maegul

maegul, 7 days ago

a mutated form of free TV.

Fantastic description!

Similarly, Casey Newton described it as “Managed decline”, on which I riffed “big tech is moving on from the internet”.

But yea, something relatively drastic is happening here. The big-tech end of the internet is no longer the internet we used to have. As you say: Mutated Broadcast TV.

maegul, 7 days ago

Me too.

maegul, 7 days ago

Yea, but to be fair that is a higher boundary to entry. With private communities, someone else can do the hosting while all the users have to do is click buttons in a UI. Obviously we’re not talking about encrypted privacy, but it’s something and a welcoming fusion of closed and open spaces in social media TBH.

maegul, 7 days ago

There are also certain benefits to “all-feeding”, like making communities easier to discover.

You can discover communities just fine without being able to up/down vote.

think disallowing votes (down or both) from non-subscribers would defeat the point of the all feed, which to me is to display the most active/interesting posts on the Fediverse right now. You can’t have that if it is only community subscribers that vote.

You can see what all the subscribers find interesting instead. Like I said, intuitively, the All feed makes sense to me as a view of Lemmy, not a means to participate. And, to the general point of the post, to enable the All-feeders to become a somewhat distinct “voting block” runs the risk of dissolving the ability of communities to be their own places.

Also, as far as I know, it is quite uncommon to follow communities on Mastodon, so you’d exclude voting from there potentially.

That’s not true I don’t think. You can’t follow the “All” feed from mastodon. You either follow a community (or, interestingly, a particular user, which is something you can’t do from lemmy).

Maybe you could somehow have both? I.e. when browsing all, take into account all votes. When browsing a specific comm, have a toggle for including or excluding votes from non-subscribed users in the feed. But not sure how hard that would be to implement.

That’s kinda interesting!

maegul, 7 days ago

so once you block them you basically have a feed of pretty great content to scroll through.

This makes sense!

maegul, 7 days ago

I think it would be nice to be able to make some posts “community members only”

This would make a good amount of sense as part of the local-only and private communities features IMO.

maegul, 7 days ago

Just to be clear, when I said “as part of”, I was thinking of it as a suite of options centered around enabling a community to control how it engages with the external world. I wasn’t suggesting that what you were talking about would pair well with being private or local-only.

maegul, 7 days ago

Thanks!

maegul, 7 days ago

Yea interesting. I don’t know enough reddit lore to be sure of this, but I figured that there would be stories. Any more details?

For me, it seems pretty logical that this would happen (which is why I wrote this post). I realised that intuitively I’d never even thought of voting from the All feed and had to double check whether it was possible.

This doesn’t mean I’m right and that it shouldn’t be allowed, but instead, that there may be some real tension here and reasonable mental models of what a community is that go both ways on this.

maegul, 7 days ago

Yea I realised that after I posted. I wasn’t really thinking about implementation details, and intentionally so, I was just trying to think through it from a UX perspective.

But yea, you’re absolutely right. With an API and federation, there is no such thing as “no upvotes from a certain kind of feed”. It was kinda dumb of me to suggest. Still, I’m personally happy to think out loud.

Limiting votes (and other interactions as mentioned in these threads) by whether a user has subscribed is more viable, but then again federation probably disrupts this again (I don’t know enough to be sure) and likely breaks some promises or conventions.

maegul, 8 days ago

The pandemic is an obvious inflection point in many of these graphs.

What exactly is that mechanism or process? That rents have gone up makes sense as passing on interest rate increases. But vacancy rates going down? There aren’t more people all of a sudden (it was a pandemic not a baby boom).

maegul, 8 days ago

Yea right. If people left tiny apartments, that should balance out in terms of vacancy rates though. Plus I knew of some people that really hated living alone and so presumably sought to live with someone else.

But share houses blowing up makes a lot of sense.

I wonder if there’s a demographics to it as well, where millennials are now middle aged, and so either more entitled in their residential “needs” or starting families, with the pandemic suddenly accelerating that trend. But in reality, was it a very foreseeable trend?

maegul, 7 days ago

Absolutely.

And this is why I’m seeing Google winning this. They’ve got the infrastructure for both running and training their AI as well as the long standing web scraping for getting in as much data as soon as possible. But they’ve also got the ads business and the brand and user base. Together, they’ll be the first to get AI tech to the point of being able to insert ads or other paid endorsements (however hard that is) and the first monetise that through ads and userbase size. Meanwhile Microsoft (OpenAI’s backer) will probably do what MS has often done which is fail to piece together a coherent business model and squander an opportunity on failing to monetise.

maegul, 7 days ago

It’s interesting to think that Big Tech might just move on from the Web, leaving it to us ordinary humans to go back to the way we were doing it in Web 1.0 just with fancier tools at our disposal. I quite like the idea.

Yep. The idea has been buzzing in my head since I read Casey’s post and thought about it as “Tech moving on from the web”. For those of us who like it, we’ll just be left to (re-)make it ourselves. It’s a weird feeling for me honestly.

It’s almost like the eternal September is actually ending.

maegul, 7 days ago

perfect!

maegul, 8 days ago

yea there were definitely some significant positives in S1 for sure. The writing was just off though.

My biggest like from S1 turned out to be the quasi-romance they created between Galadriel and Sauron. I thought it was creative and interesting without terribly violating any lore but instead kinda adding to the lore with an interesting “maybe this actually happened” that is vague enough that even the main characters (Galadriel and Sauron) can’t be sure what it was.

maegul, 8 days ago

Well, we were discussing trailers that reveal to much yesterday. That’s not happening here.

Came to say the same! And yea, I haven’t been following this closely or anything … but apart from the visual style (which I’m totally down for) I really have no idea what this is … which is awesome!

Also, perhaps as a sign of how indie this is for Coppola, he seems to have a youtube channel just for promoting this film and is posting the trailers there: www.youtube.com/

Maybe it’s a fake channel, I dunno if youtube do any verification.

maegul, 8 days ago

Although I’m sceptic of the Vision product line, I wouldn’t write it off just yet. They’ve just launched the first version and we don’t know yet how future versions will look like.

Thing is, they’re leaning hard into it, which makes sense if they’re going to make any progress in that space in part because it aligns with their strengths. But the big question is whether “spatial computing” is there yet? And that’s the elephant in the room here and where I think there was a lack of wisdom on the part of the execs. As good as Apple have made the Vision Pro, the tech just isn’t there yet as you still need a large device hanging off of your face.

Not to “if Steve Jobs were still alive” this too much … but I think of the whole stylus v fingers thing here. To blow up as a new “form factor”, it likely has to feel natural and seamless. Which means it probably has to be tantamount to wearing a pair of glasses or small goggles. If improvements of that magnitude are on the table, then yea, maybe the 3rd gen could be interesting. But if not, it’s looking to me increasingly like another Apple Newton where they just go too hard too early on something.

maegul, 8 days ago

There are successful companies that make a single product, and have been doing so for 50 years. I wish the view on companies would shift back to that being more the norm.

I’m with you there.

maegul, 8 days ago

Holy crap, who is writing all this?

LOL. No worries!

they’re enshittifying slower than everyone else - I’m waiting to see if there’s a new Apple TV release this year but my Firestick has become unusable with ads and data collection, as has my TV, and chrome stick, so my only hope is Apple TV. If I can’t get back to enjoying video with that I swear I’m done with anything tv-like

My “smart TV” is an Apple TV 3 which was released 2012 (and bought ~2015). It’s still going fine. It hasn’t had an OS update for ages. For a while, Apple streaming/tv/movies had a bug that would crash it pretty regularly. But that disappeared, meaning they probably fixed things on their backend. While a number of services have stopped supporting it (youtube and netflix, notably), streaming from a phone works perfectly well and Amazon TV still supports it (or works) indicating that there’s nothing wrong with it at all.

it’s fantastic that they’re trying to do on-device ai - they almost sold me on the iPad Pro just to better support that. I’ll probably get the Air to replace my old iPad, and grumble when it drops out of support a year earlier

I agree. I hope they persist with this.

maegul, 8 days ago

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.