Used to get about 200+ pages of search results. Now it’s about 30 actual results and half of them are fake / malicious / useless. Google as a company was once an innovator, but is now mostly a barrier to any kind of progress or improvement.

Probably belongs in the “local observations” thread but all of the employers in my area (Midwestern USA) are doing at least partial RTO – it started midway through 2022 and picked up momentum since. Obviously SWE can easily be done from home with digital meetings, and so it’s just a lot of time and energy wasted commuting. I could see 1x/2 weeks for a sprint meeting or something but the way they are doing this is just absurd. It’s all to shore up control and their CRE which will collapse anyway.

All of which goes to clarify the fact that, pay aside, corporations are really just not the place to be when it comes to innovation or forward thinking.

The corporate price gouging and death by 1000 cuts fees have gotten out of control since the COVID era. Not just for Amazon either, though they are a very strong case in point. I am trying to do as little business as possible with these globocorps anymore.

But they lost the best 10% of their posters and content. That’s devastating. Same thing as happened to Twitter, FB, and others before them.

I actually think that Android has gone downhill in a big way, but I still won’t go to Apple’s closed ecosystem, and I don’t care what teenagers think.

I think it represents people being fed up with both institutions in the real world and the decline of the quality of the internet since the last couple of decades. As for them tuning in to something else, I have seen much more interest in DIY, hard skills, personal projects and such of late, but nothing societal beyond that which would really bring people together. I think that’s the best we can hope for at this time – at least people learning useful skills or not sacrificing their whole lives to corporate ambition is a plus.

I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I’m thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.

Yeah, they should have the resources to hire pretty much the best devs, it’s not like they are a startup or in some kind of backwater situation. They’re an old company with a big name and a lot of money.

Proprietary software has basically just turned into a giant grift and it makes me not want to use any of it anymore.

Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.

Platforms get arrogant and eventually overstep the bounds. It already happened since a long time with FB and Twitter, and now it’s Reddit’s turn. You can only take your user base for granted for so long. The problem is that economic conditions are changing rapidly right now and all these Silicon Valley firms are trying to find new ways to make money in a much more hostile climate. This has led them to some desperate moves that are alienating their users. I think it will be a slow war of attrition from here on, just like what happened to most of the other platforms that made this same mistake over time.

You ain’t kiddin’ man, I went there and I couldn’t believe the amount of chiseling you all have to put up with. And I’m American!

Thanks. Never heard of that one but it made my goddanged day!

FB is a desert compared with the old days, and Twitter will get there as well. Maybe the “AI revolution” can replace all the organic human content with fake people, but that’s about their only chance long term. If you can even call such a thing a “win”.

I’ll say. The kings of proprietary code grifting, but they sure want YOU to share all your code on GH, which they own (so that corporations can rip and run with it).

Yes. Truthfully for the last 2-3 years I have been dismayed with the direction social media in general were going, not only Reddit. Here were the 3 major issues I had: 1- lower quality of content & the volume of bad content drowning out the good, 2- the corruption of the companies themselves, and 3- the toxic social environment with nasty behavior becoming the norm. I think that fragmenting the web into smaller and more distributed communities, with a slower pace, will probably be a good thing at this point in time.

PS I’m happy to admit the web has always had a dark side, but it had gotten noticeably much worse in recent years.