I mean—your response just now was snarky also. I don't think you were responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of what I said, either.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.
I'm a little surprised at this response, dang. I could understand if I was being hostile to the poster, but my sarcasm was directed at Musk (who they're quoting), whose comment about data pillaging I find highly dubious.
As far as snark, I see several other examples of that—also intended for Musk—in this thread. They don't strike me as either offensive or particularly constructive, so it's not clear to me why my comment was called out here. (Especially considering that there are a few other comments that definitely go beyond the acceptable levels of user-to-user snark as I understand them.)
I can avoid sarcastic comments about billionaires in the future, if that's a problem. If the issue was snark directed at another user, that wasn't my intention.
I'll also say that the "snark" rule you cited, while well-intentioned, seems very broad and selectively applied here.
Yes, it was definitely the "data pillaging" that was degrading service, and not the fact that Twitter is now hosted on a Mac Mini under somebody's desk...
This feels a little like the shittiest restaurant in town raising its prices. I have an account, and I wouldn't even bother logging in at this point. Why bother? The Twitter experience is so devotedly wretched that whatever I'd get from the tweet I want to see is outweighed by everything I have to wade through to see it.
There was a point when Twitter was good enough that maybe they could have pulled something like this and gotten away with it. At this point, I think all this will do is hasten their irrelevancy.
I don't know about drugs. Ego, messiah complex, and delusions of invincibility? Sure.
Putin got where he was through reality-TV-level ostentatious displays of strength. Prigozhin likely figured he was the only one who could boast measurable gains in the war, and the same tactics would work for him.
My guess is his miscalculation was assuming he was more popular among the rank-and-file Russian military and police than he is, and it's too early to tell if that's actually a miscalculation.
Put it this way: would you buy stock in a gas station where the owner was getting the gas for free from his friends, and now his friends hate him and aren't giving him free gas anymore?
Now imagine that this station is located on a busy intersection surrounded by multiple other stations.
Reddit is just a dumb pipe; its only real value came from its users. Management doubling down on its increasingly undisguised hostility towards those users doesn't scream "growth" to me.
What exactly were you expecting, a thesis project or documentary or something? As far as I can tell, petykowski just wanted to recreate the typefaces used on the Underground's digital signage. That's fine. Not everything has to be some magnum opus.
I'm speaking as a graphic designer who's been obsessed with typography for decades. Craft and taste are qualities I ordinarily pay a lot of attention to, and if petykowski had talked to anyone affiliated with these typefaces, I'm sure it would have been fascinating. But it's also important to remember that these faces are not in the same category as a high-end serif or something. They serve a bluntly functional purpose. The medium for which they're designed is entirely different. Of course they're simple and easy to copy; that's the point.
So I'm not sure how you are defining "craft" or "taste" here. These designs are crisp and legible. Your comment feels a little like somebody looking at an icon of Clarus the Dogcow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogcow) and saying "Ah, but where's the dimensionality? Where's the realism? Can this truly be considered a rendering of an animal? How lazy."
I personally love pixel/dot-matrix typefaces. I hadn't known about this project, so I'm grateful that somebody went to the trouble of doing this.
I mean—like 97% of users just post comments that are a single emoji anyway, so I'd say the level of discourse on Instagram is barely a step above that "Yo" app that was a thing a while ago, if anyone remembers that.
Reddit buying third-party apps to adopt a few token niceties and then kill them wouldn't be a middle ground. Anybody who uses those apps would see exactly what the game was and be just as outraged. It would still be a tantrum, figuratively speaking, just a more expensive and passive-aggressive one.
"Incompetence and lack of awareness" is what you get when management starts taking their community for granted.
I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.
The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.
I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.
And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.
tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.
I'd say what's not clear to me is what to avoid in the future. I'm not trying to be difficult here—and dang is one guy dealing with the internet version of a city, to be sure—but I see sarcasm all the time on HN. The really toxic, demeaning stuff, sure, that has to go. In this case, it never even crossed my mind that what I said would be interpreted as targeting the person I was replying to. (While I wouldn't have flagged it, your snarky response, by contrast, was pretty clearly targeting me.)
Looking over the thread—and HN in general—there are no end of snarky posts, including yours, and especially in regards to wealthy tech guys like Musk. The vast majority of them are permitted. That's what I mean by "selectively." Going by your interpretation, no snark would be welcome at all; if that isn't the case, which I didn't have the impression it was, then what was it about my post that warranted a response more than the others?
Genuine question. I can observe consistent rules, but I'm not seeing consistent application of this one.