What’s good for making more money is not always or even often good for what we would think of as customer-friendly business. If you can wring more money out of a few whales at the expense of pissing off customers who don’t create as much revenue, then in our current system that’s what shareholders apparently want.

Reddit wants more users in their official app where they can target them for ads, sell NFTs, and whatever other bullshit they want to sell. It doesn’t matter if the experience is worse, and it probably doesn’t really matter if a couple thousand 3PA users split for good. As long as they can tell investors that the official app use is growing and that they can target a greater percentage of users with ads and data, they feel like they won.

I think you mean to say that she deserved a medal.

Neelix was one of the best characters on Voyager and I will stand by that assertion forever.

I also think that Ethan Phillips was one of the best actors in the bunch too.

Episodes like “Jetrell” and “Mortal Coil” still move me every time I see them. Dude is amazing at playing a very damaged person hiding (in part) behind a mask of joviality. Neelix was truly a good hearted man who loved his crew, but those times when the mask slipped really showed what a complex individual he was.

Honestly, the Federation itself. I always thought you could make a really interesting show that was a mix of Federation politics and Starfleet intrigue; maybe a show about the Federation government on Earth that delved into Federation society and dealt with an overarching plot. Like maybe a season where a Federation colony at the edge of Federation space gets into conflict with another race/government, and for a season you get a mix of stories from the colony, a Starfleet ship sent to the colony to support, and the Federation Council on Earth.

Federation politics could be really interesting, but the shows always paid kind of disappointing lip service to it. One key example is in the DS9 episode “Rapture” when Bajor is being accepted into the Federation; the fact that a Starfleet admiral rather than a civilian Federation representative was overseeing the proceeding was lazy to me. Plus the entire ceremony was tiny and anticlimactic (and obviously barely got started since Sisko interrupted). Great potential for some real insight into the government but instead it’s just some rando admiral.

I believe that genetic modification to fix defects/heal diseases is still acceptable; it’s augmentation beyond what is considered to be “natural” that is the problem.

If someone would make an RSS reader with its own comments/threads independent of the stories themselves I could go straight to the app comments after reading only the headline to get shitty takes on stories I won’t read.

The Reddit experience really isn’t that hard to recreate.

It’s amazing how inept spez has proven to be, and that’s after most people had developed a pretty negative opinion of him. The CEO of a community-driven company really cannot be an anti-social megalomaniac and have the company survive.

They’ll give him money either way; it would be great campaign material for Biden though.

r/redlettermedia went down today which surprised me. Glad they’re jumping on board; I hope spez is eating some serious shit right now.

Props to The Verge and David Pierce for his coverage of the redditing in general. I have been critical of the Verge and Patel in the past, but since the big site changes I have been forced to admit that the changes have been for the better.

Smart of him not to set the bridge on fire before he’s made it all the way across.

They just start writing stories featuring reasonable politicians who aren’t taking insane positions.

I mean in a world where Mitt Romney seems like a reasonable guy, everything is satire.

The reality is that a LOT of reddit users are casuals who probably visit a couple of subs regularly using the official app or a web browser and are perfectly content with that. The issue, I think/hope, is that they aren’t the ones generating a lot of the content and discussion and they will lose interest in reddit when the big contributors have moved on.

I could be completely wrong and this may be a blip in the history of reddit, but I hope that it impacts them in a meaningful way. Reddit is 100% dependent on third parties generating content for them, so the leg they’re standing on is pretty fucking wobbly.

Apollo is a great app; I think people like it so much because Christian has always been so engaged with the user community and has (mostly) been responsive to people. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a work of art, and I don’t necessarily agree with all of the monetization limitations that were built in to it, but it is unquestionably one of the apps I’ve used the most over the years and it will be sorely missed.

This article is obviously being dramatic/hyperbolic; American military leaders are already well aware that in a serious military engagement with China where we go all-out (excluding nukes because that’s a whole different animal) we might lose. That’s why this is being war gamed: the US is working on restructuring the military from how we have been engaged in the Middle East to how we would engage in a serious conflict in the Pacific region.

These sessions play out a lot of different scenarios that lead to different outcomes; China doesn’t always win, but them “winning” in a protracted military conflict can have a lot of different meanings too. Remember that China has practically zero real-world military experience; it’s why they have been so interested in seeing how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine plays out. They’ve certainly learned a lot, but practical experience is important. There would also be devastating economic consequences for China if they got into a real conflict with a Western nation at this point; even if they pounded Taiwan and the US into short-term submission, they would not come out unscathed and then they would be facing a united Western world that would likely turn its back on them. Not as easy as sanctioning Russia has been, but I think one thing China has seen in Ukraine is that the West is more united and has more will than it might have seemed before the invasion.

Bottom line is that this shouldn’t freak anyone out: we are learning what our weaknesses are and how to fix them before we get into a real conflict with China, which may never happen. Be glad that the military is working on its strategic posture now! Honestly, what should be scaring younger Americans is how shitty our recruiting is right now…if a conflict did arise in the next few years, you can bet your ass that the draft would come back in a hurry.