DO NOT feel stupid because of absurd shit beyond your control, please and thank you. You're not. You're smart and clever and produce quality memes.
dingus
joined 5 years ago
See: Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp.
Because his PR team was aces, it's apparently totally okay to say derogatory, sexist shit about her.
She's not a good person but Jesus Christ neither is he. Celebrity culture is the worst.
https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6xh3xp/reddits_main_code_is_no_longer_opensource/
Here's a good discussion on it. Here's a great comment from a deleted account:
"back in 2008, Reddit Inc was a ragtag organization1 and the future of the company was very uncertain. We wanted to make sure the community could keep the site alive should the company go under and making the code available was the logical thing to do"
Translation: We needed you guys back then. We don't now.
The rest of it seems like a combination of technical hurdles that don't seem particularly compelling (they don't need to have secret new feature branches in their public repo) and some that don't make any sense (how does a move away from a monolithic repo into microservices change anything?) and some that are comical (our shit's so complicated to deploy and use that you can't use it anyway)
It's sad that their development processes have effectively resulted in administrative reasons they can't do it. I remember them doing shenanigans like using their single-point-of-failure production RabbitMQ server to run the untested April fools thing this year (r/place) and in doing so almost brought everything down. So I'm not surprised that there doesn't seem to be much maturity in the operations and development processes over there.
To be fair though, the reddit codebase always had a reputation for being such a pain that it wasn't really useful for much. Thankfully, their more niche open source contributions, while not particularly polished and documented, might end up being more useful than the original reddit repo. I know I've been meaning to look into the Websocket one.
Unlikely considering their source of funding comes from various European governments.
Also, it's not very easy to make open source closed source. The original Lemmy code and documentation is already out there. The only thing they could do would be to add new features that are all closed source. (This is what reddit does, as their old code is open source.) At best, it would be a fork of Lemmy with closed source elements.
Neither of those is "socialism." Socialism has a strict definition.
From Wikipedia:
Socialism is a political philosophy and movement encompassing a wide range of economic and social systems which are characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.
Socialism doesn't necessarily say we should remove all forms of private ownership, as much as it says we should remove private ownership of the means of production. Also, that doesn't mean that nobody owns it, it means all the workers own it, collectively. It doesn't necessarily mean that you can't have your own house or your own refrigerator, rather that the companies that build those will just be collectively owned. Imagine every company being unionized by default, something like that.
We have a similar structure of owning things in the US when it comes to stocks and public companies, but the thing is in that case anyone can buy a part of the company. In socialism, only workers who are invested in the company through their labor get part in ownership and choice of the direction of the company.
I do agree on higher taxes for the rich, but that's just a band-aid on the existing capitalist system, it's not really a "socialist" idea at all. Higher taxes on the rich is about trying to keep capitalism from spinning out of control into outright feudalism. The rich only become that rich to begin with because of how our system of ownership works where they take all the excess profit generated by their workers and keep it for themselves. Socialism would remove their ability to do that because they would own as much of the company as any worker. They would no longer hold dictatorial control on the finances and where they go.
Sort of, I'd say I'm way more of a socialist than communist, but I also think that both capitalism and communism suffer from being very old ideas that actually don't address issues of the modern world as much as they could. I think about the LGBT community, and remember that communism didn't just forget they existed, they ran on the same macho bullshit that vilified them for existing as capitalism. Castro admitting he made a mistake in regards to LGBT people near his death bed is far too little, far too late for the lives they destroyed.
There are valid critiques of both communism and capitalism, but we've basically got worldwide capitalism, so the critiques of capitalism simply matter more since it represents the status quo. I'll worry about critiquing more of socialism/communism when communists actually have real power worldwide beyond China, which is having it's own struggles right now as well. (Also, most of the critiques of China I have seen fall under propaganda messages from the US/Europe, and fewer of them have real meat of critiquing the actual functions of Chinese politics and how they work.)
Also, when it comes to theory, I fell in line a little more with people who weren't strictly communist, like the Situationists. Guy Debord is my pfp for a reason, and that's because he was fucking brilliant, in my opinion. I have a dog-eared copy of Society of the Spectacle that has more notes in it than any other book I've ever read.
Anyway, yeah. I'd say socialism is as good of a "fit" for me as I can find in existing political ideologies, and even that is more a close fit than a perfect fit. I'm definitely a fan of Critical Theory and the idea that we should always critique the status quo, whatever the status quo may be, because there is no such thing as a perfect world, we can always pursue improvement. If we had worldwide communism, I'd promote critiquing that as well.
o7
While I understand your reasons for not wanting to share your problems, I feel like this is a cultural thing and that it is in general a bad thing.
You're obviously not the kind of person to go around begging for other people's help, but at someone else who is similar, I feel strongly that there is a group of people here who would have your back, whether through a GoFundMe or whatever.
Can't wait for your triumphant return, Stamets. In the meantime, I hope you consider opening up so your fellow Trekkies can show the power of Federation and Friendship.
I mean, technically, the code to reddit is open source.
Probably that all the things that made reddit "good" were killed for the sake of profit.
Truth. Lemmy by design resists the influence of capital by being federated.
I think you're misreading me. Racism, sexism, and homophobia weren't the "politics" I was referring to, because you're right, those aren't politics, those are people being trash. I mean the Lemmy developers being socialists/communists didn't deter me from making an account here, because I'm not some capitalism worshipping pigboy. Their hard-left politics (the kind that led them to banning transphobic EMPRESS) are not scary to me, because I'm not a racist, sexist, homophobic douchebag.
As for Reddit and its decline. Reddit has been managed by State actors for a long time. At least since 2013ish.
Example:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.5644
This is far from the only research paper around controlling discussions online produced by Eglin Air Force Base. They were the "most reddit addicted city" because they're trying to massage the message into what they want it to be. They flood the site with persona management software and bots to influence the perception of what "people's opinions are."
If you're in any way a leftist, this alone should have been enough reason to pack up and bail on it, because they are openly going out of their way to try minimize and hide voices like yours.
EDIT: Here's another paper on the subject from EAFB, this is the one I 'member from long ago: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
Ah the ol' "I'm gonna take this question strictly literally" response.