OpenStars

But the anti-romance dialogues were pretty fun too… (choose one person, then the others get mad at u:-P)

Kotor also encouraged replays with all options so that you could try the variety of romance situations:-).

Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.

Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.

At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we’ll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit’s official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.

Here we are free.

Me too:-)

Edit: well, okay so not 3-8 hours every day, but it still was better to cut back.:-)

Believe it or not, that GIGANTIC, absolutely un-missable disclaimer was not there yesterday… or at least it did not show for me for whatever reason, definitely on mobile Firefox and I thought I had also looked on desktop but now could not swear to it. I cannot offer definitive proof but here’s a snapshot from Sept. 28 - not quite yesterday but long after July 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20230928153646/https://subredditstats.com/r/askreddit but still is missing that disclaimer. In any case, thank you for the note of caution: possibly results might be comparable across subs but perhaps not pre- vs. post-API changes.

a) a lot of accounts are bots, and depending on how they are implemented, a LOT of these have remained (or even were created) after the API changes - remember, it’s easy to spin up 1000s of these to each provide small traffic so as to not run up against the API limits. Overall, I suspect a ton more bots are there now, b/c the bot defense effort was suspended, b/c unlike a single bot, that one needs to look at ALL traffic (I suppose it could be re-written from scratch in a decentralized manner but… the developers did not choose to do that).

b) a lot of people who remain on Reddit, including myself, offer it WAY less traffic than before. I used to be a mod of a small sub, which I quit, so I went from checking it almost literally hourly, so at most once a day, and most days I do not even comment at all. Also, I used to browse r/all (actually, “popular”), but now I never do, instead preferring Lemmy/Kbin for that. My personal traffic dropped off a cliff just like this image shows, in fact probably a lot more so. Although I still do visit that small gaming sub, b/c while there is a version of it here, instead of like 5 posts a day we get at most 1 per week, which less than a handful interact with. So that is not an “exodus of users” so much as a (vast) reduction of interaction, which still impacts their advertising revenue and thus the continuity of Reddit as a corporate entity.

c) as people are saying, not everyone came to Lemmy/Kbin. Some went to Mastodon, others just stopped going online as much, and like myself I comment now a lot less than I used to, though I read just as much (here, not there). So just b/c the traffic did not come “here”, does not mean that it did not leave “there”. i.e., think of the shock of the event as making people regress more to lurking and not feel as comfortable interacting, especially given the lack of ability of smaller magazines (what are those called on Lemmy again?) here. Thus, even if they did not “go outside”, they still may not be interacting on Reddit.

I find it very interesting that this is reportedly one of the top subs on all of Reddit: “Comments Per Day” ranks it #1, by Subscribers or Posts Per Day it is #2, Growth (Day) and Growth (Month) are both #5, Growth (Month) and Growth (Year) are both #4, etc.

Not only that, it is by far the top sub by this “Comments Per Day” metric: it shows 15828 Comments reported in a recent 24-hr period of time, whereas the next highest sub is r/worldnews with a mere 5153 Comments Per Day, then r/AmItheAsshole and r/nfl also ~5k, then others rapidly falling further like r/NoStupidQuestions and r/AITAH each ~3k, etc.

To reiterate: this is the #1 sub over all of Reddit, with >3x more comments per day than any other sub, and like more comments than the next 3 subs all combined… and it still has fallen off a cliff, even by this same exact metric.

I do not know how reliable subredditstats.com is overall, but even if it were not so good lately, so long as all the stats are more or less evenly biased across all the subs, we should still be able to learn something from these comparisons? (please add a correction if you know of some evidence that this is not true) One caveat is that it might be harder to compare now vs. pre-API changes? But if it can be believed, the numbers fell from a peak of >100k in June 2023, to a more average ~75k, then dropped like a rock in July to ~15k and has remained hovering around that area ever since…

I do not visit popular subs on Reddit anymore, just one that has refused to migrate to Lemmy/Kbin, but this sounds entirely believable to me. If you click the links to the top posts, the very title titles of the posts and top comments to them also showcase the change: like the #2 top post to that sub is “Now that Reddit are killing 3rd party apps on July 1st what are great alternatives to Reddit?” w/ 78.1k upvotes, and has the top comment w/ 5.2k upvotes of “I might get back into reading books after over a decade.” (and other comments likewise, pointing to Reddit alternatives, and angry exclamations about the 3rd party apps going away)

In short, THIS seems to be the evidence that we have been waiting for all this time, about just how far Reddit has fallen / died off?

Although comments on Lemmy/Kbin I do not think have risen by +~50k or so per day, so I wonder where all that Reddit traffic went? Possibly as the aforementioned comment said, it went offline, basically nowhere.

Edit: I nominated this post to m/BestOf.

Most of us already have:-P

https://kbin.social/m/anothereden - a JRPG nostalgia gacha game

I mean… you are not wrong, but to put on my debate hat (for the funsies:-D) I suppose the counter-argument is that since they made it so that the ga(t)cha system is itself irrelevant (at least, in the earlier days of the game, before Power Creep became rampant), they seemed to feel like that was the way to keep the game “balanced”. It might also go over better in Japan than the more Western world where people might less like this idea of something that is unattainable. Oh, and one REALLY crucial detail is that you can straight-up exchange irl cash for any particular character that you want (well, any OLDER one, while the absolute newest ones are only available by the gambling approach that offers no such guarantees). Those sales only come every so often each year, but with them you can have your guarantee - and e.g. if you pull your desired character in the meantime, then you can select someone else, whoever you want in the list. Also iirc (some of?) the paid banners offer a “guaranteed 5-star”, though it lacks GI’s system where (eventually) it is the particular 5-star that you pulled for. There is also a second, subscription system where you pay to support the game each month and get increased basically stamina-style rewards, and you select 7 characters where you are guaranteed to get one of those.

So there is a “pity”, technically, just not available at all for F2P, and instead comes in the form of a P2W purchase opportunity.

I heard that GI was really bad, but also that was like several years ago, and it has been cleaned up significantly since then. And some banners much worse than others - particularly weapons ones iirc? - where like you get this 5-star weapon and then nobody who can use it. Ofc this is biased, listening to the stories of people who decided to leave it, rather than stay and git gud:-).

It does look gorgeous though, which is kinda weird for a mobile game imho but so long as processing power can keep up…

The only live service game I have and likely will ever allow myself to play is Another Eden, ostensibly a mobile gacha but unlike any others in that genre (and yet… not entirely if you know what I mean:-D - it is less predatory than any modern game that allows in-app purchases that I’ve ever even heard of but that aspect is not entirely absent from it). It hits the JRPG nostalgia feel for being a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and Cross, made by some of the same developers actually, and the artwork and music especially are just gorgeous.:-D

And ironically, many people complain bitterly that they want it to be more like GI, with a pity system. Never mind that the gacha can be irrelevant here as you can do everything purely with the free characters (and more effort, especially JP-style i.e. heavy grinding), the FOMO salt is real, and I see now that games are just giving the people what they want, regardless of whether that’s good for them or not. On the one hand it keeps further game development going, and people are free to spend how they please, while on the other there are horror stories of people dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars (I think even USD $ currency), while having little to show for it in the end.

Predatory is predatory, and while on the one hand I’d love to check out GI someday, on the other I just don’t think I could stand the gacha elements in it. It warps and twists EVERYTHING it touches, e.g. increasing pressure to make waifu/husbando portraits that objectify both women and men in it, and leads to content that looks visually appealing but in Another Eden at least, has not been tested and is not “fun” to play.

The funny part is that originally I had to choose between GI and AE, and I am so glad that I went the way that I did. Although probably better to avoid any such gacha at all in the future.:-|

It probably depends on the magazine… but yeah, people are still people:-).

A lot of the contributors to Reddit refuse to move to Lemmy/Kbin, and at this point I do not blame them - e.g. my notifications have not been working for over a week now, plus ~80% of the time whenever I try to upvote or boost something, it forgets who I am and I have to login again (actually it’s not a probability thing: it seems if I do something within seconds of visiting a page it always works, while after a threshold is passed then it never works). Plus on kbin.social at least I believe there are no moderation tools at all. Given how hard I’m being trolled on Reddit (b/c I did not kowtow to a hardcore cadre of power aboosers), I could only imagine how horrible the experience would be if even mods could not remove things? (or… something? easily? at all? I do not know the details) This technology just was never ready for deployment at this stage, and especially kbin.social still seems to be in the alpha software stage. Ofc, even so I am still enjoying it more than Reddit, whenever I do get to speak with an intelligent person, like now:-).

You are not the only one to think these thoughts. Check out the article linked here if you want a fascinating read - I could not put it down! Except I had to, for breakfast then work, but doing so really bugged me!:-P It was just so PERFECTLY aligned with what I had been thinking myself also, which the Reddit protests had spawned in me: in short, Reddit’s actions were evil, but it may have done us a lot of good actually… if we pay attention and learn from it all. i.e., the problem was never Reddit, but inside of us all along. Okay so Reddit is also a problem - or a whole series of them actually:-P - but also it is our natural inclination to go that “easy” route, which for-profit corporations are very much looking to exploit, but also there are free ways to reach that same end (which is not a good end).

On the flip side, it could be a Russian troll farm, and Reddit is not even aware of these efforts made on their behalf!?:-P

I dunno, it seems like it accomplishes its primary purpose well enough? Too bad for you that purpose is to deliver ads to the user to see while doomscrolling…and nothing else.:-(

Some thoughts:

If there is something you see that is missing - particularly documentation - then perhaps that is an excellent place to start? The older devs may have just been waiting for someone like you to come along and could be ecstatic to hear that you want to make that. Maybe they used/continue to work together in a company or are old friends or sth and did not need that, so you could break the project wide open, making it easier for everyone who comes after you, possibly also changing the very culture of the project and encouraging the more senior devs to write documentation as well, as they make new things or solidify an existing foundation before extending into new territory. And there are so many forms of documentation - Pre/Post conditions, listing dependencies/interactions, plus overall description of assumptions made - that even if some of that exists, the project could perhaps still benefit from adding more, especially from the perspective of a newer team member.

Do not neglect the “people” side of things - maybe try to connect to some of the more senior devs on Discord or wherever they are first? Like on the plus side they could give you pointers, tell you what you can ignore, send you links to documentation that would have been hard to find on your own, etc. Seriously: imagine spending 6 months writing documentation for an enormously-complicated aspect of the code (like a major, central class + all of its dependencies), only to see the entire thing discarded & replaced, and you find out only then that it was always intended that way from the start. (still not a deal-breaker, b/c most of that “6 months” would be you learning stuff and getting familiar with generalities, so not entirely wasted, yet not entirely productive either if you could have been told to have picked a different entry point into the project) While on the minus side, if you see that they are just flat-out idiots, then you can abandon the project now and move on - that is a thing that can happen, and it is better to know ASAP than to only really be confronted by that a year or two in.:-(

Perhaps also consider your “fit” for the specific project. If you are good at many things, but not at the specific things involved there, then there will be a greater cost for you to work in that area, and you will spend more time “learning” and less time “contributing” (plus, how much time will people be willing to devote to helping you do the former, when you have done none of the latter yet?). Ngl, depending on the number and styles of languages involved - e.g. a script that calls an optimized C++ library that then feeds data into making an SQL query that uses a REGEXP into a database that has literally zero documentation anywhere… and so on - and your prior amount of experience with each of them, could take a good several YEARS to catch up, as only a side-project. Even if your expertise could help them - e.g. if you are great at UI/UX while the senior devs are more full-stack but almost exclusively focused on the back-end side - there is still the matter of you needing a way to deliver your contributions to them, i.e. understanding the existing codebase enough to be able to modify it to implement your ideas.

I hope this helps!:-)

But not every such sub has >5 million members - this one is big.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.

MoAr TrAfFiC = w1n, or something.