I love these kind of unnecessarily hostile interactions that deflate almost immediately and end on a good tone. Cheers!
Quite possibly a luddite.
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 10th, 2023
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Saving the bats from dog infestation.
I guess it makes people stupid all in the same way, while they used to be stupid all in their own unique ways. The morons have organized, synchronized, and become weaponised.
Somehow I feel like they’re also dumber though - if everyone’s an idiot in their own way at least they’re original.
I mean, it’s a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.
I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.
Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.
Maybe more practically, it’s just hard to argue America wouldn’t be in a better place right now if it wasn’t for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.
I was referring more to the plot of brain-dead cable and social media algorithms fuelling the death of democracy. But you’re right, it’s probably been written many times - I’m not very knowledgeable of sci-fi, and there’s a lot of brilliant work out there. :)
The brilliant thing in Brave New World was that it didn’t at any point make it obvious that people were miserable slaves - they could leave any time they wanted, and lived a life of bliss. Still, as a reader, you end up feeling like you’d rather take the place of the savage than any of the characters living in the hypercommercial utopia. At least that’s how I felt.
Well, Fox News, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and Twitter were a fresh twist. I guess all good scifi mirrors history in one way or another, just taken to the extreme with help of technology. :)
Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.
Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.
It’s been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn’t stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.
Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That’s why it’s useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.
I think some of the issue also has to do with art style more than graphics. Realism is by far the hardest style to achieve, and it seems to be the preferred one for a lot of gamers probably because it makes them feel more adult or something. But I think a lot of games could gain a lot from striving to look good rather than realistic, settling for an art style and committing to it.
From what I’ve seen around it seems like Baldurs Gate is doing just that, and it seems to have shook up the entire industry.
Kind of! Except that nothing you post will be public the day after and it’s generally only seen by your friends anyway, making it less embarrassing in retrospect. But the sense of awkward intimacy is actually somewhat comparable to Facebook back when people had no idea how to use it.
I got talked into using it for a little while, and it’s actually nice. You get a little snippet of your friends’ lives, which can be nice especially when you’re scattered around in different places. But there’s none of the bullshit reality of Instagram - 90% of the posts is just random shit like doing the dishes, working, or not getting out of bed even though it’s past noon.
Sometimes posts make for actual conversation starters, other times you’ll get a bunch of people responding with a heart eye emoji to your picture of a laptop and a cup of coffee. It’s just refreshingly dumb. And there’s no algorithms.
There seems to also be some confused people who want to move on, but who don’t know where to go. For those of us already here it’s obvious that kbin/Lemmy is the platform of the migration, but from the outside a lot of people are still considering centralized alternatives.
Having a join-lemmy banner in the middle of r/place with no other Reddit alternatives present should more or less settle the debate on where the move is going to, in a way that speaks directly to the relevant audience (those still on Reddit).
Gradually, then suddenly.
Most users don’t make principled stands that easily. People are still on Twitter.
They’ll jump ship eventually, as the services will inevitably continue their downward spiral. As far as I’m concerned they can take their sweet time. I’d much prefer seeing the fediverse grow gradually along with its own culture rather than having a sudden influx of users act as if it’s an exact substitute for the place they are leaving behind.
I think it’s understandable that some of the people who spent a lot of time on Reddit over the years want to leave a tiny message as a final goodbye, and this is a great opportunity to do so. Kind of neat really. :)
I’d consider throwing in a pixel if I had a verified account on there.
I think there’s too much focus on spez and not enough on Reddit. He is making some bad decisions for sure, but in the end the problem with Reddit is much greater than whoever happens to be the CEO.
It’s easy to direct hate towards an individual, but I think it might not be particularly fruitful.
Writing “spez” on the face of the alien was probably a mistake if they didn’t want to get censored.
It’s funny how strong the magnetic force of watching this unfold in real time is. Not as strong as the first time, but this time around it has the added fascination of watching a train wreck unfold in slow motion. Somehow it makes it more captivating than the second round was.
Still, I’d argue the better advice would be to rather find something else to do than to watch paint dry in real time on r/place, giving Reddit traffic or not.
It’s fantastic that whoever designed this animation managed to get away with presenting Reddit as a freaking dumpster fire. You’d think someone in the higher ranks would request a change of iconography.
I’m currently experimenting with Seppo for my website, which is… not ready yet. So maybe not the greatest suggestion. But development is happening fast, and I like it for a couple of reasons.
Basic functionality such as editing and deleting posts does not work yet, so it’s absolutely not ready for primetime. But it’s a project worth following, especially for those of us with an interest in the social web.
Edit: I guess this would be more if you wanted to create a basic website yourself, and add a tool for content management to it. I read the post a bit too quickly - if you’re not interested in writing some code there are much better options to go for out there. Seppo I think is nice for those who actively want to tinker a bit. :)