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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’d argue the front ends should also provide users ways to see a more complete, instance-agnostic version of Lemmy. Like the first thing a user should see when they show up is just…Lemmy. not a page that suggests instances and all kinds of other things that they’re not going to understand.

    Part of what made Reddit work is that it was a shared site, a shared hub, and every user saw the same thing depending on what they were subscribed to. I get that certain instance admins have problems with other instances, and I get that they might defederate from some for legal or security reasons. I know they also might police their servers for content and comments they don’t feel “fit”, and that’s their right.

    But ultimately I don’t believe the user’s experience should suffer for that. If admins don’t want to host certain content on their servers, fine. I think that’s where the front ends and apps should come in.

    Provide ways of unifying the experience of different user accounts on different instances into something more…well, unified. I don’t believe I should have to care about what instance I’m looking at Lemmy “from”, I should just be able to see the whole thing based on what I’ve subscribed to.

    I know that’s a very complicated suggestion, and it might involve a lot of redundancies and crossed wires, and how the moderation would look is definitely a discussion (maybe a drop down list “see this community as moderated by ______”?)

    But genuinely I think if an app can achieve something like this, it would go a long way towards making the experience more universal and attractive for an audience looking to come from elsewhere. They do not care about decentralization or instances, and we can’t make them care by lecturing them. So we do the next best thing and create a sort of facsimile of centralization.






  • That’s not nearly shitty enough. It’s too useful. Look at all the options and other clickable things you got on the start menu, and it only took one click to open it.

    That’s not how this works anymore. If this were truly made today, it would be needlessly “streamlined”, i.e. everything is hidden so as not to “clutter up” the UI with useful things, and make more room for…nothing. Just wasted space.

    We hide everything behind multiple clicks now because the “average user” starts bleeding out their eyes if they’re forced to see many things at once.






  • The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

    No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no “ethical” way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.

    It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.

    If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.







  • Someday, a large corporation is going to finally figure out that firing the people who make their products work results in shitty products no one buys.

    The problem is, this isn’t true. The first part certainly is, though many companies are perfectly capable of making shitty products no matter how many employees they have.

    The second part though? I would certainly like to believe that, but it’s simply not what happens, especially when it comes to apps and services like Spotify. A huge part of why so much in the tech industry is just absolute ass now is because users are unwilling to try alternatives. Vendor lock in tactics have succeeded, but the average consumer is just lazy and complacent too.

    The user experience of Spotify has been dropping dramatically for years. They haven’t lost any users. They have boiled one of the most well cooked frogs in the entire tech industry. And even if you they have a significant portion of users who do actively complain about it, they probably can’t even name an alternative streaming service besides maybe Apple music, and there’s certainly not tech literate enough to understand that you can transfer your library and playlists to another streaming service really easily.

    I’ve legitimately explained this to multiple people I know personally who are incredibly frustrated with spotify, and all of them reacted the same way: at the slightest suggestion of putting in a little bit of effort to move away from the platform that they despise, their resolved disappears.

    And it’s exactly that mentality, widespread, across so many industries, that allows CEOs to get away with shit like this. They are never punished when consumers are so unwilling to change their habits.