Unblended

I saw the writing on the wall a few years back, it was so painfully obvious. I started switching to KiCAD early, and feel so bad for ever recommending Eagle to people who will now have to learn yet another new tool in order to find something usable.

Fusion360 is so bad, I had to explain why SolidWorks was different earlier today and they were shocked by things like “if I move the case the board I say is attached to the case moves to” and “I don’t have to align it by eye, it’s a computer”.

And I’m definitely not starting VMWare to run Fusion360 with nonsense online components that slow it down to uselessness and integrate it into a tool that doesn’t need to be on at all… it’s just not possible. It was obvious once they stopped updating the version. It’s pathetic nonetheless that they cannot think beyond the one-true-way of integrating a dozen mediocre tools into one extra-mediocre product.

I wonder if China has a favorite.

Can’t control when you do it.

I’ve been kind of suggesting the same thing a few times inside of posts. I’m coming at it from the perspective of having had to do a lot of in-person recruiting for voluntary activities, mentoring, and teaching – you cannot tell people things like “you should just join lemmy/kbin” – you have to wait for them to ask “how do I join lemmy/kbin?”

That’s okay! It just means that the focus when introducing people to it has to be “here’s what you’re missing”, positive about where they could go rather than negative about where they are.

It’s an uphill battle trying to argue with people who do have a point about it being harder to use (we shouldn’t gaslight people), but they’re also saying what the audience is wanting to hear because it gives them permission to do nothing.

How many are just admin accounts or sock puppets for some agenda or another anyway?

Consider focusing on the positive – link to specific posts on these systems that are objectively worth going to participate in. They don’t need an account to read and enjoy.

Then, if they discover that they wish that they could participate in the thread – that is the time to explain that they should just join whatever instance the post they really enjoyed was on for starters. They’ll realize that they can see magazines from other instances, probably after a week when they realize other instance domain names are showing up on things. Then some nice person explains what’s going on.

And now they’ve convinced themselves it’s worth joining…

I wonder to what extent the massive imbalance in news coverage was simply super wealthy families handing journalists pre-written pieces so that laziness would dictate this result (rather than the journalists doing this naturally, although laziness is natural enough I guess).

Did they initiate the process and ask for help or did you offer?

I’ve been teaching twenty years. If students get themselves to the point of coming with a question based on experience, odds are excellent that they will listen to what I’m saying. If they do something at my suggestion, they are not engaged and do not retain. Same is surely true for learning to use a new website.

So I dunno if this is a suggestion for you or other people reading this post, but consider directing them to magazines/communities that are an actual draw, since people are the actual draw. When they find they cannot post, then they will have incentive to pay attention.

This is so far true for “what is a photon”, “what is consciousness”, “how do you do a kick”, and “why are most metals thermally conductive” so I suspect this isn’t a unique thing. Dangle the incentive, then wait for them to ask how to get involved.

Again, not criticizing especially since I don’t know your approach, hopefully this can help others. The draw is the community and posts, so highlight that way before they ever see a signup page. They can browse the site without an account.

Yeah, it’d just be nice if it lost all that value before going public and ended up a loss for the VCs instead of retirees.

Doesn’t that result in the general public owning shares that gradually decrease in value while the current owners make money at the current value? Seems like index funds will be paying for it unless the actual amount the Reddit owners sell it for goes down before the sale.

Satisfying I guess, but frustrating that the people that did the damage get a payout while the public holds the bag while it deflates.