I’m on a project where we original had three devs, but two of them did exactly what is depicted in this image, so now there’s only me. There’s a proper god damn mountain of tech debt that keeps growing. At this point it’d take me probably a solid couple of months to sort it out, but of course the customer doesn’t want to pay for anything, because “what’s the problem, it’s still running”. All I can really do is glance at it every now and then, like that gif with richard ayoade and the fire from IT crowd. It’s a pretty big and widely used system too, so it’s gonna be a real biblical clusterfuck when it finally shits the bed.
This is the curse of working in tech. As long as things are working smoothly from customer perspective then the pleas to spend the time to deal with the tech debt are ignored. Yet, when enough debt piles up and things start breaking then it’s the people who’ve been warning about the problems the whole time who get blamed.
Some things that worry me are “coding superstar” “your in a small team so must be able to do multiple roles” usually means you have to work put everything on your own without support, just i want moreeee im super wary if i hear “we’re like a family” normally means i want you to do things most companies cpuldnt ask for, like working extra hoirs without pay.
Also i usually ask “how do you find working here” if they seem excited or happy i take it as a good sign, if they look worried, angry or theyre like “it takes time getting used to” im a bit wary.
I can’t really say that the slippery quality of discussion has gone down because discussion would be an exaggeration of things before more people jumped over. There just weren’t enough interactions between people to use as a reliable indication of quality.
Now, any forum I’ve ever been on, even back to ICQ days, and old school bbs stuff, there’s a certain degree of “poop in the peanut butter”. You eat enough peanut butter, and your chances of also eating bug poop go up, with it becoming a certainty eventually. You get enough human beings in the same place, you get assholes. The more people, the more assholes.
You can’t really escape it entirely. Even the best possible moderation has delays, and judgement calls. All you can do is drop the numbers until the amount of poop in the peanut butter is low enough to pretend it isn’t there. The only way to entirely get rid of the bad elements is to host your own forum, and make it invite only, while also not letting it get big enough you can’t moderate it.
But, my impression is that the good discussions are still way higher on lemmy as a whole than anywhere else currently. Mbin counts as part of that, though it isn’t the same thing.
Blocking instances helps. You’re right that some instances have a certain proclivity towards personality types and/or beliefs that go hand-in-hand with bad behavior. And the bigger ones (the one I’m on included) have big enough numbers that even without those proclivities, you end up with good bit of poop with your pb&j. Sadly, even blocking an instance isn’t going to fully prevent running across users in comments here and there.
But overall? Way better than reddit was in the five years or so before spez spazzed. Better than 9gag ever was. At least as convivial as one of the forums I moderated back in the late 90s, where the user base was pretty decent overall by virtue of it being homogenous in several ways.
As pissed as I was that reddit went all the way into stupidity, I’m happier on lemmy now than I was on reddit a decade ago. And I’m happier with the average interactions I see on lemmy than I was with lemmy before last year. And that’s including the truly abysmal run ins I’ve had over the last year here.
Federation has nothing to do with the problem you are talking about. Moderation is. That’s it. You’re picking the wrong enemy. When any platform gets big, more moderation is needed, more stupid comments will appear. Has nothing to do with federation.
Lemmy is in growing pains. It doesn’t need to surpass Reddit, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that federation and defederation is like maintaining a garden, if your goal is high quality discussion amongst knowledgeable individuals. It’s like good moderation
Hexbear does a great job with this in my opinion, they are widely federated but are selectively defederated with instances like Lemmy.world (even though Lemmy.world defederated them before they were federated). Discussion on Hexbear is usually much higher quality per conversation (assuming it isn’t a meme post).
It’s a tradeoff if you want broad federation like Lemmy.ml or Lemm.ee.
Depends. On Linux or older macOS where light mode typically means a comfortable light gray? Light mode is the way to go. On Windows where light mode means an eye-searing onslaught of #FFFFFF? Dark mode is the only sensible choice.
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