isaaclyman

“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?

I’m anti-advertising, but this simply isn’t true. Customers don’t show up out of thin air. They don’t care. Anyone who’s built or created anything knows that feeling invisible is the rule, not the exception.

A lot of us here on Lemmy are part of the software industry. Have you ever tried to make money by building a great app and waiting for users to trickle in? It doesn’t work. You might as well declare bankruptcy before you start. Selling anything at all, let alone software, is like pulling teeth—and software is more often a luxury than a necessity, making it even harder.

(Granted, advertising has made the situation worse by training people to ignore any and all attempts to get their attention or communicate information.)

Approximately every successful software business has talented and hardworking salespeople behind the scenes. I’ve learned this the hard way: you need sales experts or you won’t sell a damn thing.

Maybe someday we can find a way to get by without ads. But let’s not pretend it’s as easy as “if you build it, they will come.”

After baseball bat assault, supporters buy injured baseball player a machine gun: ‘He’s got a whole village’

Expensive for a toy, but dirt cheap for a car, as I always say.

(Assuming, of course, that you live in an area where you can replace car trips with bike trips)

There’s a handful of us that do 50 for FOSS: https://50forfoss.org/

tl;dr: on the first Friday of the month we each pick a FOSS (free/open-source) project and give the maintainer $50.

Thanks and encouragement is great too. As a small-time open source maintainer, it seems awareness has been spreading over the last few years and people are going out of their way to be kind and respectful when they raise issues; it really makes a difference. But financial sustainability and community ownership are separate and arguably more essential issues if we want FOSS to survive over the long term.

I did have one maintainer turn down the $50 and ask me to donate it to UNICEF. It’s all the same to me as long as it makes the work more sustainable for them.

This is why email never caught on. Who wants to choose between Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Proton, and Comcast? A successful email service would be one where you can only communicate with users of the same email service. /s

As this thread demonstrates, there are plenty of ways to say “I’m doing terrible, actually” without breaking the social contract. If I’m having an awful day, my go-to is “hangin’ in there, how are you?”

The last part is important. Some people don’t want to talk about how you’re doing (maybe they don’t have the emotional bandwidth at the moment, maybe they’re in a hurry, maybe they just don’t care) so give them an out, a clear signal of something else they can discuss without seeming rude. The easiest way is to return the question, but you can also just jump into the imminent topic of conversation, like:

“How are you?”

“Keeping on keeping on. Hey, just wanted to reach out about that thing on page 4, do you have a minute?”

Or if they started the conversation and you don’t know what it’s about, there’s always “Takin’ it one day at a time, eh? What can I do for you?”

The biggest “risk” of this approach is that someone may offer sympathy or ask you what happened, which is a whole new set of protocols. But for me it’s worth it to not have to lie.

Vis à vis Archimedes’ Principle, does that imply that leprechauns have a higher average body density than human beings? I’m also relatively hard to drown, despite not having any cereal-powered buoyancy. (At least, no more than the average cereal eater.)

General Mills needs to clarify the exchange rate between Red Balloons and Rainbows. The people demand it

Kavita for my ebook collection—mostly tabletop RPGs, but some comics and sci fi as well.

I don’t actually use the web interface that often. I add books to my Kavita library, then scan the OPDS feed into my scratch-my-own-itch mobile app, Bookoscope, and download whatever I want to read onto my tablet from there.

Side note, PDFs are the absolute worst. Even reading them on a full-sized tablet is incredibly annoying. Anybody have any tips/tricks/apps for that?

The Far Side would be proud

Mosquito baiting