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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 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 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.


  • 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.



  • 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”.





  • Tildes, for what it’s worth, is not intended to be a replacement for Reddit. Its creator/admin is trying to purposefully cultivate a very different culture than what you might find on Reddit or Reddit replacements like lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/etc. From their Philosophy page:

    High-quality content and discussions
    Tildes prioritizes quality content and discussion through its mechanics, design, and organization. Fixation on growth and related metrics results in other sites having a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. The priority on Tildes is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don’t have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.

    Limited tolerance, especially for assholes
    Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to “if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”.

    This is a difficult topic, so I want to try to be clear about where on the spectrum Tildes is trying to land. I’m never going to refer to the site as a “safe space” or ban anyone just for occasionally acting like a jerk in an argument—I’d probably have to ban myself fairly quickly. However, it will also never be described as anything like “an absolute free speech site”.

    Personally as an old, I love it. The whole vibe promotes longer, better thought out replies, as opposed to the modern internet where people are more often looking to do quick hit n’ run posts with popular sentiments for easy internet points. I also love the proactive removal of problem posters. Some people are just looking to stir up trouble wherever they go, but don’t fall under a specific rule that might get their account axed. Tildes isn’t afraid to uninvite problematic assholes.

    If its culture is something that resonates with you, feel free to hit me up for an invite while I have some.


  • Bouncing back and forth between Jerboa / Connect / kBin on mobile web right now. Who knows what it’ll be next week.

    This is a fun period of extremely rapid innovation, with new Fediverse apps getting announced nearly every few days by extremely talented developers. Many of these alpha/beta apps already have a better user experience than the 1st-party Reddit app, and it should get even better from here on out.




  • I’m starting to come around to the idea that kbin/Lemmy doesn’t need to experience massive amounts of user growth in order to succeed, and I’m not certain that we’d even want anything approaching the userbase that Reddit has. Similar to how not every city needs to be NYC, and some people prefer living in a smaller city.

    I suppose there’s a happy medium between “wow this place is dead” and “the cacophony of voices makes posting here feel like shouting into the void” that we’re shooting for.


  • I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

    This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.


  • It’s shocking to see how bad they’ve become at what used to be their core function. I mean their brand name became the verb for looking something up on the internet. Now it just returns a useless mix of advertising, blogspam, AI spam, and sometimes-useful reddit results.

    I’m also not quite happy with the search experience due to them constantly moving UI components around randomly. First they started shuffling around the order of the search tabs (All, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) erratically, and now they’ve also decided to also start including what they believe may be related search terms there as well, sometimes.


  • The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this behavior is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn’t work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:

    Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.

    For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you’d have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:

    Deimos’s comments by new: 948, 238, 153
    Deimos’s comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
    Deimos’s comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
    If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the “new” list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.

    One of the problems with this system (which is probably what’s causing @phedre’s issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets “pushed off the end”. The comment still exists, but you won’t be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it’s no longer in that listing.

    Deleting comments also doesn’t cause previously “pushed off” ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.

    And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.

    All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.