it's just an inactive icon on the toolbar

I got rid of my icon ages ago - one of the great strengths to me is the ability to customise the taskbar as you see fit, you can remove literally any icon you don't want there. Even the URL/search box if you want.

About the only time I see anything pocket related is when FF updates and there's some blurb about it in the 'new features' page. Otherwise I pretty much forget it exists.

In my particular case (as was the case with most forums in the day), it was really just about spamming boards with links to whatever shitty ED pills or crypto scam they were trying to sell.

They were never really sophisticated, but never really had to be either. A spammer could spend a few minutes writing a script for a bot to crawl the web looking for phpbb signup pages, then try to create an account on any it could find and immediately post the links. They could post hundreds of links on dozens of different forums with just a few minutes work - and then do it all again tomorrow with a bunch of new signups.

Experience, mainly.

I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.

I may be wrong, I don't know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.

I used to get so annoyed seeing mindless comments being endlessly reposted ('r/unexpectedoffice' was one that comes to mind, there are many more) and getting hundreds of upvotes. I'm hoping the system here discourages that sort of useless nonsense.

how can someone seek a diagnosis if they don't first self-diagnose?

That's the problem I had there. I've been waiting on an official diagnosis for almost 3 years now, but I certainly do tick all the boxes for having it, to the point I'm like 99% certain I do. But I've always been made to feel like I shouldn't be posting there or claiming I have ADHD until I can get the official verdict.

Karma scores - on an account level at least. Up/down votes on a post or comment are fine and make sense, pushing bad replies down and the best, most thoughtful stuff to the top.

But a system where accounts can build up a karma/reputation score just leads to karma whoring comments just intended to gain upvotes and adding little to the conversation. Or worse, repost bots just reposting whatever was popular last week to gain karma. Reddit's been plagued with it for years and it just makes the whole place seem spammy and low quality.

Yes, CPR is brutal and more often than not ineffective. That TV trope where someone gets a few compressions suddenly coughs and sits up all alive and healthy again is complete BS. Literally never happens.

My wife's a paramedic and in seven years has only seen someone spontaneously regain pulse after CPR twice - and that's with a team of highly trained professionals and a whole bunch of fancy equipment.

Still worth trying in many cases though, but it's certainly not a miracle procedure and not something that should automatically be done in every case.

we users aren't the priority.

You know what they say. If you're using a service for free, then you're not the customer, you're the product. They don't care about what we think in the same way a farmer doesn't care about the opinions of his cows. It's just never really been this glaringly obvious before.

I saw the same. I was just about tempted to slide back and browse quickly on my lunch break, then I saw that and just noped out of there. This place is building up quickly and strongly enough that I probably won't bother going back to reddit if he's going to keep up with this nonsense; I don't really need that sort of BS negativity.

If you have the best UX possible and no content creators (that people care about), you won't get users and without users you won't get content creators that people care about.

This. I have a small yt channel, my videos regularly get 10k+ views there. In the early days, I also uploaded to a couple of other sites (dailymotion was one, can't remember the other). Where I was getting hundreds if not thousands of views on yt, I was getting maybe half a dozen on the other sites. My most popular video got nearly 100k views on yt, and last I looked on dailymotion it had something like 8 views. Needless to say, I didn't bother uploading to other sites after that and just stayed on yt.

That said, I'm willing to start uploading to peertube once I've had a chance to look into it.

Visually, I actually quite like the look of the redesign (on desktop at least; mobile's a whole other story). But it's so bloated that on my old laptop I could get maybe 10-15 minutes of browsing time before it used up all my ram and dragged my whole computer to a crawl. And it has a whole mess of bugs that make it almost unusable - it feels like someone's CS project rather than the front end of one of the largest sites on the web.

It went about as expected, IMO. 90% of redditors just don't care that much - even if they agreed with the blackout in principle, most of them were likely just waiting patiently for their favourite subs to reopen so they could go back to browsing as usual. A quick browse through some of my subscribed (and still open) subs revealed a lot of commenters weren't even clear about what was going on.

But it has had the effect of essentially kickstarting a community here which seems to be taking shape nicely and there's finally a (small but growing fast) alternative to reddit - which didn't really exist before. I can see the following months and years seeing a gradual shift in user base from reddit to here.

Reddit's not going to die overnight; that was never going to happen. But it's possible it's the beginning of the end of their empire and the slow decline to the ranks of the remember-that-website-whatever-happened-to-that club. Time will tell I guess.