Anomander

Probably, because it's a good chill space that serves drinks and they can socialize with their friends while Little Billy gets his haircut.

The same things that appeal to OP would also appeal to many adults that have children, even if those things are of no benefit to the kids themselves.

And the sort of person who'd take a kid to a venue like that, while ignoring how disruptive their kid is to the people normally there - that demographic overlaps pretty heavily to folks who also are completely fine paying $70 for a kids' haircut, because their own cut & colour or beard sculpting run a couple hundred.

According to the people most likely to feel oppressed by the existence of rules limiting what they can do or say, yes.

Practically speaking? No. Reddit branded itself as "free speech" and pseudo-libertarian during it's launch phase, from a combination of the political leanings of its founders and as a cynical branding decision to differentiate itself from its competition. It never actually was a free-speech platform, so much as a platform that saw free speech as a branding decision and would generally aim to preserve that veneer when there wasn't a good reason to go against it.

In addition to the legal arguments around "platform" vs. "publisher", a solid portion of how the subreddit system started and why it's structured the way it is was so that Reddit Inc and Reddit.com could posture as being broadly "pro free speech" while letting mods take the heat for the content being removed.

During the Yishan/Pao eras, people were forever citing Swartz, Spez, and kn0thing as OG founders who believed in "free speech!!" that new admin and bad mods were destroying their original vision. The Spez came back and made it clear he's not aligned that way. kn0thing very publicly and firmly stated that Reddit was never about absolute free speech and admin had been quietly removing shit for years, this time Pao just announced it. So now you still get originalists trying to argue that Swartz was a free speech absolutist founder whose vision supersedes all the rest as the Pure and True and justifying their outrage. I think if Swartz were still alive during that fiasco, he wouldn't have been digging in to defend their absolute right to screech slurs at people or rally hate brigades against the spherically-inclined; or even continuing to support free speech absolutism in abstract for the platform.

Baader-Lemmyhof?

Probably.

At the very least, I can confirm that the saying was definitely was a thing a decade or two ago, when IBM was major player in enterprise / corporate computing. They generally weren't the best computers, or the best value, or even particularly great - but they were a safe choice.

You went out and bought new computers for the XYZ department from some competitor - and if anything went wrong, your ass was on the line for buying unreliable garbage from a shitty company. If you bought IBM and the same thing happened, management would kind of shrug and assume that the same problem would have gone wrong on any other computer, because IBM is a trusted safe brand.

So the idea that no one ever got fired for buying IBM was a running joke in tech circles - that it's not bad, it's not good, but it is career-safe for the person signing the cheque - and the bean-counters buying computers really like safe.

Was this written by GPT?

Graph also ends at 2010.

It spans May 1 2010 to December 31 2010; the 4.0 redesign launched August 25 of that year.

You can see searches for both sites spike at about that point in the graph - the 4.0 launch inspired a shitton of Digg traffic from people checking it out, and a shitton of Reddit traffic as the users left Digg.

Like so many of those sorts of decisions, Digg leadership ultimately assumed - incorrectly, to be sure - that their users would "get over it" in time.

They'd had minor revolts over the 2.0 and 3.0 redesigns, they'd had sitewide discontent several times during the 3.0 era due to changes in the content algorithm ... Digg had weathered several storms by that point, and I think site management simply assumed they would continue that trend.

There's a perennial issue I think for Authorities in that sort of position where you're exposed to so much baseless griping and complaining from the extremely-vocal minority that you need to gain some ability to filter out negativity and criticism, or you're crippled by it. You cannot make everyone happy and only the unhappy people will bother to express themselves, so you learn to filter out the discontent and focus on the theory, on the goals. Many times you genuinely know better than this or that upset user, and you take solace from that. But from that position, it's so easy to then also block out the more important negative feedback, the necessary criticisms, under the assumption that 'you know better' - because that's how it went the last ten, hundred, thousand, times this sort of thing came up.

Which is IMO a lot of what happened to the whole of Upstairs staff at Reddit. They got so used to users complaining and users being upset about this or that little thing that they had to develop a certain amount of resistance to that feedback - but they've reached a point where they're so resistant to all feedback about their site that they wound up losing touch with the site and its users.

I think a huge part of where Reddit went wrong and will continue to is not having and/or listening to people on staff who are skilled and qualified at simply understanding site users and site user culture. So much of their current issues could have been avoided if they had a person in a leadership position, an equal at the C Suite table, whose whole and total responsibility was understanding the users and speaking 'for' them accurately - representing them as if they're stakeholders in the company.

Yeah, absolutely nothing was preventing them from doing so already, without launching Threads.

Blocking Meta / Threads instances isn't going to stop them, either.

They can already access the data, it's all federated and it's all publically available effectively by definition, they don't need to launch a platform that interacts with Fedi in order to scrape it. And Meta will only be able to scrape user profiling data on the people accessing Fediverse through their own tools and platforms. In the large term, all data is useful and getting the additional facets of how their users interact with a twitter-like platform is good - but I don't think that's really why they chose to federate.

But...

What joining Fediverse does offer them is a way of launching their Twitter-rival product with genuine and organic content or activity already present.

Facebook & Instagram's primary demographics are not internet pioneers, they don't tend to build new things - they feed off existing activity and build on top of it. They access the platforms to consume content, and only move to creating or posting content over time as they develop networks on the sites. Meta cannot realistically launch a Twitter competitor whole-cloth. The sort of people who joined Twitter early to build that space aren't joining a Meta product, likewise the people who join new platforms or normal fediverse.

If it launched empty, it would remain empty. People would check it out, see almost no content or no content they care about, and not come back. Meta can only realistically launch a product like Threads with activity already occurring, and things like AI content or fake profiles aren't necessarily convincing enough to lure in the punters. But Fedi is preexisting and active and there's already A Thing there that Meta can point their users at, there's already content to consume and people to interact with.

I don't think so; it won't hurt 'us' anymore than we were hurt yesterday, when Threads hadn't launched yet.

I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it's one that's seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.

There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you're talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.

Which is kind of ... a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don't get their way.

The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren't protesting because they're part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They're going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.

AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they're going to let it return to it's natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.

Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.

In this case, what do you think "scorched earth" would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.

Please, tell me what I think some more. It went so well here.

You’re falling into the trap that 5e sets of assuming what is on the character sheet it’s all that’s available to the characters. By forcing players into subclasses that are all just cookie cutter variations of each others, you’re encouraging players to stay entirely in their sheet. To approach every problem by first looking to their sheet and trying to find the right number instead of creatively looking at the narrative we’re building together and finding a unique solution.

None of this is true. It's a weird strawman that you've made up, that would make absolutely no sense to any real person's opinion - if you weren't trying to create a fictional scenario where having more diversity of choice and options was somehow bad.

It’s not a “me” problem to acknowledge that 5e subclasses and races are incredibly samey mechanically,

It's absolutely a 'you' problem to see a wide variety of options with very few mechanical constraints, and go "yeah, that limits creativity" - if you feel your creativity is somehow enhanced by having hard mechanical limits on which races and classes can do what tasks in a TTRPG ... you can still create that experience for yourself in 5E. Like, having more options doesn't prevent you from playing however confined and restricted you want - so making all of these points about me, about other people is just projecting your own limitations on the rest of the world and then criticizing them for a problem only you seem to have.

and if you can’te see past the matrix and pretty illustrations WOTC uses to distract from that, that’s a you problem, for not really getting how this game works at the fundamentals.

Like that. That's not my opinion, "pictures" aren't why I have my opinion or why I might have the opinion I don't, and I definitely understand the mechanics more than fine. You just made up an opinion for me, made up an explanation why I might have that fictional opinion, and then got snide with me about an entirely fictional scenario you put on me.

You can just not use Tashas if you want. Imagining that other people need hard-coded stat penalties just to "be creative" and that's somehow impossible in a system where you, or they, can still choose to have hard-coded stat penalties is just the wildest thing to pretend is 'wrong' with D&D.

It’s like the custom stat benefits rule from Tasha’s. On its face, seems like a good idea. But now you just have every race being a reskin of each other. Kill the subclass. Embrace class differences. Let players make their characters unique based on the stories we make together, not trying to fit them into a predefined cookie cutter box.

This is so bizarrely self-contradictory.

Force players to only play the nine classes with no subclasses or features, force species into hard-locked stat differences ... to avoid them being cookie-cutter? Like forcing anyone who wants to play a reasonably-optimized STR character to play a species with inherent STR bonus increases creativity somehow? As if using Tasha's rule to play an unconventional species as a STR class means that player somehow cannot possibly also give their character a unique and interesting story as well as a slightly unconventional class/species combo? Make it make sense.

If you think that having more tools to customize and differentiate species and classes reduces creativity, that's a you problem and not a rules problem.