> even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts
Completely agree.
There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.
It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.
Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.
It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.
It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.
Crazy how if they had waited about 2-3 years, and kept windows AI-free and released it today using the latest models, it would absolutely be well received (see: muse, new siri)
Instead their incompetent managers were chasing promotions and pushed a technology which was not ready yet
These kinds of features absolutely come from the top. VP level, at the very least, if that's what you mean by incompetent managers. The middle managers are just trying to do their jobs and figure out how to get it done. If they say no, they're just going to lose their job faster than they'd lose it to AI.
No, the very top. Nadella has been driving this directly, he was going to get there first, shock & awe, etc. Maybe this would have worked if Microsoft cared about customer experience as much as it cares about customer lock-in.
>Crazy how if they had waited about 2-3 years, and kept windows AI-free and released it today using the latest models, it would absolutely be well received (see: muse, new siri)
But that would make John Shareholder sad! He wants it done now, this quarter!
Lol fixing a bug in a simple personal blog is WAY above the paygrade of latest Claude/OAI models.
It will literally one shot fix any bug that is ever found in such simple application.
New generation's "upper-mid tier" offering claims to be almost 1:1 match for the previous gen's "top tier" - in other news, fork found in kitchen.
Now, Anthropic might stall on releasing Fable 5.5, due to the "pacing the frontier" threat-to-humankind management business. If so, Fable 5.1 would remain a niche model for the next bit.
I think you need to recalibrate in your own mind what using a product means. It doesn't mean you like it, or the company behind it. It may also be due to monopoly status.
Do you like your utility company? Your phone company? Your ISP? Your insurance?
Huh? I would echo the sentiment of you recalibrating what a normie is. This is a crazy take. I would guess that fair amount of people have no idea that Facebook rebranded to Meta, let alone what goes on in and around the company.
Meta products are entertainment, not water and power, comparing them to that is so overblown.
Plenty of people don't use IG or Facebook at all, and plenty of people just go on every now and then and enjoy the experience and leave.
Here's what I found when I googled "polling on Mark Zuckerberg":
> Roughly 54% to 70% of Americans express an unfavorable view of him
> Zuckerberg is viewed negatively by both major parties. Democrats and Republicans alike report high rates of disapproval regarding his influence and leadership.
> Dislike for the Meta CEO spans all age groups, though younger adults display particularly high skepticism.
YOU GUYS are so far out of touch to say normies don't hate and distrust the people behind Meta. They will use the products but this is not a positive reflection on the brand at all.
You are playing games. You implied that people's feelings for FB would prevent people from being the target audience.
Clearly that isn't true.
Now you're hyper focusing on how people feel about FB, and not whether it precludes them from being the target market. Convenient.
And before you respond saying "I never said they aren't the target market, just that they hate FB". To which I say, reread the damn conversation. You're obviously drawing a relation between hating FB and not being the target market. Even if you're now scrambling to back out of that claim because we've shown you 3 billion reasons why you're wrong.
A great many use their products grudgingly in my experience - posting minimally, staying because network effects make it difficult to completely move, and not wanting to give FB and friends more than they already do.
Is that true? I find that unlikely. I would believe if normies don't know Alphabet or Bytedance even when they use their products every day. But Meta? You open every app they make it literally says "from Meta" in the splash screen
The average user doesn't make principled decisions around what hardware they use, the software they buy or the services they use. We have billions of Chinese phones and Windows laptops as proof of that. You can give them decades to make a healthier choice, and they'll still go back to use Meta properties if it gives them what they want.
HN users are a tiny minority of social media users, and I think it's easy to buy the fallacy that our privacy-obsessed outlook is the norm. But much like YouTube or X, there will be people defending these dumpster fires until their final breath because it's what they want. We can't stop them any more than I can make you quit using HN.
What if I told you.. the average person LIKES ai slop images and prefers them to "regular" ones.
The same way the average person prefers McDonalds food to healthy food
It's an opinion piece, I'm at a loss as to how it could be "fake". Regardless, the owner of the site is still pissy about...something to do with Tesla, I've since forgotten. Doesn't make him wrong, but it's certainly a consideration when reading Electrek.
And ”i built X” or ”i did Y” is a well known clickbaity title that produces good conversion rates on any platform
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