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I check it every so often without logging in. A lot of the old major subs went dark and both All and Popular are almost exclusively memes. The occasional News or Politics article breaks through but, and this may be because I usually didn't visit All, it's like looking at a completely different website. The comments aren't too much different but it feels like desktop users are getting the upvotes now as opposed to the shorter but still solid replies from mobile users.
The fandom subs I frequented (Star Wars, NBA, etc.) have sort of gone to shit, though it's hard to tell how much of that was always there. Actually the biggest difference may be just how unmoderated some of the big subs are, so where before duplicate posts on the same topic would be removed in Technology, now you'll see 20 articles on the same thing. I suspect Reddit admins are inflating vote counts to make engagement look the same as always when participation is actually down, but it's just a hunch. I have no proof of it.
This scene always drove me nuts. It seems so unrealistic that a ship could survive crash landing onto the planet like that.
The technology isn’t presented as magical so yes. Just because people can move objects with their mind doesn’t mean gravity doesn’t exist.
Suspension of disbelief only works if it feels like you’re trying to make the system consistent. If you start doing whatever you want because the story isn’t entirely based on our reality then it becomes an uninteresting story
The technology isn’t presented as magical..?
Kyber crystal? Hyper lanes? FTL? THE FORCE? Star Wars is sci-fi in flavouring only. There’s no sci in that fi at all. And that’s ok, that’s not the point of the stories.
Space opera is sci fi.
As a note… in many countries and languages there is no distinction between fantasy and sci fi. Sci fi is just modernist, scientificism inspired fantasy. Eventually hard sci fi came to be, and overtook most of the genre, but there are no requirements for sci fi to “make scientific sense”. It just has to have space, robots, lasers etc.
I mean, if you go by how the genre was born and all.
Everything but the force is explained in similar ways to any other sci-fi tech. And the force isn’t tech, it’s space magic. Just because it’s not an explanation we can use in real life doesn’t mean it’s not being presented as part of the natural world of that reality.
Maybe I’m uninformed. What are the scientific explanations for lightsabers and kyber crystals? For hyper lanes and FTL?
FTL is achieved by using manufactured engines to propel a ship faster than the speed of light.
Hyper lanes are created by doing an FTL jump and not running into any hazards, designating the path you just took as a hyper lane.
Kyber crystals seem to be an intersection between technology and magic from my research though so you’re half right here. The crystals are naturally forming conduits that channel magic force energy and vibrate to generate the blade of the weapon.
All of these things were researched in the last 5 minutes. You could’ve known this stuff yourself if you actually felt like looking it up.
Don’t you think saying “they can go FTL by building engines that go FTL” is not very scientific?
That isn’t an actual scientific explanation.
But that’s not the point of Star Wars. Sure a lot of stuff that is now Legenda did try to make a bit more sense of things. But never too much, because it would take away the magic of it.
It feels like a medieval fantasy world of knights, dark wizards (and racism I guess), but in space. Too much science would lose the fairy tale vibes.
It’s like expecting Dune to explain the physics behind the “Voice”. Dune is supposed to be this incomprehensible and distant tale, like reading from the first papyri from Egypt. It’s supposed to be mysterious and familiar but alien. Diving into the “science” of things in the way we understand science would kill the vibe.
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Repulsorlifts are magical. They levitate ships with no external outputs. They're also perfectly well suited to explain how a fragment of a ship can crash from a high altitude without being destroyed. As an anti-gravity device, repulsorlifts can greatly reduce or eliminate the need for any orbital velocity, making re-entry much more viable. And in the same vein, they can reduce a ship's effective gravitational mass enough that its terminal velocity is survivable.
Idk how sturdy the warships are built, an f-15 landed with only one wing without even noticing, just some sluggish handling.
Maybe these ships had so much reserve shielding an backup controll authority that they could land it even as it was disintegrating? Anyway, I always found it awesome rather than emersion breaking.
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Repulsorlifts are the technology that enables ships to hover and fly the way they do. There are typically many across a ship's structure for redundancy and handling reasons.
Not to mention that there were two Jedi on board, both of whom would probably be using the Force to pull the ship into a safer crash. We've seen Jedi use force powers strong enough to manipulate ships before, so this is not out of the question.
I'd like to know if there are any stats on how many votes it took/now takes to get onto the front page of r/all. This feels like it should be publicly available data...
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The vote counts on Reddit aren’t real. They never have been. They use an obfuscation on the vote counts in order to deter spammers and bots.
I think all we know so far is that desktop traffic dropped 3% in the month of June. So pretty much, we have barely any data at all. We need information on total traffic and mobile traffic, and from July 1 onwards.
I guess we can also say that Reddit got pretty horrible press, but we don't know if that's had a financial impact.
"desktop traffic" sounds like a carefully chosen statistic which would exclude all the users of 3rd party apps. Frankly they were presumably hoping this measure would go up?
What they’re really hoping is for more mobile users to be forced into the official app, not the desktop. Desktop people can choose Old.Reddit (for now) and block some or all ads. Mobile users on the app provide a ton of marketable data, including, if I’m not mistaken, location data at least while the app is open. They want the user data and to sell Reddit Premium or ads to users, because there’s otherwise no path to profitability. What they have now is a very slim chance of profit, but their analysts must be huffing that hopium, because they alienated a massive amount of their biggest users, which is who made the site what it is.
Since we switched to Lemmy I removed the Reddit app and the Apollo app, but did occasionally browse a single subreddit in Firefox mobile app whilst not logged in. Now they’ve totally walled off the whole site. Ridiculous.