If it wasn't hurting them they wouldn't be doing damage control.

• Spez wouldn't be doing (awful) interviews (going so far as to praise Elon Musk)
• They wouldn't be publishing whitewashed versions of history
• They wouldn't be changing the rules to silence dissent
• They wouldn't be plotting to overthrow protesting mods to install compliant ones
• They wouldn't be lying about trying to work with devs
• They wouldn't be preventing people from deleting their old comments/posts
• They wouldn't be forcing subreddits to reopen
• They wouldn't be advertising on Facebook for new advertisers
• They wouldn't be trying to smear Apollo's developer
• They wouldn't be posting propaganda notices on new reddit's homepage
• They wouldn't be censoring discussion about alternatives like Lemmy and kbin

It's working, keep it up.

I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.

(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)

I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.

Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.

They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.

Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.

My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.

This form of protest is valid and I support it.

Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.

You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.

Wow. I don't mind paying for stuff if it's good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.

we're seen as evil because we're helping DRM exist and we're ensuring people make money out of games

No, you’re seen as evil because your software is an inefficient and invasive security risk that makes games significantly worse, and compromises/punishes your paying customers in the quest for more money.

I no longer pirate games (thanks to Steam), but I’ll never buy one with Denuvo.

Fuck allllll the way off.

Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.

I think that’s exactly what they want.

They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.

The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.

So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.

Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.

I mean. Sorta.

When you use some service you have some expectation that they’ll treat you fairly and predictably. Sure their Eula let’s them do whatever the fuck they want legally but that doesn’t change the fact that if they opt take certain actions (like arbitrary taking people’s usernames) then they risk losing user trust.

If the admin just took your username one day would you just quietly accept it? What if they edited or deleted your comments? Would you just shrug and say “well it’s their site they can do what they want” and just walk away?

Look what happened when Spez got caught editing posts on Reddit, for example. Massive user outcry.

Dude’s allowed to be annoyed about it.

It’s fairly reasonable to assume advertisers are leaving. This isn’t one of those controversies that has two sides, it’s just Reddit being shitty because they want to make more money, and mods, users and disabled people on the other side being annoyed with Reddit.

There’s very little for advertisers to lose by redirecting their ad budget elsewhere, but if they stick around there’s a risk that annoyance spills over to them.

It also doesn’t take much for marketing teams to make a change - they do it all the time to stay on the right side of controversies and avoid things they don’t want to be associated with.

Basically the only reason to collect that level of ID if you’re not a bank is so you can fulfil anti-money laundering requirements necessary to allow trading of some commodity, or currency.

Surely those broadcasters will pull their streams (it's not like they're not already hurting), FireTV will get a reputation of having restricted access to broadcast TV, some people will live with it and some will buy a smart TV and not worry about Amazon any more..

So they ignored Boost, but meanwhile they actually blocked Apollo before the deadline: https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110635856662952525

Which really does support the theory that Spez is just being stubborn and vindictive.

That’s incredibly awesome. What a fantastic way to end it!

Someone go make Steam for videos and I'll pay for media again. My stipulations are:

• Once I buy it, it's mine forever (otherwise piracy is better)
• The file is high quality, DRM free, and in a selection of standard formats (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can redownload it from the service at any time (otherwise piracy is better)
• I can get everything I want to watch (otherwise piracy is better)

On mobile: multiple top and bottom tool/nav bars that automatically show/hide themselves when you scroll. They’re invariably more irritating than if they were just pinned at the top of the page (or perhaps viewport, but ideally page - I can scroll to the top of I want it back)

On desktop: animations tied to scrolling.

Anywhere: any kind of popup, modal, etc that I didn’t click on something to get. Please fuck alllllllll the way off.

Yeah it’s 30 days, though they can push it up to 90 if they have a good reason. They have to inform you of that though.

Google must be fucking salivating at the prospect of manifest v3 going live and adblockers being gimped.

I wish more people would switch to Firefox.

So, how the hell is this supposed to prevent bots? Unless Google are planning to completely lock the browser down to prevent user scripting and all extensions then surely you can still automate the browser?

Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don't know why I'm shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.

On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?

Have a look at this user's posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

Community builders are "vetted and paid by Reddit for their time": https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don't seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?

Also if you’re feeling extra cantankerous you could try emailing them directly: redditdatarequests@reddit.com

Even though they say you have to use their form, they can’t actually force you to do that: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/right-of-access/how-do-we-recognise-a-subject-access-request-sar/#requirements

Isn’t the “take it or leave it” approach to consent considered consent bundling? Didn’t google get fined for doing a similar thing?

Insurance is supposed to be a service where everyone pays a predictable amount so that they have some protection in the event of something catastrophic happening. It’s reasonable for them to assess risks, and it’s reasonable for them to charge higher premiums for riskier situations, it’s reasonable for them to ask for remediation and eventually cancel policies if someone doesn’t abide by previously agreed terms.

But there’s a line between that and “it’s fire season, send up a drone so we can cancel the riskiest x% and boost our profits”, particularly if that’s happening mid policy, and particularly if it’s in a situation where those people will find it hard to get new insurance.

I mean yes I agree with all your points. But I stand by the assertion that it’s too expensive. I could handle $5/month, perhaps, but 300 searches is waaaay too few. That’s 10 per day. I did 10 searches this morning before I got out of bed.

For unlimited searches it’s twice the cost of a streaming service. Yet it has negligible bandwidth costs, and significantly less storage cost, probably less development cost. Sure a small user base too, but at that price they’re really going to struggle to grow it!

It’s really just too expensive.

But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.

The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.

All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.

But for now.. it’s pretty good.

Yeah same. They might be holding back until the last minute deliberately in some 4D chess move, but like you I think it’s more likely some poor soul is preparing them manually.

They collect:

The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself

The information collected includes categorized web browsing history that shows how long and how often you visited specific categories of sites (i.e. social media, personal finance, or news). All site visits are classified into one of 30 categories. We do not collect URLs, web pages titles, or user-specific content without explicit permission from you.

Software usage: for example, frequency and duration of application usage such as Intel® Driver & Support Assistant, but not the application content itself such as specific actions or keyboard input.

Feature usage: for example, how much RAM you usually use or your laptop’s average battery life.

Other devices in your computing environment

Includes universal plug and play devices and devices that broadcast information to your computer on a local area network: for example, smart TV model and vendor information, and video streaming devices.

(the emphasis is mine, as is the minor reordering to not hide the browsing behaviour stuff at the bottom)

Yeah that’ll be a no from me there, bud.

Yet more evidence that aggressive adblocking is cyber security.

Install Firefox Install Firefox Install Firefox!

How bout just don’t install privacy-invading data collection services alongside a fucking device driver at all.

It’s pretty common for corporate stuff (legal or otherwise) to start with no payment changing hands, just a contract. Then an invoice lands either monthly or on completion afterwards.

That makes it easier for the work to actually start (otherwise you need to engage the finance dept up front and they’re often slow), and once the contract is signed and the work started that’s the sales process complete.

It changes how extensions work in Chrome (and derived browsers), notably it modifies the API that adblockers use to block requests and dramatically restricts the number of rules they can support. It’s a change pretty clearly designed to limit the scope of adblockers and make it easier for companies like Google to work around them.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening

Well that effectively and succinctly summed up my general distaste for Twitter and Twitter-alikes.

Making popular subreddits NSFW clearly hurts them, because Reddit has been forcing them to switch it off. They've also been forcing subreddits to reopen if they've been restricted. So those two options aren't really very viable for every sub.

I suspect this one hurts them too because this post is not visible any more unless you go directly to it or via the pics subreddit - despite it being newer and having more votes than other posts in there that are on the homepage and in popular.

If even a quarter of the people that upvoted this post clicked through to the request form they're gonna have tens of thousands of these requests to deal with.

They renamed wefwef?

Edit: They renamed wefwef.

I honestly can't believe he's being so egotistical about it. Insults mods as "landed gentry" and users' concerns as "noise" - those are literally the people that have created this "valuable dataset" he's coveting so greedily.

That’s an amusing name but they take a photoshop competitor to market using that name they’re going to lose a trademark dispute in milliseconds.

The only problem with using paths is the service might not support it (ie it might generate absolute URLs without the path in, rather than using relative URLs).

Subdomains is probably the cleanest way to go.

Haha that’s worth a go - there is basically zero chance of them responding to that properly.

Wow can you imagine how much carnage a letter based subject access request onslaught could be? There’s basically no way around employing people to open letters and then do a bunch of data entry just so they can email you and say “hey fill in this form”.

Edit: Could they even email you? Would they have to respond by post?

I don’t think users are powerless. All these shenanigans are hurting Reddit, otherwise they wouldn’t be trying so hard to shut it down.

I think it might feel like that because Reddit made a sadly rare good decision in deciding to stay quiet and out of the press, as it casts doubt on how effective dissent is.

But it’s clear from the continued pressure on mods and the fairly drastic action to arrest the nsfw trend that the fallout is way worse than they anticipated and they’re just doing damage control.

It’s working, keep at it.

One gold upvote costs $2, the recipient might get either $0.90 or perhaps $1. But most likely they’ll get nothing.