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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • A custom PC that runs modern games on good settings but is also designed to run quietly. Fan noise bugs me.

    I wish I could say that I built it myself (I used to build my own systems, years ago). But instead I paid way too much for it. I’m happy with it, but yeah…build your own if you have the time and energy!


  • More power to the protest, but I am skeptical that it will do much good. I think reddit has strayed so far from its original mission and values that today it is nothing like the platform the reddit founders originally envisioned.

    I think the reddit executives have probably already run the numbers on this and don’t care if every single user & mod who uses 3rd party apps and the API walks away from their platform. At this point they only care about the IPO and what they need to do to increase shareholder value after the IPO.

    They may even see the exodus as a positive. They may think of these power users and API-utilizing mods as a drag on their bandwidth and worse, they are users who seldom if ever see any ads and increase their ad-viewing numbers.

    Will the quality of reddit content suffer? I think it very likely will. It’s already been going downhill for a while now.

    However, the executives mostly don’t care about content quality, either. As long as the free content they get from their users doesn’t stray into illegal and controversial waters, they are happy. If the content is mediocre memes and cat photos, they are quite happy with that. The goal is to serve as many ads up to as many users per hour as possible. They are banking on millions of “casuals” to stick around and scroll through the content and see those ads. Content quality is way down the list of their concerns.

    My guess is the suits are are no longer interested in an “engagement” platform in the same way that Twitter and Facebook try to be (in their own ham-fisted and evil social-engineering ways). At this stage of the game, reddit just wants to be a mindless app that bored people can scroll while in the doctor’s waiting room, the airport, in the bathroom, or wherever they are and need to kill time.

    Have the reddit suits made a miscalculation here? Will the exodus make reddit another “not cool anymore” type of platform like Digg that almost everyone abandons? Will the mass exodus only leave bots and karma farmers behind to talk to each other? Maybe, I don’t know. It’s hard to predict that kind of thing. But I think the execs are willing to roll the dice on this because short-term profits are all they care about since they will be going public. If the bots and karma farmers fool the people buying ads, reddit will just roll with that.

    (You’d hope anyone buying ads on reddit would check to make sure their investment is actually increasing their sales…but there’s a lot of poorly managed businesses out there).

    Either way…for those of us who enjoyed old reddit (and Digg before that, and Usenet before that) I think the path forward is a new platform such as this one.


  • After running two different Synology units at home (years ago) I finally just moved everything to a mix of USB SSDs and cloud storage. I really wasn’t using many of the more advanced NAS features very often. They were expensive toys if I’m being honest with myself.

    I needed lots of storage, primarily, and there are cheaper options for that now. SSDs are also far more reliable than they used to be. I keep the “large but not critical” files on SSD and the “critical” files in the cloud.

    Not trying to discourage anyone from running their own NAS. It can do more than just store files for you, and they are fun to mess around with. But if all you really need is reliable storage, shop around for other solutions would be my advice.