• 1 Post
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle



  • I for one don’t see the issue with that “to be fair” statement here. The parent used it merely to announce that they were going to take the counter-point to the most likely community view, i.e., they were going to defend Reddit’s action of not naming Swartz as co-founder. They then proceeded to do so by explaining that Swartz never really played a co-founder role. The comment implied “to be fair [to whoever at Reddit made that decision] and then went on to provide supporting argumentation.

    It’s quite different from the lazy use of the phrase, e.g., “to be fair, both sides suck” that you may find in political discussions without supporting arguments, for example.



  • Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.

    Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.

    We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.

    For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.







  • I agree with you.

    A company’s core business and skillset is rarely to manage an on-prem IT infrastructure, which is a highly complex endeavor these days. Security most always benefits from being put in the hands of cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, who can mobilize the best talent and apply economies of scale and modern best practices to cybersecurity across an entire stack.

    It also means far fewer liability headaches for the companies that transfer this difficult and onerous responsibility to cloud providers. It’s not even necessarily cheaper to go full cloud; I’ve seen multiple examples where it wasn’t, but the reduction in complexity and liability made common sense. So even the “LaTe-StAgE CaPiTaLiSm!!” claim is just a tired trope at this point.

    It’s easy to focus on one publicized exploit of Microsoft’s cloud like this one, and not see the other side of the argument of how many exploits were avoided over the years by not having individual companies manage their own servers. It’s still entirely plausible that the general move to cloud infrastructure since the late 2000s is a net win for cybersecurity in aggregate.

    I would also add that whether other cloud customers might be breached simultaneously in the extremely rare event of a cloud-wide exploit is not a consideration when a company decides to move from on-prem to cloud. It’s just a Moloch problem that doesn’t and shouldn’t concern them.



  • Because you’re both claiming to understand the failing of reddit’s UI and claiming the same UI as a reliable indicator of all comments getting deleted. Rather, it seems some comments were likely missed because of the shitty UI. Relying on reddit’s UI for this is the specific user error to which I was referring. I hope that’s clearer.

    Thanks for clarifying. I understand the failing of Reddit’s UI from reading about it in the replies here. I didn’t know about it when I first posted, so there is no contradiction there. I also had no reason then to believe that either the redact tool (which reported deleting all comments) nor the Reddit UX (which reported no comment left) were inaccurate in their reporting.

    Had either displayed wording similar to that service page you linked to, I would agree with you that it would have been user error to ignore it.

    Barring that, I think it’s a stretch to claim user error when an obscure technical limitation of Reddit makes its UX misleading in a non-obvious way.


  • I haven’t nuked my account yet and will only do so once I am certain that all my comments are permanently deleted (some were missed due to a design limitation in the way Reddit finds them). But practically speaking, I am no longer using that account, so it is functionally equivalent to having deleted it.

    I have no regret so far. Deleting my trail of crumbs has assuaged my fear of doxxing (which, in all honesty, is orthogonal to the API shutdown fiasco and was worth doing selectively anyway). It has also given me back time that I would spend mindlessly doomscrolling on Reddit. I am now more deliberate in my use of social media and the Fediverse, which is an improvement in my online habits. For that I am grateful.



  • I had indeed read and understood the earlier comment that you linked.

    I just got confused by your “user error” suggestion, because I don’t see how this qualifies as one.

    First, the Reddit API is broken, because the select query sent by the deletion tool receives less than a full set (as if there was an implied LIMIT clause on the server side). This leads the deletion tool to erroneously announce it has processed all comments.

    Two, the Reddit UX is broken, because the profile’s Comments page incorrectly returns an empty set due to a silent design limitation (as described in the linked comment).

    There is literally no mechanism to find leftover comments through either the Reddit API or UX, because both are broken. The only workaround is to use a search engine that had indexed those leftover comments.

    That’s the whole point of my original post, and I don’t see where the “user error” may come in.




  • I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.

    My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.