NevermindNoMind

Yeah, if they were resurfacing it must have been bad and readily apparent. Based on the hubris of the COE, I imagine he would be quick to handwave away any signs of problems. Not only was he willfully against safety inspections and so forth, but he knew if he had to abandon a trip due to a concern that his brilliantly engineered sub was breaking, he’d be proving all the nay-sayers right. If it got to the point that the COE decided it was time to turn around, it had to be bad. There is also probably a decent chance that he was on notice and could have abandoned the dive earlier and maybe saved everyone on board, but was motivated to keep pushing lest he be met with a chorus of “I told you so” from the diving community. At any rate, if its true they were trying to resurface, they knew and likely spent their last moments terrified.

There’s also that old adage about experts being particularly vulnerable to believing they are smart and capable in other fields. It seems this is particularly prevalent among engineers.

Interesting piece. Definitely worth a reading the whole thing, but here is Bing AI’s summary:

Reddit’s decline: The author argues that Reddit is becoming less relevant and more generic as it tries to squeeze its users and moderators for profit. He compares Reddit to a dying mall that is losing its cultural middle class to decentralized platforms.

Enshittification: The author explains the concept of enshittification, which is how platforms attract and then exploit their users and businesses. He gives examples of how Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and Google have followed this pattern.

Moderators’ resistance: The author describes how Reddit’s volunteer moderators are obstructing and sabotaging Reddit’s attempts to enshittify the platform. He says that moderators are the ones who create and curate the content that attracts users, and that Reddit is losing their trust and cooperation.

Fediverse’s rise: The author predicts that Reddit’s users and moderators will eventually migrate to the Fediverse, which is a network of independent and interoperable social media sites. He says that the Fediverse offers more freedom, authenticity, and sanity for online discussions.

In 2006 I was named Time’s Person of the Year. Today I selected to moderate my first subreddit.

Twitter blocked links Mastadon for a hot minute calling them spam or unsafe or something. IIRC they backed down after a couple of days. Reddit has already been getting shit press for the last couple of weeks, tech journos are watching this all unfold closely, is Reddit dumb enough to take an action that is blatantly censorship and anticompetitive? It would be totally unspinable.

If they do that, it’ll tell you a lot about reddits thinking here. Spez current position is that the people complaining are a small minority and this will all blow over soon. If Reddit really believes that, then they best course of action is to let the complainers post their Lemmy/Kbin links, avoid a fresh round of bad press, and the lemmy/Kbin users will be gone in a couple of weeks and the reddit user base will remain largely intact. If Reddit views the risk of a mass migration to be a real and existential threat to their business, despite what they are saying publicly, then blocking Lemmy/Kbin links would make sense as a last ditch effort to keep their user base of casual users ignorant of popular alternatives, bad press being a necessary cost worth paying to try to retain the user base they need to sell for their ipo. All for that assumes Reddit is behaving rationally though, which Spez has shown isn’t a safe assumption.