tal avatar

tal

@tal@kbin.social

Trying a switch to tal@lemmy.today, at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

tal,
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https://2018.mudconnect.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?mode=tmc_biglist

They're still there.

I enjoyed them too, but I do think that there's room for someone to make a similar genre, but more mobile-friendly. Like, same level of support for easily letting users create more content -- just write some text -- but where the actual play differs.

  • The UI was really centered around a keyboard and onscreen keyboards aren't as-convenient.

  • Some of the flaws in the UI were patched over via macros and triggers the like on the client side. Like, if my health gets low, automatically heal or something. That provides a lot of flexibility to technically-adept users but is of limited accessibility to others. Generally, I think that if everyone is having to set up triggers for something, it's probably a flaw in the UI of the game that should be addressed in the UI.

  • While combat could be somewhat-autonomous, depending upon MUD, there was something of an assumption that connectivity would be more-or-less continuous, and even short dropouts were somewhat visible (albeit not as much as some other online genres). That's maybe reasonable for a terminal on the Internet, but wireless connectivity on a phone may or may not be there for a given person. It'd probably be possible to make a similar genre that is more resistant to dropouts and changing latency. Instead of running a constant world "tick", where updates happen on a regular basis, maybe have separate room "ticks" where players in isolated rooms have the room tick depend at least to some degree on connectivity with their client.

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First, it would also be possible to implement something like that later if it becomes a problem. Like, it doesn't need to be done now; moderator privileges could be removed later.

Second, something as simple as a per-account cap won't address the problem, because a party dedicated to controlling moderator privileges on many subs could just create sockpuppet accounts and split control of the subs up across those.

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I think that it depends on what the concern is.

The thing that bothers me isn't so much "moderators are taking on too much work". I mean, I don't think that having a relatively-inactive moderator is a problem, as long as more can be added. Rather, I'd be concerned about someone trying to seize control of a lot of forums to use them for promoting their own products or agenda.

And if that's the concern -- someone who is actually a bad actor trying to acquire influence on many forums -- I think that there are probably a lot of ways to game that metric.

One other point that makes me not super-concerned: this is a problem that every forum system that has moderated forums from volunteer members ran into when growing, and while Reddit and other sites have hit moderator drama, generally, they seem to have overcome those problems; the service as a whole continued to work reasonably well. That is, the issues here are issues that aren't new or specific to kbin's structure.

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I strongly suspect that all of the fediverse options will smash into various scaling and abuse (spam, attacks on the network a la how IRC did in the past) if they get a userbase a significant portion the size of Reddit's.

It's possible that some option on the fediverse will get there over time as they work on those issues, but I don't think that they will simply be able to deal with a transfer of Reddit's entire userbase today.

Reddit's developers spent a long time working on those issues as Reddit grew. They didn't just have things working from the get-go.

tal,
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My impression is that the down subreddits are heavily-weighted towards the large ones, though. Like, if I look at /r/all, I see a lot of small subreddits that I haven't run into before. It's not just an evenly-distributed-across-size 8,800 subreddits.

tal,
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I'm just figuring out the UI myself, but by default, it looks to me like adult content is hidden by default for new accounts. You'll need to enable them.

Go to the upper right of the webpage, where your account name is. Hover over it to get a drop-down menu. Click on "Settings". Uncheck "Hide adult content".

tal, (edited )
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I saw a comment from someone asking people not to do this, even if they're pretty unhappy with Reddit. The reason he pointed out was that many people across the Internet benefit from the content in comments being available. Blowing that off the Internet is going to hurt people who are looking for information.

I think that that's a fair point.

I was never especially enthusiastic about expertsexchange.com. But I have definitely gotten useful information from it, and it being made inaccessible would (looking at the domain, did) disadvantage me.

Also, even if one is concerned about reducing value to Reddit as a company and one considers that to be an overriding goal, if I recall reading a past discussion correctly, deleting a comment doesn't, as I recall, wipe it from Reddit's database. It just hides it in the web interface from other users. That doesn't mean that Reddit can't use it as AI training data or whatnot.

If Reddit does a Digg-style implosion over this, then I think that the loss of the active userbase is probably a sufficient disincentive. That's something that cannot be easily replaced. And that doesn't disadvantage other users on the Internet: it just means that new content will be available on other services.

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Suggestion: list a few games that you do like so that people can have a better idea of what sort of games you like.

tal,
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That's OP, rather than someone recommending games to OP. He's saying that he has played and enjoyed Call of Duty, looking for games that might be liked by someone who liked that game.

Probably a good argument that kbin should highlight the username on comments from the original poster, as Reddit does.

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I don't know if kbin usernames can contain Unicode, but given that there are many similar glyphs in Unicode, that's another attack vector.

Something that domain names had to deal with when they started using Unicode.

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Most environments on Linux that support tab-completion have some sort of mechanism for providing case-insensitive tab completion for people who want it.

Any third-party apps being developed?

I've heard there's an official kbin app in very early stages. I don't know who's working on that, but it's not in the 2023 roadmap that Ernest has shared in the sidebar - and it rightfully doesn't need to be a main focus at this early stage. I know most people reading this have probably just gotten here as well, but I wouldn't...

tal,
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There is no publicly available API for kbin yet

Heh. That's a little ironic, given the context of the influx.

tal,
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You might also enjoy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_fate_of_the_universe

OC The branding for kbin is perfect

The branding for kbin is perfect for capturing the reddit migrators. The biggest friction point for the Fediverse is choosing an instance. If I want to join Lemmy, googling Lemmy takes me to a landing page with no join button, telling me to go to these other sites. Some of these sites even actively discourage signups, creating...

tal,
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Hmm. That's not what I thought of, but I'm American, and "bin" is more used in that context in British English, so it might be a British English/American English difference.

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we sure as hell don't want to sign up to something that ends up becoming a sort of Voat

I don't care if a site has stuff that caters to a crowd with viewpoints that I don't share, as long as they aren't hassling me.

tal,
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I mean, I personally agree with Christie, but I think that the "this conduct is inexcusable" has been used regarding Trump a lot in the past, and it seems to have had a somewhat-limited impact on Trump's popular appeal. I'm not convinced that saying this in 2023, after years of many people saying similar things, is going to be terribly-impactful.

I don't know what it is that specifically appeals to people about Trump -- though I expect that political polling organizations have a better idea -- but I would guess that another candidate would need to provide those characteristics before people who do like him would drop him. Trump originally ran heavily on anti-immigration and anti-trade issues, so maybe it's that. Maybe it was public fatigue with identity politics bound up with political correctness.

tal,
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I think that if one thinks of social constructs as memes -- I mean, not in the common-today-sense of a funny image, but in the original sense of memetics, as something composed of information and analogous to a biological organism that has to spread and have other features that biological organisms do to survive -- then that's not surprising.

If someone subscribes to a particular moral system, then I'd expect that a system that has people concerned about maintaining that moral system and shifts in society away from it will tend to outcompete one that doesn't.

tal,
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What happens when all of the major studios are Microsoft-owned?

My guess is that that's probably not something that will happen, just for economic reasons. It's not free to acquire studios and their IP -- you have to pay money for them. That'd basically mean Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo having to buy up a large portion of the industry.

Microsoft specializes in being a platform provider. They provide a platform to build things on. The reason that being a platform provider is in a good place is because they are the "chokepoint", the only party that is essential to the whole ecosystem. That gives them leverage based on the size of what's built on the platform, but they don't have to provide the capital to build all the stuff that depends on their platform. They try to buy up the industry, and that model doesn't really function any more.

tal, (edited )
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Clickbait title. This is talking about people who didn't know that Puerto Rico was a US territory. That's not prejudice, just lack of familiarity.

But all were recently mistaken for international travelers lacking proper identification and denied services for which they had already paid, highlighting the prejudice that people from the largely Spanish-speaking island – and Spanish speakers in general – face in the US.

Guam is a US territory too, though an even lower-population and more-obscure one. If someone didn't know that Guam was a US territory, thinks that it's another country, and treats someone from Guam as if they're someone from abroad, I think that that has less to do with someone having a problem with Pacific Islanders and more with the fact that it's just that not everyone is aware of Guam and its status.

I put together a guide aimed at Redditors for Kbin and Lemmy! (beehaw.org)

I want to preface, if you see a mistake in the image or have something helpful to add, go right ahead! I still have the layered files for this, so edits can be made very quickly. I chose to handwrite the text to avoid font copyright infringement....

tal,
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Oooh, it colorizes up/downvotes too. Nice!

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I don't know what the DLC situation is with Starfield, but if you look at some games that do have DLC -- which I'd personally generally care about more than collector's editions -- they can get well above €299.

looks at Steam

The Sims 4 is $1,064.33 for all the current DLC.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad is $1,061.63 for all the current DLC.

Paradox has a number of games that aren't quite as large but are still definitely up there. Europa Universalis is $445.13.

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