• 9 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle


  • From my PoV it’s probably many of these projects are effectively public good spaces. Hosting a code repository has become less of an esoteric thing and turning into a public good benefit (like a physical library but virtual for code). Spaces like Reddit and Twitter are todays analogous of a public discussion forum in a park or at a bar.

    Internet tools have become so ubiquitous they are critical to serve public needs and public benefits. However these internet spaces are increasingly commercialized and privatized, which runs against them being valuable public goods (see the difference between Wikipedia, run primarily for public benefit, and Wikia/Fandom).



  • Unless you have a super compelling reason to get sequenced, do not use direct to consumer sequencing services or offerings. In general it’s not so much the tech or whatnot that is bad, but rather without being in a position to determine if you have some genetic, prospective genetic screening isn’t ideal.

    If you feel you have a good reason to be sequenced (eg family history of a kind of cancer, particularly breast and colon), seek out a genetics consult with a genetic counsellor or geneticist at a major hospital or academic center.

    This comment isn’t to constitute any kind of medical advice. Rather, you are much better served getting sequenced done well.




  • I think people will flock to wherever there’s activity. Then my random series of thoughts:

    Firstly, there’s some rumblings about setting up some kind of multi-community feature (either server-side at the community level or client-side at the user-interface level), so hopefully this comes around sooner rather than later.

    Secondly, Lemmy does support cross-posting formally (for example, if you submit an identical link to multiple communities, there will be a small bit of additional text indicating it has been cross-posted and linking out to submissions elsewhere), but text-based cross-posts are not as technically featured (this might have changed, but when I last tried it merely appended a “crossposted from XYZLINK” to the start of the text body).

    If a critical mass of people congregate, they may want the episode-posting bot to work on their community anyway.

    The broader pragmatic perspective is it’s pretty evident there are a number of people interested in participating around anime and manga centric topics, but the fact that people are spread out across a variety of different communities makes it difficult to reach a critical mass for conversations to start self-sustaining themselves. If you and like-minded individuals are interested in committing the energy and effort to grow something, I’m definitely happy to come along and help out. Ultimately though, the addition or removal of automated episode-posting bots doesn’t really change the fact that it’s hard for incidental participants to stay engaged if there’s little conversation about the episodes or anime in general, and from my PoV the real “content” are in these discussions rather than in the submissions made. In some ways, a lot of these individual episode threads become mini-communities in and of themselves.

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting something and then handing it off to someone else later either.


  • The bot is probably the same bot used on /r/manga to automatically post chapters from Mangaplus and similar services. This is usually a burst of activity during the weekends and a few submissions over the week.

    It’s just a quiet place when no one really wants to comment on anything really.

    Given it’s basically a direct port of the bot I don’t particularly care. Really the “problem” is the real content of communities like these are the discussions but there’s been absolutely no concerted interest or activity to drive people to visit and participate. Taking out bot updates for some series won’t change this.


  • Another alternative is to run it on a different Anime community on a different instance. Either way, one moderator (probably the one who created this community) has made no comments since doing so, and the other hasn’t made a comment or submission in 14 days. The last (and only) logged moderation action is from 26 days ago.

    My ultimate point here is that if you are interested in growing a community but the people who have the ability to exert influence over what sticks and what doesn’t is not being responsive, some options available here are to get the unresponsive people out, or to go elsewhere to work with people who are.



  • Discord is by far the worst place for a community to retreat to because it’s resources and discussions are impossible to find through cursory searching and I’m so sick of adding to my list of Discord servers just to get information that belongs on a Pastebin or Github readme.

    In many ways though, Lemmy has grown into something that is active much faster than so many other kinds of social media platforms. Does anyone remember Disapora or Google+ being the next Facebook or Facebook replacement? What about Wit social? Most definitely do not.


  • From my PoV:

    1. The activity around memes, image sharing, memes, shitposting, memes, memes, and memes have not felt too different from Reddit, but unsurprising as it’s very easy to consume content
    2. The typical communities that have coalesced in a grassroots fashion are thriving well as long as one can accept there’s a lot of duplicate threads (like the Twitter related stuff in technology communities). Some communities are populated by Reddit content porting bots and these feel so barren because it’s a wall of submissions with a small number of comments each and the bot owners have no visible intent to stop.
    3. Niche communities are incredibly quiet. That’s understandable but also unfortunate, more so if it is a niche community that did not move over.

    Things will hopefully get better with time.








  • Yep since the first party app’s primary goal is to generate revenue (over actually providing a good user experience), it’s packed full of everything to achieve revenue generation:

    • Ads
    • Tons of tracking to figure out how long you viewed something, what you clicked on, and so on to build an advertising profile that can be sold
    • Obtrusive Ads
    • Lots of suggested/recommended stuff to get you to keep your eyeballs on the app longer
    • Ads masquerading as real submissions
    • Paid promotions

    Third party apps don’t have revenue generation as their sole highest priority (if at all), so naturally they strip out all of that stuff which makes for a terrible user experience.


  • In many cases it’s a numbers game. Not a bad idea to connect with old colleagues or acquaintances, or to network with current or recent ones.

    The unfortunate reality is the job market is kind of awful right now, insofar as the experience is for someone looking, so you run better odds leveraging who you know.

    Specialized job boards are particularly great places to target (for example, postings at large public or private institutions nearby instead of generic job boards).