Excrubulent

I have noticed that a lot of the most irritating and vocal reactionaries come from those two instances, and it's not improving much. It makes sense - this is an alternative to reddit and the people most likely to leave reddit will include a large number of people who get banned a lot.

If they're reactionaries, they're not going to have many instances that are for them specifically - because those instances get defedded - so they will tend to go for the open instances. So those instances get a lot of the worst people.

And if their goal is growth at the expense of quality, then they won't fix it. They'll just get worse. The reasons beehaw defederated haven't changed.

When people say things like this, I wonder if they understand how impossible it is. The King isn't just a powerful man. He is a divine being.

I mean money is just as made up as the divine right of kings, and it will end one day.

To be fair though, "The website doesn't remember my settings because I don't let it," isn't really a problem the website can solve.

I just had a thought that I'd like to see a plugin that independently remembers whichever cookie-based settings you want it to on a per-site basis and then re-inserts those settings into fresh cookies whenever you visit using some sort of search & replace or markup interpeter. Basically a way to maintain personal control over what data cookies can hold.

People won't usually go to that effort just to troll when there are open instances available, and anyone with closed sign up will be quicker to ban someone who turns out to have lied about the kind of person they are, rather than these giant open instances that don't seem to give a shit.

And yes, I know it won't '"fix Lemmy" or something lol', I never said it would. I said it was a feature I would like to see.

Right well the only issue with world in that case is that other instances defed from it, so you do have admins telling you what you're not allowed to see, but you're unaware of it because you're cut off from them.

Like I said, I tend to attract that sort of person just by saying things they don't like and I've noticed a pattern. Some other instances have noticed that pattern too which is why they defedded.

The others gave you a decent rundown.

I'm certainly not meaning to imply that you did anything wrong signing up with .world, it's just somethjng to be aware of. This is actually the first time I've made this suggestion, I honestly don't know how most people feel about this, so actually maybe it was a bit much to dump on a newcomer. If so I apologise.

One thing I forgot about was that being on .world means you do miss out on a lot of piracy related stuff if you're into that.

Also though, you can read about a given instance and its policies and values when you visit it. That often says a lot about the kinds of people you'll meet there.

Welcome! Genuine advice for a newcomer: look around, figure out what instances you like, and shift away from lemmy.world to an instance that requires a sign-up request and which comports with your values. There is an account migration feature to make this as easy as possible.

It's different to what people are used to, but in my experience a huge number of the worst people migrating from reddit went straight to one of the open instances. A lot of them were banned over there for quite legitimate reasons.

They know that they can't operate their own asshole instances for long because they'll get defederated, and they don't want to deal with being known to an admin who has actual principles, so open sign up is their thing, and those instances are filling up with them.

Honestly I would like to see a feature that flags if a user's instance has open sign up.

It's getting to the point that if someone is still on an open instance, they're a little sus to me. It's easier to trust people who come from instances whose policies I agree with.

Sure, but then that's an even worse enshittification if they do make it random.

The mandatory wait-time will stop people from seeking through videos organically. Yet another thing that makes it worse for everyone.

And even then, it should still be possible to detect which frames are part of the original video and which are not, either by detecting original video frames, or building a database of ads and detecting them within videos.

The fact that lots of people still use reddit is just due to inertia. Platforms don't die immediately overnight. Digg still exists. It still calls itself "The homepage of the internet." The process of transitioning to a federated internet is going to take many years.

Reddit is still dying however. There's been a marked drop in the quality of posts over there, and they're harder to access, now they're doing an exclusivity thing with google which is also enshittifying massively. That is making it less and less appealling over time. It won't last forever as a culturally relevant site.

There will have to be designated points where midroll ads can happen, just like the current system has, so the ads aren't inserted mid-sentence or destroy an important sequence in the video. Nobody would accept it otherwise.

It's a matter of detecting those points, mapping them to specific frames in the video, then automatically detecting when an ad is inserted on that basis.

It's slightly harder to do, but not impossible.

Dark patterns work, they have the data.

See, the field of UI/UX design is very concerned with how to make the actions a user wants easier, how to streamline common actions and clearly communicate what each item does. To that end they've studied how apps get used with user interaction data. You can track with statistics whether cartain actions get taken more or less often with each change, and it's very clear that the more numerous & obscure the steps are in between a user and a task, the fewer users will complete it.

Of course this doesn't tell you what a user wants, only what they do. To understand what they want you need to couple this process with user reports and complaints to see where the pain points are. The UI has to balance how many steps an action takes with how cluttered the interface is. Some actions must be prioritised.

However, a company doesn't need data to know what it wants users to do, and it's a very simple step to take all this data and understanding and flip it on its head, to stop users doing what they want, and on average it makes a difference. It might not stop you, but it might stop your grandparents, or Dave from accounting. That's the problem.

So the short answer is, they hope to reduce adoption of alternative app sources.

I know the EU is taking steps to make this sort of thing illegal, but it's difficult to prove. I also got a letter from a consumer advocacy board in my country warning about dark patterns, so it seems like attention is starting to build on this issue.

I would expect somewhat of a struggle to survive even in a well-run Mars colony, but otherwise I agree in general.

And I don't think we even need to look at Musk's personal history, just any knowledge of what capitalists have done any time they've had access to a captive workforce. It's pretty clear they wouldn't be pioneers, they'd be prisoners.