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.
crowsby
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
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“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.
I dipped out of r/politics on Reddit because over the past few years the general trend there has been:
Reliable news outlet posts article > Partisan clickbait site posts their incendiary “take” on the article > Redditors post their hot takes based on misleading clickbait title without reading either article
There’s just no value to reading hot takes from uninformed teenagers seeking only to validate and amplify their worldviews based on clickbait titles alone. It’s important to stay informed, but there’s such a diminishing return for getting news from a subreddit vs. a legitimate news outlet, and it’s definitely not worth the mental health hit. And I don’t think it’s a Reddit-exclusive thing. Personally I’d rather stick to reading news from the sources, and keep my social media focused on other things.
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.
Kinda, yeah. I mean I don’t really identify myself as a “retro gamer” but I’ve got an Atari with a bunch of games and a newfangled TV. Every once and again I think it’d be fun to hook it up, but there’s no easy way to get it working without buying some doohickey. In this case if the doohickey is the machine, and it can use the OG controllers & games, that’s certainly appealing. Maybe a steep price for it, but definitely appealing.
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.
Don’t create accounts on different Lemmy servers they said, one is all you need they said. Simply find the one where the values and judgement of the admins wholly reflect your own despite there being no effective way to make that determination.
there’s a special place in heaven for kanban lovers that’s what i always say
This is one of the things that I’m struggling with right now as well. My reddit experience was heavily curated in favor of smaller subreddits, to the almost complete exclusion of top subreddits. The thing is, since Lemmy is so new, it hasn’t had the opportunity to build up a diverse array of specialized communities the same way. So basically right now all we have are mainly versions of the “big” Reddit communities, along with ones that decided to emigrate here from Reddit.
But it turns out, content from “big” communities is often the same low-effort, lowest-common denominator stuff regardless which platform is hosting it. Memes, clickbait, and ragebait permeate the top results, because well shucks, that’s what people want to see and engage with, apparently.
I’m hopeful that if/when Lemmy continues to grow, that it’ll become home to more active specialized communities. In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to improve the experience as much as possible by A) trying to subscribe to more communities and B) slamming that block community button like I’m playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.
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.
Conceivably you could open source the algorithm, or even better, have a variety of algorithms to choose from with custom parameters.
In a similar vein, I’m not sure if anyone remembers Slacker Radio, but it was a competitor to Pandora/Spotify/etc. It had its drawbacks (hence why it isn’t around anymore), but I absolutely loved the amount of control you had when building custom stations. You’d first seed a custom station with a bunch of musicians you like, and then there were a number of parameters which allowed you to fine-tune the algorithm to a remarkable extent, well beyond what today’s music apps offer.
I’d love to get to a place where we have options other than just saying “welp the algorithm” and just giving up, I think that the ability to customize one’s algos would be a killer feature that the fediverse can offer which the major platforms generally won’t.
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”.
For reference, that’s 31.5% of all House Republicans. Another way to see it is that 68.5% of House Republicans, which are generally the most extreme breed of Republican, are supportive of US military aid to Ukraine. I’m pleasantly surprised to find support for Ukraine remaining that high.
- 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.
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.