In one of my 300 level poli sci classes, literally one of the first things the professor said is that in politics, everyone running for office is a power-hungry narcissist. It’s only a slight exaggeration.

That type of person is at every level of politics. I’d wager that if you could get data on the real motivations of every person who has ever run for office, you’d probably see the same amount of those people at every level, from school board to president.

I like the idea of never referring to it again

I live near the former Holmdel Bell Labs complex. It’s an amazing building. It was sadly left in disrepair for decades until a developer bought it a few years back and turned it into a corporate office space with a mall at the ground floor. I got my Covid shots there.

I’ve been practicing this. In 30 years when computer input is primarily voice and touchscreens, we’ll be the only ones left. It’ll be like knowing how to use Morse code with a wireless telegraph.

Haha good life advice nonetheless

I bet new Reddit gold is going to be their crypto platform that runs on Ethereum. Just a guess.

I like writing stupid Reddit comments. If they want to pay me to do it, now matter how much or little, that’s more than I’m getting paid to shoot the shit in my downtime anywhere else.

But “residuals” are where it’s at. Old comments that never die because people keep gilding or replying. Views on that content can be (and we’re dealing with Reddit, so they very well could screw it up) turned into ad dollars. Companies are turning more of their tv ad dollars to social media.

Idk. I don’t disagree, but I think the cynicism may prove wrong here. But the cost of participating is zero if it turns out I get residuals on a comment I wrote 9 years ago.

If they don’t do anything to prevent that (as YouTube does) then sure

I’ll let you know when I figure it out

If that ends up being true it very well may pull me back to Reddit, but only to write comments that I think people will upvote. When Reddit gave out auto-generated avatars in the past, it gave me one that said it was for writing funny comments that get lots of upvotes, so they must have some logic assessing how the community responds to individual commenters.

I’d still be pissed off about how they rolled out their recent changes, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they actually had a halfway decent plan here but bungled it all by rolling it out too slowly without making it clear how one dot (keeping users in an ecosystem to make sure they see ads) connects to another (creating a community that can support a model to pay contributors).

YouTube pays contributors who attract audiences. Why shouldn’t Reddit? That’s the best possible thing commercial social media can do for its users.

It would change the Reddit community, though. I wouldn’t be there to hang out, I’d be there to work and create content tailored to… what Reddit likes.

But I can’t deny that it would attract my interest.

Thanks for the tip! I’ve been looking for something like that. It’ll save me a lot of frustration

I’m working on a similar project right now with zero coding knowledge. I’ve been trying to find something like langchain all day. I built (by which I mean I coached GPT into building) a web scraper script that can interact with the web to perform searches and then parse the results, but the outputs are getting too big to manage in a hacked together terminal interface.

How are you doing the UI? That’s what I’m finding to be the biggest puzzle that isn’t fun to solve. I’ve been looking at react as a way to do it.

I think we’ll see a variety of servers with different funding models, similar to how radio and tv stations in the us can have a variety of funding models. NPR has a network of member stations that all carry their content (if the stations want, or they can get content from another station, or they can make it themselves).

Threads is an example of a federated service with a corporate funding model. I definitely think it’ll survive since they have as much money as Facebook wants to sink into it.

But we’ll probably also see servers that run on donations by a dedicated community.

If Threads is the NBC/CBS/ABC of the federated landscape, then those small servers will be like public radio stations, which operate on donations and the occasional government grant.

I think there are people who would chip in a little bit to fund a non-commercial server just the same as there are people who chip in money to NPR.

What part of threads could they even argue was stolen from Twitter? It’s an open source protocol plus Instagram logins. You think Facebook needed to hire people to tell them about how to post text on the internet?

That’s how we got a generation of products with made up names like “Twitter” and “Google.” Just mash some words together until you get a word that sounds good. Like…. Trone. Trone.pro is $3/yr on Namecheap. My finders fee is astronomical, though