mtrower

What the...

My innocence =(

> relating to or believing in the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.

Everyone gets equal right and opportunity to demean each other equally!

> Also don't allow people to remove the ads by paying - you need to show ads to people with enough money to buy the stuff you're advertising. Exclusively showings ads to poor people does not work. Just make sure your ads aren't annoying.

I would definitely not pay money to a site that wanted to show me ads, regardless of my preferences, as a subscription member. Full stop.

> He already lost 4 years of his life to this. Hopefully he wises up and pivots before he wastes another 4 years.

I think it's up to him to decide whether that time had value or not.

> * VCs to continue to pour hundreds of millions of dollars to run the site and never ask for an ROI

Do they? I sure don't. In fact VC involvement is just about the last thing I want out of anything I consider critical infrastructure...

> My friends aren't going to leave Discord. And talking to myself isn't very fun.

While I agree with your vision, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss this. I've tried for decades to get people onto open platforms with me. Tooling pain doesn't help, but by and large, the issue is critical mass. If I were to drop out of <major communications platform here (currently Discord)>, no one would follow me except for my wife. I'm not really speculating, I know this to be true because I have tried it. Several times.

You can see it outside of close social circles as well. At one point my condo association leadership decided they wanted to shut down (well, at least abandon moderation of and cut all ties with) the community Facebook group, and bring our web presence up to modern standards. We built out a website, with many features we felt would be useful --- membership directory, community knowledgebase (some questions just repeatedly come up over and over again), a forum for community discussion... and nobody used it.

The reason? Turns out it was nothing to do with our implementation. It just came down to the fact that Facebook was already installed on people's phones, and they already spent their time there. That's it. Inertia and critical mass.

> but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks.

This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.

> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult

I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/<insert similar here>, this type of situation would be common.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...

If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.

> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.

This is a sticking point =(

> SEO spam

Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.

Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.

N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.

Alright guys, hear me out…

Let’s build a browser inside of virtual assembly code that runs in a browser that runs on an OS that runs on real assembly code (sort of). We could run that on a physical processor, or in a VM (hey, maybe we could run that VM inside a browser that runs on…)

You need a whole damn extra card for passthrough. With the price of today’s high end cards, that option seems… less than attractive.

Actually, he’s talking about vi, not vim. You’re a whole ‘nother rung up the ladder with vim.

And then we wonder why our software can’t run acceptably on multi ghz processors.

Are you sure this isn’t because you have more talent/competence for programming than writing? Or that you haven’t set the bars differently?

Writing is a daunting task for me, but that has more to do with my own talents and experience than anything. Not implying anything about yours, just something to consider.

Okay, this is fair.

Of course that would be silly. Who is claiming that?

Books are a marketing solution in search of a problem. Watch a movie.

…convincing, isn’t it?

I think this is probably a valid solution in many cases.

However, it is not a computer monitor, which is the explicit item at question here.

That is incorrect. A TV is a display panel optimized around a 10’ interactive distance. A computer monitor is a display panel generally targeting 2’-3’ at most.

So, you say you don’t know why people are upset with these devices, but people are telling you why and you’re just not accepting it. You literally told the other guy that he’s optimizing for the wrong thing, as if his priorities are somehow yours to determine.

It’s totally fine that you have different priorities and values than us, but that doesn’t invalidate ours.

Hmm, maybe more like “recommend me a manual transmission vehicle” and the answer you get back is why you really want an automatic, and here are some nice models you can buy that are all automatic.

Infuriating in either case.

> and not being able to play music or look at photos using just your TV?

I… I don’t do these things with a TV?

Basically, you’re saying that TVs were useless 20 years ago? Why they hell did every household have one?

I literally just want something where I can hook up a few consoles and a stereo system, maybe an HTPC if I feel like it. It should have good, responsive controls, be solid and dependable, and large enough that I can comfortably view content and read subtitles from my couch.

That’s it. That’s all I want.

> TV does _tons_ of processing to display SDR content (24fps pulldown

I keep hearing this. How did we do it in 2005? Because I was definitely watching HD SDR content on large displays in 2005, and we didn’t have the monster SoCs back then that we do today.

In fact it wasn’t until modern “smart” displays started coming out maybe 10 years ago, Cable switched over to HD content, etc, that I started noticing major issues with jutter, lag, etc.

Just how “underpowered” are we taking here? I’m having a really hard time imagining a chip which cannot render a menu in non-fractional fps. An 8088 can do this…

So it still sounds like a software problem to me.

Rolls nicely off the tongue, too.

Small number of people? You’re right, the average user doesn’t care about all of these details. They just care about the big picture they create, and how that’s terrible.

Uh… no, none of that, actually. What the hell? In fact, I actually don’t personally know anybody, of any technical level or age group, who uses any of the features you mentioned. So, maybe the market is not as small as you think.

> good price/feature ratio

When the features aren’t useful to you they don’t increase the price/feature ratio. When the features are anti-features, you could even consider the ratio to be getting worse…

I mean it needs a tuner to actually qualify as a TV. The bit about latencies and form factor, as well as the pricing for such, is also critical. As is the remote.

If he truly doesn’t care about any of those things, then I doubt he’d be here complaining about it. So imo at least some combination of the above is implicit.

You have an 80” monitor solution?

> It should turn on in seconds, not minutes.

Dear god, has this become a thing??

This doesn’t really invalidate those studies. What it does do, is force you to restructure your work so that you can get work done anyway.

Whether it’s more or less effective than interrupted, “zoned” work is going to depend on the individual and the circumstances, but it is certainly a way to work.