• Soup@lemmy.cafe
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    2 months ago

    News flash: it’s not just ask Reddit. It’s Reddit entirely. That place is a shithole of bots.

      • Soup@lemmy.cafe
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        2 months ago

        Yeah. That or niche subreddits that just aren’t popular enough to warrant bots. Like specific game communities. But even some of the big ones are full of bots.

      • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        This for sure. It’s something severely lacking at Lemmy, without the large user base the small communities can’t sustain the way they do on Reddit. Lemmy serves best as a replacement for the biggest subs.

        • superkret@feddit.org
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          2 months ago

          I noticed I’m not even missing the small subs anymore.
          4 different meme subs about an obscure Romanian soap opera don’t improve my quality of life.

          • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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            2 months ago

            Hobby subs are the big one. If your hobby is anything other than dicking around with Linux, we probably don’t have much of a community for it, if we have one at all.

            • CandleTiger@programming.dev
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              2 months ago

              Truth. RVs and sailboats are not here. But I feel confident I’d get all the discussion I need if I wanted to install Linux on my sailboat.

              • Revan343@lemmy.ca
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                2 months ago

                Have you considered a Framework sailboat? They’re a little more expensive, but they’re designed with repairability in mind, and come with Linux pre-installed

                • ɐɥO@lemmy.ohaa.xyz
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                  2 months ago

                  Framework sailboats are overpriced garbage!!
                  You would be better off with a thinkboat x61s

          • MeatsOfRage@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Memes no, but I’ve found a lot of value in things like my hometown has a pretty active sub on Reddit which is useful for local information or subs around specific TV shows or video games bring a lot of interesting discussion or just asking questions on niche topics I’m much more likely to get an answer from a larger user base.

            • manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml
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              2 months ago

              My home town subreddit has seen at least 1 news years eve orgy organised through it, havent seen anything comparable on lemmy!

          • KingJalopy @lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            In all honesty the lack of super specific and active communities on lemmy has actually improved my quality of life. I spend much, much less time scrolling and reading shit.

            • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              It’s a valid point, but it’s kind of like saying it’s great that the restaurant you’ve started going to has such a small menu compared to the old one because you’re not eating as much.

      • trailee@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The user volume to support niche communities is the most obvious thing missing in Lemmy. But I have a darker view of the future. Picture LLM bots forging organic-looking conversations that result in a product recommendation. It looks like a genuine human conversation, but it’s actually an advertisement. Maybe it’s mixed with some human comments, but that may only add to the realism of the fraud.

        That kind of ”advertising“ could potentially command a lot of money. And it could probably eventually infect just about any text platform. Maybe Lemmy as well someday?

        You could deploy it pretty effectively in sufficiently large niche communities.

      • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Exactly. In specific communities it’s by far the best discussion platform. And I don’t go to a site first discussion second, other way around, so to reddit I go for those.

      • kratoz29@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        Yep I can confirm, I lived in my tiny reddit bubble a lot of time to care about trending shit and bots stuff.

      • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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        2 months ago

        People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.

        And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.

        There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.

        • snooggums@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote

          Well, yeah. That is what the button is for.

            • superkret@feddit.org
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              2 months ago

              It’s supposed to be for whatever the fuck you want to use it for. There’s no downvote police on lemmy.
              Personally, I upvote every reply I get and nothing else.

            • snooggums@lemmy.world
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              2 months ago

              I downvote comments that promote hateful ideologies, whether or no they were posted in bad faith. I also downvote posts that derail the conversation, whether or not I think they were posted in bad faith because it is impossible to know if someone is posting in good faith from an individual post. By the time a pattern is clear the thread is derailed.

              Context also matters, because the same post about grilled mushrooms as a substitute for grilled steaks will be posted in good faith to different posts and be a net positive or negative depending on the post. A post about grilling in general? Positive, because it adds to the topic! A post about the best cut of beef for grilling? Negative, because it derails the thread to be about not eating beef.

              Sure, people should not be downvoting non-important topics or views that they could just block instead. But a lot of people also assume bad faith when someone disagrees with them, so that isn’t good criteria either.

        • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          Yes, it’s good to realise that lemmy is just as much an echo chamber as reddit is. Same echoes, differnet voice. But don’t you dare actually having a different voice, that will not be appreciate. People want to have discussions, but only with yes men.

  • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Using this low of a contrast (dark red on dark background) is criminal. Maybe my eyes are just that bad but good lord those notes are hard to read

  • DarkKnight_@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    A lot of the site feels like it’s been overrun by bots. The more niche communities seem to still be pretty good (and I do still enjoy engaging in them). But the subs like ask Reddit, Aita and the relationships one? Yea, it all feels like bs.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      I stay away from any big subs now. The smaller stuff that tends to have 2 to 15 posts a day (like game specific subs) feel like they did before. Although I really feel a lot of those are going to discord as well.

      • DarkKnight_@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Yea same. Now that you mention that, gaming really is one of the only reasons I’m on there anymore. Destiny for example, still has a pretty active sub. But to your point, the couple discord groups I’ve joined over the past couple years are way better.

    • soapyplasm@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      If only the niche communities over here were a bit more active. For instance, I’ve been hyperfixating on Tamagotchi, but there isn’t a Tamagotchi community here yet :(

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    The worst part is that they’re all really fucking bland questions. The shit you’d see on Facebook.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Gather round, children, and let me tell you a story of the same type of mindless corporate stupidity that happened in my state, about how something successful was ruined because all they could see was at the surface level…

    When the mini-market chain AM/PM opened some stores in Baja California, they came up with a hybrid concept that also included a made-to-order fast food kitchen serving burgers, and a sizable seating area, they called this Dave’s Kitchen. It was a huge, huge hit.

    Enter 7-11 into the scene. Getting wind of this new phenomenon and armed with corporate cash from their Mexico offices in… Monterrey I think it was… they bought every AM/PM in the state and converted them to 7-11s, surely salivating at the prospect of this large client base that was supposedly built-in with their acquisition.

    So what was the first thing they did?
    They shuttered Dave’s Kitchen. Poof… gone!
    They got rid of the soda machine, the ice cream machine… instead of assimilating the business model of what they had bought, they got rid of everything that made these AM/PMs unique in the market, replaced it with their own bland and generic way of doing things according to the home office in Monterrey.

    Within a month, the new 7-11s had lost around 3/4 of their customers. Their emergency response was to send in a squad of corporate poll takers to pester the customers still there and see… why the other ones had gone, I guess?

    Asking the wrong questions (why did the customers leave in droves?) to the wrong people (the few remaining clients who didn’t leave). And thus, nothing of value was learned, because when your corporate business school suits are clumsy unthinking hammers, every situation and problem look like a goddamned nail.

    • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz
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      2 months ago

      Gather round children; as I tell you the story of Georgie Pie, it offered cheap local (to NZ) fast food, in this case meat and sweet pies.

      Highly successful and well loved, it was a common sight across the country. Unfortunately, the corporate entities from off shore came in, diluting the fast food dollar across many more options. MacDonald’s brought the struggling Georgie Pie; mainly for its locations and to remove a competitor from the market.

      Every few years; to maintain the trade mark, MacDonald’s runs a Georgie Pie promotion where you can get a pie from MacDonald’s. It is like the zombie of local “cuisine” reanimated over and over again to server its master; for the only job it is good for.

      • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Now this truly does sound like a horrifying story.
        Move over McRib, 'cause here comes Georgie “Please Let Me Die” Pie, even less often than you do!

        Imagine if McDonald’s had actually defeated Jollibee in the Philippines, absorbed them, then resuscitated their menu once a year.
        But that didn’t happen, I wonder how did Jollibee not only survive, but thrive? What was their crucial chessboard move there?

    • leverage@lemdro.id
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      2 months ago

      Perhaps they realized it would be cheaper to stop the growth of a superior product. Especially when that superior product would likely require more types of costs that would eat corporate level profit. More higher paid employees that can’t be mechanized.

      Status quo is incredibly profitable, assuming nothing threatens it. That’s why big business does everything they can to increase the barrier of entry, and happily overpays to buy out successful competitors, with the leadership of the competitors having enforceable noncompetes for the model.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        2 months ago

        The fact that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup. This kind of thing regularly happens as well where I live despite noncompetes basically not being enforceable.

        Acquiring companies is easy, but it extremely rarely goes well. The incentives and skills required to buy something and give a sales pitch to a private equity firm simply do not overlap with the incentives and skills required to vertically integrate that thing without completely destroying it.

        In many ways these corporate ghouls are like serial hobbyists. Buying all kinds of expensive toys and tools they don’t understand then breaking them and/or giving up.

        • leverage@lemdro.id
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          2 months ago

          Obviously absolute speculation on my part, but if they were truly doing what I suggested intentionally, part of the plan would need to be plausible deniability to avoid anti-monopoly issues, and also public sentiment nightmare. Killing your favorite shop out of incompetence doesn’t win good will, but you will still go there. Doing it out of malicious intent could have people in other states joining a boycott.

          I’m in management, participated in the acquisition process of the company I’m at being acquired. At least at the 150mm/year revenue level there’s no one doing the shit I’m suggesting, no one is so competent. Cash on hand is bad , acquisition is an obvious way to deal with that. You’re spot on about skills though, 95% of management at every level is totally incompetent at the work required to actually do management shit. All the competent people leave as soon as they can because the work just got way harder and the money doesn’t follow.

        • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          that they polled customers afterwards points to this being a simple corporate fuckup

          Yes, this is my thought as well. They bought their way into the market, somehow thinking it was the chunk of real estate and not the services provided that kept customers coming back over and over again. They didn’t even bother to see what these services were, came in like a bull in a china shop, indifferent to the point of oblivious about it, even as the accounting department back at the home office had to process out all the kitchen equipment, the self-service soda and ice cream machines, etc., from every store in Baja.

          Nowadays, 7-11 is still there, puttering along, as a generic clone of Oxxo, the other large mini-market chain in Mexico, offering nothing special, except maybe along the lines of - “Hmm… Oxxo is three blocks this way, 7-11 is one block that way, I guess I’ll go to 7-11”, and Oxxos are everywhere, Jesus… like somebody gleefully abused the copy/paste function.

  • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    What’s your favorite Iron Man scene from any of the Marvel Movies?

    Fun thing to do is when you realize 99% of the internet is just advertising teams working for these rich fucking A hole’s, is you make them work for their money but posting things that PR companies would hate. Just culture jam the hell out of the dead internet. Its the only way to be. Its what makes places like r/joerogan and r/thefighterandthekid so much fun.

  • rbits@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Oh yeah, AskReddit went to shit a while ago. It used to be my favourite subreddit, but it changed about 5 years ago I think.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    the average redditor will still insist on appending “Reddit” onto Google searches since it “lets them see real human opinions” only because they can’t discern obvious botting from genuine human interactions

    • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      A lot of the botting is just copy and pasting previous actual human topics and comments though, so they’re not really wrong.

      Actual bot created content is pretty boring, and never “contributes” in a way that would make for a useful Google result. Your Google result may be a bot’s comment, but if that comment is answering a question of some kind there’s a 99% chance the comment was originally written by a human.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        copying and pasting a comment is still less genuine, since that promotes stale and outdated information. It can also create the false idea of a “widely held” opinion rather than a single person’s opinion copied a dozen times.

  • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    remember when they banned bots on r/mademesmile or something and there were no posts anymore?