That's what I'm asking. Until recently, one didn't need to bother with private trackers unless they wanted, say, a 4K rip of Suspiria from 1977, or some other incredibly specific thing. Private trackers, at least to me, were more trouble than they were worth. Why should I deal with them at all when I can get everything I need without begging for an invite and then annoying myself?

As a result, I have never joined a private tracker, not ever.

But now? I'm not sure. Something does seem to have changed systemically.

Oh, man. I hope you won’t take this poorly, but I can promise you that setting up some kind of GPT4-based LLM to wrote cover letters won’t help you find another job. Not ever.

I’m not sure if you’re trolling (if you are, LOL), but this is not the tree to bark up. Good luck though. The job market sucks at the moment.

That subreddit is, and has been for some time, an utterly atrocious place. It's filled with low-effort posts and junk memes and interesting discussion is impossible. It's barely moderated. The median age is 10.

As a 13-year MC player who is totally obsessed with the game, I literally unsubbed from /r/minecraft some time ago and didn't miss it.

Here's hoping we get some critical mass on Lemmy or Kbin to build a MC community for an actual MC community. It's badly needed.

This is a Reddit-style circle jerk. A LOT of people like Apple, because even though they’re almost as remorseless as Amazon or Microsoft or Google when it comes to maximizing profits, they build good products, create new product categories, and they’ve been doing both of those things for 40 years.

Is this a sleazy thing to do? Yup. Is it as sleazy as Meta intentionally allowing its algorithm to push softcore kiddie porn to teen Instagram users? Nope. Not even in the same ballpark.

I’d been on Reddit for 13 years and finally managed to detox by doing two things only.

• Uninstalling the app from my phone (along with LinkedIn, which I have to use, but despise). Since the browser experience is terrible, that was half the problem.
• Strategically muting subreddits that annoyed me.

Wall of text about why (but I’ll use paragraphs):

In recent years, I started noticing that everything discussion-oriented was either a Dunning-Kruger driven echo chamber or a total circlejerk for the default progressive opinion on that subject. And, anything content-oriented was reposts.

Quick caveat: I’m not saying that every progressive position is bad, only that I enjoy forming my own positions without getting yelled at. Also, I don’t know OP’s sub and I’m sure it was well-moderated. I’d imagine quitting as a mod would be emotionally harder.

Anyway, for a few weeks, whenever some low-info/naive/didactic opinion or recycled content popped up, I muted that sub.

The last to go was my professional sub, since I’m in a small field. But once I realized all I’d done there in 13 years was help people starting out, but never once received help myself (since there are virtually no posters with experience), I was good to go. I can mentor elsewhere and probably help way more.

Once I muted stuff, I had a few content subs left like r/urbanhell or r/catio, or other fun stuff I want to keep. But my feed is suddenly super quiet, so I just open it once a week, like a magazine.

It’s not quite quitting, but that’s for when Huffman (or whoever replaces him) realizes that to move the revenue needle, they need to block adblockers like YouTube, or go fucking nuts with sponsored posts, or sell personal data, or build their own LLM on everyone’s posts, or whatever they’re gonna do.

And it probably won’t be Huffman anyway, since he just dumped half a million shares at $50+ and can therefore buy an island, so he is absolutely out of there 😂

Meanwhile, if I’m Reddit’s Unix admin or whatever and have waited for years to vest my equity, I can’t even sell for another 5.5 months. It ain’t gonna be $50+ then. Brutal.

And that’s how it goes. Never again. I don’t miss it, since sending Lemmy memes to my Signal chats replaces most of the hijinks and sex/the outdoors replaces the dopamine.

The most sleazy thing it does is that if you want to download or share an image with your friends in, say, a text chain, it brands that image with Reddit crap.

They go completely out of their way to make the app unusable.

Thanks for this. It was very well-reasoned, and gave me a perspective I hadn't thought of before.

It would sound snarky to say correlation is not causation so let me say instead: just because your sister got a job with that cover letter doesn't mean it's the reason.

Hiring managers and HR don't always read cover letters. Most never do. All your applications go into a applicant tracking system (ATS) anyway and your info gets extracted. Lately, folks uses LLMs to query that stuff: "find me all the candidates who went to top colleges," or "which of these candidates can bend a steel beam with their bare hands," etc.

It's not the right sub for this, but spending a bunch of energy on cover letters won't do much. Better cover letters won't hurt and BAD cover letters might hurt, but there are many other reasons someone doesn't get call-backs.

I have zero clue what field OP works in, but they're actually free to DM me for advice if they like.

They already know that and have since people started using LLMs.

Also, if you write a cover letter with an LLM and don't tweak it, it's obvious to anyone who knows what to look for.

John Wick 4. Seemed like 2 uninterrupted hours of people shooting one-another in the face. I only made it 30 minutes.

I gave up on visiting torrent sites. They're all horrible to navigate. I just use the built-in search in qBittorrent (including Jackett).

To figure out what I want to get, I use metacritic.

Thanks! I used to use Usenet! It's been quite some time. I think I used to get porn, back when you had to download your porn to watch it 😉

It could be they just aren’t available at all.

Scary thought. If nobody's doing 4K rips of a brand new hit Netflix show, the scene is not working right now. I'm inclined to think it's just gone private, but I really don't know.

Haha! It's a real example. There was a Reddit thread in r/movies (which is a surprisingly good sub), and that came up. I ended up grabbing it. With more thought, it was a bad example, since I was able to get it on public trackers 😉

Do you mind if I ask more details about your system?

Ah, huh! Either that was added recently or I missed it. My mistake!

I’d still love to be able to download images though. In Apollo, this was just a long press.

I’m not OP, but great link!

Oh, understood! Yup, it's on by default.

I ended up registering for the QBittorrent forums, since I'm just not going to figure this out elsewhere. If the admins ever approve me 🙄and I post and get an answer, I'll update this thread.

I use both sources daily. 4K TV has notably disappeared from them in the past few months.

The 1337x plugin wants Python 3.6.0. My slot had 2.x, so I updated to 3.9. But, the plugin also wants Qbit 4.4.x. Feral always installs 4.3.9 with a --noupdateflag, since that's the version they've tested. I figured I was beat, but just for fun tried to install another plugin that my requirements met. That didn't work either 😂

At that point, I reinstalled Jackett and added 1337x. Which wouldn't work without installing FlareSolverr, which requires Docker, which is unsupported on Feral since it needs root. Nice!

Another commenter noted I could just use Prowlarr (and I was going to) but that also requires Docker, so this story has a sad ending. That ending is me pasting in magnet links from another tab and wishing for three hours of my life back...

It's a stupid idea that brings them no value and it's user-hostile.

I didn't realize it could be turned off though! I guess that's useful for when I hold my nose and scroll quickly through the meme subreddits to find things for my meme text chains.