As for the ages here, the people most likely to migrate are the long term Reddit users that have had an account using third party apps since 2010 or so (because younger people have only ever known the official app). That self selects for anyone that was old enough to use Reddit in 2010 back when the user base was mostly high school / college / recent college grads. Someone in their late teens / early 20s back then will be in their 30s now.

Stress is relative to your own personal conditions. It’s not absolute. A tech executive might have a nice house and financial security, but if he’s working 80 hours/week under intense pressure to meet some deadline, that’s still stressful. Nobody wants to be perceived as a failure at work, even if their personal financial consequences for failure are minimal.

Your argument seems to imply it’s impossible to feel stress if you’re comfortable in life. Even the poorest Americans can count on access to food, clean running water, electricity, internet, etc. For most of humanity’s existence, and still today in some parts of the world, these would be considered enormous luxuries, so anyone with access to them would be seen as extremely comfortable in life. Clearly though, people can still be stressed out despite having access to these sorts of things that most of history would consider luxurious.

Stress is relative, not absolute.

The play to earn model is literally a ponzi scheme with a fancier name. The money you earn has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t appear out of thin air. In 100% of P2E games, the earliest players get paid by the revenue from later players. Eventually, the game stops growing, so the later players are left holding the bag.

Obviously, some people make a lot of money in ponzi schemes (most notably, the people that start the ponzi scheme in the first place), but it’s a terrible design for people that aren’t the ponzi creators or the first adopters lucky enough to get in on the ground floor.

Why? You should let each post stand on it’s own merit.

First, account age is silly for Lemmy, as almost 100% of people on here will have an account creation date in June 2023 or later because this place was a ghost town before Reddit decided to kill the APIs. A month from now, is someone with an August 2023 join date automatically presumed to be a troll, or are they just someone making the switch from Reddit a month later than everyone else?

As for karma, neither negative karma nor positive karma really tell you anything about the poster:

For instance, people can make good faith arguments advocating for conservative political opinions, but because the user base skews pretty far left here, those arguments will be downvoted. A discussion forum that bans opposing viewpoints is useless, and the echo chambers on Reddit are something I’d love to avoid here.

Similarly, it’s also possible to effortlessly build positive karma. Simply copy/paste highly rated comments from the last time a common repost appeared on the feed, and chances are, your copy/pasted comments will get upvoted too. You can even automate it with a bot.

Karma meant nothing at Reddit, and moderators shouldn’t be using it for decisionmaking purposes. It’s useful for ranking posts and comments, but anything beyond that isn’t helpful.

In what context?

In the insurance world, you sometimes see the phrase “L+ALAE Ratio” to refer to the ratio of (losses + expenses) divided by premium. It’s a way to measure profitability for a book of insurance business: how many dollars of loss and expense do you have to pay per dollar of premium earned? Lower is better, and you don’t want that ratio too much higher than 100%, because that means premiums aren’t high enough to cover losses (though investment income can sustain small underwriting losses).

I could see “L+” used as shorthand for “L+ALAE” or “L+ALAE+ULAE,” though admittedly, I’ve never seen that specific shorthand used.

Doubt it. It’s just dumb low effort posting over here trying to force inside jokes on Lemmy. I blocked all of that sort of stuff back in the day on Reddit, and I blocked it here too.

I almost exclusively read non-fiction, but I just got done reading Slash’s autobiography (the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses among other projects), and that book kept me absolutely hooked from start to end. I have no idea how he’s still alive after the wild stuff described in that book.

I shifted from that to a book about the history of the US Postal Service last week, so it’s a pretty big contrast in tone.

I agree, though hopefully this will pass with time as people default to Lemmy rather than Reddit for their downtime. That said, when the Titan submersible craft story broke a week or two ago, there was decent discussion on here. For the most part, comment threads are a ghost town aside from threads bitching about Reddit, but there are occasional exceptions to the rule that should become more common as people get adjusted here.

The past 15 years of growth in anything technology adjacent has been fueled by one thing: Extremely cheap debt. Interest rates have at been rock bottom since the 2008 crisis, and they’ve only started to tick up recently. That means the ability to fund infinite growth for basically nothing, so tech companies have relied heavily on debt financing.

Now though, that’s no longer viable. Silicon Valley Bank was very heavily involved with all these tech companies, and it went insolvent in March largely because of rising interest rates. They held a lot of long term bonds at low interest rates. In normal conditions, rising interest rates mean lower bond prices and unrealized losses, but not a major problem because they can just hold them to maturity and never realize the loss. Bank runs forced SVB to sell the bonds for huge losses though, turning unrealized losses into realized losses, and a non-issue into a major problem.

Now that cheap debt is gone, these tech companies are desperately scrambling to attain profitability. It hasn’t been discussed much, but this is a big reason for the changes at both Twitter and Reddit.

That’s why it has to be done today. At the moment, Jerboa instantly crashes when trying to access Lemmy, which will definitely scare away new users. My understanding is that this is because Lemmy.World is on version 17, but Jerboa requires instances to be on version 18 or higher. If successful, I believe this would fix the instant crash issue, so we’ll at least have an Android app working again.

Hopefully, these are just growing pains symptomatic of a site trying to deal with rapid growth and rapid improvements.

Side downloading .apk files from something other than the Google Play store is shady as hell. It’s way too easy to sneak malicious code into the app that way. Even if the project is open source, I don’t have the time or the skillset to review the code to confirm it’s not malicious. No offense to the developers, but there’s no chance in hell I’m doing that for an upstart app I knew nothing about a month ago.

As a result, I’m using Lemmy via Firefox’s mobile browser right now, with Jerboa completely useless crashing the second I open it.

Hopefully they fix it soon (i.e., within the next 24 hours). First impressions matter a ton. For the masses migrating tomorrow once RIF and others shut down, Lemmy and the different apps for it will appear to be dead on arrival. If we expect any actual content on Lemmy beyond complaints about Reddit and questions about Lemmy, we need those people to migrate over.

The idea that different fediverse instances can all be on different incompatible versions is mind bogglingly dumb. The federation/decentralization design choice overcomplicates things to a huge degree. There are far more downsides than upsides to this approach. I want to like Lemmy/Jerboa, but at this point, the official Reddit app is looking more and more appealing.

I can start. By far, my favorite earned this month was “Get Up, Mr. Bubbles” in Rocket League. I’ve been playing Rocket League for years now. I’m not very good at the game, but it’s the perfect “easy to learn, hard to master” type of game with short matches great for people with limited free time. I got the platinum years ago, but I still play all the time because the gameplay is so much fun.

For this specific DLC trophy, you have to score an Aerial goal on a specific map: Aquadome. Scoring Aerial goals is difficult: You have to launch your car high into the air, hit the ball at the perfect angle, and hope it heads right for the goal. Across hundreds of games over the years, I only had 4 aerial goals, none of which were on that map. While playing a week or two ago though, the ball ricocheted high above the goal, so I decided to go for the aerial. Somehow, I connected and scored. Teammates and opponents both started spamming “Wow” into the chat, and the trophy popped. I wasn’t expecting it at all, but it was pretty cool to earn one of the DLC trophies I assumed would forever stay locked. According to PSN Profiles, there’s now a nearly 3 year gap between my first trophy and my last. It’s only a silver trophy, but it’s one of the rarer silvers in the game with only 9.9% achieving it on PSN Profiles.

Before they killed Reddit, I frequently made new accounts for privacy reasons, as recently as maybe a month or two ago. Email was not required.

I’ll be honest: that’s a shitty way of handling this. Making 20 accounts to view content from 20 different instances that don’t want to cooperate with one another defeats the purpose of all of this. If that’s the plan, the Lemmyverse or whatever it’s called is dead on arrival.

No chance.

Creating a Reddit alternative is easy because you only need to host text, and text doesn’t take up a lot of space. The entirety of Wikipedia’s text, for instance, can be compressed into something like 22 GB, which is small enough that it can be stored on low-end consumer hardware from 20 years ago. The more difficult problem is getting a user base: people don’t want to switch unless they have a compelling reason to, and even with Reddit shitting the bed recently, Reddit alternatives are still pretty empty.

With video, you have both problems. Like Reddit alternatives, getting people to switch and produce content for the platform is difficult as hell. However, even if you somehow manage to succeed at that, video takes up an enormous amount of space. It simply isn’t feasible to host that much content without millions/billions of dollars of funding available if the platform takes off, and no company wants to invest that sort of money on a low probability gamble competing against one of the largest companies in the history of the world.

I was gifted Reddit gold a few times over the years for random comments I made, which gave access to the lounge subreddit. It’s mostly nothing but dumb memes roleplaying as gilded age oil tycoons and the like. Definitely not worth paying anything for access to it.

Top Day is probably the best sort option so far, but I wouldn’t mind something that updates a little more frequently (e.g., Top for the past 4 hours). Additionally, I wouldn’t mind adding a decay mechanism that gradually pulls posts lower as time passes. As things stand now, if a post is immediately popular within the same hour it gets posted, it’ll remain as the #1 post on Top Day for the next 23 hours before immediately falling off the page altogether the second the post becomes 24 hours old. That leads to stale pages, and if people see the same posts every time they check this place, they’ll assume it’s a dead community and never come back. By implementing something that more gradually cycles content, if I check the site once at lunch and again a few hours later on my train ride home, I should get different content.

The problem with subscribing to communities at this point is the lack of content. I subscribed to a few different baseball communities, but none of them have anything other than maybe a welcome post or a few gameday posts without any comments. Communities are duplicated on a bunch of different instances too, which makes things a million times harder than it needs to be. I have no idea if one of the half dozen baseball communities I’m in now will make it big, if a new one entirely will make it big, or if they’re all doomed to never have content.

Define “intentionally inflammatory.” Reddit was always very left-leaning politically, so I assume the userbase here is similar. I suspect conservative memes/links/etc. would be considered intentionally inflammatory here in a way that leftist memes/links/etc. would not. It’s not really possible to define a one-size-fits-all definition: One person’s inflammatory is another person’s ideal content.

Additionally, define “spamming links.” The biggest problem with Lemmy so far is lack of content. If I go to the baseball subreddit, for instance, I see a bunch of highlights from the games that took place last night, a bunch of discussions on World Series odds, a bunch of questions about stats, etc. Over here, none of that exists yet. A few people have tried to build individual communities by posting similar content over here. It probably looks like spamming a bunch of links to MLB’s website for highlight videos. However, without someone spamming those links, the community is basically dead with nothing to comment on. We probably need a little spamming at the outset to grow the community to be large enough to sustain itself organically.

The idea of Shreddit takes me back to when I first joined Reddit in 2011. At the time, I was in my mid 20s going to rock/metal concerts pretty often. A friend of mine encouraged me to sign up for Reddit and to check out the Shreddit community. It took me ages to figure out she was talking about /r/metal.

I bring that up to make the point that community discovery in my early days of Reddit was pretty difficult, but I eventually figured it out. In time, I’m sure the same thing will happen with Lemmy.