This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is true for the their frontpage at least. Many say it wasn't a good knowledge base, I feel like it was. Specially for those who starting hobbies or running into issues. Also the most random knowledge would show up there.
If you were using it to get facts to form an opinion, I would say it wasn't the best but then again, that style of research is difficult even without reddit.
I miss the good quality reads I'd get from it, but Lemmy is now that filler for me.
If you were using it to get facts to form an opinion, I would say it wasn't the best but then again, that style of research is difficult even without reddit.
Agreed. But if you wanted human opinions on say, a specific brand a vacuum, 👌
Not sure that is valuable anymore. They say when something becomes the benchmark it ceases to be a useful metric.
That is to say marketing departments have been long aware of peoples use of reddit and have sewed themselves into the fabric of the "what do you recommend" posts.
It might be useful to make sure you arent buying trash, but it wont ever give you the unbiased best answer on those recommended threads.
but it wont ever give you the unbiased best answer on those recommended threads.
I completely agree. Don’t trust everything you see on the internet
It might be useful to make sure you arent buying trash
This was the main goal. Mad people are likely to be vocal people and they are the ones that go to Reddit and complain about how the latch that releases the waste container on a vacuum broke after a few months.
Reddit wasn’t the only place to go for research on infrequent purchases but it was always a good starting point
Fair, but I went to Reddit to see someone disassemble Ryobi batteries to tell us which ones use hood Sony cells or no-name ones, or to see people complain about which products suck. It’s harder to astroturf that.
A quote from the article: "response to concerns that the new r/homeautomation mod team could overlook posts with dangerous misinformation, the anonymous Redditor pointed me to the subreddit's sidebar, which has a disclaimer about the dangers of electricity. However, the disclaimer is only visible on old Reddit. The mod doesn't know why."
That kinda sums it all up, right there.
If a mod can't be bothered to know why something only shows on old reddit, they shouldn't be a mod at all. It takes all of two minutes to find out why, and not much longer to fix.
It's fine to jump in and learn on the go. It isn't fine to jump in and not learn at all.
It's almost as if replacing much of your unpaid labor force who largely seemed to care about content with shills isn't a smart plan.
While I enjoy some Reddit drama every now and again as much as the next person, this article had a plenty of words but very little substance. A few former mods are concerned that new mods don't have the proper knowledge and background to moderate effectively (but with no concrete examples of a post's misinformation directly leading to harm), and researchers are worried they may no longer be able to use Reddit data for their studies (although Reddit has a policy around research-based access and is working with Pushshift to improve access).
These examples feel cherry-picked, and the article itself says that it's too soon to say whether or not content quality was impacted by the API changes and mod replacements. Without actual data - or at least many more examples of specific concerns that weren't present before the changes - it doesn't do much other than say "a few people are worried that something bad might happen."
Hey — I’m one of the former r/Canning mods quoted in the article.
The issue with trying to get data on unsafe canning from Reddit is twofold: firstly, people who undertake an unsafe canning practice who fall ill (or die) don’t typically come back to Reddit to report on their situations. If you’re fighting for your life in a hospital bed, you’re not likely going to login to Reddit to post “Well, I followed some bad advice here, and now I’m in the hospital”. So while we do know from a small number of documented sources that people who have got sick (and died) did so from following bad advice online, it isn’t as if they routinely self-report this.
(And conversely, if you just wind up with the shits for several days you may not even connect it in your mind to eating bad home canned food — and you’re probably less likely to go online and brag how you were able to shit through a sieve because you followed a bad canning recipe).
Secondly, time is a significant factor. Something you cook up in a pot on your stove and eat right away will be perfectly safe for all but the most immune-compromised of people, but stick that same food in a jar without proper processing and put it on a room temperature shelf and it becomes a time bomb, with the danger ramping up as more time passes.
That passing time doesn’t really work with publishing deadlines, and considering the unlikelihood of people self-reporting doing bad canning and hurting themselves (or others) there really isn’t any way of “waiting to see if someone hurts themselves”. People sometimes can stuff and then leave it on a shelf for years — so the harm may not be realized for quite some time.
Sure, it would have made for a better article if there had been a slam-dunk obviously unsafe recipe/practice posted and someone had died in the process — but gathering such data could take a very long time, and I’m sure Ms. Harding can always post another article in the future should such data become available.
Is there a canning community in the Lemmy verse now. It's fascinating, but I never thought about it until this article
There is !canning@lemmy.srv.eco, but there are zero posts, and I don’t even know if it has a moderator.
I was asked to moderate it, but turned them down. After what Reddit did to us, I’m a bit burned out on the idea of doing daily free moderation work. Besides which, I have a job and a family and other hobbies to give my attention to.
Hopefully someone picks it up, and hopefully people begin to contribute. It would be nice to have a new home for canning discussion outside r/Canning.
I mean… tech news articles on Lemmy are posted by a bot, so we're not far better off
Even without them, Lemmy has extremely limited material for learning about stuff.
Reddit was never a place to go to for facts. Reddit has always hated facts.
It's perfect if you want to feel outraged all the time though.
I've been learning to control the outrage, and figuring out ways to turn things around. It's like my time with conspiracy theories helped me to discern bullshit, fact check, be objective, etc.
The hardest part is when you're served something on your "side" of the issues. It's so much easier to spot errors on the "opposing side" than your own.
Depended on the sub, some were actually pretty well moderated (though a lot weren't)
And you think Lemmy is better? Lmao
I see all over the internet a certain tribalism towards each person's social media of choice. Even when people admit that there are problems, they still want to convince themselves it's better than all the others and that everywhere else is pure drivel.
I am rooting for Lemmy but I'm only going to call it "better" when searching with "site:lemmy.*" returns me better results than "site:reddit.com". For now the culture is a bit better but the content is still pretty scarce, not to mention that there is nothing making this place any less susceptible to misinformation.
of course
I felt it was enough to hint that.-lol Criticism of alternatives being too much like Reddit hasn't been well received.
To quote Nelson Muntz: “Haha!”
Consider
old.reddit.com/r/redditseppuku
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons).
He noted various canning misconceptions, from thinking the contents of a concave lid are safe to eat to believing you don't need to apply heat to food in jars.
For example, Barclay pointed to one mod recommending "citizen science," saying they would use a temperature data logger to "begin conducting experiments to determine what new canning products are safe."
It includes already-canned tomatoes, which experts like the National Center for Home Food Preservation (NCHFP) recommend against, as there's no safe tested process for this.
What's critical for Reddit's content quality is not that moderators adopt identical philosophies but that they are equipped to facilitate healthy and safe discussions and debates that benefit the community.
But the hastiness with which these specific replacement mods were ushered in, and the disposal of respected, long-time moderators, raises questions about whether Reddit prioritized reopening subreddits to get things back to normal instead of finding the best people for the volunteer jobs.
The original article contains 670 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 71%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Wat.
Poor bot did its thing, but the article starts off in a way it can't handle well it seems.
Also doesn't appear to be able to handle that the article is over 4 pages
This bot meta as hell
What a poorly written article...
