Boz (he/him)

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  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • This. The whole question of whether Reddit meant to restore comments is a distraction. The actual issue is that people who wanted their comments deleted are finding that their comments have not been deleted. If Reddit wants to prove that it was not their fault, they can do it in court. No lawyer is going to believe the kind of half-assed excuses Reddit has been handing out. I would like to see this hashed out in court, if for no other reason than that a court case is probably the best way to find out what is actually happening here. It seems like Reddit not going to be honest unless they’re forced to be, even when honesty would benefit them.




  • Whether they’re doing it on purpose is not relevant to the legal aspect of the situation. They have a responsibility to honor deletion requests. If a user complains, the appropriate response is “sorry you had a problem, we’ll fix it,” not “sorry, we will only honor our legal responsibilities if you follow our preferred [but not stated until now] procedure for requesting deletion, try again.” Having database problems opens you up to legal liability whether you like it or not, and trying to convince users that you are not responsible for your own database is… inappropriate.

    Besides, there have been bugs with manual deletion, too. This is at least partly a problem with their own systems.







  • There’s a difference between “incapable of understanding” and “doesn’t have enough background information to understand.” Are there people who can’t understand certain tech concepts? Absolutely. But there are a lot more people who just miss the first rung on the ladder, and can’t make it to the top. They can understand when they get the explanation from the ground up, but until then, they’re stuck.

    I see it happen a lot when tech people try to explain something that is brand new to the listener, because when you are already able to understand something at a high level, you forget to mention the first several rungs. It’s usually a great explanation, it’s just not an explanation the person on the ground can use.

    …also, I don’t think it’s failure to understand login when every instance asks for a separate login if you don’t navigate there through your own instance. It’s a misunderstanding that results from experiencing the fediverse without understanding how it works, not a failure to grasp an abstract concept.



  • You’ve lost me on the precise breakdown of growth types, but I don’t think there’s any kind of growth that can be sustained indefinitely without fundamental changes to a business. If you sell widgets, you are eventually going to hit the limit to how many widgets are going to be purchased anywhere, by anyone, and then you’re going to have change something in order to grow.

    And sure, I’ll accept that it could be all right to grow past the point where your business model has to change. Some businesses do spread into multiple fields and do reasonably well in all of them, although at a certain point it might start violating anti-trust laws. My point is just that “infinite growth” as a long-term strategy can go down some bad roads, regardless of how innocent the starting point is. Even a benign tumor can be life-threatening if it grows in the wrong place, and I think that can apply to growing businesses as well.




  • You mean if the stable state is to have a layer of management on top of daily operations, and the management never mixes with operations? Yeah, although to be strictly fair, someone has to do the annoying financials, and those people would not be helpful to people doing other kinds of work. I think that’s just a way of restating the problem.

    I think another part of the problem is that business don’t want to have a stable state, they want to grow constantly, which becomes a problem for an increasing number of people no matter how a business is structured. It never really surprises me when ambition gets businesses in trouble, though sometimes I wonder how they manage to make the mistakes they do.


  • A company whose billionaire quits can usually get a millionaire replacement, without much loss of utility. CEOs get shuffled around all the time without any particular effect on the company they “run.” I think they mostly run lower executives, who run managers, who run lower/middle managers, who run supervisors who know something about what the company actually does, and run the people who do tangible work. The CEOs who get into the news for doing something dramatic to a company are the exception.


  • She’s not just chilling, she made a press release saying Twitter just had its most successful day (I think by user engagement, I don’t remember the metric she mentioned) right when Threads was blowing up. If she wasn’t straight up lying, she was looking at some reeeeallly well-massaged data.

    …of course, there’s a market for CEOs who do that, too, but I admit, I was a little shocked. I thought she was supposed to be the Responsible Adult ™ here.