yumcake

The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can’t happen when the conditions aren’t pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn’t casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That’s the unique content from Reddit.

Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit’s moat is the user presence which other platforms can’t just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.

Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I’m no expert on it. It doesn’t seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.

Yeah, the most effective factor for weightloss for me hasn’t been CICO. It’s been time. Having the time to plan food, research the macros, record them, weigh out the specific portions, then cook it, weigh out the servings and then I get to eat…

It 100% works, and the diet doesn’t feel bad when it’s well supported with generous protein, fiber, and carb timing. But it takes a lot of time. Sometimes I might find myself with too few carbs and I’ll be left lethargic and too tired to calculate something within my macro/cal budget to eat, but too stubborn to just eat junk. Takes me a long time just to summon the will to make something macro friendly that won’t leave me starving later for having blown the budget too early in the day.

Even just eating a smaller portion of a macro-friendly meal means I need to weigh out the individual components of it. A big part of it is just lack of experience, not having a more flexible meal prep system that allows me to quickly throw together pre-portioned snacks in addition to my usual meal prepping. But that takes time, since I’ve also had to throw out every recipe I know and research a new portfolio of macro-friendly food. I also have to cook both normal food for the family, plus macro-friendly food just for me! All the top fitness channels only feed themselves, nobody is feeding a family simultaneously.

Yeah, I feel like the generative AI Google has added (for those who opt-in) has been a pretty useful enhancement. It will read through the results and try to summarize it back to me in a useful way, the same kind of summary I’d typically try to find by including Reddit in the search term.

However…it’s pretty common for the AI result to get some of it’s information from Reddit postings. Like this morning I asked “on myfitnesspal is the fitbit calorie adjustment accurate?” and it had some of the generic chat answers about how calorie estimation is done in general in exercise science, but the most useful bit was the last sentence claiming that “MyFitnessPal overestimates calorie needs in 95% of cases because it overestimates calories burned from activity”.

That’s a pretty broad conclusion, and the first supporting link it provided was a detailed 8-year old reddit posting from a software developer examining the MFP calculation, comparing against measured study results on calorie burn estimates by activity, and noting a consistent overestimate by roughly 20-30% which appears to fall in line with the baseline calorie burn that users would experience even if they did not perform that exercise activity. His conclusion was that the estimate is directionally reliable if you deduct 20-30% for the double-counting of sedentary calorie burn.

That kind of in-depth examination by someone with expertise and without financial motivation is the contribution of the “hive mind” the critical mass of people serendipitously stumbling across topics/questions they have answers for and volunteering useful information. We’re going to lose a lot of that unless or until some replacement for reddit pops up. A diaspora of small niches of information may not be as useful if it is buried on bot-generated clutter in a way that search isn’t able to sift signal out of the noise.