To be real clear, the only thing this does is screw over the hourly employees trying to survive on tips.
It does absolutely nothing to the business, they don't care, at all. It doesn't impact them in the slightest.
Yes, by law, if someone makes so little in tips that they would be getting paid below minimum wage the business is supposed to make up the difference.
Assuming that happens for the entire shift.
In practice, by all accounts... That pretty much never happens.
Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.
That generally lasts until I encounter something that's bad enough that I don't really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.
The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you're intending to.
And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.
That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.
Oh, and if it's ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.
If there are not already people running fediverse nodes that exist specifically to harvest potentially 'interesting' data, there will be.
You edited it? That's maybe interesting. You deleted it? Same deal, maybe interesting.
It looks like an email address? Definitely might be interesting. A phone number? Yep.
An address? Definitely could be interesting.
If you posted it, assume that it will always be available to the exact people that you don't want to see it.
Don't do this.
Just use a good, random, password generator with decent settings.
Varying away from that just to 'change the kind of password' is only going to reduce your security.
You want as many random bits of information as possible in the password. That's it.
I use + addresses for stuff.
Well, since I run my own mail server, I tend to use _ instead of + as the separator, simply because more places will consider it a valid address.
But it's amazing how useful it is to include the name of whoever you're giving the email address to in the email address. It lets you keep getting email for stuff like password recovery. And when an address is leaked, not only can you block that one, but you also get to know who leaked it.
Which is awesome for knowing which businesses to never use again.
Yes and no.
I suspect that Reddit is going to lose a fair number of chargebacks, because the credit card association rules are often a bit more strict.
Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.
And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.
But it's also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.
And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.
If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well... They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.
On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I'm not sure if that's even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don't want.
But it sure would be interesting to try.
The advice to always use a unique password per site is an excellent one.
The why is multifaceted, and some of them are moderately complex.
First off, not every site is going to be storing your password in a good a secure manner.
In an ideal world, every site on the planet would be hashing it with something like bcrypt with a fairly aggressive cost setting, and good salts.
And they would have a way to automatically rehash your password on login in the event that the password hashing settings change. (Almost everyone misses this one.)
In practice... It could be stored in plain text. It could be hashed with classic crypt(), or with md5 or sha1 with no salt. There are so many ways to get it wrong.
On the rehashing one, they could have picked something that was best practices at the time, you setup your account, and then two years later, best practices have changed, it turns out that there was a way to attack the previous way, so they change how they do it... And that's great for everyone who changes their password or sets up a new account after that change, but everyone who did it before that change? Well, those passwords are just sitting there hashed by the old method indefinitely.
Or someone could compromise the site, and grab every password everyone enters.
Or you could fall prey to a phishing attack, and type your login to what looks exactly like the site in question, but is infact a common typo of the real domain.
Again, there are a lot of ways for the password used on a site to get compromised. Many of those ways are entirely out of your control. It is standard practice for attackers to attempt to use that password and username / email on other services when this happens, just so that they can see what else they can get into.
Don't let that work.
Because they are unilaterally removing benefits that people have already paid for, and are explicitly stating that they will provide no refunds.
If you paid for a year of premium, a good chunk of the benefit has been the coins to buy awards.
After they get rid of both coins and awards, well, you have still paid for premium in advance, but it is now worth a fair bit less to some people.
Also bad, but more arguably in regards to the law, they are choosing to remove all past awards on posts and comments.
Which means that people who have bought coins (or premium to get coins) are having all of that undone, again, without any possibility of refund.
Arguably, this is much more problematic for people who had purchased coins, but who had not used them all before the announcement. Because that's taking the money, and then simply choosing not to provide the service that was paid for, while simultaneously stating that there will be no refunds.
You could try to argue that, well, they can use those coins up until they turn buying awards off... Except, well, one of the nice things about awards is that they last as long as the post or comment does.
This is... Problematic.
Extremely problematic.
When I was a teenager, well, there's a whole lot involved, but I basically didn't have any dental hygiene to speak of.
Who cared?
Well, I had more than one root canal by the time I was 20.
I'm a bit obsessive about it these days, but I have not needed any more root canals.
Take care of the teeth that you want to keep. Don't worry, if you don't, they'll go away.
The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.
There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that's someone else's problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.
How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don't risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can't do anything about it. Maybe you're on vacation, and you don't have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you're sick, or just extremely busy that week.
You're not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn't, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.
Well... No. It's complicated, but there are several ways in which Russia's invasion of Ukraine have both directly and indirectly increased gas prices. Some of them most definitely are part of 'simply because they can', but the invasion has given people more handles to do that as well.
If there is a significant drop in available supply, prices go up. There are not that many suppliers in the world who can do this all on their own without causing themselves very significant financial harm.
This is why OPEC, when it has it's act together enough for everyone to go along with it, has been such a thing, and holds so much power. If almost every supplier is part of OPEC, and OPEC decides to decrease supply, well, prices go up, and none of the suppliers take a hit.
In a very similar manner, if people think or expect that supply will decrease, you get a very similar effect, despite there being just as much supply as there was 5 minutes before the news or rumor went out.
And, of course, it is perfectly possible for suppliers to sell their product outside of the global commodity markets. It's rare, because it's almost always going to be selling it for less than the current market prices, but today we have some good examples of this.
Russia was a huge supplier of various petroleum products, and even though the oil you use to make gas and natural gas are rather different products, to a limited extent they are just barely interchangeable enough on the usage end that a significant shortfall in natural gas can be partially made up by increasing usage of gas, at least in some places.
(See Europe going through an exceptionally cold winter while not having enough of a natural gas supply to be confident in even normal usage.)
At the moment, you have Russia almost entirely excluded from the global commodity markets. Russia choosing to sell outside of those markets at a significant discount, to evade sanctions. Which gives other oil producers just a hair more leverage in continued price control.
All of this is the backdrop for the international companies that do most of the oil prospecting, drilling, etc, who have all decided to almost entirely stop bothering to continue investments in opening up new oil deposits. These most definitely impact pricing as well, though on a longer time scale.
It's a complex mess, with quite a lot of gambling, and actors who have a vested interest in screwing with the system, and entities with enough control to not only gamble, but to tilt the result to avoid losing those gambles if they really need to.
And given that everyone involved wants to make as much money as possible, only the fact that it is a global market keeps prices even remotely sane. Any excuse to hike prices will be taken.
The other big problem is that if it's big enough, it may be uncomfortable or down right painful for any partner.
Again, that's usually more of a girth than a length problem, though too much length can also result in pain. (Bumping into the cervix is, for most women, a rather painful experience.)
The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
Based on the comment, I think that what is wanted is a little different than what people are assuming.
First, it sounds like there is a desire to implement enough of the Mastodon API that various mobile Mastodon clients can connect to kbin.social and interact with that side of things. I have no idea how difficult this would be, but I suspect that it would be an interesting undertaking.
And second, unrelated, but it came up in the comments, and I think it would be an excellent idea, there is definitely a desire to implement a Mastodon-like way to export and import enough of your account information to easily migrate to another instance.
In my opinion, there needs to be an option that can both import and export a fully Mastodon compatible format, so that people can migrate from Mastodon to kbin, and can migrate back from kbin to Mastodon, at least for stuff where that makes sense.
At the same time, I am unsure if that format would be sufficient for everything required to migrate from one instance of kbin to another, or between kbin and lemmy.
And given that last point, it should come as no surprise that I think that if another format is needed, or even an extension to the existing format, that should really be coordinated with Lemmy, so that it is easier to move around the entire ecosystem.
You make a great point about GDPR requirements.
But I don't think that the full export would be very practical as an account migration tactic. There's no value uploading previously made posts/comments/toots to the new instance, because it can't do anything with them.
From the comments, I think that the general answer is: We all recognize it, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.
And we can't pin it down exactly, because a lot of different places used a logo sorta like this in the 90s.
And being the 90s, a lot of that was never on the internet in the first place.
It rings very strong bells for me, and I don't think the reason is one that (at the time of this comment) has already been posted... But I can't for the life of me remember what it was for.