nefarious

@nefarious@kbin.social
1 Post – 19 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It's not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit's userbase weren't going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn't the point.

Here's what's changed since the API changes were announced:

  1. Reddit's responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit's administration sees them.
  2. A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they're still willing to do it at all).
  3. The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
  4. Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They've shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.

We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there's ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.

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Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it'll just grow back later!

(But seriously, don't actually do this unless you're prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don't even try it on a VM or a computer you're planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don't expect, you'll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running rm -rf / could actually brick your computer. This shouldn't still be the case, but I wouldn't test it, myself.)

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I think this article from the Verge explains it pretty well.

tl;dr:

  • The Fed kept interest rates low from 2008 to 2021. Low interest rates made it easier to borrow money and meant that debt-backed investments like bonds had a low return, so investors favored stocks for a better yield on their investment.
  • This meant tech companies could borrow a ton of money at low interest rates and raise a ton of money from investors through stock sales, allowing them to build services that weren't profitable in order to grow as rapidly as possible. This basically defined the internet as we know it today - big companies offering free/cheap services with minimal restrictions. Companies could afford to charge low fees and look the other way on things like ad blockers.
  • However, now that interest rates are going up, borrowing is much more expensive and investors are less motivated to buy stock, so all that easy money has dried up. Companies are having to raise revenue by increasing prices, adding more ads, blocking ad blockers, etc.

It means the creators I enjoy actually get paid, whereas with adblock they don't get any ad revenue.

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The team is bringing back some of the games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, and more than 50 games will be brought back starting on July 25th. Over the long term, “we hope to convert many of the most beloved games to HTML5,” TNT says.

I'm not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There's no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.

Honestly, I should probably set up a system-wide adblocker, but I just use uBlock in Firefox and avoid apps that shove ads in my face.

Much like Reddit, Twitter's first mobile apps were developed by third parties. The term "tweet" even originated with one of those apps.

First sentence of the article:

Reddit is bringing back r/Place — a collaborative project where individual users can edit pixels on a giant canvas

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place

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Sorry, I don't see what this has to do with my comment? I was answering the question "What is the point of Youtube Premium anyway?" and said nothing about the price increase.

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Statcounter bases their data on web traffic. If you're browsing the web on your Steam Deck, I think that should count.

Could've been UPS using USPS for last-mile delivery. The OP is also from feddit.de so maybe they're not in the US.

I had wondered about this. I figured that all of these surveillance capitalist adtech/analytics companies would have to have some metrics on this.

What would be really nice to know is how the numbers look now that the blackout has been over for a while. A 6.6% drop is pretty tiny if it only lasted a day or two.

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Can I pick a PC? x86 is retro, right? /joke

But seriously, probably the PS2. Mainly because it's the only console I got as a kid and also because it's the last console before games and consoles started wanting to phone home over the Internet. I have PS3 games that I'm pretty sure are permanently hampered or unplayable because their servers are offline, but I feel confident I can still boot any PS2 game I own and play it without issues.

I think that might be the codecs' fault. At least for me, my headphones sound terrible in headset mode on all the devices I've tried, regardless of whether they're running Linux, MacOS, iOS, or Android.

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TIL! Thanks for the clarification.

I have a Targus cooling pad that works pretty well for that. It's like a thin plastic tray thing with vents and a USB-powered fan to provide extra cooling, but I mostly use it without the fan to elevate my laptop off my lap and allow for extra airflow. Something similar might work well for your use case.

That said, I've noticed my laptop's fan will start to make an obnoxious rattling noise if I use it on my lap for too long. Fan rattle is a known issue with my laptop and it goes away once it's sat on my desk for a while, but it can be annoying so YMMV.

The framing of "Go back to normal" or "Only sexy pictures of John Oliver" was clever. Lots of people are going to pick the funny option over the boring one in basically any low stakes poll, so even people who don't care much about the protest probably still voted for it.

There's also a lot more motivation for the people who are pissed about Reddit's changes vs. the people who just want their infinite feed of content back to its former state.

I bet similar scenarios play out with spez's whole "moderator democracy" idea.

I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.