Carl

• Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy’s userbase tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you “look like a bot.”

I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can’t even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.

I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )

I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they’re trusting with years of their content.

Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on, and there are no off-site backups? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.

The lack of tagging on OP’s account has been the biggest reason I considered blocking them. I don’t mind reposters, but tag your shit so people who don’t want it can filter it. I quickly gave them a bright red user tag instead. So I can at least see at a glance when a post is from them, to then decide if I want to engage.

Especially when a lot of their posts have been old Reddit content, (often from several years ago) which was clearly just meant to grab attention. Their posts always felt like the “tales from reddit” types of YouTube channels, where someone just reads Reddit posts verbatim and adds a few quips as “content”.

I think RuneScape is notable because the entire game ran in your browser. There was no install, so a lot of the game content was streamed. And streaming anything on 56k is impressive.

Pretty much this. I’d copy anything I want to keep onto a temporary drive, (cloud storage, a USB drive, second SSD, etc), then use it as an excuse to refresh my install. Then just copy everything from that temporary storage after my new install is finished.

Wounds heal best when they’re kept moist, (something tattoo artists have known about for a long time, as they always suggest keeping lotion on a healing tattoo) and traditional gauze bandaging actively dries out wounds. This prevents effective healing and causes additional scarring.

Stop the bleeding, and then smear a bit of Vaseline on top of the wound before putting a bandage on to cover it. The Vaseline will prevent the bandage from drying out the wound, allowing it to heal faster and with less scarring.

It’s a reference to the Child With Small Telescope meme:

It was part of a series of posters that a comedian made to troll his neighborhood.

1. No, you can’t. The rules state that you need to upgrade all of your properties in a given color at the same rate. For instance, if one of your green properties has two houses while the rest have three, you have to upgrade the lowest one before you upgrade the rest. Additionally, the rules specifically state that you must have four houses before upgrading to a hotel. Your post is a great example of one of the bad house rules I originally mentioned.

The scary part about this is that he likely has zero actual support from any kinds of disability, because chronic Lyme disease isn’t officially recognized in the medical world. Or rather, they recognize that there is a correlation between Lyme and long-term impairment, but they have no treatment nor palliatives for it. So they just sort of say “deal with it. Most people can return to work after a few weeks, so you can too.”

Sort of like how long COVID affected (and still continues to affect) a sizable part of the population, but government disability in America didn’t recognize it as official so patients with long COVID had to keep going to work even when they were dealing with debilitating long-term symptoms.

Most organizations in general. There’s a quote from a career congressperson somewhere, that basically paraphrases as “when I first got into office, I tried to find the big movers. The people who really knew what they were doing. I wanted to find them so I could learn from them. And all I learned is that nobody knows what they’re doing. We’re all making it up as we go.”

Monopoly isn’t an awful game if you actually play by the rules. It’s not great, but it’s not awful either. But most people don’t know all the rules, make up a bunch of stupid house rules, etc… And as a result, the game drags on for hours even after it’s clear who the winner will be. In reality, playing by the rules has each game lasting like 20-45 minutes.

For example, most people know that when a player lands on an unowned square, they get the option to buy it. Straightforward, right? But most people don’t realize that if that original player turns it down, it goes to auction. The players can submit bids to purchase the square, and they can start far below market value. Meaning that all of the squares should get bought relatively quickly, instead of taking like ten rounds. There is actually a strategy to refuse to buy a square, to intentionally send the property to bid, just so you can then potentially buy the properly below market value. Basically, Player A lands on a square. Player A refuses to buy the square at the market price of $1000. Player A then wins the bid at $800. Player A effectively got a $200 discount, simply by sending the property to auction.

Also, the bank can’t go bankrupt.

You can run out of houses to build. Know how you can upgrade four houses to a hotel? And the game only has 32 houses? The hotel increases the square’s rent, but returns the houses to the available pot. It’s actually a perfectly valid strategy to upgrade all of your properties to four houses, and then refuse to upgrade any of them to hotels. Since the game only has 32 houses, you can use ~7 properties to effectively lock out any hotels from being built. And since nobody can build any hotels while you’re sitting on all of the houses, your 4-house properties are effectively the most expensive in the game simply because nobody can upgrade their properties while you’re hoarding all the building materials.

Nope, I’ll spoiler the story (in increasing levels of graphic detail) below:

I can’t believe I actually typed that out three separate times… I suffered so hopefully some curious user can be spared.

Interesting take with Dread, because it’s one of my favorites. The only section I legitimately dislike is

That one specific boss can get fucked.

The Sims will be a great case study for some future game design student, in how to take a massively popular IP and ride it straight into the fucking ground. It’s like EA intentionally makes the wrong choice at every single turn. You’d think that eventually they would stumble across the right thing to do, but somehow they seem determined to keep making bad decisions.

My complaints with the game weren’t based on the difficulty. Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime. In contrast, I loved Sekiro because it was a tight concise game with solid progression and a sense of exploration without needing to cross vast swaths of nothing in between each area.

Plus I tend to dislike games that use animation locks as an artificial form of difficulty. In Sekiro, you’re consistently the fastest character in the game. The game feels responsive. If you fail to parry an attack, it’s because you as the player failed. But with most FromSoft games, they use slow animations as a way of artificially introducing difficulty.

Yeah, I always ended up doing custom bases for each resource, and then tying it all together with trains. It kept things fresh, because main bus designs absolutely suck the fun out of it. A properly organized and optimized train network is truly a marvel to behold. I always avoided going full grid with my trains, simply because I wanted to avoid the exact “micro factory inside of each square” problem you touched on.

I used a grid for my trains, but only to make blueprinting easier. Nothing worse than bringing two tracks from different parts of your base together, only to realize they can’t actually mate because the damned tracks are off by one square (one started on an odd square, another started on an even) and the tracks literally won’t let you bend them into place to meet in the middle. The grid was simply a standardized track length, so I knew my intersections would always meet up cleanly. Basically, I wanted to avoid this problem:

But I also haven’t touched Space Age at all, so maybe trains are an old meta by now.