It's always the little details that make these images impressive ... anyone can just cut and paste an object into an image and it doesn't look real

But add in details like lighting, shadows, smoke, mist, water, reflections ... and you make all those shadows and reflections plausible and at the appropriate angles ... very subtle additions and it makes it very convincing.

Also ... the most valuable content I find or want online for my own uses is all text based ... reading blogs, forums, news sites, articles, creative writing, wikipedia

I really don't care about design or flashy lights and pictures ... I just want to read the news

I often just toggle the read only view as soon as I find something I want to read and seldom care about what a site looks like ... on the other side of that ... if the site is so messed up or controlling that it refuses reader view .. I skip it and move on

I was a mod of a small niche reddit sub for about six years. When I started working on it, there were only about 200 subscribers and it was a pretty quiet place. Over the time I managed it, I had to work the group to get them interested. I'd regularly post, comment and like whatever was happening. But at the same time, I'd do searches throughout reddit to look for like minded people and just let them know my sub existed. No big marketing push but just a little reminder that my sub existed. I'd set out private messages to people and connect with them .. about half wouldn't respond .. a quarter would say they weren't interested but about a quarter would say thanks and that they weren't aware of the sub and would have a look.

After doing that for four or five years, I grew the sub from 200 members to 2,000.

I also learned that on any social media about 90 percent of users are just lurkers who like reading stuff, liking stuff and maybe once in a while commenting. It's only about ten percent of the group that are active, comment, post new content or even create new content. The larger your group, the larger that ten percent becomes and the more content your group generates and the more activity happens.

Keep working it ... it's all up to you in the early stages, you have to put in the work to contact people, encourage them to join and talk and chat with your base to keep them engaged. You create the content or highlight new stuff or keep posting content you find and share to your group .. all your users are there ... they are the 90 percent, you are the ten percent right now.

As your group grows, eventually there will be one or two people that will be enthusiastic and they will help with content ... then as the activity grows, there will be a few more active users who will post and comment regularly.

Your group will never suddenly one day jump to 10,000 users and your community becomes a hive of activity ... it grows organically like a plant in your garden. Right now it is small and fragile and anything can bring it down ... you not tending to it will mean it dies. But if you water it, tend to it, look after it eventually it will grow into something big and there will be many people that will come around to help you with this enormous garden or field of crops that have sprouted from your activity.

What is going on here? .... is this a time warp? .. is this a new thing? ... is this an old thing? ... is this a thing? .. did I just find a time machine?

My guess is that most of them are probably preparing to cash out soon ... because the whole thing is hanging on faith and promises that no one is sure will be kept .... it's like dating that hot girlfriend/boyfriend and hoping that some day soon, you'll go to bed together and they just lead you on leaving you to wonder if anything will ever happen or not

100 years from now .... Anime Titties is the defacto source for world news

Shells, Shills and Boughts

I got into reddit about ten years ago ... I wasn't part of the first wave but back then it felt like the site was new and things were happening. Then it just slowly devolved into what it is now

I really don't mind the change as it just gives me a new perspective on things and people ... change is good ... any time we are caught standing still, we always seem to lose something, especially in the digital world.

Great perspective and a fanstastic way of seeing how we should view our participation in all this internet activity

Same here ... but commenting, sharing and posting Lemmy for the past few days and I just got into kbin ... I'm still learning and I find it is really engaging my brain to try to figure out what is happening ... on reddit I was a mindless zombie just rehashing content I had shared a hundreds times before

The big thing that everyone should understand is that there seems to be no negotiation ... no middle ground ... either you stay on Reddit and you suck up all the advertising or you don't

I wasn't quite sure what to do and I drifted in and out of my account for a while and thought protesting, sharing memes or trying to circumvent rules or something ... then I just realized ... the worst thing anyone can do to a social media site is to simply just stop using it at all

Once you abandon Reddit, you've done the most damage you could possibly do

Social media is built on human participation ... of all kinds, positive, negative, hateful, loving, inclusive, exclusive ... it doesn't matter what the participation is, as long as you participate

So once you leave ... you've severed a section of the site to let it die ... if enough people do the same, the rot of users abandoning reddit will turn the site into an empty billion dollar shell that will quickly become worthless

Best TL:DR I've read in a while ... thanks