Nor the whole idea of capturing opponents to raise them and make them fight for you. That’s from 1987 already, from the Shin Megami Tensei series; it predates Pokemon by a fair bit.

Good catch - you’re right.

Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.

I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.

So this is just another part in reducing cost on section that doesn’t produce money.

That’s what I immediately thought - they’re cutting corners to decrease dependency of googlebux, as depending on how things go those bux will go dry.

Embrace the paradox: «è un schifo ale lubię to».

The text says “several”, but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn’t look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint’s goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

1. As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don’t like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
2. If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you’d open a package with it, then click “install”, then the program exits because it’s looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I’m almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.

Of course they do. Beans, no poop challenge, ???, profit!!! repeat as needed.

(…we need more memes!)

The [hi]story of my life in a single pic. (My tarot deck is even the same as the one in the pic, a Rider-Waite.)

Instantly subscribed to that comm.

I’m aware of the site:example.com google feature. And, while useful for users who already know about Lemmy, it doesn’t help to recruit new users, and that’s a main point of the OP.

About centralisation: that “yet” is key. Putting all your eggs in the same basket is not a bad thing… until someone drops the basket, you know?

I’ve seen your post. Ouch - you stumbled upon some nasty circlejerking there. On multiple levels.

Plenty people here expect you to treat their “vision” as above everything else. Including your agency (“free will”), issues that you might want to solve, etc. That makes them unable to tell the difference between “criticising Apple” (a fair thing to do) versus “treating someone who bought an iPhone as an emissary of Satan” (what they’re doing against you).

To make things worse plenty muppets there are putting words in your mouth, regarding Samsung vs. Apple.

If it’s any consolation, it isn’t just Lemmy. The whole internet of the 20s feels like this nowadays.

TL;DR: I know that feel, bro.

The “instances hosting communities” structure alleviates albeit not solves this problem; communities about related topics end in the same instances, that you can block.

I mostly agree with the OP, it would be great if Lemmy had more sources of newbies than just “pissed off redditors”. (I have further reasons for that, but they don’t matter here.) As such I’ll focus on specific tidbits here and there.

The content is indexable (by Google), but your point stands as it sucks. It’s hard to reliably find Lemmy content by it.

Do you - or anyone here - have a good idea on how to solve that? Someone suggested a Lemmy-based engine; it’s tempting but it wouldn’t help if the person doesn’t know about Lemmy already.

Reddit is not something you discover from word-of-mouth or join from peer pressure

It used to be like this. “Stumbling” upon the site was only a thing later, as it had already enough content to become a source of info.

Even taking only English speakers into account, it isn’t a bad name. It’s a simple word, it sounds like “let me” (good association - unlike… GIMP), at most it might evoke you Lemmings.

And once considering other languages it’s actually better than plenty brands out there, including Reddit, Facebook or Twitter. By sticking to CV syllables there’s less room to butcher it into unrecognisability.

Absurdity is like seeing your cat go “mrwn! mrwn!” at the passing plane, then suddenly flying and catching it. Then cruelty is what your cat does with the passengers.

Reddit Gold is a great example IMO.

If Reddit’s goal was to serve users, instead of profit, it might’ve still implemented Reddit Gold. A site doesn’t run for free, and having another source of income could help to serve users better.

However then the nature of Reddit Gold would be completely different:

• There wouldn’t be a “gilded” sorting, as it enables astroturfers to exchange money for visibility.
• There wouldn’t be microtransaction mechanics associated with it, such as packs of “X+Y coins” associated with broken values in real money (so you need to pull out a calculator to know which one has the cheapest price).
• Even if platinum might’ve appeared, silver wouldn’t. Because the userbase was already joking about a “Reddit silver” award; so creating a Reddit silver was basically “nice meme you have there, it’s now my source of profit, sucker”.
• It wouldn’t change every five minutes as they were trying to find the best way to capitalise on it. “Gold! Awards! Coins! Back to gold! Rewards system!”
• They would’ve asked the users on potential ways to finance the site without contradicting its values.

Reddit could’ve become a non-profit for users, financed by them. So the outcome was avoidable, at least years and years in the past.

But for that Pigboy and kn0thing would need to give up the pretension of drinking champagne in an IPO. kn0thing gave up too late; Pigboy never did.

A good “dividing line” where the outcome became fixed was the introduction of Reddit Gold.

There were even earlier signs of Reddit caring more about profit than the best interests of the users.

2014: buying and crippling Alien Blue. Reddit could’ve built its own official app and users would have two to choose from; or it could have bought and improved Alien Blue. By doing neither, Reddit showed complete disdain towards user experience.

2015: Reddit fired Victoria Taylor. Except that Taylor did an essential job there, as she was a bridge between Reddit Inc. and mod teams; she was for example the one verifying people for Ask me Anything (back then it was a big deal).

You probably could find even more signs of that, if digging further. And while neither is as serious as the way that Reddit handled T_D, both already show that it was putting revenue over users.

I remember reading your text back then. It’s great, and it shows something that neither the article in the OP nor my comment show - the role of network effect in the process.

I think that this article is accurate and sensible.

There’s a point that I’d like to add, that the author doesn’t mention: user trust.

The main value of an online platform is the user trust, as it dictates the users’ willingness to help building it instead of vandalising it. In Reddit’s case it means people writing well-thought posts, moderating communities, reporting content, using the voting system, etc.

And user trust is violated every time that a platform takes user-hostile decisions. Like Reddit has been taking for almost a decade; with 2023’s APIcalypse being a big example of that, but only one among many.

And when user trust is violated, it’s almost impossible to come back. John Bull explains this well, with the Trust Thermocline; but the basic idea is that those violations pile up invisibly upon a certain point, when they suddenly become a big deal and the platform bleeds users like there’s no tomorrow. And once it reaches that point it’s practically impossible to come back.

So perhaps we aren’t watching Reddit die. Nor we will, in the future - because Reddit is already dead. What we’re watching instead, with morbid curiosity, is a headless chicken running around, while we place some bets on when it will stop moving - so venture capital can have its dinner.