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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I never could figure out why Roku got to be so popular. It’s not the best at anything, it’s just decent at the like 1-2 things that it tries to do. But so is just about everything else out there these days. You can’t sideload things on it, the UI is just sorta…there. It’s not configurable at all. It just exists. I’ve tried pretty much so every major media streamer out there and the Roku is, by far, my least favorite. It’s not really bad, it’s just not very good either.


  • Ilikecheese@lemm.eetoTechnology@lemmy.worldApple TV vs Firestick.
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    1 year ago

    Apple TV doesn’t have ads at all. If that’s all you care about, I would say go for that.

    The Firestick isn’t really jailbreakable per se, but it doesn’t really need to be. You can sideload things with extreme ease. There’s a pretty decent app that allows you to watch YouTube with no ads or sponsored content shown. That alone is worth the cost of a Firestick for me. It does have some ads in the menu, but they’re not super obtrusive and never bothered me much. Plus the cost is much lower. You used to be able to put a different launcher on the Firestick and never see any Amazon content at all (ads) but they fixed that a while back and I haven’t bothered to see if that works again, but for all I know it might.

    Edit: it does.




  • Ilikecheese@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldIs there someway to stop this?
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    1 year ago

    So this is the 2nd time you’ve mentioned subscribing to communities and asked me what the point of subscribing to multiple ones are. You are proving my point just by asking this question. If you subscribe to one community per interest then this is literally not an issue that you will encounter. This only happens to people who browse /all or search by new or generally try to see everything that the fediverse has to offer. So I’m really not sure why you keep asking me about why someone would subscribe to multiple communities because that’s not something I have suggested that anyone should do. In fact, I don’t really see much of a point in subscribing to ANY communities, but that’s beside the scope of what we’re discussing here.

    Also, I wouldn’t call what we’re discussing “reposting”. Reposting generally means that you’re taking older content and posting it again in the efforts of bringing new attention to it, either from people who are new to the community, or by people who never saw it the first time it was posted. Again, it’s semantics, but the fact that you’re calling these types of posts “reposts” really shows your lack of understanding of the larger problem here. It’s also why your definition of spam absolutely doesn’t apply here, as none of the content we’re discussing is commercial or unsolicited.

    YOU’RE the one that’s not addressing the issue here that I’ve brought up. I’ve never said that what’s going on isn’t annoying or a problem. I’m just saying (for like, the third time now, but who’s counting) that it’s an issue of blame. By continuing to mis-label it as spam, you’re placing the blame on the people who are contributing to the community as a whole. The people who are bringing content to this platform. The people who make it worth this place even existing. And by suggesting that the solution is to block those people, you’re literally suggesting to people that they remove quality content being posted to the correct places. This is insane to me that you think this is a solution.

    Look, there is a problem with the way the fediverse is set up. And it needs addressing. I’ve already suggested a couple of different ways to fix it, both in the short term, and in the long term. Your “solution” is to block anyone who is participates in more than one community just because they are trying to spark a discussion in the most places possible. I’m not saying what they’re doing is working out, but to place the blame on the people who are actually trying to make it better is just…I don’t have words for how ridiculous that is. People are using this platform as it is set up in the way that it is intended. That’s not spam, no matter how many times you incorrectly proclaim it is.

    it doesn’t work or help Lemmy to do what you’re suggesting

    Just curious, but what do you mean with what I’m suggesting? I’m not saying I like, or even agree with multiple posts in multiple likeminded communities. Hell, I actively dislike the fact that there ARE so many communities that are basically clones of each other. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed. I just said that doing it wasn’t spam. What other suggestions of mine do you think is harmful to Lemmy?

    I think the biggest issue here is just your way of thinking. You referred to Lemmy multiple times as “this website” or “this site” and that way of thinking is at the heart of the issue”. It’s not just a clone of Reddit, where everyone was on one site and everyone all has a chance to see all the same things. Every instance is different, shows you different content, and federates with other instances in different ways. It is set up to be different for a reason. There is no single thing that is good or bad for Lemmy as a whole, because Lemmy as a whole is not one single entity. Your “spam” problem is only a problem if you choose to look at as many instances of Lemmy as you can, which unfortunately is the best way to get new content for now. The solution moving forward is to curate the specific communities that you end up looking at by blocking instances that duplicate content, or hopefully Lemmy as a whole will allow for a better way to cut down on viewing repeated content across multiple instances. The solution is not to blame the people sharing content and block them from ever being able to share content to you again. Unless you’re just not interested in the content to begin with, but even then I would suggest it’s better to block communities rather than the people putting content in them.


  • Firstly, not everyone uses subscriptions. A lot of people browse by /all so they end up seeing a lot of repeated content. That’s the nature of how the fediverse works.

    Secondly, I don’t think calling it a repost is fair if all they’re doing is taking one link or article and posting it to all relevant communities. When I think of a repost, it’s usually someone taking old content that has been around for ages and posting it again for new users or people that missed it the first time to see. This isn’t typically what’s happening here.

    Finally, I really don’t agree that blocking the posters is a good idea. If anything, you as a user should either use subscriptions, as you suggest, to cultivate what you want to see, or use the block function to block redundant communities so you only see things once. But blocking posters only means that you won’t see other relevant posts they make in the future. This isn’t a sustainable method for being able to get content that interests you, and I can’t fathom why anyone would suggest it.

    Ideally I’d love to see multiple like-minded communities be able to federate their content amongst each other so that anything that gets posted to one will get federated to all of them, comments and all. And then anyone viewing one of those communities, either through a subscription or through /all would see just one instance of the post. This also has the wonderful side benefit of creating redundant servers hosting the same content which means if one server goes down the chance of content being lost is greatly lessened. Kind of like crowd sourced redundancy. Hopefully this is something that the people that are developing the platform will be able to add in the future. It will solve this problem while making the platform better for everyone at the same time. Win/win.


  • I don’t disagree with much of anything you said (and it doesn’t sound like you disagree with anything I said either) aside from the classification that it’s all spam. If I make one on-topic post to a community and you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean it’s spam. If I made 2 posts to to different communities, you admit it’s not spam. The problem isn’t the users who are posting, and blocking them isn’t a solution, at least certainly not a long term one. The problem needs to be addressed at a fediverse level, and not at a content creator level.

    If I send out an email to 100 of my friends inviting them to a party and they all wanted to get that email, that’s not spam. If I send out 100 emails to the same people asking them to buy essential oils, that’s spam. It’s not the amount of content that I send, it’s if the content is relevant and appropriate for the audience that defines if something is spam or not. I agree that it’s very annoying to see the same content in dozens of different places here, but to call it spam is to place the blame on the poster, and that’s not where we should be focusing the blame. Dance around it all you want, but posting on-topic content to the correct places isn’t the definition of spam. Period. The only people calling it spam are people, like yourself, who don’t know what spam actually is.


  • Ilikecheese@lemm.eetoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldIs there someway to stop this?
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    1 year ago

    It would only be spam if it was posted to communities that aren’t on topic or if the individual communities were not interested in the content posted. The way the fediverse is set up, there are going to be tons of communities that all offer similar content. If I find an article that is on topic of several communities, why should I have to pick which one I post it to? How would I choose? Why can’t I post to multiple if I’m trying to get people in all communities to see it?

    Spam is typically thought of as unwanted material. As long as the things that are being posted are legit, this isn’t a spam problem, it’s really a fediverse problem that someone is going to have to find a solution to like only displaying links one time if multiple posts are made to similar communities or better yet figuring out a way to federate multiple communities into one big community where everything posted to one automatically gets posted to all of them. But that’s still not spam, that’s just redundant on-topic posts being made to proper places.

    It may be semantics, but word choice matters. Especially when your suggested “solution” involves blocking people who are posting legitimate content to places. If everyone goes around blocking all the people posting content, pretty soon there won’t be any content or any people to see it and that’s harmful to the fediverse as a whole. Let’s use the correct terminology and come up with good solutions to the actual issue at hand instead of thinking of it as just needing to block a few spammers like these people are sending out dick pill emails to thousands of people at once.



  • DNS blocking doesn’t stop YouTube ads, for example.

    Huh? I was able to block all ads on YouTube on my iPad just by installing a AhaDNS profile.

    I’m not saying this doesn’t suck, but I really have faith in people’s desire to get around shit to not be too worried about this. I figure there will always be a way to get around anything Google throws at you, even if it ends up being something as complex as running your own proxy server that ends up receiving the full webpage google wants you to see, stripping out everything you don’t want to see, and just forwarding that to whatever browser you choose. Sure, that’s a little more work than I’d like to put in, but if that’s what it ends up taking, it’s not that much effort.




  • I remember working for a small local ISP in the late 90s. We didn’t offer unlimited accounts and charged people overages for any hours over the amount they selected with their account. As an employee I didn’t have these restrictions and even put in a second line in my house so I could use the one modem 24/7 and use the 2nd line to double my bandwidth (to a whopping 67Kbps) overnight. I ended up using more time in a month than there was actual hours. One month as a joke the billing manager sent me the bill that I would have received if I was a normal customer and it was thousands of dollars. I want to say I got the hint and started using less time and resources, but honestly thinking back on it, I doubt that was the case.




  • That’s a good question. I think, kinda like politics in real life, the people that would make the best moderators are the ones that have very little desire to do it while often times the ones that do want it are the worst suited.

    Someone once made me a moderator of a ~30,000 subscriber subreddit without me asking and I hated every second of it. All I ever tried to do make the place as good as possible and enforce the rules in place. I got praised for being a good mod, but just as often I got called a power tripping asshole by people who didn’t want to follow the rules. You really can’t win, and honestly I wouldn’t want to even try to moderate again. It takes up too much of your time, you get almost nothing from it and even when all you are doing is trying to do your best, you still end up being hated by some people. It’s just not worth the hassle.