blivet

One of the most enjoyable bits in REAMDE was about how the users of an MMORPG split into two warring factions over whether they preferred the default color palette or a custom version.

Yeah, 10 or 15 years ago I read an article about how Google brings up new storage modules when they need to expand, and their modules are essentially shipping containers full of hard drives.

Asteroids. I shudder to think how many quarters I spent playing that game. Sometime I’ll have to see if there is some retro arcade out there where I could go play it again.

You’re right, of course, but the person you’re replying to is also correct in that the firing of Victoria years ago was an early indication that Reddit seems to have decided as a matter of principle that it will not under any circumstances pay anyone to manage content.

Yeah, it took me quite a while, but I finally realized that practically none of the posts in the advice subs are real. Once I did, anytime I happened to see one I couldn’t help but think, “Dear Penthouse, I never thought I’d be writing to you, but last week…”

It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.

Absolutely. The golden period is always the exact moment you discovered it, whatever it is, and as soon as you become more familiar with it and begin to see flaws, you perceive a decline.

I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.

Individual users having some sort of reputation is useful. I always thought it was handy on Reddit to be able to distinguish people I happened to disagree with from actual trolls. The latter always had pretty high negative karma scores, and it was good to know that there was no point in engaging with them.

Yeah, I have a couple of domains registered with Google, and I remember people saying that it was likely they would shut down the service the way they have killed so many other products after people started to rely on them. At this point it wouldn’t surprise me if they canned Gmail.

Life always finds a way.

Are you sure? Even if it’s true, I like the life forms we’ve got right now an awful lot, and they don’t deserve what we’re doing to them.

“The planet,” in terms of a rock orbiting the Sun, sure, but we are killing an awful lot of flora and fauna that would be doing fine if we weren’t around to fuck things up.

I’m genuinely surprised at how well behaved people are. I’ve only run across a single case so far of somebody being deliberately annoying.

At my old job the director of my department had a poster up that said “move fast and break things”, but he also demanded 99.9999% uptime.

When I was a kid 10% was the standard. I don’t know of any other profession whose pay has doubled in real terms during my lifetime. As far as I’m concerned, if 15% isn’t enough, too damn bad.

I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.

Yeah, some of my favorite subs would often go for days or even weeks without a new post.

Yeah, the people who prefer old.reddit are exactly the sort of people the owners don’t want to have to deal with as they try to change Reddit to more closely resemble other social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.