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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems (awful.systems)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] 11 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I mean that's the fundamental problem, right? No matter how much better it gets, the things it's able to do aren't really anything people need or want. Like, if I'm going to a website looking for information it's largely because I don't want to deal with asking somebody for the answer. Even a flawless chatbot that can always provide the information I need - something that is far beyond the state of the art and possibly beyond some fundamental limitation of the LLM structure - wouldn't actually be preferable to just navigating a smooth and well-structured site.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    Yup, exactly. The chatbot, no matter how helpful, exists in a context of dark patterned web design, incredibly bad resource usage and theft. Its purpose is to make the customer’s question go away, so not even the fanatics are interested.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago* (4 children)

    See also how youtube tutorials have mostly killed (*) text based tutorials/wikis and are just inferior to good wikis/text based ones. Both because listening to a person talk is a linear experience, and a text one allows for easy scrolling, but also because most people are just bad at yt tutorials. (shoutout to the one which had annoyingly long random pauses in/between sentences even at 2x speed).

    This is not helped because now youtube is a source of revenue, and updating a wiki/tutorial often is not. So the incentives are all wrong. A good example of this is the gaming wiki fextralife: See this page on dragons dogma 2 npcs. https://dragonsdogma2.wiki.fextralife.com/NPCs (the game has been out for over a year, if the weirdness doesn't jump out at you). But the big thing for fextralife is their youtube tutorials and it used to have an autoplaying link to their streams. This isn't a wiki, it is an advertisement for their youtube and livestreams. And while this is a big example the problem persists with smaller youtubers, who suffer from extreme publish, do not deviate from your niche or perish. They can't put in the time to update things, because they need to publish a new video (on their niche, branching out is punished) soon or not pay rent. (for people who play videogames and or watch youtube out there, this is also why somebody like the spiffing brit is has long ago went from 'I exploit games' to 'I grind and if you grind enough in this single player game you become op', the content must flow, but eventually you will run out of good new ideas (also why he tried to push his followers into doing risky cryptocurrency related 'cheats' (follow Elon, if he posts a word that can be cryptocoined, pump and dump it for a half hour))).

    *: They still exist but tend to be very bad quality, even worse now people are using genAI to seed/update them.

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    People can't just have a hobby anymore, can they?

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    Nope. And tbh, did some dd2 recently, and for a very short while I was tempted to push the edit button, but then I remembered that fextralife just tries to profit off my wiki editing labor. (I still like the idea of wikis, but do not have the fortitude and social calm to edit a mainstream one like wikipedia). (I did a quick check, and yeah I also really hate the license fextralife/valnet uses "All contributions to any Fextralife.com Wiki fall under the below Contribution Agreement and become the exclusive copyrighted property of Valnet.", and their editor sucks ass (show me the actual code not this wysiwyg shit)).

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