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  • 18 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Because Reddit is in the unique position where a small amount of users can affect a vast swathe of their platform - moderators.

    Most mods don’t care, by volume. The ones that do are often also the ones that are more active, more engaged, and more entwined with communities outside Reddit.

    During the protest last year, polls come back favorably pretty much everywhere to shut down - but after the shutdown actually happened, a tidal wave of lurkers who never vote and never comment came out of the woodwork to complain and call it all stupid. Public opinion of all users is likely against practically any protest that could happen.

    I don’t like it, but that’s how it is. The best realistic outcome is that a large contingent of content creators and more informed users leave the site - but how many of those are left that haven’t already vamoosed and are still willing to leave under some unknown worse circumstance?



  • Let’s be honest with ourselves - no, it won’t be wildly unpopular. This change affects very few people and the people still using Reddit at this point likely won’t care much, and I have doubt any future change would cause much outrage either.

    Because think about this - who is actively complaining and gnashing their teeth about the continued downward spiral and still scrolling, posting, moderating there at this point? I’d love to believe more people would jump ship - but if it ever happened it would take a far larger-scope fuckup than anything we’ve seen so far.






  • People like to think that they’ve made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn’t. There wasn’t a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn’t give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).

    The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there’s already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don’t give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don’t particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.

    Even if it hurts to realize this, it’s important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren’t stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.














  • I am subscribed to over 100 channels, ranging from daily uploads to 1 video every few months. Frankly I don’t need more stuff to watch. When I do want to find something new, it’s either a recommendation from a friend, something I saw on a different social media, or something I searched for myself deliberately.

    This change isn’t a good thing, it’s Google trying to pressure more people into giving up more data, but the “threat” of them removing their algorithmically recommended content from my feed is not a threat at all, it’s a bonus if anything.



  • Tried posting the video this time instead of a link to the news page.

    Some welcome changes to the Lithoid species pack - tweaks to their unique origin, tweaks to Terravore to make it less fiddly. A new advanced space racism civic! (This is one of the weirder parts of talking about Stellaris.) Personally I’m a bit underwhelmed by the new portrait; It’s good art, but I really prefer more out there non-humanoid designs, which is the opposite of what they’re going for here. The quality of life changes to ascension perks and gestalt nodes are welcome as well. This kind of tidying up is why I like the whole concept of the custodian team.

    Only real negative thing here is the increase on price for some older DLCs. It’s only two dollars, and they are tweaking them to be better, but I still feel like it’s gonna cause unnecessary backlash for little gain.







  • (Screenshots taken from the Interface in Game site, here: https://interfaceingame.com/games/team-fortress-2/)

    I wanna talk about the game I’m currently absorbed with, Team Fortress 2. TF2, being rather old, allows total customization of the UI, from the HUD to the menus. The default UI is clear, but also dated in places; you can really see where they slapped on new elements that clash a bit with existing ones, like the medals on the scoreboard compared to other elements, or the loading screen for a map, which has the very old Source infobox in the bottom right, a stylized background and panel taking up most of the screen, and a well integrated but still a bit off info bar at the top that was added more recently. The most glaring example is probably the community server browser compared to the newer slide-out tabs and menus for navigating play options. If Valve was still doing major work on this game, I’d say they need a good UI unification art pass.

    When browsing TF2 custom HUDs on a site like this, there’s quite a few different styles to choose from, ranging from those that attempt to refine the vanilla HUD to those that make it something entirely different. Many competitive players prefer minimalistic HUDs that put pertinent information like health and ammo count closer to the center of the screen, so that one doesn’t need to divide their attention while fighting. Still others will pick a HUD that is a different style but still “complete” and fleshed out; even others still will fill their UI with memes (which I never understood, but to each their own).

    Sometimes you just have to appreciate the little touches, though, like the animations and presentation on a map’s video tutorial and the class select screen. It oozes a particular aesthetic that the game has deviated from, over time.



  • I’ve bought every Stellaris DLC over the years, and I’m not even a particularly avid Stellaris player (347 hours played (which while notable is peanuts compared to the superfans’ hours) and haven’t played recently). Here’s my thoughts on it:

    I buy DLCs day 1 that I am supremely interested in, and everything else I pick up on discount either during a sale or from another site (not sketchy key resellers - I use https://isthereanydeal.com/, which lists more legitimate sites). In multiplayer, all players can use the DLC the host has, so I’ve been the dedicated host for my friend group there. I don’t think the massive amount of DLCs is good, but it is at least tolerable (I liken it to a subscription model) and I enjoy how the devs share some of their insights during the development process. Despite all the flaws it has, Stellaris is a really cool sci-fi 4x game that probably has the least ridiculous learning curve compared to other Paradox strategy games.