They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

I use Windows with an audio interface on my PC, and I think that caused some audio routing issues when it came to remote play. I haven’t tried it again, might have been fixed

The weird part for me isn’t that the corrections are online. It’s that the whole book isn’t a searchable help page with all the errata patched away.

I actually found this because I was following a guide that needed Process Explorer to find out which damn program was catching my controller before DS4Windows was.

It was Firefox, specifically the Stable Diffusion WebUI for some reason.

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

I’m always baffled when I see people post links to the Fandom site for Skyrim rather than UESP my beloved. Community-run, for passion and not for profit. The internet of yore, today.

Simpler “digital newspaper”-type interfaces beat all the video-auto playing nonsense any day of the week. Fandom’s interfaces are genuinely baffling to use, who approved all of this visual cramming of information I didn’t ask for? You know I won’t randomly start enjoying any of it right?

Fandom’s Steam key store, Fanatical (used to be called Bundle Stars), is still pretty good, although I wish I didn’t feel like spending money there directly funds those autoplaying cancer videos.

That’s true, but now you have to remember which server is legit. One benefit of a centralized service is that you have centralized verification, which at one time was a point in Twitter’s favor.

I’m not very well versed in cryptography, but if I understand the certification system for websites, different sites apply to a certificate provider, of which there are multiple. Maybe something like this is possible for the Fediverse? Where a user or community or instance can be “verified” by one or more trusted verification “agencies” or whatever.

I just hate how “toxic cesspool” is the default. I was just watching a short video on YouTube about the US city of Baltimore, a place I heard about from an old family friend who studied at Hopkins many years ago.

The video was about the city’s decline, with the primary cause (according to the video) being the hollowing out of the manufacturing and logistics industries. The channel, Forgotten Places, doesn’t strike me as one that toxic people would be flooding to (those channels exist).

Can you guess what every other comment is about? Hint: it’s not the abandonment of productive industry. A small number of comments name more historical industrial employers that have left the city, but by far the comments with the most upvotes are “we all know we can’t discuss what happened to Baltimore 😉😉😉😉😉”

The only gesture it still needs is swiping a comment right to left to collapse the entire comment thread

There’s more than just that to it.

I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.

Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.

Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.

I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.

I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.

These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.

But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.

That’s an interesting angle that I completely failed to notice. I thought this whole experiment is for Facebook/Meta to get a headstart in a new tech space, like they’re been trying to do with VR and the whole crypto craze.

While I never assumed their intentions were pure with any of this, I clearly was not nearly as cynical as one has to be with these people.

I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.

I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.

I picked up Dinkum. I thought maybe it will be the Minecrafty Animal Crossing-like that I hoped would be made one day. I didn’t play it yet, but it looks like what I want out of a Deck game (besides the Deck<->Switch thing). I also got Necesse, a game with similar themes.

I picked up The Rewinder as well, which looks like my idea of a quintessential indie game.

Besides, after a decade of only buying things on deep [1] after they’re out of the zeitgeist, I think it’s about time I play things that are a bit earlier in their lifecycle. Especially indie stuff, where the money isn’t going to some exec’s yacht polish.

While I bought it some time ago, I finally got around to playing Grim Fandango Remastered, which has been delightful on the Deck. I love how the game was conceived for a totally different type of machine than what I’m playing it on.

[1] it appears this community auto-removes the word for “reduction in price”. I guess there’s good reasons for that, but this is a Steam Sale thread lol

How is Sleeping Dogs on the Deck? I played it a bit a few years ago on desktop, so it might be worth downloading onto the Deck so I can restart and take it in. I remember being really engrossed in the world. I think I ended up not playing it because I started Saints Row 2 and that game grabbed my attention like nothing else. I was particularly nostalgic for the classic early 2000s GTA games, so SR2 was like an undiscovered fourth one.