I’ve presented you with the proof that early Reddit was populated with large numbers of sockpuppet accounts by the owners, creating whole cloth communities to draw in users, which is not something that is happening on Lemmy.

The entire reason the Digg mass exodus was viable was people leaving Digg found these “preexisting” Reddit communities and felt more comfortable joining in.

Lemmy doesn’t have that socketpuppet population to springboard with, so growth is slower and unpopulated communities are not falsely full of fake users.

Shenanigans.

Yes Lemmy is smaller and doesn’t have instantly fully formed communities. Reddit has been around for almost 2 decades. Lemmy is newer, smaller, and actively fights the sorts of shenanigans that Reddit initially used to get big.

If you want more niche activity, make posts and interact with posts. Lemmy is user driven- that means you. It isn’t a giant megasite where you can just expect to be a passive receiver of endless content.

I’m only but one person.

It gets me thinking. Tech literate people are the types to install blockers, and would be the same type of people both motivated and knowledgeable about how to switch browsers. On the line of thinking it seems like it is just going to drive them away from Chrome. Tech illiterate people remain unaffected since they are getting ads anyway.

But then on the other hand, if someone is tech literate then why are they even still using Chrome? Does such a person value whatever advantage Chrome theoretically provides over their ad-blocking?

I’ve been off Reddit for a couple of years, but that’s still sad news. That was a legitimately good community, and the name flip was good, and I think they were partnered with worldpolitics which was the flipside community.

I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.

Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.

It is interesting to me that the chorus always talking about “switching” to piracy after every incident is also intimately familiar with piracy already. Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.

What does the creation of a multi-national state owned search engine have to do with Google? I presume nations have the resources to do that all on their own.

What would you suggest the Google search engine be allowed to do to profit as a business?

I get the feeling a lot of people would complain about Google search doing that too.

Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?

The older generation demographic continues to shrink, while it seems the great majority of Gen Z and A are perfectly happy to use whatever ecosystem is built into their device. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t want better software, merely being realistic about the choices of populations.

Chrome was backed by Google, a multifaceted staple of the Internet ecosystem and rolled out with a ton of marketing behind it.

I remain skeptical that Firefox could plausibly overtake Chrome. The mere word of mouth of tech enthusiasts simply isn’t enough to make a population majority proactively switch.

Dreaming is one thing, but I remain skeptical. Tech people always seem to vastly overestimate how much the average population will react to tech news. Most people don’t care. They should but they don’t. In addition to that, use of Chrome by businesses is heavily entrenched. The IT guys probably hate it on a personal level, but it takes a lot to make business bigwigs change direction away from a “trustworthy” big company like Google.

Took my freshly re-cobbled together computer to local computer guy after an upgrade with hand-me-down parts. He asked what was wrong and I said there was an alarm for the CPU fan, and that I’d torn the case open and hooked a second fan into the CPU fan connection and it also didn’t work, and the I plugged the CPU fan into a different connection and got it working, so by elimination I was pretty sure the fans were good and the connection in the motherboard was bad.

He seemed mildly amused/impressed by my spiel. I’m not really a computer person, but swapping out parts to narrow down the source of the problem seemed logically basic.

I ended up chilling with him while he worked on things. He found WinZip on my desktop and let out a “whoa retro.” which hurt me deeply.

He can’t keep getting away with it.

And this is why I’m asking, because I know little about UK law, and am trying to figure out how this is going to move forward. She can sue, now I wonder about the theory that leads to a win. Protected categories is a start, but it feels vague, and I’m curious what the precise angle and evidence brought in will be.

I am waiting to follow the case for updates, because while I hope that the outcome pushes back on AI system like this, I am skeptical of current laws to perceive what is happening as protected class discrimination. I presume in the UK the burden for proving fault in the AI lays on the plaintiff, which is at the heart of if the reason is legitimate in the eyes of the law.

If the AI is flagging faces and immediately alerting employees, it is likely also going to throw up a flag for abnormal interference like that. Or if it doesn’t do it now, it is a feature that could be added if such hats become a common enough.

A tangent to explore. I though am curious how the current case under the current laws is expecting to go forward.