My only gripe with using FMHY as my main.

Edit: looks like it’s been fixed! Thanks FMHY admins!

I’m always baffled when I see people post links to the Fandom site for Skyrim rather than UESP my beloved. Community-run, for passion and not for profit. The internet of yore, today.

Simpler “digital newspaper”-type interfaces beat all the video-auto playing nonsense any day of the week. Fandom’s interfaces are genuinely baffling to use, who approved all of this visual cramming of information I didn’t ask for? You know I won’t randomly start enjoying any of it right?

Fandom’s Steam key store, Fanatical (used to be called Bundle Stars), is still pretty good, although I wish I didn’t feel like spending money there directly funds those autoplaying cancer videos.

They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

Due to how haphazard it’s been with community growth, there’s always the possibility that another one will take off if spam or other issues start piling up here.

For now there’s a tiny amount of content at all, let alone spam.

Although I must admit, having the proper “Football” community instead of “Soccer” is nice.

96% is the best layout. All the convenience of not having a bunch of dead space between your arrows and nav cluster, with all of the convenience of having a numpad with all the nav keys your heart can want. Yes I want Home and End right there on the first layer, I’d have to go mad not to.

You only need to choose one key to sacrifice, and I happily tucked Insert one layer under Delete. Print Screen is non-negotiable.

I’m always so surprised to see how unpopular 96% is.

In Lebanon, “Handy” means a cordless landline.

I think it’s just really formatting-sensitive. !wefwef@lemmy.world should work, wefwef@lemmy.world doesn’t

I just hate how “toxic cesspool” is the default. I was just watching a short video on YouTube about the US city of Baltimore, a place I heard about from an old family friend who studied at Hopkins many years ago.

The video was about the city’s decline, with the primary cause (according to the video) being the hollowing out of the manufacturing and logistics industries. The channel, Forgotten Places, doesn’t strike me as one that toxic people would be flooding to (those channels exist).

Can you guess what every other comment is about? Hint: it’s not the abandonment of productive industry. A small number of comments name more historical industrial employers that have left the city, but by far the comments with the most upvotes are “we all know we can’t discuss what happened to Baltimore 😉😉😉😉😉”

Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do

That’s an interesting angle that I completely failed to notice. I thought this whole experiment is for Facebook/Meta to get a headstart in a new tech space, like they’re been trying to do with VR and the whole crypto craze.

While I never assumed their intentions were pure with any of this, I clearly was not nearly as cynical as one has to be with these people.

Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

“Guys I know the instructions say I can use any odorless cooking oil, but is there anything wrong with just buying the $89 Apple oil? I want to have a matching set”

Have you played the MediEvil games?

I never enabled them, so I never really noticed. I didn’t feel like the app got noticeably worse. If anything, I got more comfortable with Apollo year after year and the old desktop site I was so familiar with was becoming less appealing over time.

I do understand how, after maintaining the same app as his main gig, he would want to work on something else after almost a decade - especially something with mainstream appeal. There are young folks in my family who got Pixel Pals (the standalone app) after seeing their friends have them. That’s huge.

I hope he does come back eventually to make some Fediverse stuff.

That said, isn’t that how leagues work in the US for most sports? The bottom teams are constantly given legs up to keep the winners cycling. That’s what the whole draft system is about, right? Full disclosure: I know close to nothing about US sports.

No disrespect to US sports fans or athletes but over there it seems more like the brand they care about is the league itself, as an entertainment product, compared to football teams in most of the world which are much more independent. Even just the name “franchise” says something.

That’s in the Canary Islands, for those of you like me who don’t know where Fuerteventura is.

TIL the Canary Islands have a population of 2.2 million (!)

I do feel like that about Apollo. It’s crazy how different the Fediverse feels via a UI that copies Apollo pretty closely, I feel like I just dropped into a gaggle of tiny subs. Sure most features are missing, but the progress is so fast.

I still am pretty bummed about losing the old site. I’ve spent so long there. But I was hopping sites before and it’s now wrong to start doing that again. Complacency is how we get apps like Instagram, which are more ads than pictures of friends (which is all I want out of that platform)

There’s more than just that to it.

I recently downloaded it so I can save some um research content for later research (I’d been off Reddit for maybe two weeks at this point, I wasn’t going to hurt my pride if I saw the app for myself). When I refreshed the front page of my research throwaway, all the posts were hidden and replaced with new ones. Refresh again, those are gone too, replaced by three or four stragglers. Final refresh and there’s nothing on the front page. They’re practically begging me to go to their algorithm page (popular?). It looks like an A/B test they’re doing, and it looked like others were annoyed at this from the feedback I saw on the official mobile app sub. It was an A/B test with no toggle or anything.

Normally, in an app made to give the user a good experience, this should be a feature you turn on and off. I remember a ton of people swearing by some kind of post hiding system, so, sure, this is definitely a plus for some people. But I’ve refreshed my Reddit home page for over a decade now. Don’t make it misbehave all of a sudden.

Their app, with all its bloat, can have some nice features. For example, during my research session, I was swiping through an album. When it was finished, it swiped into the next post. At first I didn’t like that, but a few posts later, I liked it, I got the hang of it. Decent navigation feature, fine. This isn’t so bad.

I tap into another part of the app a different sub I think, and now the only direction I can scroll is downwards, and instead of showing me the next (image) post, it shows me some random popular vertical video from a different subreddit. Literally just TikTok navigation for Reddit. Which again, would be completely fine, if it was a button I could tap to enter this mode, but not just haphazardly switching between different navigation UXes so that the app can quantify which one makes me see more ads. Fucks sake.

I didn’t even want to download their app, and the one time I find a new feature that I don’t hate, it gets turned off within the same session to serve me a feature I specifically don’t want. I don’t think vertical video is the death of the human experience, but it sure as hell isn’t for me, and it sure as hell is the last thing I want out of a site like Reddit.

These A/B tests infuriate me. I open Instagram every once in a blue moon, and I absolutely despise scrolling down my feed and seeing the same information displayed ten different ways in less than a minute. On one post, the likes counter is bold, on another, it has profile photos, on another, it’s an accented color… like that’s worse than just picking the worst option in my opinion.

But that’s the thing. No first party app will ever be designed to have a good UX first and foremost. That’s secondary. What’s important is their meaningless metrics that make the site worse, so they can charge more for ads (even if they make the site worse for paying users…). I understand that they’re trying to appeal to new people over on Reddit, I genuinely believe there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I stumbled upon it now for the first time, I’d think it was hot unusable garbage, and I would not have guessed this is site would have been my literal front page of the internet™ for over 11 years in another life. Probably would just assume it was a porn site with a weird news aggregator attached.

You’re telling me you don’t like putting on on your most ridiculously offensive Yeehaw Hollywood American accent when asking your phone to set a timer?

How is Sleeping Dogs on the Deck? I played it a bit a few years ago on desktop, so it might be worth downloading onto the Deck so I can restart and take it in. I remember being really engrossed in the world. I think I ended up not playing it because I started Saints Row 2 and that game grabbed my attention like nothing else. I was particularly nostalgic for the classic early 2000s GTA games, so SR2 was like an undiscovered fourth one.