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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • 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.









  • 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.










  • Bit of a misdirect in the headline. This was not primarily a scientific projection. This was a political reckoning by scientists who had recently suffered the bureaucratic pain of serving on the IPCC, and voluntarily responded to a survey.

    As one climate scientist put it:

    “As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make,” Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. “We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades.”

    Change never comes from politicians first, but these are people who are zoomed in on whether politicians are changing their minds.

    They’re not going to change their minds slowly over time. It’s gonna be nothing at all until the electorate is too loud to ignore, and then suddenly 100% of officials will claim they’ve “always condemned fossil fuels”, “from day one”, and “in the strongest terms possible”.

    We’ve seen time and again that policy changes tend to bubble just below the surface for long time and then suddenly emerge with multiple changes happening in quick succession.

    I was of voting age when just saying the word “civil union” in the context of gay rights was political suicide, and I’m not that old. Things can change quickly. Keep your hope alive and keep agitating. We can do this.