My man, I said nothing about the science or the validity of that comment, just that it's wrong to call Ask MetaFilter "some Ask Yahoo knockoff". If you want to get het up about an argument I never made, you do you.
It doesn't matter if it was created before Ask Yahoo or if it's older.
It does if you're calling it a "knockoff" of a lower-quality site that was created years later, which was what I was responding to.
edit: btw, you've linked to the profile of the asker of that question, not the answer to it that /u/half_built_pyramids quoted.
some Ask Yahoo knockoff...
AskMeFi predated Yahoo Answers by several years (and is several orders of magnitude better than it ever was).
It was always bullshit, but in terms of political effectiveness it tapped into some powerful racism and dogged Obama for years to the point that he actually did release his long-form birth certificate. But the attempt to conspiracize about flipping burgers at Mickey D's is a lot more ineffectual and ridiculous.
So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.
Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We're all better together. I really hope you reconsider.
Tbh, I block ads when I can but have a hard time getting angry about this. YouTube is both incredibly useful and incredibly expensive to operate -- seriously, what other service lets you upload hours of HD video which anyone in the world can access instantly, indefinitely, for free, and at the same scale YT does? It's a peerless engineering marvel and it would be a tragedy if it were to shut down. If seeing some short skippable ads is what it takes to keep that resource viable, that's honestly pretty fair.
Convenient (for them) that they start this only after destroying all the coins people earned over years of using the site. I had over 80k coins and 18 years of premium from various awarded posts (all OC) that they just threw away for nothing.
If they respected my contributions, I might be excited about this, but now I plan on contributing absolutely nothing of value ever again.
I'm all for shitting on Xitter, but this is a pretty bad article. It's written like somebody put it through Google Translate a few times, and doesn't cite any sources for any of its claims. Closest I could find was this Business Insider story on a report by Apptopia, which only says that its downloads in various app stores declined 30%, not its overall userbase.
It's something I started noticing shortly before the API stuff. Bot accounts using ChatGPT to respond to random posts and comments. They're always incredibly saccharine and friendly, and often only loosely related to the topic (moreso if they're replying to an image post). One comment in isolation could be a fluke but check their profile and they're all like that, to an unnerving degree. I imagine they get sold off to spammers once they get enough karma. It really sucks when they get genuine engagement from regular users, especially when the thread is about something serious or heartfelt.
I remember similar cynicism when Obama appointed ~former telecom lobbyist~ Tom Wheeler as FCC chair... only for him to come out with the strongest net neutrality regs in history. People can surprise you.