• 0 Posts
  • 115 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 14th, 2023
  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Do you think things will get better?English
    23·
    5 days ago

    Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

    In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

    On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

    Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

    Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

    Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

    There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

    When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

    It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

    And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

  • kibiz0r@midwest.socialtoTechnology@beehaw.org•Reddit is profitable for the first time ever, with nearly 100 million daily usersEnglish
    3·
    17 days ago

    A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

    I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

    35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

    I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

    Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

    But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

    • I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
    • Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
    • Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
    • Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
    • Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
    • Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.