Man, seeing people putting in effort from r/transcribersofreddit always reminded me about how many good people are in the world. It’s a shame they won’t be able to keep going, and even more of a shame that Reddit doesn’t care about blind people using their platform.
Reddit doesn't care about anybody. not about its user community and the free content they provided, nor the mods and the free labour they provided, nor u/spez who'll be discarded when they're done with him, nor the admin who're playing villain's bullyboys to the T.
I know I’m angry with Reddit atm, but that is the first time I have seen a Reddit post embedded in an article like that, I just had a look at the embed options and they are very good. I assume that Reddit is trying to fill the hole that Twitter left when Elon had no idea why embedded tweets were good for traffic.
It’s a shame that I strongly dislike too many of nuReddit features, it meant I missed the good ones using oldReddit.
It would be a very long way away, but a lemmy embedded feature in the future would be cool, I especially liked how you could opt for dark mode.
People are so gullible. Only now do they see reddit for what they are.
This is also why good poeple can't understand how evil some people can be, and they think they must be misunderstood or it's not their fault or something else.
Last year, CBS correspondent David Pogue commented on the sub’s “jerry-rigged” design before
A shame that this keeps getting brought up. Yeah, some of the stuff was super-basic. But the absolutely key component, ie, the pressure vessel itself, was anything but jerry-rigged.
That said, I'm really curious how the pressure vessel failed. My random guess is that the viewport glass (which may not have been glass at all) cracked and then ruptured. I know that one of the vessels that has been down to the Mariana Trench experienced glass cracking; that was definitely a sweaty palms moment for the crew.
Also, given that the hatch had to be bolted shut from the outside, I've been wondering whether they need to be set to specific torque values each time. Meaning, what would happen if they were unevenly torqued down? My bet is you'd get uneven warping where the hatch mates to the vessel cylinder. Even if the warping is microscopic at sea level, the stress differential would get magnified at depth.
It's also got to be pretty rattling to folks like David Pogue who have already been passengers. I've heard David himself say he's still trying to process it all. But there's got to be an ample heaping dose of "holy shit, that could have been me if the dice had fallen differently". It's already started to bother me that he keeps getting pulled into interviews; the first one was fine, but to keep pressing him with "what are your thoughts/feelings"… I'd rather buy him a beer and talk about literally anything else, so he can have a breather.
The report detailed “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns,” according to the filing. These included Lochridge’s worry that “visible flaws” in the carbon fiber supplied to OceanGate raised the risk of small flaws expanding into larger tears during “pressure cycling.” These are the huge pressure changes that the submersible would experience as it made its way and from the deep ocean floor. He noted that a previously tested scale model of the hull had “prevalent flaws.”
...
A day after filing his report, Lochridge was summoned to a meeting with Rush and company’s human resources, engineering and operations directors. There, the filing states, he was also informed that the manufacturer of the Titan’s forward viewport would only certify it to a depth of 1,300 meters due to OceanGate’s experimental design. The filing states that OceanGate refused to pay for the manufacturer to build a viewport that would meet the Titan’s intended depth of 4,000 meters. The Titanic lies about 3,800 meters below the surface.
Well, first off, you're in the wrong thread. Your points are valid: the viewport glass was technically rated for the depth, but the viewport company said that they wouldn't actually stand behind it because OceanGate was using a different hull. The viewport company suggested a different viewport but it was more expensive and OceanGate refused.
The torque on the bolts wasn't something that had occurred to me and is interesting.
free speech cannot be monetized by a corp and remain free
Even innocuous things like removing a dislike button are about removing the power of users to be negative, or share it. Can't have human expression affecting corporate profits, after all.
We need a public square that prioritizes the users, not whoever can think of a shitty way to profit off them.
imma push back against that just a little bit. the shape of ui elements, what sort of interactions a platform allows a person to make, are kinda arbitrary, and putting deliberate thought into how they are laid out is important. in real life social interactions, there is functionally no analogue for a like or dislike button. there are fully cogent arguments for not including "the power of users to be negative" that don't rely on suppression of speech or whatever, because that power is kinda exclusive to online platforms to begin with, and can allow larger groups to suppress the visibility of people they don't like. "being negative" in a social context is a tricky idea to pin down, and there are a lot of real life social contexts where "being negative" would be seen as anti-social.
in any case, a downvote is sorta equivalent to shouting somebody down, or interrupting somebody who's talking. depending on how its implemented, it might actually be a pretty potent tool as suppressing discussion. in certain contexts it might be useful, but any utility it provides is necessarily less than articulating why you disagree with somebody with a comment.
Both with what a downvote means (closer to the other commenter) and to the importance of UI elements
none of it is arbitrary
Those “arbitrary” elements are very intentional
It’s intentional how many clicks it takes you to post, to agree, to disagree, to move on, etc.
It’s intentional that infinite scrolling takes no effort and happens automatically, while diving deeper into the conversation takes effort
All of those are decisions and as soon as those decisions are motivated more by money than by benefiting the person using it, it becomes cancerous to the values of free speech and open expression.
maybe arbitrary isn't the right word. i'm not saying it isn't important, or that companies don't manipulate the UI to encourage certain behaviors. i'm saying that elements of the UI have no intrinsic, obvious meaning. a downvote is socially constructed, its purpose is ambiguous, and its impact on our free speech is not a self-evident. its impact on a platform is complex, multifaceted, and difficult to describe fully.
you may think that the removal of a downvote is an obvious attack on free expression, but, again, there are arguments against features like the downvote which do not rely on greed or a desire to repress. downvotes were invented by these companies, the social act of downvoting somebody became possible alongside the UIs that implemented it, and the utility and role of that UI feature exists within its context. downvoting is not a natural feature of human communication, its like a social prosthetic, an ability which did not exist before it was created for us.
its kinda like a handshake. we all know what a handshake means, right? but no, not really. if you went elsewhere in the world, it might mean something very different, or nothing at all. even within our culture, some people might think its really important to have a firm handshake, and other people might not care. some people might find it gross. some people might refuse to shake the hands of certain kinds of people. some people don't have hands to shake. there is, in some sense, a social role to the handshake. it's a greeting, or an agreement, or a sign of respect. but pinning down exactly what it means is really difficult, because its value and social role are constructed by the society in which they operate, and the people who use it.
i'm not saying these companies aren't attempting to alter their platform to influence human behavior. they are doing that. but, frankly, the level of actual fine grained control they have over how people socially construct their UI features is nowhere near absolute, or even particularly logical. they may think that removing UI features, altering how they work, will lead to specific outcomes, but as we have seen with things like Twitter's verification, how users will interpret and socially construct those features is not fully under Twitter's control. the culture of a website is not the UI implementation, its how people decide to use that implementation. and for downvotes, we know it isn't an unalloyed good. because downvotes can do different things on different platforms, the actual utility being removed really has to be determined from the specific implementation we're talking about, but in most implementations, downvotes affect discoverability. highly downvoted topics may be deprioritized, put at the bottom of a thread, something like that. maybe it increases visibility, if a platform feels that people should see what other people seem to hate alot. the impact a downvote has on a discussion is, therefore, really not just a binary good or bad, its complex. if downvotes increase visibility, you may be encouraging attention seekers to behave poorly on purpose. if downvotes decrease visibility, you might be facilitating the ability for groups of users to censor other user's opinions. if they are subtracted from upvotes and represented with a single number, thats different than if the proportion of upvotes and downvotes is made visible to the user. if your total quantity of upvotes and downvotes affects what abilities you have on the platform, different users may be stratified into enforced social castes by the platform's code.
i'm not saying that corporations are doing a good job, i'm saying that we cannot take at face value the goodness or badness of any particular UI feature, and cannot assume that these companies are removing or adding features specifically for the goal of reducing free expression, because the relationship between profit and freedom of speech is not a simple one. lots of online social media platforms are not currently profitable. reddit isn't. twitch isn't. twitter isn't. so they don't necessarily know what changes they have to make in order to become profitable, they're just doing what they think will make them profitable.
Gee, that sounds a lot like Tesla's method of responding to any press inquiry with an automated poop emoji. I wonder why they're taking a page from Musk's booklet? /s
I think The Verge has been getting better over time. Its kind of a breath of fresh air they seem to mostly stay politically neutral and they occasionally use tasteful euphemisms while reporting very accurately. I miss Paul and Dieter but the newer people are doing great work too.
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