Claim Chowder: Death of Reddit

6FPS V5#4: April 10, 2023

chuqvr@gmail.com • @chuqvr@fosstodon.org • chuq.me
Glass • GoodReads • Photography

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Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

The days are getting longer, and a bit warmer, even if we had a day last week with freezing rain and hail that left some pockets of white around the yard for a day or so. Last year we had planned on revamping some of the landscaping and started pulling some old and tired plantings out, then got sidetracked into a major upgrade of the irrigation systems.

With those behind us, I’ve been working with our landscapers to move forward this year; they came in one day and did a major pruning of all of the fruit trees, and we replaced two dead trees in the orchard with Ranier Cherries. The whole yard has been cleaned up, and the first of the spring plantings has happened — where the roses used to be we’ve started planting some grasses instead (it’s too cool and damp for roses to thrive here), and some other plants have been removed and we’re starting to replace them with a combination of huckleberry, barberry and peonies. I’ve got a spot staked out where I’m going to put in a large container or two, and that’ll be where my dahlias go (here it’s best to treat them as annuals you remove and store over the winter).. We’ve also had the veggie garden cleaned up and mulched. Still to come are more plantings for the front, and the beds along the driveway next to the orchard, along with two larger rhodies to replace a pair that didn’t survive the last two winters.

Our fence contractor has set the posts and will be back early next week to install the fence itself around the veggies — we’re replacing what was effectively a very tired metal post and chicken wire fence with a 4’ cedar enclosure, which I think will improve the look of things massively.

We probably have another month or six weeks of work with them to get everything planted, cleaned up and mulched; some of this is us changing what was here, other parts is dealing with deferred maintenance of the landscape by the previous owners (but nothing serious, mostly just tired and needing some TLC). They still have a day of storm cleanup in the woods in the adjoining parcel as well.

So, lots of progress, although it’ll take another year to really see it, um, blossom into what we see the potential of right now.

Other than that, it’s been a lot of work — busy time, shipped three sets of documentation updates this week with one more next week — and doing the planning for the next quarter.

Birding has been slow, in part due to above, in part due to weather, but we’re seeing definite changes in the mix at the feeder as the winter birds depart and the spring/summer birds arrive.

This weekend looks to be mostly rain, but after that, I’m hoping to spend some time out and about with the camera chasing birds again. If I get lucky, maybe I can get some time this Friday out with the bald eagles.

And OH! I bought an XBOX

Finally, I retired my Nintendo Switch after the move when I realized I simply never used it any more (but I may haul it out for the new Zelda game, then retire it again). But I decided I was ready to do something other than play games on the iPad, and after thinking about it for a bit, I went and bought an XBOX S, their basic model.

The game that got me to set this up is the upcoming Diablo 4; my primary time-waster on the Ipad is Diablo Immortal and while I don’t intend to leave that game for D4, I do expect it’ll shift some of my time, and honestly, I still prefer single player dungeon crawls over MMO-style games, although while it’s gotten a lot of criticism (especially for heavy monetization), Diablo Immortal is fun and I’ve gotten involved with some fun people over there (and yes, there are the normal jerks, but I’ve blocked the really annoying ones).

We’ll see how this fits in to life over the next few months. It’s down here in the office area where I work, so I have to come downstairs to use it; on the plus side, I’m not annoying Laurie with it as I whack away at orcs and goblins.

We’ll see what other games I dive into over time; I think now that everyone else has played and moved on from Elden Ring, it might be time to give it a whirl.

Free Prints to Subscribers

Anyone who’s interested in a free 8x10 print of one of my images si welcome to it. All you need to do is check out the images in one of the four portfolio galleries on my photography page, and then send me an email with the request, including the title of the image (or URL to the image), your name and a mailing address. My only requirement is that the email the request comes from must be a subscriber to 6FPS when I get the request. I will mail these out at no charge worldwide for any request I get during November, as quickly as I can make the prints and get them packaged up.

What do you want to hear about?

Since I’m done with the e-book projects, I expect to put more time on writing for the blog again, and while I have a number of topics in the to-do list, are there things you want me to talk about and write about? I have been asked recently about how I produce the e-books, and that’s on the list, but what else do you want me to cover? Drop me an email and let me know.

And with that, see you next issue!

What's New from Chuq?

Claim Chowder: The Death of Reddit

Back in 2015 I wrote a couple of pieces about Reddit, the first of which was titled The Death of Reddit, which gives you a taste of my opinion of the site at the time. I took the pieces down a few years ago, but I found that most of what I wrote was duplicated here.

I thought I would revisit this in light off just how enthusiatically Elon Musk has been killing off Twitter, an act I considered basically impossible until he bought Twitter and started burning massive piles of his net worth on the roof of the company’s office building.

The reality is that Reddit did right itself — it still has the basement of evil but they’ve done overall a very good job of keeping it from encroaching on the more public and civil parts of the site. It’s not how I’d choose to run a site, but it works for them, and it seems to be mostly a good citizen to the net at large.

So yeah, I was wrong about Reddit. I still only rarely use the site, but I keep thinking I need to spend time exploring it and see how useful it would be to me. There’s a lot of good, solid content I get pointed to on the site, and I’ve realized it’s time to take a fresh look at it.

If you had asked me in 2015 which site in 2023 I’d expect to be on fire, it wouldn’t have been Twitter. Would I be surprised if Twitter had lost its edge and was falling into irrelevance? oh, definitely, and to a degree that was happening.

I’d love to discuss why Elon felt it was a good thing to walk into Twitter and set off a thermite bomb, but trying to assign any kind of logic to what he does seems stupid. I mean, seriously — he fired corporate communications, and set up email so that any request for an interview returned the poop emoji. who older than age 12 does that?

I left Twitter when it was clear it was going to blow up big time under Musk and he started trying to re-invision it as a right/conservative mouthpiece (he just decided to have NPR defined as a “state owned” media, in case you were wondering where his attitudes are).

I frankly don’t miss it. Moving to Mastodon has pretty well replaced all of the things I used to use Twitter for — and I was someone who didn’t think Mastodon would be as successful as it has been in taking over for Twitter.

So, good for them. I still think there are some serious issues ahead for Mastodon (and which are visibly brewing today — a big one for me is the subset of nerds actively trying to tone police the content to their view of what’s acceptable). The federated model of Mastodon isn’t new. It’s basically what USENET was, and one thing we proved with USENET is that as a federated network grows and becomes more diverse, management of abusive sites becomes harder and harder, and so the abusive content becomes effectively difficult to wrangle.

I haven’t yet seen much in how Mastodon is building itself up that will make it different than USENET, but I’m hopeful those running the admin gauntlet for the network will figure it out, and maybe learn from the mistakes we made back 20+ years ago. I wish them luck, because I’d really like to be able to just continue using Mastodon until it’s use becomes irrelevant to me.

I feel sad about Twitter. It had potential, but was badly run by bad management and was spiraling into irrelevance. And then Muck came in and bought it and set it on fire as a way to fix it. This is one that’s going to get taught in business schools for many years — on how not to do a thing.

And meanwhile, Reddit, which I thought was dead, is just chugging along and doing fine. And one of those things where I’m happy to admit I was wrong…

Recent Photography

As I create new images and re-process older ones, I post them on my site in the Recent Work area. Additionally, every Wednesday is Photo Wednesday on the blog, where I post one of my non-bird images, and the bird images are posted on the blog each week as part of Feathery Friday.

March wasn’t much better for going out and taking photos. But, to prove that Spring really is arriving, I’m happy to show a (pretty mediocre iphone image through the window) of our first Rufous Hummingbird of the season.

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds and Birding

Science and Technology

Interesting Stuff

Recommendations

This month let me recommend to you a video game I re-discovered when I got the XBOX. That game is Hades from Supergiant, and it’s a classic roguelike dungeon crawler, with a nice storyline melded in. The basic play is that you’re Zagreus and stuck in the underworld and committed to getting out, and you endlessly work through the dungeons looking for the exit, and dying, and as you do, you slowly build up your power and capabilities. But mostly you die, and then you start over. It’s very replayable and I find it a lot of fun and feels a lot like the classic Rogue games, but rethought for video play.

Hades 2 has been announced but has no release date yet, but I’m definitely looking forward to it once I can get my hands on it. What I’d really love is something like Skyrim that I can just go spend months poking about and slowly working the storyline, but I haven’t found a game like that I want to play (ideas?)

About 6FPS

And with that, I'll see you in the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqvr@gmail.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

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