I was using the mobile app.

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

That video was a mess. Miller trying his best to not allow an actual question.

To be fair though, that reporter’s gotta step it up. You can’t give these guys an inch of wiggle room.

Recently had to cancel Xfinity. Had to wait for a text chat so I could schedule a cancellation appointment. They didn’t call at the requested time. I called instead to make an appointment for them to call me back.

30 minutes of waiting and questions about what it would take to retain me as a customer or who could take over my account. I told them up front that Xfinity isn’t available at my new address but they had to ask all the questions anyway.

All of this nonsense meant I was 6 days into the billing cycle, so they had already charged me for a full month and held onto the remainder until the next month.

Ugh.

I fully expect that, just like the rest of the account management parts of Xfinity’s site, the page that serves the “cancel” button will be horribly slow to load, frequently broken, and borderline unusable, while the upselling pages remain lightning fast and reliable.

prioritize process over people

Huh. I feel like that line is familiar…

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

just sold you out

They been sellin us out since the start. And they never even paid for us!

(Everyone seems to be taking the opposite message from my original post, so I guess I’ll just replace it.)

Here is a pretty good video about the original incident when it happened, responding to some of the criticism of the soup-throwers by comparing their demonstration to the self-immolation of Wynn Bruce, in terms of media attention, cost, and damage:

https://youtu.be/5COJyheLHSE

(I had not heard of Wynn Bruce before the video, so I assumed nobody else had either. Wrong assumption on Lemmy, I guess.)

Seems like a pointless waste of time for a first-party effort, when they could be… Idk, implementing the audio manipulation APIs that Discord relies on, or something.

But I don’t necessarily see direct harm from it either. Just useless.

I haven’t tried it yet, but GrayJay purports to be an aggregator along those lines: https://grayjay.app/

No.

They did issue a fix: “Buy a new CPU please!”

That’s why they don’t mind the reputation hit. If 1 person swears allegiance to Intel as a result but 2 people buy new AMD chips, they’re still ahead. And people will forget eventually. But AMD won’t forget the Q3 2024 sales figures.

It’s worth checking out Louis Rossmann’s take too: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8

I rarely ever find myself disagreeing with either of them, so this is an interesting situation.

Edit: This is also a good take about live service, separate from the “Stop Killing Games” initiative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO38QvKraTQ

You first, champ.

Perfecting his argument.

Honestly, they should probably leave income alone and just double down on the wealth tax.

Wage-based taxation has always been an awkward way to target the rich.

I have very different feelings about someone from a poor background who went into massive debt to develop their skills and become a top earner vs. someone who inherited a fortune and doesn’t put any effort beyond checking their bank balance periodically.

Plus, there is the “won’t they just leave?” argument. Which is mostly FUD, but in the case where someone’s wealth is based on their skilled labor they do have a much easier time just leaving. If your wealth is from owning a portfolio of apartment buildings, good luck taking those with you.

As an able-bodied neurotypical 30-something straight white cis male with a suburban middle class upbringing and an office job, I don’t participate in identity politics.

Or maybe an abbreviated hash of the text of their specifications?

Interacting with people whose tone doesn’t match their words may induce anxiety as well.

Have they actually proven this is a good idea, or is this a “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” scenario?

I think part of the problem is that when you read about the horrors of the Holocaust as a kid, you can’t help but think of Nazi Germany as a cartoonishly, outlandishly evil place full of people who spend every waking second thinking about how much they hate impure bloodlines.

You come away with an impression that it should be obvious when genocide is happening.

Then you go home after school and you see something about genocide in the Middle East, and you ask your parents about it and they say “Well… it’s complicated.” And if it’s complicated – if it’s not cartoonishly, outlandishly evil – then it must not be genocide.

So, literally the story of the actual Luddites. Or what they attempted to do before capitalists poured a few hundred bullets into them.