• 4 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • On the contrary, I find it to be pretty honest about the article’s contents. Clickbait implies it misrepresents the content behind it, or adds noise to it that exaggerates what the content entails.

    The article itself is persuasive in nature and quite literally is intended to convince the reader to adopt some new product or service- in this case, Nobara. The author is of the opinion that the reader will benefit by switching over. The title reflects that.

    “look at me, I’m using this and that and you must use it as well because everyone does and you’re missing out”

    It doesn’t say you “must” use some alternative. Necessity isn’t implied anywhere in the title. And the fomo? Nowhere does it say everyone is using Nobara and you should adopt it so you don’t miss out. The article lists and elaborates on the arguments Nathan makes, which aren’t just an appeal to majority, and the title reflects that.

    If you’re going to throw a fit over a title of an article be honest about how persuasive the content is and what the actual article is about, then that’s just childish.


  • Looking it up online, the subject of Opera being chinese spyware seems to be debated pretty thoroughly, but with no definitive consensus (that I could find at least). Any articles on the subject I could read up on?

    I use Firefox myself, so it wouldn’t really impact my internet usage, but I’m just curious about what’s going on with Opera.

    Funnily enough, I think the last time I used Opera was the Internet Channel on the Wii way back when, which was powered by Opera lmao










  • Never really was a fan of the copious amount of awards to begin with. Gold and Silver were fine enough, and they got a point across. If I saw them on a post or comment, I’d have an indicator that someone really liked it, and wanted to praise it beyond giving it an upvote. Silver and Gold were two tiers to this, which coupled with upvotes, was more than sufficient in giving users a metric by which to value posts or comments.

    It turned to shit when I start seeing diamond-clad medals, seal heads, unicorns and rainbows, and shooting stars flying across my screen. It took the simple approach and turned it into a clusterfuck of visual noise because the people designing them had no clue about the basics of a user interface.

    And then they kill the entire thing because (shocker) it just doesn’t work. Typical.


  • 21 yo software dev here, so not quite older, but I’d say I fit the tech nerd bill lmao

    While a lot of people are conscious about the software they use, I think being involved in tech, either as a hobby or career, ups the chance that a person will care about things like user privacy, how an app is run, algorithms that might manipulate the user, or even how technologically literate the rest of the community is

    And that isn’t to be condescending towards people who are more apathetic about it. It’s like how a doctor might be more behooved to eat healthy; when you’ve seen and studied what can go wrong, you’re more compelled to avoid it


  • Yeah, some of these takes are just off the rails. If Reddit had some scheme to mass-convert people to Republicans, they wouldn’t be quarantining subreddits like The_Donald that would theoretically be instrumental in achieving this master plan. Or they’d be manipulating posts on r/politics to be far more right leaning.

    Not killing off API usage in hopes of angering the volunteers who protect against bots in hopes that there’ll be an uptick in pro-Nazi bots in hopes that it’ll sway the result of political elections.




  • Even on Lemmy, I’ve been seeing a bit of this. Like on the front page, for a day or two, there was that meme from LemmyShitpost about US incarceration rates titled “Happy Freedom Day… I Guess”

    Come on, do people genuinely want to shit on a country on the day of it’s independence that millions of people look forward to celebrating? Can they not keep their negativity and hate to themselves? Any comment that called out this circlejerk was just downvoted and was told that “Lemmy isn’t the platform for you” and that Lemmy is only for “People that live in reality”. Verbatim.

    It’s just saddening to see, and it reminds me why I just curate my subscription feed and never look at the general front page. Like yes, a collective outrage at the Reddit admin is what drove the spike in users as of late, but it feels different when you’re shitting on other people and the things they’re passionate about, for something undeserved.


  • Oh yeah, I agree it’s more effective, by far. I imagine that’s why Google has Opinion Rewards and other companies use surveys to directly understand the needs of their customers. Though getting people in mass to volunteer that info, especially without some small profit incentive like Opinion Rewards might be tricky.

    At least in the realm of targeted advertising, the closest example to user input would be when you set up an account, you’re prompted to select your interests. Like with Windows 10, when you’re setting it up for the first time, you’ll be asked about your interests, which Microsoft will then use to send ads and news pertaining to those categories.

    But yeah, I see what you mean


  • While I hate the shady data harvesting practices of companies like Meta, I do want to play devil’s advocate here, as far as the value of data goes, if only for the sake of me understanding the shortcomings of it better. If a company were to dig through your trash can to get an idea of what you want to eat, so to speak, they’d probably find data on a history of foods you have eaten, if you’ve been interested in burgers, or any other foods you’ve been interested in. Or if you’ve been an adventurous eater in general or if you prefer to stick to variants of the same stuff you normally eat.

    It may not give you a foolproof way of knowing what your next actions will be, but wouldn’t it give a company an educated guess, at the very least? Enough to improve the chances of targeted ads being more effective, as opposed to missing altogether.

    If catching the user’s interest is a dice roll, then wouldn’t the data at least improve the odds of rolling a number you want?




  • I was offput by it so much on my last phone that I rooted it (first time rooting any Android) just to override it as much as I possibly could. For me, it wasn’t because of the flatness, but entirely because of the huge padding.

    The volume slider, which was a thin stripe before, now looks like a comically large bar for no reason at all. Small circular icons on the notification shade which could fit 4 in one row, now only fit 2 in a row. Pulling down the notification shade still let you see the screen behind it, but now it grays it out entirely.

    As for the custom color selection, the main gimmick of Material You, it is entirely hit or miss. On my own phone, Pixel 3, I used a red/maroon color, and on my new phone, Pixel 5, I use a mint green.

    There’s situations where my chosen color looks really good, and others where it looks horrendous. As it turns out, having one universal color choice for things ranging from the notification shade icons, time display on the lock screen, calculator, etc. makes it difficult to find one color that looks good for all of them.

    TL;DR: I hated it when it came out. I have gotten used to it now, but still dislike it immensely.