Just do it! I would suggest just start writing. Editors and technology can help you cover some of your issues. What sort of books are we talking about? 200+ page nonfiction? IMO writing a book is an endeavor.
Find a platform somewhere and write short stories, whether it be your family and friends or somewhere on the Internet. Check out lemmy.world/c/writingprompts (even bigger on Reddit). Write blog posts. Write write write. Maybe exploring those partial ideas. Collect all your writing in one area so that you can look back at it and see progress.
I think it also ties into a larger portion of people being fed up with corporate social media and corporations in general. All the ads, tracking, and shareholder profit driving decisions instead of what makes a product “good”.
If I get to about 40% of a book and I don’t care about what happens to any of the characters, I’ll just drop it.
I’ll usually flip to a random page in a new book and read a few paragraphs to see if I like the way the author writes. If it doesn’t click with me; phrasing, vernacular, etc, I won’t bother with it disregarding whatever the story is about.
There’s a lot of good answers already here, so I will post a few unique things.
I’m writing a novel (a damn good one too). The first thing you want to know is that you need years of experience if the novel’s going to be any good. That does not mean you need years of reading and writing experience specifically— you can replace it with other kinds of experience. For one, you’ll need some maturity— some understanding of people, some understanding of the world, stuff like that. And then you’re going to want to read at least a little about writing, even if it’s just TVTropes.
This may not work for you specifically, but it would also help a lot if you— like me— are a huge lover of any of the fictional arts. I don’t really read novels anymore, but I am obsessed with the multimedia fiction arts— things like movies, comics, and video games. I read a ton of articles about writing, I watch a ton of multimedia critics and essayists, and I read things like Mythcreants and TVTropes. Unlike most people I know, I hugely value the writing and storytelling in video games, and can get really angry at games that have a ton of writing/dialogue but it’s all crap (looking at you, Pokémon and Golden Sun).
I would also like to say that pure “pantsing” is a pretty bad idea, even for pantsers. “Pantsing” means that you just sit down and start writing. Don’t do that. At least start planning and writing down things you really want to see happen in your novel, locations, characters, whatever. At best, outline as much as possible before you even start. With that said, having a roadmap is good, but not critical; personally, I think preparing your novel to include scenes you are super excited about is much more important.
Which leads to a very important point: if you don’t like writing something, stop writing it. Focus on things you love. If that scene or genre is boring you or is soul-crushing, stop writing it and write a scene you’re excited about. If you’re excited about something, your readers will be too. They’ll feel your energy and love.
Next point. In this day and age, don’t write anything too standard or predictable. There are a million and a half generic D&D-feeling fantasy books that don’t get published, and they will bore any agent (and reader). Bring something new and exciting to the premise, and make sure people know about it from the first few paragraphs. Intrigue people.
Final point for now: Focus on writing well. Don’t focus on what’s selling, don’t focus on a market, don’t try to chase bandwagons. Do not care if you will get published or not. For one, trade publishers are usually awful, don’t offer anything of value except a professional editor, and are basically crappy venture-capitalist middlemen. Just focus on writing something you love and which is genuinely good, for now. By the time you’re done, the trade publishing landscape will probably have changed anyway.
API changes should have come into effect on July 1st, but they have been doing a prolonged rollout (a lot of the popular apps closed on June 30th) so that shattered some hopes for people that believed the blackouts would work.
And they also managed to make a lot stupid comments and other decisions between then and now. Combine that with people already being unhappy and some hostility towards the company is not out of the question.
Hating platform is unproductive, but emotional response is a very human thing. I’m just happy new alternative platforms came from Reddit greed and they are thriving. I stopped following all the Reddit-focused communities and I don’t even keep up with what’s happening there.
In my experience, when Linux works, it’s beautiful (yay package managers). But once you have an issue or go off the beaten path, it can get complex and confusing very quickly. You’ll find a perfect fix… oh wait, that’s for Red Hat. This is Ubuntu and everything is different.
This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).
Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous. But heaven help the adventurer that tries to do the install manually. And building from the source? Hah!
The registry gets a ton of shit, and yes, it can be opaque and confusing, but hundreds of text files in hundreds of random directories (that might be a different place on a different distro), all with their own syntax, isn’t necessarily all that more intuitive.
You want this to work differently? Then code a fix yourself! What do you mean you’re not a programmer?
I had multiple Ubuntu installs stop updating because the installer by default made the /boot partition (IIRC) something like 100MB. Do a couple updates and that gets filled up with unused files, and then apt craps itself. And this wasn’t all too long ago - well after the point it was supposed to be the district for the everyman.
Like you, I want to like it more, but it’s never smooth sailing. Granted, a lot of that is familiarity with Windows (and believe me, many curses have been thrown MS’s way), but it always seems to turn into a struggle.
Not just “oh this is for redhat and I’m on Ubuntu” but what I run into all the time is that you find a perfect guide but it turns out to be for the wrong version of Ubuntu. So most of it works until you get half way through and you get an error because they’ve switched from initd to systemd or something. Then you are stuck, do you try to roll back what you’ve done so far? Try to adapt the instructions to the new system? Then you end up chasing your tail down rabbit holes of what is backwards compatible, what isn’t, what can coexist and what can’t, etc etc etc.
If you have been using a particular distro and are familiar with the subsystems then the new version comes out and you just have to learn about the few changes in the release but for someone new it adds a whole second layer of complexity to have to learn the whole new OS in addition to trying to blindly figure out how the old system worked, what’s different in the new system and how you adapt instructions from the old one to the new one, or if you should just give up and try to find a different guide that will work.
This man page is thirty pages long and has in depth descriptions of all fifty switches in alphabetical order, but all i want is an example on how to do a very simple, common thing with it. And of course, all commands have their own syntax (of course windows isn’t any better, outside of Powershell).
Yes man is intended to be a manual so it’s understandably bad at being a cheatsheet. Check out tldr or tealdeer. They are similar but I found tealdeer to be much faster for me. Also try a shell with better completion than bash, like zsh or fish. Having better completion will sometimes sidestep the need for a cheatsheet altogether.
Don’t curl to bash, it’s dangerous.
You can curl the file normally, inspect, and then run it with bash. All the safety issues of running stuff you found online still apply (is the source trusted?), but you don’t get the issues that arise specifically from piping curl to bash. But most applications don’t need you to curl | bash in the first time because of package managers.
I feel a part of it is similar to anger of the natural process of grieving. Many of us spent years contributing to the platform and enjoyed just spending time with other like-minded members of subreddits. I personally loved reading the chains of comments. Reddit was a great source of pleasure; a place for sharing humor, frustrations, and other random cool things. Much of what made it enjoyable, including he third party apps, was taken away in a fashion that felt like the user base was betrayed, hence the utter vehement expression of some former users. It will pass in time.
I do hope it does, I don’t particularly enjoy the hating in general. Kills the chill vibes around here. Which is why I’m trying to understand it better.
I was a post-blackout refugee myself, I’m not OG Fediverse. But the tone in those initial days of migration were overall a lot more chilled out. It’s really not until this past week or so that it feels like the hate machine is firing up.
I was wondering if maybe people were still blaming the hacks on reddit or something, I know that was flying around for awhile.
Yes, casual racism and sexism, but not necessarily in a way you might expect.
For example, in the first book, Casino Royale, there’s the typical setup… here’s your mission in an exotic location, here’s your gear, here’s your beautiful assistant…
“Bond was not amused. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ he said bitterly. ‘Do they think this is a bloody picnic?’”
Bond being a womanizer is no surprise really. I obviously don’t support that kind of behavior, but characters are often more interesting when they are flawed. Even if the flaws were unintentional on the part of the author. (Thanks for the resources btw)
Reddit used to be a lawless land that didn’t care about comedy accounts or multiple accounts or shit posts. No one ever got banned. No one ever got censored. It was fun. People didn’t take it that seriously.
The last few years however it’s been turning into basically any other social media site. Politics everywhere, censorship galore and bans handed out willy nilly based on nothing more than ideologies and opinions, mods and admins tightly controlling narratives of threads and entire subs, and just slowly eroding what made it a fun site to visit. Certain political ideologies have taken over and anything outside of those opinions is insta-banned. Going to Reveddit or uneddit (i think thats the name of the second one) and looking at any “hot topic” thread was eye opening - mods and admins removing dozens/hundreds of completely harmless comments because they didn’t like the opinion that was shared, leaving no trace that the comments even existed, giving the perception that there wasn’t any censoring going on.
I don’t hate reddit. I deleted my 12+ year old account and left because it isn’t the site I liked, and an alternative now exists in Lemmy. I think Reddit is a shitty site now that is basically a highly censored astroturfed political site, but I don’t care that I’m no longer using it.
People on here are hating reddit more now because more and more people are coming here from reddit because of the shitty things reddit has been doing.
I suppose that would lead to a lot of associations. Personally I blame all of that on the people that actually did it though, not just reddit as a whole, which I just view as a successful website. The actual real life people who did those things and made those decisions are the ones that deserve the real condemnation.
But it’s those enablers fault. They have names. Blaming just “reddit” lets them off the hook too easy. We should use their names to attack them, instead of the faceless, cold business they are just milking for cash. The business is the tool. The person using it is the dirtbag.
The mods and admins are willing stooges who enabled those I blame: Steve Huffman, and the companies that helped him neuter, remove, or paper over the parts of reddit that users built - transforming it into the shitheap they're trying to parcel out to the market in an IPO.
The blame lies at the top of any shitheap. Always.
(But I have no love for stooges except for the original three.)
True, but the problem is that the real life people that did those things are all anonymous admins and mods that face no repercussions and give you no way to appeal or reverse anything. They’re the ones controlling the site and ruining it, much like how lots of people now think that Elon Musk is ruining twitter. Is it twitters fault or musks fault? They’re one and the same.
No, they’re not all anonymous. You can look them up. I mean, low-level employees are just doing what their boss tells them. But the boss–the person making the decisions–that guy’s got a name. A lot of the upper level management of the company are known publicly.
The little guys are anonymous, the mods especially, but not the people that made the biggest decisions. If we blame Musk, we should certainly blame spez. Who you can find the real name of with a single google search.
Admin accounts are fully anonymous. Mod accounts are anonymous. Almost all mod messages are sent from a modmail account, so you don’t even know which anonymous mod took action.
It’s not just spez who is the problem, it’s the admins too.
The misc grunts, sure. But they’re just following their instructions. You can follow it up the corporate ladder to find the guy who has the real responsibility for the whole culture and strategy that everyone is following.
The guy in charge picks the playbook his company uses, so to speak.
Dog whistle literally just means coded language that an ordinary observer might not notice, but can be used to subtly identify other like-minded individuals.
Not all dog whistles are necessarily bad (depending on perspective). I'm an ex-mormon, and one dog whistle is a tapir. Without more information, it is too subtle to really know for certain whether I just like tapirs, or that I'm actually ex-mormon. But eventually, two ex-mormons might see enough signals to finally confide in one another.
A lot of the language you used is innocuous enough, and I didn't feel like it was at the level @hoodatninja claimed, but it definitely had a "Reddit was becoming too woke" vibe to it, without actually coming out and outright saying it, aka, a dog whistle.
When you’re looking for dog whistles because you want to try and dismiss someone’s point/opinion you tend to find them everywhere. Not because they’re actually there, but because everything looks like one when you’re of that mindset.
Reddit became too political. I literally said that. Lots of it is right wing, but vastly more of it is left wing. That’s not controversial to say. Their rules and enforcement literally state left wing talking points.
I’m not saying anything about being “too woke”, no. I’m saying it’s too political now, being run by mods and admin that push their political agendas and censor and ban everyone they disagree with. It goes both ways, “far left” and “far right”. It just so happens though that the admins have made the site rules more “far left” meaning unless you play along with their talking points and ideologies you get banned.
This is the exact thing you see in liberal circles - just say any objections to the politics is complaining about “being too woke”.
I’m basing it off literally seeing things people get banned for. You can see all comments that get removed by admins/mods by going to reveddit.com. You get banned for “hate speech” for daring to say something as controversial as biological males shouldn’t compete in sports against biological females.
I’m not a conservative btw. Have never voted for the Conservative Party in my country. I’ve voted for our “far left” independents more than I’ve voted for even our regular “liberals”.
As I said, Reddit has gotten too political across the board, irrespective of which way it leans. If they banned people for being pro abortion I’d be against that since I’m pro abortion rights. It’s just a fact that Reddit leans very left in its moderation.
I’ll ask you a question - do you think it was a conservative or a liberal that made “misgendering” a hate speech violation and ban worthy on Reddit?
Firstly, misgendering falls under the “no hate speech” site ToS. Not sub reddit rules - site wide.
Secondly, admins are very active in censoring opinions and taking down posts. Again - reveddit.com. You can literally see that they removed posts very, very frequently. Not just mods - admins. They show differently.
Admins ban you from the site, not the sub. Mods can only ban you from the sub.
I also never said I don’t have a political leaning. I do - to the left. That doesn’t mean that I automatically agree with every liberal policy or thought. I’m anti abortion but I’m pro free speech. I don’t believe anyone should be censored for saying something.
People like you always make the same mistake of assuming that literally everything that could be considered “conservative” is automatically wrong and should be censored. That’s what you’re saying here.
And again - no, not site wide banned. I had absolutely received a 1 day site wide ban from admin for a post that said that no amount of hrt can get rid of the natural differences that come with biological sex, citing “hate speech” despite there being nothing wrong with what I said, along with science backing it up. I deleted my account months after that - the api changes but more so the extreme control being exerted by the admins after that were the last straw.
Thanks also for confirming that you are a Reddit mod or frequent reporter of content you don’t like. People like you are what ruined the site because you can’t tolerate differences of opinions. Literally what I said in my original post 😂
I’ll ask again since you still haven’t answered - do you think it is a liberal or conservative policy to ban misgendering and questioning of gender ideology?
Not a word about “misgendering” my dude. For good measure here is the content policy as well. Please point out where you see this rule.
It’s covered by this:
not for attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people
They deem any talk critical of gender ideology as an attack on marginalized or vulnerable groups of people.
It’s also explicitly covered here on your link:
Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability
It then lists “gender identity” as a protected class.
Revveddit hasn’t worked since the API changes so no, I can’t see that. Please show me some examples you have since you make it sound so apparent.
Damn, wasn’t aware of this since I just left reddit behind.
Well the rule doesn’t exist so there’s nothing to answer.
Classifying gender critical speech as “hate speech” for “attacking marginalized or vulnerable groups of people” exists, so answer the question please. Do you think that would be a democrat or republican application of the rule?
If this is all happening and is as bad as you say it is, then let’s see some links! A single link even! You’ve provided no evidence so far. It’s just a feeling you have as far as I am concerned.
If reveddit no longer works than that becomes pretty hard unfortunately. I do love how you’re acting like it’s a conspiracy theory that reddit is getting more and more left leaning though. It’s fact. Go create a burner account and go in to any article about gender or trans people in sport and comment something along the lines of “trans women are still biological males and should not be able to compete against biological females” and you’ll be banned, guaranteed.
Going on about how “censored” everything is and how “certain political ideologies” are the only opinions allowed and anything else is “insta-banned” reeks of right wing extremism (hence, dogwhistles). I know I’m sticking my neck out to say so but given nobody has yet provided a single receipt/anecdote to back up their claims I find myself super skeptical at the idea that they’re presenting even a marginally balanced version of the truth right now. There’s a reason “certain political ideologies” (ie. the “eradicate trans ideology” and “destroy wokeism” crowd) are not accepted in decent online circles. There’s no room for that kind of hate, and I’ve never met someone on that side of things willing to hold an honest conversation on it. They just want a platform to be hateful.
This strategy reminds me of right-wingers I’ve dealt with in the past who complained about being banned from Twitter for ‘simply saying “learn to code”’. If you understand the context, the harassment, kicking someone when they’re down, the dogpile they contributed to, the absolute hate campaign their seemingly innocuous (piece of a) comment contributed to, there’s completely sensible reasons why a ban like that took place. But I know the playbook; these guys thrive in the darkness. The moment I start prodding into the nuances, they pretend they were trolling the whole time and basically ragequit. If they control the messaging then they can make themselves sound reasonable by tearing away context and presenting a whitewashed and often unrealistic version of what happened.
I could be wrong; for all I know this guy’s talking about truly god-awful subs like r/TrueRateMyFace (I forget what the name was and it doesn’t deserve to be remembered, as the mods explicitly support men posting their exes on there and actively ban commenters who “overrate” the scores they give out, while pretending they’re working with an objective measure of true beauty) but I haven’t experienced this egregious political de-platforming they’re talking about and it’s telling that they didn’t go into any level of specifics except to keep harping on the “censorship” point. Not every opinion or argument deserves a platform.
Appreciate you taking the time to explain. That's not really the vibe I caught, but I could be projecting.
I, too, am upset at how echo chambery reddit became, and the knee-jerk censorship the mods displayed. I had an account permanently and immediately banned from politics for "hate speech" because I said that DINOs Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin were date rapists for bending the Democratic party over against its will after taking them out to a nice dinner. Over the next few weeks, I was silently banned from about a dozen other subs.
Turns out that the person behind it all was the same "powermod" who threw a colossal tantrum after being banned herself just a couple of weeks ago.
I disagree with you about globally deplatforming "the bad guys," because I don't get to choose who they are, and one day - like above - that "bad guy" could end up being you.
if you get banned from enough subs you get that account suspended. try to come back as an alt and get banned again, your get ip banned from the site.
powermods would abuse their position as mods of multiple subs to silence and harass people they didn't like or agree with. I myself was a victim of this.
it doesn't matter if reddit is woke, what matters is the behavior. doesn't matter if the powermod in question is left or right leaning, they still basically have the power to ban someone from the entire site, merely because they don't like your politics, or worse, one comment you made on one sub.
even if that comment is bannable, doesn't mean you should be banned from unrelated subs, let alone the site. it's also double ridiculous when you are a power user or other significant person in the sub who has helped build the community and some power mod decides you're a threat to them.
It's hard knowing that your favourite small subs are a ticking time bomb; once they get too large they tend to be too strictly controlled and the content quality drops.
People act like strict moderation/“control“ is universally bad, yet AskHistorians is often held up as one of the best subs ever created. Do you know what makes that possible? Do you know what would happen if they relaxed the rules?
Most subs are hobbyist or the like and far too often I see 'locked because ya'll can't behave' in the last few years. There's an upvote/downvote system for a reason; not everything needs to be babied and pruned to what the mods want. Might be one of the few good things about the removal of API because they can't mass delete comments anymore, killing the actual discussion.
Oh come now you aren’t so naive as to think that system actually works as intended or anywhere near as good as it needs to be to leaned on. Would you trust a community vote that used upvotes/downvotes?
not everything needs to be babied and pruned to what the mods want.
What the community wants. And no not everything, but frankly some people do act like babies and need to be handled as such. I personally had no tolerance for trolling. The sub I modded did not want that crap at all. Hence why they kept supporting our rules and every vote we held to change things ended with “this works well.”
People think they want a “true democracy” (doesn’t exist with the tools we have) and “total free speech” on forums but let me tell you you absolutely do not. Go ask Voat how that turned out.
There used to be expat circles where it was a great for expats just to vent, China, Japan Korea and Thailand. Making fun of Redditor who are absolutely naive about a country and found 'love' on wechat, to archetypes, making fun naive locals, to self deprecating humour like violently shitting yourself from food poisoning or how squat toilets are racist against caucasian-chinese because white people can't squat to shit. Then I guess some Asian Americans do not understand the country well enough to get the context and then one day it's all gone.
2balkan4u is a great example of this, just users from the Balkans bantering then admins saw this as a 'hate' subreddit and just gone, people knew it banter and a gross exaggeration of beliefs and perceptions about other countries which has been a ongoing thing for last 1000 years. Yet Reddit admins put a stop to that, banned the entire subreddit. For a website that preaches tolerance, people outside of American culture do not see black and white in race, sexuality or politics yet be completely ignorant to the point of intolerance.
Everyone is just looking to be outraged these days. They want to find something to complain about so they can get it banned so they can feel good about themselves.
my entire history of reddit was joining a small cool sub about a niche topic i liked. learning more and more and watching it grow. then watch it become flooded with low quality content by more and more people who were just there to brag and ask stupid questions and troll. then the good users would leave and the mod would ban anyone who disagreed with whatever populist bullshit was being pushed and pointed out viral marketing and steal advertising accounts. that or the mods were uptight nazis who basically banned anyone or anything outside of what they posted. or the pathetic users who would stalk and harass and insult you because you said something they dind't like.
i just wanted a place where i could enjoy things and learn things and be free of peopel trolling for attention and validation for their fragile egos. pretty much all hobby subs become 'look at this very expensive thing i purchased'. or if they were artistic it was 'good vibes only'. on top of all the bullshitting and lying and karma farming.
reddit was best when it was basically link aggregator with comments. as soon as people were able to post images/videos and were able to ban anyone they disagreed with, it basically devolved into a kindergarten level show and tell hugbox with the mods being kindergarten teachers telling us anything other than 'being nice' meant you were no longer allowed to participate.
Exactly. Reddit used to be fun. anarcho communists and hardcore libertarians could trash talk, debate, and banter. people on the site were just fun weirdos. nothing was personal, very little was seriously political.
then everything became serious business, and no more fun was allowed and mods became growth-grubbing ban-happy nutcases who only allowed 'correct' opinions, and the site became useless as both a source of entertainment and education because it became about perpetuating the very serious bullshit bubble of your sub at all costs.
i have been mostly having the same opinions for a decade on reddit. the past couple of years my pragmatic thoughts are now a bannable offensive because they aren't so far-left or far-right nonsense.
As many mistakes as Reddit has made, I have no desire to return to the time when we had FPH, “ham planet,” and c—ntown. I definitely have no desire to see creepshots or jailbait return. I think your rose tinted glasses are a little too thick, my friend. It was not all sunshine and rainbows lol
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