That’s why kbin should self-upvote by default. If only Michael Scotts are upvoting their own comments, then the Michael Scotts have an inherent advantage in comment visibility.
We’re going to hear more from the Michael Scotts and less from the humble Pams.
Thanks for making this. I’ve been reading it a ton during my “break” from reddit.
One thing I noticed is that multi-part replies aren’t captured by the archive. Here’s an example with part 2 of a comment missing: https://ask-historians-archive.netlify.app/posts/zpjnpi.html
Anything that can be done about that, such as detecting comment chains where a person replies to their own comment?
Other than that, this is really a superior way to browse askhistorians. There are no moderator comments to skip over, and no threads with 30+ replies that are just a sea of [deleted].
Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?
I’d expect them to be… I don’t know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn’t finding it.
There have always been a lot of wingnuts in the U.S., but at one time you could assume that if someone reached a position of power in the military or government, they probably weren’t completely insane.
That time has passed.
I’m not surprised that desperate politicians are still going to this well, but I’m pleased to see the media no longer taking the bait. You can practically hear this journalist’s eyes rolling. “This shit again?”
Yeah, if I’d been given a chance to buy Twitch in its first year for $100, I would have said no. I play a lot of video games but watching video game streaming for fun is beyond my comprehension. It was one of my first “No, it’s the children who are wrong” moments.
Probably imported, but that doesn’t make them less real. The ease of transferring accounts will be a major advantage for this platform.
To what end? This was embarrassing for everyone involved.
Yeah, I wish people would stop spreading this lie, especially when the truth is no better: As reddit’s admins, spez and the others explicitly oversaw, tolerated and defended r/jailbait and every subreddit like it on the site, for a period of multiple years.
This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit’s downfall I’ve read.
There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.
Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit “dying” in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don’t have to talk to him in person.
And that’s a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it’s the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.
It’s easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit’s chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.
I don’t understand the timeline. It’s been reported elsewhere that the tourism company didn’t report the submarine’s disappearance for eight hours. This article says “The Navy began listening for the Titan almost as soon as the sub lost communications.”
Did the crew sit there trapped for eight+ hours and then the sub imploded? I thought any hull failure would happen a lot faster than that.
Or is this article confused? It would make sense that the navy is always listening, and deduced what they’d heard after they learned of the disappearance.
I had the same visceral reaction to this law as most old-school internet dwellers, but I’ve changed my tune. My view now:
Yes, it’s ridiculous to charge someone money for linking to your content, but it’s less ridiculous than the status quo.
We’re at a point where foreign corporations are extracting most of the profit from local journalism simply by hosting links to the content, while the people who actually produce that content at considerable expense are going broke. This situation is the result of those foreign corporations building a virtual monopoly on news by out-competing / crowding out all the old places we were exposed to headlines: from newsstands to flipping through the channels to media homepages to RSS feeds.
And sure, hosting links to those news stories is mutually beneficial, except that almost no one clicks the links. The headline, teaser and photo are scraped and displayed on the third party app, and that’s all anyone cares to look at. We’re all to blame for not clicking, but those same tech companies are especially to blame for fostering this culture of five-second attention spans.
This law will probably not be effective in the short term, and might even backfire due to Facebook’s content blackout. It’s easy for them to give the middle finger to small markets like Australia and Canada.
But major players like California are considering similar laws, and you can bet Facebook will suddenly find they can pay content producers when the alternative is losing the world’s fifth largest economy.
Agreed, and the fact that the hateful parent comment is still sitting at the top of the thread also makes me concerned for kbin’s ranking algorithm.
At the moment it has 28 “upvotes” and 51 “downvotes,” which on reddit would have it buried and hidden at the bottom. Here it’s remained the top comment since the article was posted.
Possibly because it has three “boosts”? I don’t understand the difference between boosts and votes. But this site is going to have to do something about it, because normal people are going to run from this place if this kind of sociopathic content is elevated here.
I’ve seen that number floated around and am also skeptical. But if it’s accurate, Reddit should just… do it. Full control of their site of hundreds of millions of users for the payroll of a medium sized business? They’d be stupid not to.
And honestly, I wouldn’t even be mad. Paying their mods would effectively pop the balloon of my moral outrage.
You want to deny your employees the tools they need to do their jobs? Fine, it’s your productivity that will suffer, no one else’s. You want to rule the site with an iron fist? At least you’re not being huge hypocrites and pretending it’s community-run.
They were actually told to get bent but not fired, which is even funnier. Imagine insulting and belittling a key department in your company but letting them continue to run things.
Reddit was not going to change its mind.
Honestly, I thought they might. Not to cancel the API fees entirely like some wanted, but to reach a compromise with developers that would increase Reddit’s revenue and let the apps stay in business.
But it’s become clear since then that killing the third party apps isn’t an accident or side effect, but the explicit intention of the API changes. Now I can’t see Reddit compromising as long as spez is in charge.
I still have a dim hope it could happen. The protests aren’t over and Reddit is feeling it.
When we make comments, we start with zero upvotes instead of the one pity self-upvote on reddit. I notice you can upvote your own comments though. Does this do anything?
Is there a way to go directly from the feed to a submitted link? It’s probably obvious, but anywhere I click on a submission seems to take me to the comments page instead of the external link.
I get where they’re coming from, kind of. If they’re going to make another move in the future, they need to still be moderators of the subreddit or no one will pay attention.
But they need to realize that 99.9% of people will only hear about their actions, not their reasons. And their action has been to surrender to the admins’ demands and return to normal operations. They’ve contributed to the growing narrative that the protest has failed, which puts more pressure on the remaining holdouts to fold.
A couple news stories of moderators of prominent subreddits being forcibly removed by reddit would have been a thousand times more effective than these vague promises of future actions that might never happen.
If you’re looking for some logic in this mess, it’s that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.
So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we’re forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we’ve stuck to old habits.
This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we’d only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.
Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it’s just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)