crowsby

Similarly, platforms that default to a massive CREATE AN ACCOUNT box centered on the screen and make you play Where’s Fucking Waldo trying to find the size 8 “Log In” hyperlink.

Man that’s sad. The AV Club was my go-to site for TV/Movie reviews for years, it’s unfortunate to see them degrade into the same kind of low-value content farm that their (former) sister site ClickHole makes fun of.

“I’m a helpful AI and automation tool,” reads the Auto News Desk’s bio. “I collect, analyze, and deliver information like high school sports scores and real estate transfers. My job is to help the newsroom deliver lots more useful information while freeing up their time to do important human-powered journalism.”

You know, it’s bad enough that they’re using these godawful services to the detriment of both writers and readers alike, but what I particularly dislike is that all these shitty LLMs are being humanized with biographies and cute little names. Like little cheery mascots celebrating the death of human-powered industries.

It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.

free as in beer yes, but not free as in the amount of time you will spend trying to install drivers for all your peripherals and then find yourself being castigated for asking for help in a GNU/Linux forum and being criticized by forum oldheads for not using the search even though you did use the search, but it only led you towards other threads which also all ended with terse messages to use the search, and then you’re directed to a 1200+ page megathread on driver issues and told to spend the next three months parsing through it repeatedly before daring to post again.

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

I agree with the author in that balancing actual work vs. meta-work like writing tickets/documentation/scoping tickets is always going to be a pain point regardless of the project management system in play. Jira can be fine in that regard, but it also gives PMs & managers an opportunity to tinker with things and “improve” workflows in the glorious name of adding value.

It reminds me of the old quote about democracy: “Jira is the worst form of project management software except for all the others”.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

I see we’ve unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I’m disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

• Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
• The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

It’s reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they’re cowardly acquiescing when it’s not our neck in the noose.

That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

• I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the “main” instance.
• Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I’ll sign up there and check it out.
• Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
• Oh hey, now I’m probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

Spam bots pursuing an audience shouldn’t be a surprising thing. Even glorious fediverse valhalla is battling with them.

The difference between the Threads & Twitter situations is that I’m inclined to extend a lot more leeway to an engineering team that’s less than two weeks into a new platform, versus one that’s been around nearly two decades and is suddenly dealing with issues because the owner decided to haphazardly fire the teams responsible for maintaining those areas.

I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

• Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
• Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
• Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
• Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.

• Time to first response
• Resolution time
• Customer support costs

It’s key to note that customer satisfaction with response is not among the metrics the CEO is highlighting. It seems that the role of customer support is increasingly to frustrate customers away from pursuing issues, rather than reaching a mutually-satisfying resolution. I consider most customer support chatbots as a tactic towards that: they’re not going to offer any significant assistance and exist simply to waste my time, so of course the imaginary “time to resolution” is going to be minimal. If they’re going to make it a hassle then I’ll just open up a credit card dispute.

You can block communities and magazines that focus on it, which should get rid of the lion’s share of Reddit-related content. It’s been a bit disappointing to see so much low-effort, choir-preaching memes and content flood in. Hopefully the Fediverse can progress to a place where the primary activities extend beyond discussing the Fediverse & Reddit.

If the goal was to extract concessions, then any actual opposition to it was nothing more than pantomime and theatre. Presumably he finagled a deal he’s happy with.

Now Hungary is a different beast, since Orban has recently been much more warm and cuddly with Putin than Turkey has, but perhaps with Turkey acceding to the arrangement they’ll play some follow-the-fascist-leader and fall in line.

Bouncing back and forth between Jerboa / Connect / kBin on mobile web right now. Who knows what it’ll be next week.

This is a fun period of extremely rapid innovation, with new Fediverse apps getting announced nearly every few days by extremely talented developers. Many of these alpha/beta apps already have a better user experience than the 1st-party Reddit app, and it should get even better from here on out.

I’m surprised at how low-value the content appears to be. My Frontpage, which I’ve curated fairly meticulously, looks like All, and All looks like a Tiktokky shit show.

I suspect they’ve fiddled with the algorithm in order to put their finger on the scale and better control the narrative, and also, a non-negligible group of original content contributors have decided to step away.

I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.

All good. The main negative has been international travel, but generally I prefer to switch to a local SIM card when travelling anyhoots.

Since a lot of the exodus was prompted by conflict, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a higher proportion of folks here who speak conflict as a first language, at least for a while.

I kind of feel like without purposeful and diligent pruning, all online communities sink down to the lowest common denominator. That’s hard to manage since a community is as much a vibe as it is conforming to a set of explicit rules. Personally I like the tildes.net code of conduct, since that’s basically a similar philosophy.

I’m not entirely sure that Steve Huffman understands how protests work. The whole point is you don’t have control over them, friendo.

You can’t just say but we made a business decision and expect people to just say welp guess we should give up, there’s no overcoming business decisions.