not original or interesting.

One thing that’s kinda depressing is how many Reddit threads would have some quippy pun as the top comment, then a few comments down might be some super insightful, interesting, and original comment. But it’s not as easily digestible as a one line pun, so it isn’t considered the best.

The example you give is also a big concern with how modern AI is very susceptible to leading questions. It’s very easy to get the answer you want by leading it on. That makes it a potential misinformation machine.

Adversarial testing can help reduce this, but it’s an uphill battle to train an AI faster than people get mislead by it.

though I don’t doubt they would just rely on web scrapers without it.

They absolutely can. Bots have been around for decades even for sites that don’t offer an API. There’s plenty of libraries meant for programmatically interacting with webpages. It’s not much harder and mostly it’s just very annoying because it’s fragile and can be easily caught by honeypots, which makes it a bad approach for legitimate users who don’t want to risk a ban.

Plus, only one person actually has to create and maintain a library that utilizes scraping. Every other bot owner can just use that library to make it easier.

So basically removing API access is just a slight barrier for malicious bots but a major barrier for any legitimate usage.

You’re phrasing this as if it’s something great about the fediverse, but centralized sites can just ban the magazine-equivalent directly (since they only have what we’d call local magazines). In fact, the fediverse may be worse. What’s stopping bad faith actors from constantly creating new servers pushing bad content? Centralized sites can generally do more to control who can use them with things like captchas, but federation can’t have such measures.

Yeah, I recall some subs I’m in explicitly said they’d blackout for two days, then reopen and ask users what they want to do, which is an extremely reasonable approach.

I plan to check in tomorrow for exactly that reason and everyone else here should, too. If the people who agree with the blackout don’t go back tomorrow to announce their support for an indefinite blackout, it shifts the ratio of remaining people in favour of ending the blackout.

And even for those who don’t intend to return to reddit, the blackout is a good thing because it will drive further people to sites like this. We need content creators. I don’t think we’ve hit critical mass yet. And the front page feels very dominated by news about reddit, which does not have long term potential. This site cannot be just a place to complain about reddit.

The traffic you refer to only costs reddit money and doesn’t directly make reddit money.

The real question is how much indirect money it makes. The nature of social media is that only a tiny number of users actually make content and you need that content for the other users to stick around. I think third party apps users are disproportionately the heavier users that bring this indirect value.

Plus, since reddit makes money from ads, the opinions of advertisers matters. If reddit’s brand is tainted, that makes them less appealing to advertisers and that means less money. I think it’s in reddit’s best interest to be a cherished site that people like.

Honestly I think it’s weird that they don’t know how reddit works. Surely advertising experts need to know how the platform they’re advertising works? Otherwise reddit can shill whatever bullshit they want at the advertiser’s expense.

I don’t get that. Cyberpunk is by no means perfect. But how is it not a complete game? I put in a ton of hours and thoroughly enjoyed it. Are you saying that because the AI was bad, it’s incomplete? Cause very, very few games are complete if that’s the benchmark we use.

It got over hyped, but capital G gamers did what they do best and blew it out of proportion as if someone kicked their baby.

Note: I played on PC several months after launch. Maybe it was incomplete when it came out, but it sure as hell ain’t now.

What I’m most happy about is that the Fediverse so far seems to be mostly actually pretty good people (though I’ve been largely chilling in kbin since the blackout started – it only just turned on federation). Most past attempts to abandon reddit only saw the most toxic, horrible people leave. Sites like Voat were never an option because the users were awful. It’s nice that so far, I haven’t really seen any of that. In fact, it feels the opposite, with the people who left reddit being disproportionately great people, with the toxic people being more likely to stay on reddit.

I wonder if it’ll last? I hope so. I wanted to leave reddit in the past but never felt like there was anywhere comparable to go that wasn’t shit.

Do you have the link on hand? I’ll pour one out too.