snek

snek, 11 months ago

From the article

Reddit didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. According to Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt, “We’ll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We’ll be in touch as corrections are needed.”

Fucking fuck me sideways

snek, 11 months ago

I agree that it would have to have lots of rules and limits to discourage bots/farming.

Having it help fund the servers is an excellent idea, fully community-driven.

snek, 11 months ago

While I still would like to see an alternative to Karma that's less problematic, I agree with the idea that gamification will not solve issues. If anything, it creates a "KPI/score" people want to desperately meet for the wrong reason.

snek, 11 months ago

(1) No Karma system at all

(2) Karma spread over several numbers rather that one; think of Github's user page for example, stats for everything in general on one's profile to reflect general activity

(3) Community award badges

snek, 11 months ago

Interested! :)

snek, 11 months ago

The saddest Catch 22 I've ever seen... Need education for money, need money for education, rinse and repeat

snek, 11 months ago

Take Jordan for example, a county being ruined day after day by neoliberal policies and ruthless privatization.

It's good to read what neoliberalism has done to some country in practice: https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/jordans-protests-and-neoliberal-reforms-walking-thin-ice

snek, 11 months ago

The obsession with giving people results directly in the search page was a huge mistake on their part. Content quality is just decreasing, people get wrong answers to questions they would have otherwise answered easily and accurately by reading an article on a website rather than a sentence taken out of context.

And for businesses to make it to the stupid Google box, they have to write articles formatted not for human eyes or cognition, but for SEO.

Thus Google is one of the main drives of quality decreasing online. Their unhealthy practices forces everyone to write dumb shit (like those Q&A or click bait articles) in order to have some kind of platform or presence.

snek, 11 months ago

I agree that contributing is good overall, but with how this ranking system works, we might never make it to top Google search results even with good content. People are also spread over several decentralized forums rather than a single site (AKA Reddit, which is how Google likes things to be).

Sound a tad bit radical but the solution for me is to give up on Google and its attention-sucking click farming. I use Brave Search but it isn't significantly better. Maybe a solution for searching here is to have a search engine that goes through online forums/communities/subs.

snek, 11 months ago

Try finding an OLD article about something that just hit the news. Impossible. And it amazes me that Quora and Pinterest (garbage questions in, garbage answers out) to be always at the top, shining.

Also, search symbols like using double quotes for exact matches or a minus sign to remove a keyword from the match... They don't fucking work anymore.

snek, 11 months ago

They need to do a better job surfacing ANY KIND OF user-generated content. Seems like this is failing due to Reddit being a fairly old site, thus being bumped up the search results. Lemmy, kbin, etc communities are on newly created domains, giving them minus points on Google's retarded result ranking system. This system is now effectively hiding the internet from us by holding out good content that doesn't satisfy it's ranking algorithm. This system crumbles in the face of new changes because they are treating the internet like a town square rather than an organic community-driven living machine.

snek, 11 months ago

I've been on Reddit for the past 6 years, to answer the question about the point of reference.

In my opinion, Reddit is suffering from the same problem as the internet in general: the more quantity you have, the less quality overall. The internet kept getting larger and we couldn't index every website anymore so only an ever-diminishing portion that makes it to the surface; in Reddit, this is equivalent to how the sorting algorithms work (best, rising, etc). More people means more fun, but inevitably it means the general subreddits will slowly decay into normalcy. Whatever human biases and behavioural patterns we have will eventually decide what makes it to the top and how much each new opinion or idea is consumed. We're over-populated, and somehow I feel like a federated alternative to Reddit may solve that idea to some extent. At the same time, I'm curious about the new problems that will arise from with system. There are so many available services to choose from, will this lead to a healthier internet or will we get stuck in bubbles of our own creation? At this rate, we'll find out soon enough.

snek, 11 months ago

No, we are talking about the exact same thing. I just gave a reference to what years I am talking about. Of course Reddit will differ by year. Thanks for doing the math for me like I'm some 4 year old goof.

Please don't start this "the last good album Metallica made was X"... It doesn't get the discussion anywhere, nor does it serve any purpose.

snek, 11 months ago

I use adblocking either through Chrome extentions or by using Brave Browser. I don't feel good about not supporting some websites, but ads have become extremely intrusive and excessive. It's not my fault that ads try to finger my brain at every chance whenever I am on the internet. I do it for my own peace of mind.

snek, 11 months ago

I think this is a very accurate description of the problem. A company can do anything for money, and we feel those effects in the declining quality of search results as everyone dances to the repetitive tunes of SEO. It could be possible to persuade Google to adopt and apply better Internet ethics, but I feel like moving away from large companies like Google and adopt other alternatives is the best solution altogether. Just cut it from the root.

snek, 11 months ago

What functions will it have?

snek, 11 months ago

Thanks for the offer, I might add you later. Some tips to get started would be really appreciated.

I'm a programmer as well, so if you want any help let me know.

snek, 11 months ago

Cool, I'm at work atm but I promise to take a look as soon as possible. My initial goal is to try to have a PoC bot running before the 1st of July.

snek, 11 months ago

Hi, thanks for the help. This is exactly the purpose I posted in the original thread. I'll take a look but will likely build my own. If your repo is good, I'll fork it.

snek, 11 months ago

Sure.

snek, 11 months ago

I was checking which base module to depend on, seems like your code is also using the lemmy-bot module. The issue with that now is that it’s got parts not working and some issues already posted on its github page. I’ve forked it to see what could be changed. Would be nice to ask if it’s possible to contribute there.

I’m also thinking of trying something like this out: github.com/db0/pythorhead. TypeScript is fun but python is more flexible.

Anyway I DMed you if you want to talk about this so we don’t clutter this thread since it was originally meant to get ideas about what functionalities the bot could do.

snek, 11 months ago

Wonderful

snek, 11 months ago

I am planning to create a bot that would allow people to tag posts or content they want to get fact checked. The idea is this:

(1) you tag the soon-to-be fact-checker bot under a comment or main thread, something like @fact_check_this

(2) the bot cross-posts on the community page on lemmy.world

(3) for the future, given sufficient answers to the post (maybe we can control that with flairs or something), the bot can also nudge back the person who requested the fact checking

(4) will share the code for the bot so that others can replicate this on their own instances, now thinking of forking this one: https://github.com/SleeplessOne1917/lemmy-bot