• 1 Post
  • 96 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 4th, 2023

help-circle
  • What would be the point? Reddit doesn’t make any content. They’re just a platform. If they go ahead and paywall subs, those subs are going to have a tiny potential subscriber base. Therefore, they will be less attractive to post to (smaller audience, fewer upvotes etc).

    About the only place I can maybe see it working is AskHistorians. And you pay the Historians to answer the questions. Which would of course reduce the amount Reddit takes from the paywall. Doesn’t seem worth it, to me.

    Even then, I think the Historians would rather reply in a new free sub with wider readership than take $20 for putting in three hours of work responding to something. They do it because they’re passionate. Not for money.


  • This works for us:
    Step one: Keep your instance civil. No tolerance for horrible people (racists/bigots etc).
    Step two: Maintain a vibrant local set of communities free from nastiness.
    Step three: Let your users engage with the noise of the fediverse as much or as little as they desire.

    We don’t bother with telling our users who or what they can access, and don’t immediately ban visitors based on their home instance. Will that scale to millions of users? Probably not. But that’s a problem for future Nath - maybe.


  • The biggest problem I see with this is the scenario where calls are recorded. They’re recorded in case we hit a “he said, she said” scenario. If some issue were to be escalated as far as a courtroom, the value of the recording to the business is greatly diminished.

    Even if the words the call agent gets are 100% verbatim, a lawyer can easily argue that a significant percentage of the message is in tone of voice. If that’s lost and the agent misses a nuance of the customer’s intent, they’ll have a solid case against the business.


  • I did phones in a different century, so I don’t know whether this would fly today. But, my go-to for someone like this was “ok, I think I see the problem here. Shall we go ahead and fix it or do you need to do more yelling first?

    I can’t remember that line ever not shutting them down instantly. I never took it personally, whatever they had going on they were never angry at me personally.

    Then again, I do remember firing a couple of customers (“we don’t want your business any more etc”) after I later became a manager and people were abusive to staff. So you could be right, also.


  • Surely opinions on this are going to vary wildly? Lemmy is full of people installing graphene and de-googling, while I’m happy with stock Android on Pixels with a custom launcher. Samsung, Sony and Asus all have serious devotees as well.

    There’s also different responses depending on what you want in a phone. Some people want smaller than 6", others must have a 3.5mm jack. Some want SD storage. The camera is vital for me, but most of my colleagues don’t really care about the camera.

    How would you sift through all that for a “best” one size fits all phone?


  • If it was that big a deal for you, why would you use a phone OS by that same company?

    SMS is hot garbage:

    1. The first “S” stands for short. If your message is over 160 characters, you are sending multiple messages. The implementation of SMS is a hack on the carrier network in the first place, and joining multiple messages, particularly across carriers is a complication to this hack. Sure, 99.99% of messages are delivered just fine. But if the message doesn’t arrive for some reason, there’s no acknowledgement of this. The recipient just doesn’t get it.
    2. SMS is easy to spoof. If I have even basic carrier access, I can send a message to your dad from your number.
    3. SMS is not secure - at all.
    4. I can initiate a number port on your number, and while that port request will likely fail, it’s possible that I can receive messages that were destined for you in the short term.

    But sure. It works for anyone on any phone.




  • The author has a MacBook and has discovered that the new Apple Silicon is terrible for games. Particularly 32-bit games. It turns out Valve hasn’t re-made these 10-20 year old games to compensate for Apple’s hardware compatibility changes.

    Somehow, that’s Valve’s fault and a sign that they’re going down the drain.


  • It isn’t a monopoly though. Even ignoring the Blizzards, Epics and GOGs of the web, any developer can host their game on their own Web site and market it completely independently of Steam and keep 100% of their takings.

    The monopoly on storefront argument holds water in mobile land where side-loading a game is not possible/easy. In the world of computers though, I don’t think the same standard applies.







  • That data is valuable, but I’m unconvinced that it belongs to Reddit. They didn’t create it.

    I also don’t believe it should be free/legal for someone else to come along and take all that data off Reddit. While it was provided to Reddit by its creators, they haven’t consented for it to be used by another party.

    How you go about stopping that, I have no idea. How you go about monetising Reddit, I’m not sure about that either. It isn’t by claiming you own everything though. Yes, you own the platform. But not the people, nor what they post. And those are the things that attract visitors.



  • Choice recommends the Sennheiser HD range (HD 300, HD560S & HD 599). The 560S won out with quality of sound and bang-for-buck.

    Their Headphones study actually surprised me, I rock a pair of Jabra Elite Active 3’s as my daily, and Choice really hated the sound quality. I’m obviously no audiophile, as I love my Jabras. They also didn’t love the Sony wh-1000xm range, which was the biggest surprise as they’re by far the most popular headphones I see among my colleagues.



  • Australia has Choice. It is funded and independent by being a paid/subscriber service, though being a member is not expensive. Choice is pretty well-known, as when a product wins a recommendation it is prestigious. Therefore, the manufacturers will proudly put a Choice logo on their ads to assure consumers that their product is good.

    I can’t see Choice going away, as it’s a very good service and by far the most trusted source for unbiased reviews in Australia.