Formerly /u/neoKushan on reddit

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  • 31 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • The subs going dark should have only been half of the protest. Users should have also stayed away from the site but I don’t think that was really coordinated.

    The number of new posts didn’t drop much, the comments dropped a bit more but only by like 20%, which isn’t a lot given the amount of subs that went dark. Reddit doesn’t care about subs, they care about users and it seems engagement was still pretty high.

    The next protest should be to all users to stop using the site. Drop the users and they’ll start to listen.


  • A “Rate limit” is a server-side thing to prevent abuse or accidental overwork of the server. It’s a limit imposed by the server at how often you can do something, the something might be commenting, upvoting, uploading an image, etc. and the limits might be layered in that you might be able to only post once every 2 minutes no matter what, but you also might not be able to make more than 100 API requests over a period of 60s regardless of what those requests are.

    The limits can be hard limits, as in you hit the limit and you have to wait for 2mins before trying again, or it might be more like a sliding scale where it’s “no more than x over a given 5min period” in which case mashing the button will lock you out for 5mins but hitting it every minute or so won’t incur a limit.


  • I think this has always been the case, though. Engines haven’t just suddenly got better, they’ve been getting better and better for decades now. Some of those improvements give you features “out of the box” that you used to have to implement yourself. One of the reasons Unity became so popular with smaller developers is because it lets you focus on building your game - most of the tech is there, you’ve got an asset store for additional models, plugins, etc. so save you time but ultimately making a (good) game still takes time. Making a game is a very iterative process and a lot of the quality of a game these days is less to do with developing the engine and more to develop the mechanics of the game itself - the way your characters move, the responsiveness of the controls, the UI layout and so on. All of that stuff is hard to be given to you by an Engine, because it’s specific to your game.


  • I don’t know a lot about Lemmy’s implementation but a difficult thing to deal with is how do you “rank” a post? Like you have a small community of a few active people, but there’s federation with a massive community with lots of users - which posts are “better”?

    Worse still, there’s an inherent lag/delay with the federated posts, a post that was very active in the last hour might have only been federated to the server in the last 5mins - so what do you do, do you bubble up all those posts or ignore it because there’s more recent and relevant things?

    The kicker is that these decision points aren’t instant either, any system that’s doing this kind of ranking will have an algorithm as you describe, but that algorithm will take time to process all the data, while the data is coming in batches as each server federates with each other. It’s a difficult problem to solve.