The lack of an obvious place to go seems to be all that stands between Reddit and total collapse. Instead of an obvious Digg->Reddit type path, it's more like Reddit->a bunch of less than equivalent options.
You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos.
It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.
There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.
I think less centralization is actually a good thing but yes it does mean that reddit can hang on a little longer because it's less obvious to people what they can replace it with.
I can't understand the appeal behind Discord for general communities. Everything is one giant persistent group chat--there's no discrete threads or posts to search, at least not in the servers I'm in. Sad that so many companies are opting for Discord for building communities.
I've tried multiple times to use discord, and the fundamental blocker for me seems to be in it's name. Every one feels just like a private slack channel for a company I don't work for. Discordant.
To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo- just wrong.
It's only about 5% of users, which is sizable but not unkillable by any means. The third-party mobile apps had way, way more than that and they proved very killable.
When Digg started to do stupid things, everyone switched to Reddit.
When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed networks are always a bit harder to get traction.
So the question is, if Digg users fled to Reddit, where are Reddit users fleeing to now?
Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"… I've heard people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or potential popularity.
Internet forums are fundamentally not companies that can grow infinitely and where investors 10-100x their money. Digg was unprofitable. Tumblr was unprofitable. Twitter is unprofitable. Reddit is unprofitable. When VCs/investors ramp up the pressure the company has to change in ways the community doesn't like, and that is what normally kills it. Whether that happens with Reddit as well is TBD, but I can personally say that the quality of the forum has been steady declining over the last few years.
How does Facebook succeed making stupid amounts of money in this context? Is it the reality that they just have enough of data to make targeting effective enough?
Network effects mostly. If your relatives or friends are on facebook then you will either have to put up with it or miss out on social contacts. This does apply to other kinds of forums too to some extend but limited to a more abstract numbers game where the biggest forum is the place to be rather than more personal direct connections that you don't want to cut.
They serve up a ton of ads, which is also gradually driving people from Facebook. But if reddit served as many ads, it would be completely unusable.
Ads make the signal to noise ratio degrade. That works for spending a few minutes on FB, skimming to see what's up with friends or family, but not for reading long forum threads on reddit.
Facebook doesn't just serve ads. They have high quality identity and market data on their users that is very appealing to advertisers looking to spend their money on specific targets. I don't think reddit is currently able to supply advertisers with data of that quality. I assume forcing people to sign up with an email or use the app instead of the website are attempts at bridging that gap.
Facebook has best-in-class behavioral advertising tools, and can be used to create highly specific segments for ad targeting. You can sell pretty much anything on Facebook, so that attracts advertisers.
Reddit on the other hand has a bunch of anonymous users whose preferences are much harder to figure out.
Like I said, Facebook has better tools. Reddit is rock bottom when it comes to their ad product. They should have swallowed Twitter's business when their advertisers started fleeing, but they haven't.
You cannot use Facebook without creating an account and giving them a shit ton of data about yourself and your entire network. That data is what is used to show ads on all their properties and all over the internet. Reddit's user base on the other hand is mostly anonymous.
> Twitter is unprofitable. Reddit is unprofitable.
At least for Twitter and Reddit, these could be profitable. There's so much fucking garbage done on both platforms... remember the hexagon NFT profile pictures on Twitter or Reddit's NFT avatars? Who in their right mind other than cryptobros would/did buy these, and how much developer attention got sucked in by these projects? Reddit has around 2.000 employees, what are they doing all day long, given that most moderation is being done literally for free?
I believe the difference is that when Digg screwed up the redesign Reddit was ready to take its refugees. When the Reddit fiasco happened last year there was no clear place to migrate to.
Having said that, and being perhaps too negative, do we know how alive Reddit actually is? Because once you factor the power users that left, the bots reposting top comments on reposted stories, the auto-generated content and the shills it is possible that Reddit has already started its decline but hasn't noticed yet.
This rings true with my experience also. A couple weeks ago I bought a bunch of computer parts online, the majority from NewEgg and a MSI motherboard from Amazon. Hooked up everything and it wouldn't post. Thinking it was a power supply I swapped out and tested the new power supply in my old PC and it worked, so I took the old power supply and put it in my new PC and it didn't work. Returned the motherboard to Amazon and bought different brand from Best Buy and it's been working like a champ ever since.
On a different shipment from Amazon I received a small bathroom rug. The weave of the design was off by over an inch on two of the sides. I've never had such bad experiences in the past from Amazon than the last couple months.
When the notifications say 'In Transit' they aren't passing through a FedEx building, but rather are sending GPS ping notifications every 12 hours. Your package was most likely on a slower mode of transportation such as rail or a trailer. This is done to show progress on slower routes because sometimes there could be a couple days between a hub touch.
"Ambition" rather than 'They are just killing off UPS and FedEx' Its a huge billion dollar story that's been incredibly soft, just look at UPS's stock, this will result in them losing their largest partner, no movement at all.
I am super sure there is an acquisition of one of convoy et al by amazon very soon to build the AWS for trucking as well because they're going to have so much extra capacity in a matter of 2/3 years.
Convoy like companies don't actually have capacity from my understanding: They are building a uber like platform to share extra capacity. <it is also funded by Bezos> So if Amazon is to build their own trucking-cloud, this is just a logical buy (unless they decide to build in house for some reason)
This reminds me of the E-13B font [1] seen on checks since the early 1960s, but in a square format. The goals are similar, produce machine readable and human readable text. There have been attempts to also make a version with alphabetical characters as well in OCR-A [2] in the late 1960s.
Checks are now often scanned optically, with the MICR line, the courtesy amount field and the legal amount field all being read by software character and handwriting recognition. There is a small security deficit, since a fraudulent check with a non-magnetic MICR line would not be detected.
as I was taught that was the correct way to do it. Suddenly, I was getting dunning notices saying I'd only paid $12.34. This happened simultaneously across different accounts. Clearly, the software had changed.
It's nearly as secure as going to the ATM to deposit the check and most banks are OK with the increased risk because they have extra identifiers (phone/app info) when you 'scan' the check. Which is to say the whole process is not terribly secure.
History wise it came about with the removal (or reduction) of check float when checks began to be processed electronically (turned into an ACH transaction with images of front & back being taken by the submitting bank). In the last TOS I read about check scanning what is actually happening is that your scanning of the check replaces the bank's scanning and they are using extracted data to create the ACH transaction. In the meantime they extend credit to you to match the amount they would normally advance you (varies by account and amount). It's been a while but I recall it being specifically credit as opposed to the usual 'available funds' at an ATM; this seems a distinction without a difference.
In the end - it's not secure or at least not much less secure than going to an ATM to deposit the check. The difference is that the ATM keeps the physical check for some small period of time such that if there is a problem with the ACH the bank might have physical possession of the check to assist in a fraud investigation (not that I think they'd need it as the law enabling electronic clearance I believe made the electronic images equivalent in all ways to the physical check).
You're on point about the strategic focus. Think long term, who these shipping companies want to align with: Target, Walmart, other companies with physical presence and a need to grow their e-commerce to compete with Amazon. By not renewing the Amazon contract you can focus on helping your long term partners and let Amazon deal with figuring out how to continue providing the same level of customer service with it's relatively young last mile delivery portion of shipping. And any bad Amazon customer experiences that result due to the last mile delivery damage their brand, and can result in lost sales, hopefully a gain then to one of these shipping companies long term partners.
Five years ago there was a similar situation with the transportation of prescription medications. FedEx put out a public statement that they intended to fight the Department of Justice order:
"We want to be clear what’s at stake here: the government is suggesting that FedEx assume criminal responsibility for the legality of the contents of the millions of packages that we pick up and deliver every day. We are a transportation company – we are not law enforcement. We have no interest in violating the privacy of our customers. We continue to stand ready and willing to support and assist law enforcement. We cannot, however, do the job of law enforcement ourselves." [1]
Ultimately two years later the DOJ dropped the charges against Fedex.
"In court on Friday, [U.S. District Court Judge Charles] Breyer said FedEx was 'factually innocent.' He said the company repeatedly asked the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to give it the name of a customer that was shipping illegal drugs so it could stop working with the person, but the agency was either unwilling or unable to do so." [2]
If this plays out similarly, FedEx will use a similar blacklist mechanism to comply with the law, but is suing right now to prevent any backlash that will inevitably occur when the blacklist doesn't contain an illegal entity and it's discovered there was a shipment that slipped through the cracks.
"Export restriction rules “essentially deputize FedEx to police the contents of the millions of packages it ships daily even though doing so is a virtually impossible task, logistically, economically, and in many cases, legally,” it said in a filing. ... FedEx responded by saying publicly that it would deliver all products made by Huawei to addresses other than those of Huawei and affiliates placed on the U.S. national security blacklist." (from the main article in this thread)
There's nothing wrong with Web Design 2.0, in fact I prefer it when I need to interact with information on a website. When I use Netflix to browse for a movie or TV show, linear is good. I don't need free positioning, overlapping elements. If the goal of the site is to showcase creativity and art, Web Design 3.0 is a possible tool in the toolkit.
In December of 1994 the 10 year minus 2 year was at 0.15 (currently it is 0.18 in Feb 2018), but then we had to wait for the next recession until 2001. It could go back up like in August of 1984 or January 1995, or continue downward and put us in a recession in a couple years.
The lower-end of the curve is ALREADY inverted. But that's not "the indicator", the 10-year is the indicator that is tracked. Still, seeing the curve invert between 1-year and 5-years is worrysome to me.
This is a less reliable indicator: but when the lower end of the curve inverts, usually the higher end inverts soon afterwards as well.
We've definitely dipped on the 5-year and 7-year. But I'm not aware of any inversion on the 10-year (even an intra-day one). Or was it on the Global Bond market? (I think I recall one story about the global bond market becoming inverted...)
Hmmm... do you have a citation by any chance? I'm definitely interested if you can remember where you saw that data, for the full details of the situation.
Turns out I misremembered. I was thinking of the inversion which happened in December, which was as you said, the 3- and 5- year briefly inverted (by 1 basis point).
