This has been tried and tried again, and it never catches on. Computer interfaces that are completely detached from physical 3D space are just much more flexible and easy to use.

They also seem to think that continually spending money to do mundane things in a virtual world is not a problem for regular people who actually have to watch their spending.

If computer interaction benefited from being more ‘like reality’, then Microsoft Bob or any of the countless other attempts to create a reality- and/or 3D-based computer interface, would have caught on long ago.

Typora also supports it, it’s a great low-overhead tool overall.

• you save a lot of money. People easily forget how it all adds up.
• you save a lot of space. Cars take up a huge amount of space and are just sitting around 90+% of the time. Imagine what you could do with a garage if you didn’t own a car.
• you save a lot of time. A car needs maintenance, it needs to get cleaned, etc. All of that takes up time.
• less worries. About money, about it getting stolen or damaged, etc.
• you don’t need a driver’s license per se if you don’t own a car.
• you don’t have the sunk cost forcing you to use it. Say you buy a car and then you end up barely using it. You might feel obliged to use the car to go shopping or to go on vacation, because it would be ‘wasted’ otherwise.

A requirement to answer a message within the hour 24/7 seems very strict for a paid job, never mind a volunteer moderator doing this stuff for free.

Imagine being so douchey that, despite relying on free content and free moderation, you still whine about not being profitable being the users’ fault and then you demand from moderators that they are basically available 24/7 to take your call. This is not just a dumpster fire, this is throwing canisters of gasoline into a dumpster fire.

I was a premium subscriber, simply because I used Reddit a lot, I could financially bear it, and I generally liked how the place was run so I wanted to support them. Now I feel betrayed and my trust is violated, like when your friend borrows money off you and then never pays it back and just laughs in your face for being so naive. So I went from ‘I love Reddit’ to ‘fuck Reddit’ in about a month. Impressive achievement.

According to that logic, I’m doxxing myself every time I go to the supermarket.

In the case of Reddit, apparently yes. By which they also spit in the face of their most loyal (paying) customers.

The problem is that selling your data + targeted advertising is always going to be more lucrative than a subscription model. So even if you are willing to pay a subscription, it’s usually only a matter of time before the social media company in question changes tack. Especially if they have shareholders and/or venture capital investors breathing down their necks. If you run it like Wikipedia is run, I’m pretty sure you can operate a social media company on subscriptions/donations, but as a business model that doesn’t make sense as it is not the least effort way to make the most money.

I used to be a Reddit premium subscriber, because I used Reddit a lot and I wanted to support them. Silly me.

Early 2000s Internet is like 90s Internet but with more bandwith and CSS.

I once racked up a ~€500 phone bill by dialing into US-based BBS’es. My parents were furious.

It would be normal for ISP’s to give you some free webspace to build your own site, that’s how perfectly ordinary it was assumed to be for regular people to be having their own self-hosted sites.

We’re not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we’re going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.

There’s a place in the world for Reddit too. It’s grown so hostile the past few years, like I’ve actually had anxiety from it, and I’m a perfectly rational person.

In my experience, this depends on the subreddit. The very big/popular ones tend to be the most toxic, whereas the more niche/nerdy ones are friendlier.

In these past few days, it did surprise me how many people just expect their free content and free moderation and don’t even want to be slightly inconvenienced or show support.

I’m also seeing a lot of this, and I don’t think it’s particularly positive news for Reddit. What made Reddit cool was the quirky stuff, which initially gave it traction. The bottom-up vibe of subreddits being created and managed by the community. These days, most of the Reddit audience is just there for the meme scrolling, they just want their content. They appreciate the moderation, sure, but for them it’s just an obvious thing that happens. It’s not that kind of users who make a platform like Reddit great. Sure, Reddit can reap the benefits of the environment they built for a while to come, but who’s going to create new niche subreddits that feed into the more mainstream ones? Who will create quality original content? Who will moderate the hard-to-moderate subreddits for free, just because they care? Reddit is undervaluing its power users. If they’re not careful, they will end up with an advertising platform with no users, or just a generic meme-rehasing-mill. Maybe they don’t even care, as long as the money rolls in. I think YouTube is an interesting example of a money-driven platform that still walks the fine line of taking care of their content generators. Not always successfully, and there’s a lot to be said against building your entire revenue on YouTube, but they do acknowledge where their appeal comes from. Reddit seems to think that people will keep flocking to them no matter what.

Basically just the hastle of maintaining and hosting it. My ideal situation would be an instance with a few people, where we can share some of the burden, and perhaps cost. But maybe that has its own headaches when there is a falling out etc.

There are also other drawbacks with your own Mastodon instance in terms of discovering new people, as a lot of those tools are geared towards the server scope, and Mastodon prohibits a full index search.

I actually don’t know what the Lemmy policy is on indexing, but a way to search the entire Fediverse (or at least large parts of it) would help tremendously in popularizing it, I think. I understand why indexing would be blocked, but that seems a lot like security by obscurity to me, which I don’t think works very well.

I run my own Mastodon instance, but for Lemmy it seemed more logical to join an existing instance that aligned with my interests. I wouldn’t be adverse to abandoning my self-hosted Mastodon for a shared instance, but I would prefer a small instance run by and for people I know, rather than one of the huge ones.