Definitely Reddit’s buildup was smart. The transition to profitability not so much. Although we’ll see.

Man, remember all those who kept arguing against it? I would say “Reddit is dying”, and these new accounts that had never visited my sub before we decided it should go dark suddenly appeared and started talking crap about anyone who criticized Reddit. That should have been a smoking gun alone for people to realize what was going on. But instead, people just said “yup, that’s Reddit for you”. Which extremely unfortunately… they were right, bc that is what it had become by that time.

i.e., spez didn’t kill Reddit by denying the usage of third-party apps - that was merely the final nail in the coffin for many of us, topping off a process that had begun several years earlier.

This sounds familiar, almost as if history could perhaps, maybe, just possibly… repeat itself? Nah! (says spez)

People will follow the content creators indeed. Right now I’m not sure where they went though. The last I looked, it was basically nowhere, though to the extent that it was anything I thought it was X (even if via a temporary Mastodon intermediate). Musk fed Huffman bad info, which the Musk himself was not doing (or rather, the circumstances were entirely opposite - a public company going private rather than one attempting to make the polar opposition transition), and Huffman was dumb enough to fall for it, then Musk rakes in the rewards for his dirty deed.

Nowadays - or perhaps soon - as you said it might be Bluesky. So trading one corporate landlord for another, but it makes sense - the content creators will go wherever their audience is, and then the latter will in turn mindlessly follow the hoarde, but with an enormous delay measured in high number of months to even years. Plus, content creators need revenue to survive, e.g. how many videos is Ian Danskin (of Innuendo Studios) putting out these days? Then again, how many people especially younger ones even watch 20-30 minute long “video essays”, rather than TikTok(-style) short-form clips?

All the rest: yup.

Over time yes, but then again those most likely to leave have already done so. At this point I don’t expect anymore large exoduses from it, but even if there were I’m not so sure that they would come here.

Conservatives would not feel welcomed in the slightest (nor should they, hey-oh!:-), normies would not feel comfortable due to the heavy need to block every damn thing here just to survive it, and especially the people who think they are leftists (as I once naively thought, with zero evidence I should add!:-P who wants to bother actually looking up definitions of terms? especially if everyone around you is a conservative and thus it makes no functional difference) will find themselves most likely to become dogpiled onto by the people most ah… “eager” to look down upon their fellow human (and some as we so recently and unfortunately discussed go so far as to tell others to kill themselves - highly inappropriate language, especially coming from an instance admin).

So even if some were to leave, where would they go? Twitter is dead, having been eaten from the inside by X and cancelled, then necro-birthed into its current undead existence. And Facebook… just… no. Threads then? Maybe in a few years but either way it’s not comfortable and familiar like Reddit is. So even if people left Reddit, I would expect them to go crawling right back into it, maybe just change their subs or some such. Especially when they roll out subscription model to avoid (some of) the ads, though it’s too soon still as they get people used to them slowly but surely… just like a frog in a pot being cooked slowly (except that’s a false story, bc irl the frog actually does have enough sense to jump out!).

Or maybe they’ll simply touch grass, until they can’t stand that anymore?:-) Playing games rather than talking with people can be a real distraction from the grittiness of life - and then there’s Discord servers that so long as you only want a singular specific game, actually do offer a convenient method to discuss such a focused topic.

So “less profitable”, I guess we’ll see. Probably somewhat less, but substantially so? That I dunno.

this comment in one of the cross-postings seems relevant: https://lemmy.world/comment/13157556

True dat.

Oh that’s definitely true - if their existing machine works and they only want to get away from Windows then it’s not even a question (putting Mac OSX onto a not-Mac hardware just isn’t quite the same experience…:-P), definitely go with Linux then.

Yeah there is no OS in existence and never will be one that has zero issues, true dat. Windows included.

Okay but… will putting Linux on it be any better, in your view, or are you saying Windows or bust?

Yikes, that’s… a good perspective. We all did not used to be this poor, especially with the expectation that it will never get any better, so I hope that my comment was not too terribly insensitive. Maybe I’ve led a charmed life - e.g. I’ve literally never had to repair any Mac device that I’ve ever worked with, mostly work machines but one in particular that I bought entirely on my own lasted a good 10+ years before it simply gave up one day (whereas another was stolen, etc.) - but yeah they definitely don’t make them to be easily repairable, being made mostly out of like fucking glue or some such.

I would definitely sell a homeowning millionaire a Mac though - at that point they can afford whatever they want, so I’d happily take the cut:-).

And I would still hesitate to recommend Linux to an old person - if only for fear that I’d be stuck answering all their numerous requests for free tech support - but yeah I get you that it’s a solid option, and a way more cost-effective one if that is the chief concern i.e. not a homeowning millionaire.:-D

Thank you for sharing your perspective.

I may prefer Mac OSX, but Linux really is a fantastically beautiful - and functional - OS, so I am glad that she can enjoy it better with this!:-)

Boomers in particular are known for extremely often falling into the trap of “ask not what I can do for you but what I can get out of you”, so yeah, that makes sense. And when it comes to a personal desktop I actually get it b/c while you may be busy with work + kids & having a real life where you touch grass, and then something doesn’t work, at that point it’s less of a choice to have to spend hours trying to find why this driver doesn’t work with your hardware, and what older dependencies you are not meeting, so you have to roll backwards and then set up multiple concurrent installations of whatever e.g. Python and then change EVERYTHING to either use one or the other by default… it’s exhausting.

Which as a “hobby” is fine (is it thogh…?:-P), but if you were simply trying to look at pics of your newest grandkids or something, is standing in the way of the real fun that you want to be having instead.

And using computers - and software - is literally a shittier experience today than it used to be, where even the major vendors (Google, Microsoft, etc.) don’t walk you through what you need to do in order to get some particular setting applied or working right. For some reason they cannot be bothered to always put onto their tech pages tiny little details like what version of the software a tidbit of advice is meant for, or what I would want would be to see all of the versions collated together on the same page. It’s too much work to keep up, therefore they simply don’t. And average people just give up in frustration.

Therefore fwiw I like Macs b/c you need that support far less on one of those, where it truly does “just work”, far more often than Linux, yet doesn’t have literal ads in the Start Bar like Windows.

Okay so (1) very good points, especially the details but also (2) genuinely, have you ever actually tried using a Mac? e.g. the glass feeling of the touchpad is noice, for someone who can afford it. And those built-in Expose features are astonishingly useful, in providing things that I had previously only ever seen on a Linux or even new features that I never had. They are super-light, and functionally beautiful. The “Air” in particular at that point was iirc more of an almost tablet concept, not meant to be a full laptop, so like something to take to class and write notes in, not perform video editing in like a Pro - though it still had a full-sized standard keyboard, unlike some ThinkPads that I had to use (though way back in the day so not sure about modern ones there) where the keyboards were all smooshed and I had to spend 15 fucking minutes hunting for the damn tilda/backtick key.

Ngl, Apple got complacent and for several years fucking Microsoft Windows has been the one actually innovating the UI/UX, and yes Linux far more so as always, but the Apple experience is still fairly solid.

So if we are talking about “parents”, who may even own their own home b/c those things weren’t fantasy way back in the day (when, no kidding, the government actually paid out socialist subsidies to encourage people to do just that; back before that ladder was yanked up for the rest of us), then for them cost might not be the overriding factor? Or some people may just be okay with paying the premium price to get the good stuff? Again that trackpad… hmm…:-) - if it were free I doubt you’d turn it away at least (b/c if nothing else you could put Linux onto it):-D.

You do have an excellent username btw:-).

I hate Windows with a passion, but when forced to at work, Windows 7 is the only thing I would consider. Until they allowed me to switch fully over to Mac that is:-). (Linux was not an available option.) Hey, maybe one day Microsoft will make something that is somewhat good like… hehe I can’t even finish that sentence with a straight face:-P.

WHAT!? Apparently desktop icons are forcibly rearranged and while the location of the setting varies across versions, you can turn off the auto-align to let her do that. I haven’t used a Linux UI for a few years but this may help: https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=288291.

I hope that helps make her happy:-).

True… though Windows itself keeps changing things between major releases, so someone may feel that they need to learn a new interface either way, which lowers the barrier to such a switch-over. For myself I did not think it was that hard, but then again I came from Linux to Mac OSX so I am definitely not the average use-case:-P.

Anyway, good point.

As long as you are available to be on-call to fix literally all of their support issues:-). That’s an old joke, back from the time people used to have “printers”, and so like on a Windows and Mac machine adding a new peripheral is trivially easy whereas to install a new printer/scanner/whatever on a Linux machine, even if it is as simple “apt get whatever” can be quite intimidating to elderly people (tbf the OP does say “parent” and not “grandparent”, but I was thinking both).

Anyway, that’s a good point that I have no fully thought through yet:-).

That is a very good point. If the constraint was added that someone would need to purchase a new machine either way - their old one died lets say, and possibly they want to switch form factors from desktop to laptop or vice versa - then would it change your answer?

Trying to put Linux onto a new machine can involve literal horror stories, especially with a particular vendor of graphics cards (Nvidia) that seems to enjoy breaking things. And too many of the cool/special features that would “just work” on their machine if it were on an OS provided by the manufacturer - some neat-o keyboard buttons lets say - could take potentially hundreds of hours and ultimately writing your own driver coding to make it functional on Linux. Not always, obviously, but it can, whereas with a manufacturer-provided OS it is guaranteed to function right out of the box.

But yeah, getting a new Mac is something on the order of like $1000 USD, plus older machines have had more time for Linux drivers to have been written anyway, so cost and newness of the machine are definitely major factors.

Just a shout-out that Mac OSX is also a very nice OS that is neither Windows nor Linux. In fact I am interested: would anyone argue against this, again this is for parents, presumably someone who has (been forced to) used Windows their entire lives at work yet knows nothing whatsoever about tech?

It absolutely is imho. Like at some point it was not social media as it became later, following (well, attempting to) the financial success of Facebook and Twitter/X, and instead people could submit long-form answers to questions, rather than merely vomit their feelings into the never-ending stream of others doing the same.

^This

I also choose this guy’s wife

And my bow

etc.

By deprioritizing people finding answers and instead encouraging them to make new posts all on their own to ask the question yet again, over & over, spez tried to make money and enshittified Reddit by taking it away from its original purpose that had given it such a reputation for being great.

So it’s not “having ads” that destroyed it, but the chasing after ad revenue at all costs that was driving it into the dirt. Even before the protests revealed that starkly to us all that the Reddit we had known and use to love was dead - spez had stolen it, he took our efforts and that ad-bloated, authoritatian-modded corpse was what was leftover. And it wasn’t even bc of profits alone, but greed in chasing short-term profits above all else, including long-term profits. Aka capitalism killed it.