Design & Illustration

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Yep I remember this pattern of behavior distinctly from last time.

    One of the big ones that sticks out is you start seeing a lot of people claiming to be democrats or left aligned showing up all of a sudden and being big time concern trolls and talking about sitting out the election and/or claiming that there’s no difference between voting democrat or republican, which is demonstrably absolute horse shit.

    And just a lot of added vitriol. It seems like even politically unrelated discussions get meaner and more argumentative. I expect it’s just gonna get worse as we get closer to November. It’s only the beginning February. Ugh.



  • Yeah agreed on the trending problem on Mastodon. In fact, as a whole it does a pretty poor job of serving interesting content without putting in some work. The only way I’ve been able to get a stream of stuff I actually want to see is by filtering a lot of stuff out and following a lot of specific hashtags.

    I think the problem they’re wrestling with is definitely technical but also partly philosophical. Because when you start doing trending content, you start looking at some amount of algorithmic aggregation and that can get messy when you’re positioning yourself as a network that specifically doesn’t play the algorithmic BS game like the Metas and Twitters of the world.




  • I just hope the platform will expand into more niche content over time. The big topics seem to be news, politics, and some specific tech subjects. Would love to see arts/crafts/hobby related stuff take hold here as well.

    That said, I do think a lot of the discussion happening here is pretty high quality and the place does seem to be improving over time. Time will tell. Hopefully more people wake up to the fact that reddit is not gonna hold up on the long term. I expect them to go IPO crazy this coming year and I don’t think a lot of the core users are going to like it.






  • Eh those rules seem dumb and are in some ways… but as someone who moderated a roughly 200 and 250k subscriber subreddits for around 6-7 years, I can say from experience that an insane amount of people just tried using the platform to shotgun links to their bullshit youtube channels or content mill tech blogs.

    You’d see one of those links, look at their profile and sure enough they just had a huge list of them firing off the same link to 10-20 subreddits, then the next link, then the next. No discussion, no commenting history in those subreddits for the most part. They were just using them as a way to get clicks and nothing more.

    Left unchecked, that shit destroys the quality of a community. I know because the first big sub I grew from about 10k to 250k had been left open to that stuff for years and had totally stagnated. As soon as I started cleaning house the place blew up in numbers and quality of content.

    The vast, vast majority of people linking their own off-site content on reddit (in my experience as a mod) was definitely people just spamming. And if you let them do it the subreddits go to hell.