Imagine if they also masked… and kept doing it even after COVID is “gone” (aka: killing fewer people).
Earlier this week, I had to catch a bus and go to a clinic to get my blood work done. Plenty of coughing and sneezing people in both places, and other than the office workers, I was the only one wearing a mask.
While it really does feel like it, as a person working in healthcare, I do see some change after the whole shitstorm from recent years.
There are people who actually wear a mask, few, but they are around.
A lot more people seem to be conscious of spreading their illness to other people be it a cold or COVID.
People definitely wash their hands more often. I know we do.
Some people started getting their annual shots when they didn’t intend to before.
Local businesses open their windows and doors a lot more than they used to.
But also I also see some negative tendencies:
Interest in flu shots has waned. That might have something to do with the govt introducing a free flu shot programme from your GP if you’re above 65 or with specific conditions (which is a great thing) But I definitely see a lot more vaxx-scepticism and fear of combining both shots (infant vaccination plans are a lot more intense and the vast majority are fine).
People politicising a disease.
This is country specific but food supplement companies aggressively promoting “immune system stimulants” to the point where in the beginning of The Plague™ they somehow managed to include them in hospital treatment plans.
This came out longer than intended but there were some things that I needed to get out of my system.
I’m glad there are positive changes, and obviously those are most effective in healthcare situations.
However, from my personal experience as a university student in Canada, everything is the same if not worse than before. Hand sanitizer stations have been removed or simply not refilled, people straight up refuse to wear masks even when they’re sick. A week or two ago in class, I saw many people literally sneeze into their hands and then wipe the snot on their chairs (and these are supposed to be engineering students!). There is still no ventilation or even filtration in any of our classrooms.
Not only is personal protective equipment not used by almost anyone, its use is actively stigmatized by many, including professors at school. To me this is completely ridiculous, but unfortunately reality.
Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Absolutely! But I don’t think that’s the point of contention here. The problem is the “abuse” rhetoric, since it’s not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They’re imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
Again, that’s a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.
I worked with a mainframe team at a casino. It processed all the transactions that went along with the machines and how much everyone was gambling.
Those machines were intimidating. Black, blue lights, the fans even sounded distinct. And the terminal emulator to talk to it made it seem even more esoteric and spooky.
Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they're exhibiting to this day isn't new.
This was the first thing I assumed would happen when they announced the API pricing. A lot of spam prevention and deletion is done by bots that use the API, made by people that likely can’t pay the new exorbitant fees to keep those going.
Most bots actually would continue working, the free API allows for 100 requests a minute which for most is enough, and they have been manually adding exemptions for moderation bots that need more. The question is if the creators are willing to continue supporting them, for free, in the future. Plenty understandably do not.
Also currently being a moderator (of any subreddit) allows you to bypass both the the rate limit and NSFW sub ban - which itself seems to be a manual list of mostly porn subs, as most of the subs that are nsfw as a protest still work so it isn't a blanket ban.
@JohnEdwa The bots should not even hit the limit, otherwise its a hint for any anti-bot detection. Just create lot of small bots staying low on threshold to be detected. Together with an AI, then the missing bot detection utility and some missing moderators, Reddit should become a bigger pile than it is already.
Steve Huffman thought his bank account should be like Zuck and Musk’s because he also ran a social media site. Took advice from Musk, who just wasted 44 billion dollars and had ZERO experience with social media, then turned Reddit into an actual pile of garbage just like that.
It’s so absurd: On paper Huffman has managed a social media platform much, much longer than Musk, but somehow he is so ignorant that he looks to Musk to tell him what to do with it.
Yes, Reddit moving another step closer to Dead-Internet Theory.
There were already bots talking to bots on there. This is about to get worse. I don't think most people realised how many bots BotDefense was finding and neutralizing.
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon
This is the reason I'm still using Twitter. I use Twitter not to tweet about what I did, but to get news from people I follow.
Tech people can move to Mastodon because their circles are moving, but not with common people.
For me, personally, Mastodon is like empty void. No one to follow and I can't interact with people who share same interests because they only exist on Twitter (since the "famous people" isn't moving from Twitter)
The famous people did move over for certain specific groups; app developers are pretty much all on Mastodon now, the WWDC chatter / visionOS experimentation / etc is way more active on there than on Twitter. (Of course if any group ought to be uniquely pissed off at both Twitter and Reddit, it’s app developers)
Reddit migration will succeed for some communities and fail for others. Generic subs can live on with new mods and new subscribers. They're not much different from FB or Twitter. Just mindless content to feed that infinite scroll.
Specialized subs where the community as a whole (or a majority at least) decides to move to a new home will move (or have moved already), because for those the community is what matters, not the venue.
%100 this. I have Mastodon and use it sparingly because I found a good community but I still find myself going back to Twitter because most of the people I follow on Twitter haven't moved and most of the people I follow on Twitter are celebrities or influencers. The only way a #twittermigration will work is if most of the influencers and celebrities move off the platform as that's the content most regular users go for. With Reddit however we just need people that create good content to move, the lurkers will follow the content regardless of how "complicated" the platform is. The reddit lurkers won't stay on Reddit if there isn't any quality content being posted there, they may be satiated with reposts for a while but eventually they will leave and go looking for the content and if that content is on Kbin/Lemmy they will come here.
I suspect that I'm amongst the majority here in that I still use reddit as well as Kbin - at present the fediverse front ends just need time to introduce features to make them more usable.
I don't think it's a question of enough people ditching Reddit, but just enough to create and/or provide quality content.
And really that doesn't matter as much as participating in a platform that's free of all the BS Reddit evolved into. Fediverse has a platform free of almost everything long term Redditors came to hate.
If you're expecting everyone to leave Reddit, you're going to be disappointed. Most Reddit users do. Not. Care. They'll stay for as long as Reddit entertains them.
The Twitter migration was actually a really great thing for the Fediverse. It diversified Mastodon, and made it an actually lively space. It's still a nerdy space, but it's so much more than it was. It's a genuinely general and engaging microblogging space. And while, yes, it doesn't have everything that draws the Twitter clout chasers, celebrity watchers, and journalists or politicians, it's a viable alternative for people who are looking to actually engage with each other.
The same is true here, and will be true after tomorrow.
I have no idea why they are publishing pieces like this, and it’s objectively false. Mastodon had over 60,000 sign-ups in the last week, and my feed is as busy as it ever was. It went from like 4 million when I signed up less than a year ago to over twelve million now.
This may be overly cynical, but the same company owns Reddit and Ars Technica.
Articles which would make one tend to expect failure of the Reddit migration are aligned with the interests of that company. This may not be related, but it hard not to notice.
I think it's because there was a hope for wholesale migration of most/all users from Twitter to the Fediverse. Or at the very least for enough migration to make Twitter a barren landscape that would precipitate its imminent demise. Neither of those happened. Of course, neither of those are realistic outcomes either.
arstechnica.com
Active