All these idiot cable channels/companies keep starting paid streamers doomed to flounder or fail. Meanwhile any one of them has the funds to ramp up a viable Youtube competitor where the content is free to them plus they can rake in more of the ad dollars that they already monetize their services with on tv. Freaking dinosaurs.
I just wish they had saved at least a CSV record of what was in people's Google Music account when they deleted that service. I lost track of a massive music collection I had built up because Google loves killing off their products.
A group called The Coalition for Independent Technology Research has started a campaign to try and fight the API change. Knowing Reddit nothing will come of it however if anyone cares here's their post about it: Reddit Has Cut off Historical Data Access. Help us Document the Impact.
I think Cicero is doing some new things in the way the site is set up to handle free speech. The tagging system for users to self moderate their feeds is a very interesting idea to de-emphasize the need for overbearing moderators and I'm very interested to see if it can hold up at scale and under stress.
Also the user content monetization plan seems like a stellar idea that I want to see in action as well.
Beyond that I think this site will become what we make of it. If we keep aggregating content we find interesting, and making sure to leave substantive comments (and upvote) where we can that creates a sort of gravity to pull in new users.
So you want a reddit alternative that is nothing like Reddit?
Me I just want Reddit without the censorship, political bias, and mod abuse, the way the site used to be before they went corpo, anti-user, authoritarian and whatnot. The conversations will come, people are already starting to comment more, including on link/aggregation posts. When we first got started it was about populating the site with content, any content just to get past the "empty restaurant syndrome" phase. I think we're nearing the end of that phase now. There's customers at the tables now, enough that we're starting to talk to each other more.
There's more that is needed though. Cicero needs to implement a few things (making offsite links open in a new tab (SO important), a listing of all subs on the site, auto-linking subs mentioned in comments, showing users their karma in the top bar, live preview under the comment box, adding more spacing between paragraphs so long comments don't look like walls of text, etc.) and we as users need to do our part to comment more. BTW I don't think this whole calling people "normies" thing is very productive. Reeks of tribalism and sets up an "us vs them" dynamic we could do without but hey that's just my opinion.
Anyway, we have a ton of content now that we can start conversations around. I think discoverability is an issue though. I only find new subs by viewing people's profile and realizing they've been posting in subs I've never seen on the home page or on s/all. That's a problem. No way folks are going to comment on posts they never see and can only find by backtracking through user profiles.
In any event I think one part in your greentext example highlights exactly the engagement problem you're lamenting:
>finally a nice post
>create account
>go to s/random
>click on create a post button
This person found a post that interested them, by your implication, a comment post with replies. Then, instead of adding to the conversation in that post, they immediately go to create a new post that may or may not get the same traction as the one that initially caught their eye. Why? Because making a top-level link/aggregation post is usually a whole lot easier than making a text post or a reply comment. For top level link/aggregation posts just find something you think is cool, post the link or image, make a title, hit submit... super easy. Reading through a linked article or user post and coming up with a cogent, relevant reply or coming up with a compelling top level text post often takes time and effort. I mean look at this novel I'm writing here. I've been at this for like a half an hour, it's the second draft because I originally went off on a tangent listing all the crazy fucked-up subs Reddit used to allow in it's wild west days to grow their users.
We do need more subs that encourage text posts. Subs like Reddit's r/askreddit would be helpful here. Right now most of our subs encourage aggregation posts, like few people are going to be making top level text posts in a sub like s/science or s/memes. But an s/askmainchan type sub would encourage conversation. So yeah I guess that's my recommendation, aside from us making efforts to leave more comments, we should start more subs that invite users to converse.
Players would customize a human avatar and set off to become whatever type of entity they choose through their gameplay choices. Avatars would have certain base attributes that would influence their positions in life at the start of the game (for instance players could choose to start as a wealthy businessperson or aristocrat if they want to court membership in the vampire clan Ventrue or the mage faction The Technocracy's convention The Syndicate. Start as a punk or biker gang member to move in the same circles city Gangrel, a jungle tribesman to be near Uktena Werewolves or Dreamspeaker mages, etc. etc...)
Another option would be just playing as a mundane human and letting the game choose your fate. Maybe your character comes upon a person being mugged and decides to fight off the robber, getting killed in the process. The next scene you wake up in the afterlife realm of Stygia, a new recruit to the Grim Legion.
Maybe the robber is actually a weak caitiff vampire that you manage to fend off after seeing what they are. Maybe you start seeking out and destroying such weak vampires attracting the attention of a Messenger who leads you to become a Hunter who battles creatures of the night. Or perhaps your vampire slaying spree results in vamps from clan Assamite seeking to embrace you by force, or you getting recruited by the Technocracy.
Perhaps your avatar comes upon a dying man and before you can call for help light erupts from the man's body and enters yours, you are now the very rare person given a Fae soul in adulthood (they usually inhabit children before birth), a Changeling.
Anyway, once a character's path is set they'd play out all sorts of World of Darkness scenarios as missions, world events, challenges etc. They'd level up their abilities and their avatar's position in society vying for power against all the other factions and entities in the game. The end game would allow players to enjoy various types of gameplay from sci-fi FPS (a Technocrat Void Engineer in the Border Corps Division fighting off invading aliens), to puzzles (first to escape the ever changing Tremere chantry survives), to fighting (Akashic Brotherhood mages martial arts dueling each other or underground fight clubs where all types can pit their skills against each other) and so on.
The game would be the ultimate realization of the original The World of Darkness before everything went through a million changes after 2004. I know I'd play the ever loving feck out of it.
Having now read the article I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this flowery humanist language by those wary of AI. It all tends to boil down to the same underlying theme that the works of AI are unnatural, soulless and only that which comes directly from a human's toil can ever be soulful, mindful or transcendent. Lots of warnings that AI has the potential to rob us of some innate essence that makes humanity and our doings so great etc. etc.
It's all a bit too luddite and short-sighted for my liking. It's a philosophy that ascribes this haughty sense of holiness to human consciousness and what it produces. I'm of the mind that our brains and the consciousness therein are just biological machines, moving electrons and writing memories no different than computers. Love is a chemical cocktail. Hate much the same. That we see, say, a beautiful painting that moves us isn't due to the humanity of the painter but to that painting triggering mental processes in us that cause specific chemicals to hit specific receptors in a process we define as the experience of emotion. I find it ludicrous to say AI producing the same result in us is somehow less valid because AI did it instead of another person.
I mentioned the short-sighted nature these types of arguments tend to have. They almost never play the technology forward to when AI LLMs are all but obsolete and we're in the realm of AGI. What happens to these flowery notions of the primacy of consciousness when the AIs are conscious? Does the art AI creates then suddenly gain this mythic soulfulness these types of arguments deny they posses today?
It seems like these arguments are setting up this budding sort of AI racism, getting their "Humans are better because humanity FTW, philosophy" all ready just in case some AI gets uppity one day and starts calling itself a person.
Anyway my philosophy on AI is to let it do all the things. Let it capture every industry, every job, all of it. Let the AI and robots do everything and get them to the point where they do it all amazingly well. Let humans finally fucking chill out. We are due as a species for some fully automated, leisurely, heaven on earth type living. Everyone free to do whatever they want whenever they want. No work unless you want to work on something while surrounded by awesome tech we can only dream of because AI figured out some crazy sci-fi level physics and now we can teleport and have holodecks and not age and shit. All these "but muh humanity" motherfuckers need to go like read some poetry and just stay out of the way.
If they held to today they're down a lil over 58%. Oof. Not a gender thing though, most investors have that one play where they went long at what turned out to be the top. If this group is smart they quickly switched to short side plays to ride the downtrend then went long again when the bleeding stopped. I mean that or some yolo DCA shit who knows with cryptobroads.
Yeah the Presonus Eris are prolly the best reference monitors in their price range. Not sure monitors are the best option for OP though since they're meant to not color or enhance the sound like regular speakers. I don't really have a regular speaker recommendation though since I've been a headphones guy for like ever. So *shrug*
Well my hope that the show would go beyond just being mid-tier at best has not been met with this opener. But then when Akiva "Hack" Goldsman's name is attached as the writer that's to be expected I guess. My main takeaways from this episode:
WTF is with the super soldier serum? Never before in Trek has this stuff been mentioned or used. Not even in THIS SHOW's previous season when it could have come in handy or even saved lives multiple times. Why TF aren't all officers carrying a hypospray of this syrum at all times? I'm calling this stuff Bullshit Juice from now on.
Why the holy goddamn hell are they trying to introduce another war arc? Strange New Worlds was supposed to be the optimistic TOS/TNG style show. This whole episode was pretty much darkness that hinged on fighting and blowing up ships.
Pike, the captain of the ship, is in this episode for one scene at the start then fucks off to go see Una. Another first because there has never been a Star Trek show that started a season without it's captain. Pike was sidelined a whole lot in season one as well. I'm starting to think he's a guest star in his own show.
And why the Gorn??? This pre-TOS show is threatening a Gorn war story when Kirk in TOS didn't know that species at all when the Metrons force him to fight one. Young Kirk is on this show. What the fucking fuckity fuck?
This show seems to be getting worse, just when I thought nuTrek couldn't disappoint me more.
HP makes the worst printers I've ever used in my entire life. And their ink carts run out so fast they're legitimarely a scam. Fuck 'em.
All these idiot cable channels/companies keep starting paid streamers doomed to flounder or fail. Meanwhile any one of them has the funds to ramp up a viable Youtube competitor where the content is free to them plus they can rake in more of the ad dollars that they already monetize their services with on tv. Freaking dinosaurs.
I just wish they had saved at least a CSV record of what was in people's Google Music account when they deleted that service. I lost track of a massive music collection I had built up because Google loves killing off their products.
A group called The Coalition for Independent Technology Research has started a campaign to try and fight the API change. Knowing Reddit nothing will come of it however if anyone cares here's their post about it: Reddit Has Cut off Historical Data Access. Help us Document the Impact.
Of these options TPB, but rarbg is the first stop if I'm using a public tracker.
Much aggreed.
I think Cicero is doing some new things in the way the site is set up to handle free speech. The tagging system for users to self moderate their feeds is a very interesting idea to de-emphasize the need for overbearing moderators and I'm very interested to see if it can hold up at scale and under stress.
Also the user content monetization plan seems like a stellar idea that I want to see in action as well.
Beyond that I think this site will become what we make of it. If we keep aggregating content we find interesting, and making sure to leave substantive comments (and upvote) where we can that creates a sort of gravity to pull in new users.
Just a matter of time and persistence.
So you want a reddit alternative that is nothing like Reddit?
Me I just want Reddit without the censorship, political bias, and mod abuse, the way the site used to be before they went corpo, anti-user, authoritarian and whatnot. The conversations will come, people are already starting to comment more, including on link/aggregation posts. When we first got started it was about populating the site with content, any content just to get past the "empty restaurant syndrome" phase. I think we're nearing the end of that phase now. There's customers at the tables now, enough that we're starting to talk to each other more.
There's more that is needed though. Cicero needs to implement a few things (making offsite links open in a new tab (SO important), a listing of all subs on the site, auto-linking subs mentioned in comments, showing users their karma in the top bar, live preview under the comment box, adding more spacing between paragraphs so long comments don't look like walls of text, etc.) and we as users need to do our part to comment more. BTW I don't think this whole calling people "normies" thing is very productive. Reeks of tribalism and sets up an "us vs them" dynamic we could do without but hey that's just my opinion.
Anyway, we have a ton of content now that we can start conversations around. I think discoverability is an issue though. I only find new subs by viewing people's profile and realizing they've been posting in subs I've never seen on the home page or on s/all. That's a problem. No way folks are going to comment on posts they never see and can only find by backtracking through user profiles.
In any event I think one part in your greentext example highlights exactly the engagement problem you're lamenting:
>finally a nice post
>create account
>go to s/random
>click on create a post button
This person found a post that interested them, by your implication, a comment post with replies. Then, instead of adding to the conversation in that post, they immediately go to create a new post that may or may not get the same traction as the one that initially caught their eye. Why? Because making a top-level link/aggregation post is usually a whole lot easier than making a text post or a reply comment. For top level link/aggregation posts just find something you think is cool, post the link or image, make a title, hit submit... super easy. Reading through a linked article or user post and coming up with a cogent, relevant reply or coming up with a compelling top level text post often takes time and effort. I mean look at this novel I'm writing here. I've been at this for like a half an hour, it's the second draft because I originally went off on a tangent listing all the crazy fucked-up subs Reddit used to allow in it's wild west days to grow their users.
We do need more subs that encourage text posts. Subs like Reddit's r/askreddit would be helpful here. Right now most of our subs encourage aggregation posts, like few people are going to be making top level text posts in a sub like s/science or s/memes. But an s/askmainchan type sub would encourage conversation. So yeah I guess that's my recommendation, aside from us making efforts to leave more comments, we should start more subs that invite users to converse.
Only for being ugly.
I think the bigger question is how did he become an air nomad?
Once, at church, when I was twelve I thought to myself, "Man, Father O'Malley's dick tastes weird."
Hmmm. Wonder why?
Bruh, dark mode.
An action-adventure MMORPG set in the complete pre-V5 "World of Darkness" universe (meaning all the lore from pre-2004 Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, Wraith: The Oblivion, Changeling: The Dreaming, and Hunter: The Reckoning combined).
Players would customize a human avatar and set off to become whatever type of entity they choose through their gameplay choices. Avatars would have certain base attributes that would influence their positions in life at the start of the game (for instance players could choose to start as a wealthy businessperson or aristocrat if they want to court membership in the vampire clan Ventrue or the mage faction The Technocracy's convention The Syndicate. Start as a punk or biker gang member to move in the same circles city Gangrel, a jungle tribesman to be near Uktena Werewolves or Dreamspeaker mages, etc. etc...)
Another option would be just playing as a mundane human and letting the game choose your fate. Maybe your character comes upon a person being mugged and decides to fight off the robber, getting killed in the process. The next scene you wake up in the afterlife realm of Stygia, a new recruit to the Grim Legion.
Maybe the robber is actually a weak caitiff vampire that you manage to fend off after seeing what they are. Maybe you start seeking out and destroying such weak vampires attracting the attention of a Messenger who leads you to become a Hunter who battles creatures of the night. Or perhaps your vampire slaying spree results in vamps from clan Assamite seeking to embrace you by force, or you getting recruited by the Technocracy.
Perhaps your avatar comes upon a dying man and before you can call for help light erupts from the man's body and enters yours, you are now the very rare person given a Fae soul in adulthood (they usually inhabit children before birth), a Changeling.
Anyway, once a character's path is set they'd play out all sorts of World of Darkness scenarios as missions, world events, challenges etc. They'd level up their abilities and their avatar's position in society vying for power against all the other factions and entities in the game. The end game would allow players to enjoy various types of gameplay from sci-fi FPS (a Technocrat Void Engineer in the Border Corps Division fighting off invading aliens), to puzzles (first to escape the ever changing Tremere chantry survives), to fighting (Akashic Brotherhood mages martial arts dueling each other or underground fight clubs where all types can pit their skills against each other) and so on.
The game would be the ultimate realization of the original The World of Darkness before everything went through a million changes after 2004. I know I'd play the ever loving feck out of it.
Haha, thanks yeah I just imagined the World of Darkness game I've been wishing they would make.
A rubber band would do the same as that bottle opener for -100% the cost.
Doing God's work, thanks anon.
Having now read the article I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of this flowery humanist language by those wary of AI. It all tends to boil down to the same underlying theme that the works of AI are unnatural, soulless and only that which comes directly from a human's toil can ever be soulful, mindful or transcendent. Lots of warnings that AI has the potential to rob us of some innate essence that makes humanity and our doings so great etc. etc.
It's all a bit too luddite and short-sighted for my liking. It's a philosophy that ascribes this haughty sense of holiness to human consciousness and what it produces. I'm of the mind that our brains and the consciousness therein are just biological machines, moving electrons and writing memories no different than computers. Love is a chemical cocktail. Hate much the same. That we see, say, a beautiful painting that moves us isn't due to the humanity of the painter but to that painting triggering mental processes in us that cause specific chemicals to hit specific receptors in a process we define as the experience of emotion. I find it ludicrous to say AI producing the same result in us is somehow less valid because AI did it instead of another person.
I mentioned the short-sighted nature these types of arguments tend to have. They almost never play the technology forward to when AI LLMs are all but obsolete and we're in the realm of AGI. What happens to these flowery notions of the primacy of consciousness when the AIs are conscious? Does the art AI creates then suddenly gain this mythic soulfulness these types of arguments deny they posses today?
It seems like these arguments are setting up this budding sort of AI racism, getting their "Humans are better because humanity FTW, philosophy" all ready just in case some AI gets uppity one day and starts calling itself a person.
Anyway my philosophy on AI is to let it do all the things. Let it capture every industry, every job, all of it. Let the AI and robots do everything and get them to the point where they do it all amazingly well. Let humans finally fucking chill out. We are due as a species for some fully automated, leisurely, heaven on earth type living. Everyone free to do whatever they want whenever they want. No work unless you want to work on something while surrounded by awesome tech we can only dream of because AI figured out some crazy sci-fi level physics and now we can teleport and have holodecks and not age and shit. All these "but muh humanity" motherfuckers need to go like read some poetry and just stay out of the way.
If they held to today they're down a lil over 58%. Oof. Not a gender thing though, most investors have that one play where they went long at what turned out to be the top. If this group is smart they quickly switched to short side plays to ride the downtrend then went long again when the bleeding stopped. I mean that or some yolo DCA shit who knows with cryptobroads.
Truly
They need more subs to join the protest. RN reddit's algo is promoting the subs that didn't go dark to make it look like business as usual.
Yeah the Presonus Eris are prolly the best reference monitors in their price range. Not sure monitors are the best option for OP though since they're meant to not color or enhance the sound like regular speakers. I don't really have a regular speaker recommendation though since I've been a headphones guy for like ever. So *shrug*
Nice. I have it on a playlist I listen to every now and then. Song rocks.
A lot of the subs are saying they're blacked out indefinitely. Guess we'll see which ones really have the cahones to keep at it.
Well my hope that the show would go beyond just being mid-tier at best has not been met with this opener. But then when Akiva "Hack" Goldsman's name is attached as the writer that's to be expected I guess. My main takeaways from this episode:
WTF is with the super soldier serum? Never before in Trek has this stuff been mentioned or used. Not even in THIS SHOW's previous season when it could have come in handy or even saved lives multiple times. Why TF aren't all officers carrying a hypospray of this syrum at all times? I'm calling this stuff Bullshit Juice from now on.
Why the holy goddamn hell are they trying to introduce another war arc? Strange New Worlds was supposed to be the optimistic TOS/TNG style show. This whole episode was pretty much darkness that hinged on fighting and blowing up ships.
Pike, the captain of the ship, is in this episode for one scene at the start then fucks off to go see Una. Another first because there has never been a Star Trek show that started a season without it's captain. Pike was sidelined a whole lot in season one as well. I'm starting to think he's a guest star in his own show.
And why the Gorn??? This pre-TOS show is threatening a Gorn war story when Kirk in TOS didn't know that species at all when the Metrons force him to fight one. Young Kirk is on this show. What the fucking fuckity fuck?
This show seems to be getting worse, just when I thought nuTrek couldn't disappoint me more.
My episode rating: *Sigh*