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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • I started regularly using Reddit in 2013 and r/funny was general low quality spam from there sites, with A LOT of reposts, basically all content was the same content on loop. r/adviceanimals was huge and was basically a mashup of shower thoughts, jokes, off my chest and general opinionated statements, and it was huge. r/f7u12 was big but already seen as declining and cringe.

    The humour here isn’t just Reddit style, the enormous amount of shitpost humour here is reflected in basically all “taking to chronically online strangers” community on the internet, from twitter to discord etc. I’d say shitpost humour outweighs all the other humour in this site.

    What Lemmy absolutely does have in common with old Reddit is the userbase being a bunch of trekie programmers. It used to be tech support on their office computers and now it’s software developers on their home Linux machines but the way people talk and act is really similar. In old Reddit days, it was so easy to assume that whoever you spoke to was in work that it was the normal assumption, and you’d see a massive uptick in porn on r/all when evening hit in America. Summer Reddit was a name given to the school kids who’d suddenly swarm the sites in the summer holidays during office hours, and the average age and humour had a noticeable shift.

    Lemmy now feels like a site of similar in their 30s but they don’t have 9-5 desk jobs where they browse Lemmy all day, so the hourly and daily trends don’t really align like they used to, now it’s all the classic trends at once as teenagers use Lemmy on their phones in school and work from home means people are shitposting and jerking off all day and night.



  • I love sync and it’s been my go to app for a decade across reddit and Lemmy, but I find it’s advertising and pro features far more frustrating now than ever before.

    The dev also takes long breaks but I don’t mind this as his work while he’s active is really really good and fast.

    If you already use revanced manager for YouTube or other apps, there is an ad free patch for an older version of sync which has an easy APK to seek out, which is recommend.




  • Unfortunately I suspect we’ll get third party ‘consoles’ that are basically the equivalent of the handhelds from nthe console market, potentially locked to set stores.

    The only reason we currently don’t have any prevalent under TV consoles that are glorified steam deck competitors is because anyone interested in that market is tech savvy enough to see you may as well have a PC doing the same.

    I don’t see consoles dying out for a decade yet but I suspect the next step is this. That or they’ll embrace cloud gaming, where people are just streaming games of their servers, making them much harder to pirate, easier to charge a subscription for and easier to maintain and release smaller hardware changes. This has 99 downsides although does come with the upside of basically not requiring the larger tech companies to hold back innovation by generation, which may accelerate the the gaming tech industry slightly. I saw an article back when the PS5 was releasing that was basically about how a huge field of graphics tech has a boon on a major console release and stagnates with it, which is caused by so many of the people making content for high end graphical tech being people making games for consoles and there is little reason to outpace what they can perform.

    All of that is my speculation from absolutely nowhere in the industry, so take it all with a big swig of salt.


  • I was weirdly forgiving of Fallout 76 (never played it, I’m not too hot for multiplayer games) because it was made so soon after fallout 4. It always felt like one of those DLC that got so large that it got released as a standalone game, which practically any large game studio has done and Bethesda did with Arcane’s Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider.

    A huge soft spot I have for the elder scrolls comes from the heroic fantasy exploration with enormous orchestral music and adventure in every direction, something people say about Starfield is that it’s large and sparse, which is accurate for a grounded space game but goes against what makes half of Bethesda games fun. Fallout falls in the middle of the pack being far more pulpy than Starfield and in 4, I feel this was a large issue with it feeling bland; it’s pulpy wackiness was toned down when it should have gone up.

    I don’t expect Bethesda to give me the video game equivalent of game of thrones but I do expect the Saturday morning cartoon that I’m equally fond of, and they still hold all the ingredients to make that recipe. Unfortunately Starfield was always tonally wrong for that, but ES6 is perfect for it.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still only buy ES6 a year or so after release, maybe 2-3 if it’s really crap, but I think a fair few of the ways that they’ve deviated from the working formula post Skyrim may not be an issue here.




  • TF2 source 2 totally makes sense as although TF2 gets no updates, it’s still a popular game and valve can’t totally take the idea of upgrading it to source 2 off the table themselves.

    This one is a shame that I don’t really understand, I wonder if it’s related to the fact that it’s for the GameCube and that’s Nintendo’s territory. I’m curious to see if this activity continues and expands, as even on steam there are remakes of half life in source and basically fan expansions to portal being sold for profit, among other products and projects.



  • The thing is, it’s quite easy for a marketing department to measure their success. They release an annoying unskippable YouTube and and change nothing else in their marketing and their profits go up by 1% or whatever. As much as I basically do no shopping where the day to day advertising I see can influence it, that’s a pretty abnormal lifestyle pattern. Plus I’m still susceptible to choosing specific items inside a shop, and I definitely susceptible when I’m looking for specific products and come across secret ads disguised as advice.





  • There’s a power station in snowdonia, Wales nicknamed Electric Mountain, that just pumps water up the mountain all year round to drop it at optimum times. The cliche examples given are the world cup final half time and after a Dr Who finale. At that point they just drop all the stored water over their turbines to counter the massive surge. I’m sure equivalents of this are common all over the world but it feels so uniquely British.



  • This current wave of enshitification to online services is generally driven by said online services taking steps that they believe to be more profitable to the detriment of the people who use them.

    That has always gone on but it feel like it’s everywhere at once at the moment; with the place I live in, the transport I use, the food I buy, the media and art I consume etc.

    1900 years ago, the world knew that the only things people desired were bread and circuses, i.e. to have your needs met and have entertainment, a lot of people have built their modern circuses off of things that are becoming unusable or deserve boycott. It’s far better than living in a warzone or something but to have many things we rely on for satisfaction stripped from us at once.

    I just wanna spend my free time entertained without having to perpetually change what provides that entertainment, is that not why most of us use this site?