No such thing as bad PR these days, 24 hours later and we're on to the next thing, that's assuming people even saw it in their doom scroll feed. Gone are the days when everyone watches the same TV news or reads the same newspaper.
I'm just confused how we can be in an industry where " what's the alternative, just buy MS and live with it" is making a strong comeback simultaneously as all the big tech giants, MS included, are telling us we can generate infinite code and cloud configuration for a reasonable per-token price.
Amazon og Google or OpenAI having a one-click port of Githubs daily experience and Githubs CI infrastructure seems like it would be a pretty straightforward proof-of-AI-concept for a critical audience.
That's the cult of Microsoft for you. They have always been an average to below average company but have benefited from incredible openness from its customers because for the longest time they were perceived as the only option. Their real product is Microsoft
Microsoft of today isn't a leader in anything they're not the only ones in.
> They have always been an average to below average company
I think about this every time I'd hit a corrupted Access database, corrupted Exchange store or OneDrive messing up a sync. Was it actually the hardware or just sloppy programming filled with race conditions?
I was going through some old emails in an @hotmail.com account only find some had their headers but completely blank bodies so I guess Microsoft's own servers get impacted by it too.
I can't believe so many people think these wearables are "accurate"; then they wonder why they aren't losing or gaining weight when they go by the expenditure estimates on these.
A 2020 systematic review by Fuller et al. found that consumer wearables often perform poorly at estimating energy expenditure, even when they measure steps and heart rate reasonably well. Across brands like Apple, Garmin, Polar, and Withings, calorie burn estimates frequently showed substantial error, often in the 15–40% range and sometimes exceeding 50%. Wearables can still be useful for tracking trends, but not for precise calorie calculations.
protip: if you actually want to do better, look into "adaptive TDEE".
This comment confuses me. Why would we expect calorie burn to be related to steps and heart rate? How could a wearable measure energy expenditure? What if someone was wearing a heavy backpack? The energy to move the backpack has to come from somewhere but the wearable can't tell that the person has one.
Is it really that confusing? Heart rate is correlated with oxygen consumption which is correlated with metabolic activity. The wearable would see the increased heart rate when a person is moving with a heavy backpack versus moving without one.
Now whether we can do that accurately with today’s wearables and without calibration to each individual is up in the air as far as I’m concerned. But it seems strange to me that you’re confused as to how we could even directionally infer these things.
> The wearable would see the increased heart rate when a person is moving with a heavy backpack versus moving without one.
I'm sure it would notice the heartrate was up, but how is it supposed to translate that into energy consumption? Eg, my heartrate is 80 bpm. How much energy am I burning in an hour? There isn't enough information to say, even if we add in data points like a gps measure of my velocity and elevation change.
> I'm sure it would notice the heartrate was up, but how is it supposed to translate that into energy consumption?
Well, you need more oxygen to burn more nutrients. This means faster heart rate.
The body normally doesn't want to waste energy, so the heart rate at any given moment is just enough to cover the requirements.
Precisely calibrating that is another story. You can go into one of the places that directly measure the oxygen use and get the baseline data (e.g. https://www.dexafit.com/services/vo2-max-testing )
It's not super far fetched to come to approximation, conservation of energy and all that, the main variability people in energy expenditure comes from activity.
Get population averages of base metabolic rate based on sex/weight/age etc. Get base heart rate. When heart rate increases due to activity,estimate what activity and intensity and use weight to estimate activity expenditure on top of base. A lot of assumptions of course which make these tend to be inaccurate but if the assumptions are right then methodology is not that unsound.
> Why would we expect calorie burn to be related to steps and heart rate? How could a wearable measure energy expenditure?
A lot of exercise equipment manufacturers will display very approximate numbers, based on assumptions the user can adjust if they want (but they seldom do).
If you jump on a treadmill at the gym and set it to a brisk walk, it'll show you a 'calories burned' count that goes up by 7 calories per minute based on your speed and an average adult's weight.
It doesn't have to be all that accurate to motivate the user to just do 5 more minutes, and to put a checkmark on a product feature list.
They'll use flawed research to claim diet and exercise don't work for obesity, then the general public uses that research and claims, "Diet doesn't work for fat people."
Soon, everyone is convinced every guy with a trivial amount of weight to lose needs to be on GLP-1s.
This is always the most boring part of any health thread. Both sides of this have airtight arguments. The diet/exercise people will talk about thermodynamics, and the "it's more complicated" people will talk about epidemiology and the fact that "diet/exercise" hasn't worked as a population-level intervention at any point in modern memory. It's a classic axioms vs. empirics battle and it will never go anywhere useful.
Ok but if they acknowledge it's an addiction, that's still a medical issue requiring treatment. Maybe that means going to food addiction anonymous meetings but if GLP-1 is like methadone for food, why not do it?
GLP-1 will prevent you from eating so much, but it won't make you eat healthy. You can and likely will still fill yourself up on junk, and will deal with the risks associated with that. Albeit it won't be enough to make you fat, but that's only one slice of health.
Learning to control your diet solves both problems.
I'd also argue there's a lot of value in learning to not be dependent on medication to control your behavior, because it's not available in most situations.
You can't take an exercise pill.
You can't take a career success pill.
You can't take a "hard, but necessary conversation with my partner" pill.
Those all require you to consistently do things you at times don't want to do, just like avoiding junk food.
If you are in a place where you truly can't control your habits then of course GLP-1s are an amazing tool. However, if you don't adjust your life-style you will relapse when you get off, so the real solution is to adjust your life style. Also, there are benefits to exercise that aren't connected to losing weight. In my experience, 100% of the people I know on GLP-1 drugs are not exercising. I'm sure I'll get 1000 responses of people who do, but in my experience they don't. So you put yourself in a position where you're not addressing the actual problem, you are on a drug for life, and you aren't being healthy in other capacities. Are there times where these drugs make sense? Yes. Of course. Spare me the lecture. Everyone I know on these drugs are middle class people who absolutely could be healthy but don't want to put in any work.
Thats like saying running the car does little for gas burning because you can fill up in 5 mins.
You have to actually kick your ass when you exercise. Most people don’t push that hard. Michael phelps ate what 6k calories a day or something crazy to maintain his prime form with the amount of caloric burn he was doing in training. If he continued to eat like he did in those crazy olypmpian training years, he’d be morbidly obese. If he ate like he does now in those years, he’d starve.
I think the "you can fill up in 5 mins" analogy is apt and reasonable, actually.
For the average person it's much harder to exercise out of a bad diet than just change the diet. I think it's an easier "sell" for most people to start off trying to eat less than to keep eating the same way and jump right into "kick your ass"-level exercise.
The killer with exercise is that it makes you hungry, proportionally to how hard you worked out.
It's a real killer for "calorie blind" people to go on a 750 calorie hike, and then stop by for a "treat" on the way home. That treat being a 500 calorie blueberry muffin with 200 calories of butter on it. Then they go home and have dinner.
Diet and exercise tells people what to do, but not how to do it.
Knowing that you should do something, doesn't necessarily mean can do it. There's still the question of exactly how.
E.g., diet is heavily influenced by hormones/hormonal cycles and access to quality food choices, which vary significantly between people. The glp1s available now are a big help with the hormonal part of this, but they are not within reach of a large proportion of people.
> To me this is just subconscious denial/defending of their food addiction.
If you have to make up unobservable phenomena to explain plainly visible facts, it's usually a sign to look for a different overall model.
I can't think of another thing that is called addiction yet requires this very specific wording. Can you give me another example of something that is required for life, but too much is called an addiction?
It's something I've read a few times. Most of the studies I've seen say it's effect is modest at best. At least if it was a drug there wouldn't be enough evidence for it to get FDA approval (especially with all the "side effects" such as injury)
Arguably this is a limitation on how the studies were done, as nobody is going to pay for extensive studies since you can't patent exercise.
The studies can’t really prescribe very intensive excerise either. I mean they have to take people where they are. They might have them on a treadmill for a 30 min walk and call that the excerise component of the study. No one is making them squat heavy to failure or clean and press anything. No one is running them on the track until they puke.
Bodies are all different. Diet and exercise can work for one person and not another. But the type of person who wants to believe all fat people are slothful, all unemployed people are lazy, and so on, will invent in bad faith the straw man argument that we think diet and exercise do not work at all. They're not worth engaging with.
According to the nasty, nasty fights I've had with people about this topic there are, apparently, some people whose bodies are actually perpetual motion machines and I'm various kinds of insensitive for even bringing-up physics as it relates to weight. >sigh<
I believe AI has already solved being underweight, or obese, or skinny fat, or simply fat, yet people are paying for scam solutions.
This is one of the biggest quality of life boosts provided by AI, yet many everyday people are completely unaware of this.
The price of an AI solution is $0, and within 2-3 weeks you'll know if it works for you or not.
Compare this to any fitness coaching, or dietician, or any other method, or even GLP-1s, the cost is not zero.
Many people who do not even need GLP-1s are using GLP-1s to lose a trivial amount of weight, even though their appetite regulation is not a problem!
The thing is, they are refusing to believe that it's even possible.
There are many people using steroids and peptides, if you put a starving person in famine affected sub Saharan Africa on steroids, can you have them return to normal weight without providing them additional food? But many "foolishly" believe this is possible with steroids and peptides without giving them more food.
Users spend tokens on DeepSeek, Claude, and others -> generate variations of projects uploaded to GitHub -> Microsoft (GitHub's owner) -> trains LLMs on this -> ends up with better models.
No matter what model a user may use at any price point, microsoft can distill it.
It's distillation at a higher level
most good programmers aren't going to commit garbage solutions; they'll push it to a git remote once they see it actually solves a problem they are trying to solve, and since the git commits and their messages are also AI generated, you've good visibility into the user's intention and resulting edits to the codebase.
I know many people who have got banned and never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
Thing is, they use AI to ban people; over time, many false positives accumulate and not everyone has the time and energy to appeal bans.
Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
But the Reddit management is seeing this as a "win," not able to see the consequence of doing this.
I stopped using Reddit not because I got banned, but because it has been steadily converted from the world's most popular forum platform to a trash heap of engagement hacks and shady practices. Moreso than SO, which was already struggling with existential problems before AI, Reddit did itself in.
I've been struggling to find something that scratches the Reddit itch, in the lineage of Slashdot, then Fark, then Digg. Any recommendations? I don't mean niche communities, there needs to be enough of a mainstream critical mass the makes it _the_ place to go. I don't think it's Lemmy, though maybe it could be.
I really enjoy lemmy with summit client on my phone. Never been on it from my desktop though. Probably a good thing all things considered.
It's got pretty good coverage of most things related to my country and interests, but if you go too far afield/niche theres not many users on many topics
There isn't one unfortunately. Some nerd is ok on Lemmy but you'll never find stuff like knitting or local communities. Not with any people on them anyway.
I tried to post on r/showerthoughts several times over the past 10 years. And every time it deleted my post saying my thought wasn't original. I was wow how they would even know that, and this was pre-AI.
there is an amazing opportunity on the internet for proper community that isnt slinging shooting to either extreme of the political spectrum. we need a decent discussion board like reddit without the horrible mods banning or automods deleteing something because it wasnt EXACTLY following 19 different rules in the sub baar.
Rely completely on LLM moderators. But it's problems largely stem from its reliance on volunteer human moderators, who often self-select for strange and problematic characteristics (e.g. they are attempting to advance a political agenda by manipulating what people can read on the site).
This site is a prime example of the worst kind of enshittification that could happen around an IPO. I left when the first moves around that were looming (API restrictions and 3rd party app ban). This is one of the rare decisions of mine that I have yet to be critical about.
When I read old.reddit.com was disabled for non-logged-in users, to be sure I'd never hit this site again even by mistake, I put a rule in my router's DNS resolver to lie and pretend an NXDOMAIN.
Reddit is an absolutely hostile platform now, the amount of dogpiling is insane. Say the wrong thing and apparently you're simultaneously a bot, and a valid target for harassment (why people are so invested in harassing people they think are bots, I have no clue?)
I thought that calling people bots was just a way to dehumanize what they perceive as an opponent, just like in wars, but they know that it's a person.
It's easier to call someone a bot or other names than to engage with them or to try and understand their point of view.
We're increasingly pushed into different groups and sides with little to no toleration of each other. It's been progressing more over the past 10-15 years in the UK, US, and possibly elsewhere.
I think they honestly believe that because they can't even fathom that anyone would legitimately have a different opinion on something than them. And if they do, they're literally Hitler anyway.
I went on Reddit recently to look something up and some of the niche subreddits were decent but I was shocked at the amount of just total garbage that's there now (including lots of weird misogyny) so it's not just the bans that are a problem. It feels like every social media platform is just miserable to use now. Except occasionally posting here my only social media is just Discord servers with my actual real life friends.
Everything moved to Discord now. Reddit started ignoring subreddit subscriptions which made the whole platform a homogeneous blob of slop. Discord has maintained separation between communities and has minimal discoverability features so users stick to the servers they participate which builds a sense of community.
Where are you seeing this? When? I go to "Home" and I only see my subscriptions.
I have a cosmetic filter to avoid clicking on the "Popular" link but I never see anything from the front page that's not part of my subreddits. I don't use the app.
Honestly, agree. I find the niche subreddits are nice because they are still very human, in terms of both users and mods, but once they get a bit bigger it just gets destroyed by new users and bots.
Problem is there are no niche subreddits anymore, there are no walls between subreddits at all. Reddit runs on a modern algorithm where any individual post which scores well will be shown to the whole site regardless of users individual subscriptions.
Reddit still has a place for very niche communities. To this day it can be the best place for a lot of things.
But what's really clear for anything newsworthy or controversial or political is just how much Reddit is botted and brigaded and how easy that is. And Reddit seems totally unwilling to tackle this at all. But you can get something to r/news or even r/all frontpage with even a few hundred accounts.
One example that comes to mind of Reddit enabling this kind of thing is the feature they added where if you click a user they can hide their history. You can still find it, particularly in the LLM era (but it doesn't even require you go to that far), but most people don't go looking because of that extra effort. It's a shame because the botting becomes really obvious.
I honestly think all social media (including Reddit) needs to be required to make public what country an account is posting from, particularly when it comes to politics or anything controversial. My thesis is that you would see just how botted these areas are, how so many accounts with big followings are overseas and likely bots.
You might be tempted to say "they'll just use a VPN". This is a solvable problem however because VPN IP ranges can and will be identified and should invoke more scrutiny. For example, streamers use this kind of thing to find people evading geogating. But also you can't hide latency. Issue someone a challenge and there's only so fast they can respond.
My account of well over a year and 11k karma was banned by admins presumably for an admin-deleted comment where I said "Hi kids, buy our product!" as a Steve-Buschemi-meme reference, and was flagged as spam. To your point they also have their Comment Quality Score (CQS) which lowers you automatically if you use Proton email aliases, lowers you if you use VPN to access the site, among other things.
Made several polite appeals and requests for clarification, all which went unanswered.
I was banned from subreddits for belonging to r/conservative. Mods wanted me to disavow that subreddit to atone for the sin of belonging to that subreddit.
You will catch political sub bans for posting in and/or joining all sorts of other political subs, no matter what you actually said. I got more than a few from the exact opposite end of the political spectrum. All the political subs have been bought and paid for by propagandists for atleast a decade now. And having to either catching more random bans or having to self-censor myself, I left.
Hell there were even multiple political sub moderator purges that were right out in the open. Entire mod lists changing over night in multiple subs even way back.
It wants you to have a conservative viewpoint. But it doesn't ban you if you join like say r/AdviceAnimals which 2 years ago many subreddits were taken over when Trump was running for office again. r/AdviceAnimals and others were banning those that were members of r/conservative.
Reddit took action in March 5, 2026 to stop that practice.
There was that 1 person who used to work(paid?/volunteer?) at Reddit that actively tried to cultivate high-quality AMA on Reddit. Ever since they've been gone. It hasn't felt the same.
Some amount of hope and optimism that was around has definitely dried up or at least moved elsewhere into other smaller communities.
Everything is overly centralized around a particular influencer/podcaster/celebrity/product or whatever nowadays, it's harder to find topic based or open community-based places. The other places still exist, but still difficult to find and keep going.
I do hope the pendulum swings back towards hopeful optimistic culturally rich community vibes in many digital spaces.
I think the various reddit dramas over the years have taken their toll on the site even if they didn't completely kill it. You can see it in moderation these days, individual sub mods have called out the fact that no one pays them and they don't have the motivation to spend all day enforcing quality for free. No one has stepped up to replace them so most moderation on Reddit is site wide LLM powered moderation.
I gave up on contributing on reddit as everything is being removed by auto moderation as if bots can't spam /r/funny to farm some karma, and how am I supposed to get 1,000 upvotes if I post only in communities that have 1,000 active users? The entire thing is rigged to favor bots and propaganda over genuine human interactions.
This happened to me and I haven't bothered to create a new account. I was a 16+ year user. Banned over something innocuous. I tried appealing but it was clearly AI which denied the appeal - despite them claiming it was a human.
Something most people don't know is that Reddit now has a kind of AI partnership with moderators of the larger subreddits. If those mods ban a user from their sub, the AI can suspend or ban a user for "breaking the terms of service." Given the state of Reddit, and the kind of people who moderate the large subreddits, it's creating a fairly violent and polarised community.
> Slowly, more and more user accounts get banned, and even technical people I know fail to make a new account which lasts more than 3-4 days.
Meanwhile bots are running rampant and I can't scroll through the site for 10 minutes without seeing an obvious bot post or comment. Dead internet is real.
I am very into powerlifting and bodybuilding. So, I've been religiously following Mr Olympia (once a year event which is the largest bodybuilding show in the world). Last year, on Mr Olympia day, there was no thread about the Mr Olympia. Similar thing happened this year:
How does the bodybuilding sub not have tons of threads about the biggest bodybuilding competition? I don't know but I think it's because people gave up on posting due to abusive mods:
Last year, I made a post on that sub with comparison pics of the top 3 competitors. That post got deleted by the mods saying it was a duplicate of existing post (???). I tried messaging the mods that there was no duplicate and they first gave me attitude and then silenced me from messaging them.
The Reddit banning algorithm is strange in its own way.
In the past, I had tried to maintain a two accounts setup by policy. My main account (focused on camera, optics and photography etc) got gilded several times, with some posts appearing on their 'Popular' feed. I have used a secondary account(s) on occasions which engages in politics, tech, immigration etc. It has got flagged for contentious debates and I have been Reddit-banned once on one of them (for political criticisms and arguments against right wing; not my finest hour).
Whenever I tried to create a secondary since that incident, it gets banned immediately by their algorithms. It is insanely invasive in how they are able to detect someone. But I am surprised they never touch the gilded one - even if the same device/app was used for registration.
A theory to that feels there is more to than meets the eye in the way they use their filters to ban accounts. They are more lenient to older accounts (having Awards) or the ones which have got recognized in some way (appearing on Main Feed / Popular), but willing to discard the ordinary. Their user management policy is definitely intriguing
I refused to make a Reddit account. I knew my personality would lead me to wasting entirely too much time on the site if I could reply. (Like here... >sigh<)
When they killed "old.reddit.com" for non-logged-in users I stopped reading it at all. It's completely useless to me now. The "new" UI is garbage and makes me enable JavaScript.
> never managed to get back on Reddit because Reddit is using some very invasive and persistent banned user detection techniques.
The trick is to delete your browser cache (not just things related to reddit, everything), then wait a week to a month before creating the next account.
Also subreddit mods can ban your entire account..wtf. I was banned for arguing in a poltical subreddit. So if a mod doesn't like your political beliefs they can ban you (and your devices apparently) from the site.
And can confirm, they are suspiciously good at detecting sock accounts.
subreddit specific mods can't ban you directly site wide, but they have tools through which they can report your second account for ban evasion, and if the automated system runs a check and finds you had an old banned account on the same sub, your new one is perma banned too.
Somehow over the last couple of years it feels more and more like screaming into a void. It doesn't feel like I'm interacting with people anymore. There are no reactions anymore...
Reddit is an online mental institution. That's hardly an interesting insight, it just makes me sad when I think how good it used to be, before the events of 2016 broke Redditors brains.
My account was banned back around 2021. I had a separate account on mobile, which got subsequently banned for 'evading a ban'. Have been unable to create an account since then, even on entirely new machines, different OS, renewed IP. Whatever tracking techniques they use are downright scary.
The worst part is that all of this started because a mod in a right-leaning sub silenced my account, then decided to turn it into a permanent ban for no reason.
Nowadays, I'd still like to visit r/programming for a change, and share some of my work, but otherwise it's such a cesspool of AI-generated content and bots that the appeal has almost entirely faded.
Ive experienced this as well, i confronted some reddit devs at a conference about their ability to track sock accounts and they kinda just smiled and acknowledged what I suspected vaguely.
I used to be a lot more enthusiastic about decentralized protocols. I don't know how to solve the AI problem though. I think the Internet as we knew it for assumed-human interaction is dead, and the surest way to believe you're interacting with humans now is through existing trusts, such as accounts older than AI and highly-moderated forums, and to charge for access.
100%. I was on reddit 15+ years, mostly participating in a few niche subs, and got site-wide banned for making threatening comments after mods failed to keep political BS out. Ha! Far worse things have been said by talking heads on crappy cable TV news shows (you Faux). My appeal went into a black hole.
I tried making another account, and you are right, it got banned a few days later. Tried once again after learning how they do persistent bans and found they let me keep posting, but after 3 days my post views always stayed at 1... in others words they didn't "ban" me but my comments were clearly no longer visible to anyone else, and I haven't been back since. What a joke of a company.
Reddit is by far the most toxic place on the web, yet somehow manages to get the least amount of scrutiny from regulators. Makes you wonder why, doesn't it?
Until journalists can be paid under the table to mislead the public, the problem will persist. Almost anyone can be bought on a Friday night for the price of a few drinks and benefits.
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