If evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience (which is debatable to begin with), it’s that way not because our evolutionary history doesn’t inform our psychology but because our understanding of both those things is too immature for the questions most people are are trying to answer. But that in itself depends on the questions and the level of answer one finds acceptable. I’ve found Michael Tomasello’s book “The Evolution of Agency” perfectly proportionate in the kinds of questions it seeks to answer given the information it has, and I think the wild speculations I extrapolate from it are totally fine to share in random internet conversations.

Nah, I think that overstates the extent to which our ancestors were the hunter more than the hunted and ignores the social dimension. An early human might have been at risk for predators when they were out alone hunting or gathering but when you’re with the group I’d think that’s a much smaller threat. Having to deal with social threats from within the group, now, that’s ever-present. And still present today!

Also, after reading a book about the evolution of agency that suggests the evolutionary innovation of humans is that we’re a goal-seeking system that’s able to function as a part of a larger goal-seeking system (collective action)… I wonder how much that can account for existential dread. We have a diffuse drive to be part of something greater than ourselves but it’s not always clear what that should be.

That is absolutely hilarious. Yeah Reddit, I totally buy that you want internet communities to not depend on platforms like Reddit. This would be totally monetizeable for you, not that you care about monetization and not that monetization has proven to work at cross-purposes with making good internet websites/communities. And once you mentioned blockchain, well that’s when I recognized the subliminal cues suggesting a well-thought-out proposal that positively impacts the world.

EDIT: Ugh just saw that again, they just linked an old post, this one apparently from 2021. I don’t think it changes things much insofar as they’re presumably planning to replace awards with something and this proposal presumably describes it. But I already didn’t see them successfully implementing the thing as written, and knowing now that it’s from 2021 it just makes me more certain that whatever they roll out is unlikely to be exactly what’s described here.

I’d say knowing this was written two years ago makes the text less hilariously on-the-nose but that depends on whether they’d write something different today doesn’t it, I’m not sure they wouldn’t.

This question is so generic I can’t help but feel there is a more specific idea behind it. Can you talk about what made you want to ask this, what kind of answers you’re expecting?

Is it, though?

My kid was conceived via IVF. I literally have a picture of him as a 5-day-old blastocyst. (ok I can’t help being pedantic and pointing out that I think it would be more accurate to consider the embryonic disk as the true “here is me when I was little” precursor as the zygote/blastocyst develops not just into the baby but into the whole amniotic sac. But whatever).

That first comment has thrown me for a loop. The replies accuse if of being ChatGPT, and it extremely looks like ChatGPT, but I think it might be a human imitating ChatGPT? Bang-on imitation if so.

It really reminds me of this paper that was discussed on the Many Minds podcast awhile ago, about a new hypothesis on the evolution of music. Basically this person argued that music evolved as a credible signal for group cohesion - working together is a critical adaptive skill for humans (I recently finished Michael Tomasello’s book “The Evolution of Agency” which I think drives that point home even harder), and singing and doing music requires coordination. And putting on a good performance requires really good coordination. So the idea is that it evolved as a signal of “you don’t want to fuck with us, look at how much of a well-oiled machine we are”.

It’s just one hypothesis among others of course but it’s compelling enough to me that it’s wormed itself into my brain as being obviously true.

Anyway, I kind of want to find that author and link them to r/place and just go like “whaddaya think, is there a paper in this”. There are quite a few ways internet communities flex and compete in terms of “we’re more numerous and better organized than other communities” but I’m not sure there are others that are as performative as r/places. And I don’t think it was intended that way, was it? Like, today’s r/place says “alone you can do something, together you can do more” but when they originally did it had they expected explicit subreddit coordination to be such a big part of it? Or were they expecting something much more random and individual-driven?

I don’t think there currently are but I haven’t searched either. I will say there were two separate “how about we do this” on kbin.social/m/redditMigration (where I first posted this comment), and given most replies seems to agree on shunning r/place I’d guess that nobody has started anything at this time. This comment isn’t me volunteering to do it either, I wouldn’t even know how to start, I just decided I disagreed with people’s arguments and wanted to throw my thoughts out there. I might participate if something did get coordinated though; I don’t have the app but when I was checking out r/place on my browser I seemed to hit a page where it looked like I could participate. Dunno if they changed things or if I misunderstood.

Anyway ISTM lemmy.world/c/reddit (is this where this is?) and kbin.social/m/redditMigration would be the logical places for such coordination if it were to happen. They’re the places I’ve seen people talk about it.

There are definitely diminishing returns to increasing the discoverability of something (if we hate the word “advertise”) once enough people know about it. What are your reasons for thinking we are now at this point of diminishing returns and not still in the expansion phase?

Like, if it were actually the case that everybody who had an interest in being on Lemmy or kbin knew about Lemmy and kbin and understood exactly how much it was in their interest to be there… The only conclusion I can come to is that Lemmy and kbin kind of suck, given the activity in the subs I’m interested in. Or are inherently niche products that intrinsically interest few people compared to a platform like Reddit. I can definitely see an argument that this is true of Mastodon given the graveyard of “here is my new home away from Twitter” accounts that haven’t posted since 2022 (I don’t think Mastodon sucks but I can definitely buy that it has features that made it an unsatisfactory replacement for Twitter for most people in 2022), but whether that argument is correct or not I don’t think you can make the same one for kbin or Lemmy at this point in time.

Anybody who gives the slightest fuck about finding an alternative is already aware of kbin/Lemmy.

That’s just empirically not true and it’s not how people and internet communities work. But I guess a more important question is, are you saying this because you believe it to be true or because you are happy with the size Kbin and Lemmy currently are and would prefer not to have a mass migration from Reddit that would change the vibes ? Because that’s absolutely a valid concern. If that’s not where you’re coming from and you really do just think that sentence is true, at what point in time would you say we reached the point where everyone who needs to be aware of kbin/Lemmy became aware of kbin/Lemmy?

By trying to “advertise”, you’re only opening up the platform to brigading.

You WISH kbin or Lemmy were big and well-known enough to be worth brigading. Or maybe you don’t, which would be valid as I said above and is a different conversation. And it’s possible that by “brigading” you mean “an influx of newbies who ruin the vibe”, in which case I agree that this is a possible effect of what I suggest. In fact it’s the desired effect. However if this does in fact result in a mass of people going onto the platform with the intention of ruining conversations who would not have gone on it instead, that would suck but I’m not sure it couldn’t also be leveraged as a streisand effect. Kind of like how for a nobody like Rocky Balboa just being in the ring with Apollo Creed was a win.

Oh, and on top of that, you’re giving Reddit additional traffic, which is exactly what they want right now. Just leave it alone!!

Yes, giving Reddit additional traffic sucks and is what they want. If there were a way of participating in r/places without doing so I’d recommend that as a no-brainer. However it doesn’t just give Reddit additional traffic and “what Reddit wants” isn’t necessarily what’s actually best for Reddit. I made an argument for why I think it would also cause a certain amount of migration from Reddit and we can get more into it once I better understand whether that’s something you want to avoid or not. The question then becomes what the net effect will be, and I don’t think that’s easy for anyone to know, including Reddit. But numbers-wise, given the number of people in these threads compared to the audience of r/places and the percentage of that audience who would be nudged towards checking out/contributing more to kbin or lemmy from seeing them on r/places, I really feel the net effect is more likely to be on our side.

Hi, I seem to be reposting this comment everywhere there is discussion of r/place on Kbin and now Lemmy. I just haven’t really seen those points being made so I thought they were worth highlighting. Sorry for the spam, this is the last one I promise. I need to go to work.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that’s a compelling point but I don’t think it’s as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of “don’t go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that’s just helping Reddit” has some “But you live in a society, curious” vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you’re protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn’t go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it’s not that impactful if it’s a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community’s coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there’s a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that’s pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place’s first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they’re doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities’ size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking “why fuck u/spez ?” and “the only reason I’m still on Reddit is that there aren’t any alternatives”

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren’t aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the “fuck u/spez” movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren’t aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got “Lemmy” as a recommendation in replies and said “interesting I’ll check it out” - they legit hadn’t heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don’t know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that’s fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is “which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places”, I’ve come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was “but the admins will just erase it”, and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there’s stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that’s visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that’s a compelling point but I don’t think it’s as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of “don’t go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that’s just helping Reddit” has some “But you live in a society, curious” vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you’re protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn’t go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it’s not that impactful if it’s a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community’s coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there’s a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that’s pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place’s first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they’re doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities’ size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking “why fuck u/spez ?” and “the only reason I’m still on Reddit is that there aren’t any alternatives”

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren’t aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the “fuck u/spez” movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren’t aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got “Lemmy” as a recommendation in replies and said “interesting I’ll check it out” - they legit hadn’t heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don’t know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that’s fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is “which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places”, I’ve come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was “but the admins will just erase it”, and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there’s stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that’s visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

I’ve only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands “minecraft” to be an adjective meaning “that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic”, it’s adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.

Maybe it’s time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age