Up to a point. Google+ was invite only for so long that by the time it became available to the general public no one cared anymore. When people signed in with their new accounts they couldn’t find anyone they knew, and they never came back.
Really stupid on Google’s part, because they launched at a time when people were angry with Facebook for selling private user data, and a lot of users probably would have moved to G+ if they had been able to.
Yes, I signed in out of curiosity, and I was completely disoriented because there was no feed of just the people I followed. I kept clicking around, thinking I was missing something obvious.
I’m grateful to this strip because reading it caused me to learn the correct spelling of “abstruse”. I’ve never heard anyone say the word, and for some reason I had always read it as “abtruse”, without the first S.
I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren’t even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old “Internet for Dummies” sorts of books back in the 90s, but I’ve never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.
Not really. There is some discussion of “emotionally sticky nodes”, but they aren’t really defined, just described. Which is fine, and it’s actually an interesting article, but when you start throwing around terms like “nodes” it makes it sound like you want your readers to think you’re talking about something that is empirically valid, not just giving your opinion.
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
I started routinely deleting my comments anyhow after someone creeped me out by searching through my history for ammunition to use in an argument. I just deleted the five or six recent ones I hadn’t done yet, and that was that. I’ve kept my account because it might come in handy at some point, but I’ve only been on Reddit once in the past few weeks.
I’ve noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That’s probably the smart way to do it.
In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn’t remember what a lot of them were.
Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I’ve been around since the earliest days of the web. It’s kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student’s pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.
The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.
Yeah, same here. I spent my entire time on Threads clicking on everything I could find, trying without success to find a view that just showed the people I followed. I guess it’s continuing the time-honored Facebook tradition of not letting you decide what you want to see in your feed.
When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@fhristianselig@mastodon.social) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this
Yeah, Reddit singled his app out to be cut off first. So petty.
Yeah, there seems to be an inflection point in the lifecycle of businesses nowadays where the leadership loses any interest in what the company actually does. The products it makes or services it provides are considered almost irrelevant.
It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.
It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.
It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.
I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.
It’s genuinely infuriating that with 2000 employees Reddit couldn’t be bothered to put together a halfway decent app. Apollo was created by a single developer.
I’m genuinely surprised at how well behaved people are. I’ve only run across a single case so far of somebody being deliberately annoying.
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Yeah, the people who prefer old.reddit are exactly the sort of people the owners don’t want to have to deal with as they try to change Reddit to more closely resemble other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
Yeah, I don’t use Reddit any longer, but it was really great that there were active subs devoted to incredibly obscure topics. If you wanted to talk about something, chances were that thousands of other people did too.