insomniac

I discovered there’s giant 5 hour+ videos of entire Saturday morning cartoon blocks from all different networks from the 90s on YouTube. Complete with bumpers and vintage ads.

I have to be up early on Saturdays now because the baby doesn’t understand sleeping in so I put these on.

I guess you’re a HAM radio operator in this analogy

That’s a good point although with smart phones, I wonder how much of the teenager traffic is baked in year round now. Summer Reddit was terrible but then it just became Reddit.

How many people are less engaged in the internet at the beginning of summer because they’re on vacation or partying? I would think drops like this as the weather improves are pretty normal.

That hurts my heart

I don’t think it’s inevitable Threads will have a better user experience than non-corporate apps. Meta has different goals and will optimize the user experience to drive profits. Look at how they continuously make Facebook and Instagram worse to drive engagement.

Also, see Reddit. Apollo was one dude’s project that blows the official app out of the water. And all the other apps scrambling to support Lemmy benefit from apps like Apollo and Reddit is Fun lessons in UX. It’s early days but we’re already seeing Lemmy apps with a lot of potential.

Linux is another example. Technical issues for new users aside, there’s a lot of beautiful, easy to use desktops that blow windows 10/11 out of the water. And other less new user friendly options for power users are available as well.

The community driven approach has been demonstrated to work because it’s only goal is to give the community a good experience.

Yeah it sucks Facebook marketplace has become the dominant way to sell things online. I used to use Craigslist all the time but the only thing there anymore are scams. I deleted my Facebook in 2017 but ended up coming back with a fake account for marketplace but I feel gross about it.

Can we get it to nuke your Facebook account too?

They haven’t shut down entirely. They’re in this weird restricted state where flairs can respond to old unanswered comments and they have these daily themed discussion threads. But you can’t ask new questions right now.

The mods seem pretty committed to Reddit and not moving. Their goals aren’t quite in line with the third party app devs and they’ll probably get enough of what they want eventually to come back. They want better mod tools and Reddit will give them a few minor improvements which they’ll call a win and turn back on. They’re not holding out for third party apps to come back or anything like that.

I find this really disappointing, they should find more meaningful ways to at least spread out from Reddit. They could mirror questions and answers in the fediverse at least which would give them a foothold outside of Reddit when it does eventually implode. But the mods are somewhat hostile towards these kind of ideas. But I don’t have any insight in to their private conversations so I could be off base. They just get kinda snippy with people who suggest anything besides hope Reddit improves.

This has always been true of course but we used to have much faster turnover in social media sites. The current players have been around so long they seem like they can’t fail. But it’s not a coincidence that we’ve been riding a wave of cheap capital since about the time the current players started to dominate. Now that the free money tap is shut off, everyone’s scrambling to be profitable. The grow as fast as possible and never care about making money paradigm is over.

We’re basically in the ??? phase of “steal underpants, ???, profit” underpants gnome economic model.

I think we’re also seeing the ad model start to break down. It was always a Ponzi scheme. Everyone hates ads and goes out of their way to avoid them. If less and less people engage with ads, no one is going to pay as much because it’s not worth it. This forces companies to be more and more invasive in their data collection and ad targeting which erodes trust in the companies and degraded the user experience.

We’re seeing both these things converge and it’s shaking up the entire internet order.

Nothing. I miss being more informed on what’s going on in the world but I don’t miss mindless Reddit discussion about it. I miss a lot of subs though. If AskHistorians goes back to normal, I might pop in for that occasionally.

This is getting better and better though, I’d rather ride out our awkward phase than get sucked back in to the Reddit cesspool and drift away. Although we really need to stop talking about Reddit so much.

PWA always have a ton of UI quirks that make them hard to use. It’s a cool idea and I wish they would take off but they just aren’t there and I’m not sure wefwef will be able to overcome that, as good as it looks.