An impersonator issued a fake Reddit take down notice against SaveVideo
np.reddit.com
np.reddit.com
So, gaming this out, I don't think the person that ran SaveVideo was evil either. Assuming good faith, the most likely explanation that comes to mind is that someone fabricated a cease and desist notice.
Either that, or Reddit lost track of one of their lawyers on payroll, who got a bit too bored. (As strange as it sounds, this actually happens; I once received a C&D from Magic Leap merely for mirroring their Magic Leap developer manual to my personal site. No idea how they even found the link.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/nw294q/sunsett...
As a former digg refugee, I'm sorry to see the same dysfunction strike reddit.
Called it. :) It was indeed a fake takedown: https://www.reddit.com/user/SaveVideo/comments/ojohbq/update...
I remember people on Reddit making fun of facebook saying everything on there was on Reddit 3 days ago. The tables have turned since then.
I got sick of seeing two kinds of videos:
1. Teenagers dancing to a specific song, always one of a handful of songs.
2. Teenagers performing physical feats to a specific song, always one of a handful of songs.
- watching the video completely
- liking
- commenting
- sharing
increase your account's affinity to the tags associated with that video. If you like multiple videos with the same tag, you'll start seeing many videos with that tag. So, I think searching for a few tags about topics you're interested in and liking a few videos will prime the algorithm enough to make suggestions start being relevant.
This can also be annoying - I must have liked a few vids about dnd, and now i get more dnd suggestions than I want.
I almost always go to the comments to find a mirror instead of trying to load a 30s clip. I've got brand new hardware and a gig connection...It shouldn't take >30s to load a <30s clip!
It is so strange to see a company making their mobile experience WORSE these days.
Looking at the complaints on the site about the video player UI and the lack of response from Reddit to said complaints, it is speculated that some consultant convinced some Reddit executive that they needed to emulate the TikTok UI to grow their user base. This ignores the fact that TikTok is video-centric, while Reddit is comment-centric, and breaking comment functionality to emulate someone else's video functionality makes no sense at all.
I thought this was just me and my settings! I have a bunch of accessibility things set and thought somehow that was fucking with it. It’s like a dance of flipping just to push that x. Crappy design.
I remember it was a shitshow at the time, probably around 2012, I worked for a company that was leveraging Twitter's API for a product and we got quite nervous about the hostility.
The Twitter fiasco was indeed a shit show. I remember being on HN once a week or so during that time but was on daily for a few weeks during that time.
I believe the alternative Twitter app for $50/year came out around that time as well before failing.
Facebook started locking their stuff way before Cambridge Analytica - I'd say by 5-8 years. Even then, Fb acted like an open platform for games and quizzes, but locked down its social-graph while siphoning Google's (via one-way Messenger-GTalk/XMPP interop). That marked a turning point for Google's attitude towards openness as well, since open vs. closed systems exhibit something similar to the paradox of tolerance: closed systems will take advantage of open systems and smother them out of existence.
For Google. That may have been a turning point. But Google’s actions by and large are their own. No one does their repeated bad behavior because of a few incidents with FB or other big players. Even more, I have no doubt Google would’ve ended up close enough to where they are now even without FBM’s interoperability shenanigans.
On the other hand, FB had no reason to lock things down the way they did after Cambridge as it was already pretty much locked down. That was a perfect excuse to do something in their interest while garnering praise from everyone.
It’s easy to blame FB for everything. They are the most blamed tech company for years now. Not as nice when society is complicit with one of their lockdown times though.
This is accurate. And Twitter runs a lucrative data sharing business. In Q1 they made $137 million from data licensing. So there are two reasons they've locked down access.
The users, community and tools always get screwed in the process and they have never mattered to them as soon as the investors come in. Has happened on every social media company.
Very unsurprising of this to happen. It won't be the last.
Pretty much everything that helps a company grow is seen like a threat when "it helped us yesterday, but now can help others". Just like the competition hypocrisy: small companies love competition and fully support it, then they grow and do whatever they can to destroy it.
In the Twitter example, I understand the direct conflict with revenue, but it still seems like a bad long term play.
But I’ve also seen this in B2B, where the API enhanced growth, reduced churn, enabled sales and didn’t compete with subscription revenue.
But new wigs in the business wanted to chase something new.
And copying (and then restricting, as opposed to competing) API use cases became the low hanging fruit.
In the end it was shortermism, most of the wigs only stay for 2 years, and the cost to the business plays out on a longer timescale.
I really don't understand reddit adding features that are just enough to kill off competition la video hosting, but not enough to be usable... OK maybe I'm starting to understand now.
I actually don't understand this part. Trying to remove their external dependencies seems reasonable, but how would making them bad help?
A part of it is surely dark patterns to keep users engaged (i.e. the limited comment depth), but some of it just looks incompetent to me.
Every once in a while I'll open up the official client and I'm just blown away at how bad it is. It's constantly trying to get me to watch livestreams of people doing random things unrelated to my interests. Why would I ever want to watch a livestream on reddit?
When a million apps are better in every way and the old site is better, its confusing what they are doing over at reddit.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
if ( window.location.host != "old.reddit.com" ) { var oldReddit = window.location.protocol + "//" + "old.reddit.com" + window.location.pathname + window.location.search + window.location.hash; window.location.replace (oldReddit); }
// sorry, I'm not familiar with HN md
But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling.
Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.
I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.
In some cases, it is...
But I think, most times, it's the equivalent of getting something you ordered online, encased in a large blob of jello.
You can look at it, but everyone is going to have a hard time interacting with it.
Is there any guarantee that even reddit will keep around image posts uploaded to its own servers, forever?
Personally, I still prefer links as I find them easier to sort and categorize in my bookmark library, or indeed take screenshots of the linked content if I deem it worth of it.
As it is with images, I don't really bother to sort them so I have them scattered all over. In the folder where my SMS app saves images, in the folder where whatsapp saves images, in the case of discord I rarely explicitly download and save the images outside the app, etc. Opening a link I receive opens the link in one program, my default browser, from where I can manage the link as I see fit. All these different apps have their own built in image viewers, save locations, or layers between the message and the content/image, making it much more of a hassle to manage that image as compared to a plain link.
Spam.
The target site may be spammy: lots of adverts, popup/unders, taboola "chumboxes" etc.
Or, if a site can make money from inbound link traffic, there's an incentive for its owners to spam links in subreddits to drive traffic to themselves.
> This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app
Definitely another problem, walled gardens that you can't link into as well as out of.
This excuse doesn't really stick as reddit moderates content both by their user base but also by subreddit mods and reddit admins.
I'd say that this is all to do with the goal of turning reddit into a walled garden.
The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
Moderating a subreddit is not a job. Moderators are regular users from the community who are picked to have a say in how the community is regulated.
> The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress.
Good to see that you're agreeing with me, unless you believe that mods fixing a problem without resorting to a walled garden is somehow a counterexample.
> The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
You're needlessly overgeneralizing. Using an automated filter that's prone to false positives is not a problem at all, or refutes the point I made. In fact, it supports the fact that forcing a walled garden is needed or desirable.
Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds.
I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it
I think you're totally out of touch with the general populace if you think average users don't keenly feel the spying gaze of big tech.
My 92 year old grandfather moved to iOS two years ago, at age 90, to reduce how much Google got from him. Dude doesn't know a damn thing about computers, but he knows Google is spying.
I think it's valid to suggest that people don't trade links to reduce spying.
- 80%+ of Americans agree that there needs to be Data Privacy legislation controlling big tech https://epic.org/privacy/survey/
- Americans are rather in favor of breaking up big tech and popular anti-trust action continues https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/1/dfp_vox_tec...
- Apple has pivoted their iPhone advertising strategy to promote privacy against Big Tech (lol) as their #1 selling point
80% on an online positive-assertive survey ran on population that small it's a completely bogus statistic.
heck I can't even fathom how people would cite this, the methodological note is three lines, doesn't tell how the participants were selected, say votes were weighted but doesn't say the weights nor the weighted parameters; they have like 72 pages of demographics, probably a couple person for each, and say the error margin is 2%
I note with amusement that you did not post this same comment in response to every other reply which included no sources at all.
I suppose one only thinks critically when they disagree.
The phrasing of the question and prompting of it plays a huge part too. Including Trump’s name at all is huge. It makes it an immediate reactionary political question. Swap Trump for something on the left and you’ll likely get different results. Even without Trump. The prompting is worded the way it is. It’s so political it’s going to skew anything and everything.
For the first one. Your description just sounds reasonable. Why would you say no to general regulation against big tech? Besides not wanting to be a hypocrite if you’re on the right (which clearly shows a ton of them are fine being hypocrites with that 80% figure).
Change regulation to oil companies or manufacturing and suddenly those centrists and people on the right won’t be polling the same way.
Which again means this is more political than any actual knowledge of the situation. People don’t know or understand online privacy by and large. It’s such an obvious take. To argue against it with credible sources that don’t actually relate much to the topic shows how far out your thinking is. There will never be agreement because you’re not even thinking about this in the same way.
It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.
Reddit has become about rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site. Following a link and actually reading an article for 5-10 minutes isn’t as exciting as rapidly consuming a few videos, a few screenshots, and a few self posts along with the top comments for the most interesting ones.
Even on HN it’s common to read comments where the author obviously hasn’t bothered to read the linked article. Many people are more interested in the social and discussion aspects of these sites than being redirected somewhere to read an article for several minutes straight.
If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off
It's nice to have videos, images, and short articles in a familiar layout
I know I'm much more likely to click a recipe link if it's a self-post, because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story
Thank SEO for that.
I don't know how to solve the problem at scale, but would love a site that preferentially de-ranks content based on the ads it has. That is, rather than me using an ad blocker, I'd like the search engine to do that for me. That probably exists, but then it also has to be as good as Google which isn't easy. I default to duck duck go, but often (say, 10%) I can't find something I am looking for there, go to Google, and its a top 3 result. Tricky set of problems here but I'm optimistic five years from now I may be happier with my search engine of choice.
This is equal parts funny and hurting my soul...
is it partially because new reddit is a SPA that just craps itself when going to a external link and loses where you were?
It has to do more with every other platform being hostile to embedded videos, especially on mobile. Nothing plays inline anymore.
Too bad websites are even making this inconsistent and broken, by using cursed webdesign to a degree that the browser can't figure out if an element is interactive before the user clicks on it.
The whole point is having everything
a) in the context of the feed b) stripped of extraneous crap
Opening links in new tabs accomplishes neither of those things
My guess is that people prefer having everything on one site because it makes the whole UX consistent. If we're being honest apps, websites etc. are wildly different to navigate and use, and when you're used to one site's behaviour and quirks it makes visiting other sites a bit more cumbersome. Especially if you're not using adblockers.
On HN, if post is not a link, clicking on title brings to comments. If post is a link, clicking on title brings to link. Can't we just have clicking on title brings to comments and a separate icon for going to external website?
The title is a link in both cases. In the first case, it's a link to a HN discussion. In the second case, it's a link to an external website.
I would love to see any semblance of evidence that this is true.
Reddit shoves a lot of things down your throat and forces users to do things without providing alternatives.
It's super aggressive in making you use their app (the mobile site is purposely broken), aggressive about making you create an account, and doesn't allow alternatives for sharing images in some instances.
And while we're at it (poor feature, not necessarily a preference), its search is awful.
I highly doubt these are things "Reddit's user base prefer."
The one saving grace reddit has right now are its niche communities where comments are still thoughtful and the content is still interesting. Reddit does everything it can to get in the way of that.
And let's not even start on their inline video player. It frustrates me that they look to shut down and stop bots and services like this, because their video play is such complete crap.
I dread the moment when they remove old.reddit.com, but I guess it'll finally make me leave because there's absolutely 0 chance I will be using the new interface.
Also, this whole SaveVideo issue is laughable, most of the content on Reddit is already stolen from other sources.
Do they have a choice or any say at all? Reddit is known as a leading employer of a vast collection of dark patterns to manipulate and pressure and restrict what a user can or cannot do.
While that may be a common user preference, it's also a strategy at at large companies. Shit, even a small brick and mortar store doesn't want you to leave the store because you may find what you want elsewhere. The web as it started out is the opposite of what any company wants.
We made sharing images dead simple. You can copy and paste them around. Download them and upload them. You can copy the hyperlink and the target site can either display it by ref or it can copy the content and display it inline. On the modern web the copy/paste works amazing for images.
Text is similar - I mean, you can't load a .txt file into most comment boxes, but you can trivially copy and paste text.
Rich documents with inline images? Nope. If you copy and paste rich text data or HTML, the images are probably going to go away - Reddit's rich text editor fails on this. Raw markdown or HTML? Getting the images in is tricky, you generally need a parallel way to upload them and need to update all their paths separately. Copying and pasting rich text is always a roll of the dice about what's going to get mangled... for Reddit? It's images that get mangled.
That's why dumb screenshots have won. Because documents don't support dumb copy/paste usefully. I can't copy/paste a Tweet but I can screenshot it.
edit: This is also why gifs beat video.
1. Really easy 2. Uniform across Apps
I've noticed that college students don't really know how to use e-mail anymore, and they will send screenshots of e-mails instead of forwarding them. Kind of makes sense, though, when only some Apps have "forward" and each one has a different way to do it.
Why fuck around with that (or copy/paste, which is a nightmare on Mobile) when you can Screenshot.
Well, that's what happens after you alienate everybody that prefers something else...
Reddit's use-case now is mostly just a facebook that isn't facebook. This is exemplified by the addition of user profiles and the ability to "post" to your own user profile as well as customized profile avatars.
I agree with your description of reddit as it is. But the reason for this is that reddit stopped being reddit almost a decade ago. Sharing links is unpopular because Reddit is now Facebook.
Practically any web nowadays try to be Facebook-like, giving fast to consume content to users, and having an unlimited scroll of pictures and autoplaying videos all over the place.
Reddit even copy some shady or dark patterns like forcing you to login in your computer or forcing to install the app in the phone just to see some post somebody sent to you. At least this can be solved just entering "old.reddit.com", but we don't know when this possibility would disappear.
I understand their website is theirs, and they rule how the things works there, but that kind or opacity makes me to never use those websites and recommend people to do that.
Oh! So it's Facebook now?
And ultimately that’s sad, because it should 1. Be possible to implement and 2. Should already have been implemented by the platforms.
Last week I struggled to send an Austin powers gif via signal.
Because searching via images on google & ddg forced me to a website (wouldn’t just give me the result) and then those websites did everything possible to NOT give me a gif.
I’m disappointed that this has become the reality of the internet, and I think many people on this site are in the same boat.
I like saving stuff as plain text, and when stumbling upon an old quote or code snippet that I've saved it increases the chance that there is some context as to where it came from.
Here's a link to the addon, maybe someone here finds it useful.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-with-con...
PDFs with embedded bitmaps can actually do that (and are currently supported widely, but PDFs are a terrible format with way too much attack surface). Same for any other composite html+whatever formats like epub. Standardizing a non-book format name and a spec that mandates nothing more than bare xhtml & image support with no JS or CSS interpreters would probably be quite sufficient.
> duckduckgo
Duckduckgo caches/proxies the images on its desktop site, which is useful when it gives results for sites that are since dead. Often at a lower resolution, but that's what reverse image searching is for.
For the sender, especially on mobile, it takes less time to take and share a screenshot, then it takes to get the URL, copy it and paste it into a message.
For the receiver, it takes less time to receive and view a screenshot then it takes to recieve and open a link. Web page rendering times suck, so the people have found a solution to work around that.
I much prefer to receive a screenshot of what someone wants me to see, than a link. I can view picture messages much more quickly than I can view links, and I often wont click a link because I don't want to sit there waiting for a page to finish rendering.
It's either slow because it's full of adverts, or it's slow because it's stalling waiting for an advert/tracker to load that's blocked by the pihole.
A screenshot is truly WYSIWYG and is the most reliable way to know that they will see the exact same thing that you see.
It's essential to avoid link rot. Not long ago, old Reddit content was almost always dead.
As usual, it's just trade-offs.
Even super small businesses that rely on training videos as paid income don't host things on YouTube because they want more control over the content.
It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite
I hate it. Most apps don’t need to be apps. An actual regular website is so great. And if you can, just a static page is the best as far as accessibility and usability and linkability…
Fundamentally Reddit is not a link aggregator but a content aggregator. Link is one way to reach those contents. It is simple and scalable. But content consumers would always prefer first party content, ceteris paribus. One link away is one MORE step away. Faster solution always wins.
In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.
We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.
Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...
I’ve written a little service I run locally that allows me to “one tap” download videos right to my camera roll on my iPhone to make getting the raw videos as painless as possible.
I've noticed this as well. I wonder if this is a desire path indicating the need for a universal "share" button on mobile? Or maybe it's a consequence of people becoming used to sharing real-life experiences by taking and sending a picture?
I’ll point out, I wasn’t making much from my sites. $50 was a good month.
There's so much tracking shit appended onto the end of the link that by the time they get it and whatever url parsing algorithm their device uses maims it, the url is no longer in tact and trying to click it brings you to a broken page.
I make a concerted effort to remove all of that before sending, but Google et. al. are working very hard to make that harder and harder by continuing to make changes to obscure the link. I already have to copy it, and re-paste it into the mobile address bar just to see what the entire link looks like. The vast majority of users won't even know what parts of the url to trim, nor will they care enough to do it.
So they just send a screenshot.
Can you give an example of this (with the real link to compare)? Tracking info can be added to the URL but should not break the page.
There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.
I'm not able to find an immediate example but usually happens when sharing links via a format that doesn't explicitly format them as links, such as SMS
As a rule I don't install any add-ons or extensions. Because a trusted extension today can become malicious tomorrow as has happened so many times.
Yes, but we are talking about why the average person just sends a screenshot. Insanely long links filled with tracking data that may or may not result in a clickable link on whatever app-browser-OS they are using is the reason. There is always a workaround for people that A: understand the problem, and B: care enough to find and use the workaround. But since the average person is not likely to pick this topic to use their limited time, energy and knowledge on, they go with the easy consistent option.
Whenever there is a problem and the two options are 1. have all individuals change their behavior or 2. fix the system so the better option is the easiest, the answer is always 2.
I got on Reddit in 2009 when it reminded me of YC/HN. text only, cooler heads prevail, it’s not completely overrun by 12 year olds and Russian trolls yet.
If I can scroll through content effortlessly, then it's easy. If I have to open each link in a new browser view/tab, ugh. Embedded images on Reddit load instantly, while loading an entire Imgur page takes forever.
Not to mention that linked content is often ephemeral, whereas first-party hosting ensures it always stays viewable together with the thread.
So across usability, performance, and link rot, first-party content is a win in every way.
And if you're interested in the content's source/attribution, it's often in the comments. Even when (often) the OP doesn't post it or doesn't even have it (because they got it elsewhere), someone else does.
I'd sooner suffer link rot.
I also don't appreciate the progression into carefully crafted doomscrolling. Content isn't so valuable that I'd sacrifice quality for quantity.
...?
Reddit's always been a place for memes. It's never been HN.
On the other hand, there are plenty of subreddits where quality of discourse is amazing. It's really up to you, so I don't know what you're complaining about.
> carefully crafted doomscrolling
That's an awfully perjorative way to say infinite scroll. But again, the quality is there in subreddits if you want it. Your choice. I think it's great they're able to cater to different types of users looking for different things.
I see multiple reasons:
- Everyone knows how to take a screenshot, but very few people know what a URL is, why it matters and why you should use it to share content
- The URL is purposefully hidden by the app to make sure other platforms can't access the content. You must use the official app, with your account, to access content.
People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.
Speed... it's always speed.
It's about 4 seconds faster for me to look at a screenshot to understand a friends "LOL!" than click a link, have browser load page, render page, render ADS and then I scroll down to find the picture of the dog riding a skateboard.
Speed speed speed.
Speaking for my wife, she mostly browse and share stuff on her phone. It's much quicker and consistent to take a screenshot and share it than trying to discover/remember in each app what is the best way to produce a link to paste somewhere else (how many clicks to get a share link in the amazon app? how about the YT app? FB app, can you even do it?)
I just want to point out the extent to which marketing doublespeak has infected the world.
A person from the 1990s might think that this means redditors making new content. But in this case "moving towards first party content" means "copying the interesting part from your site, to my site, and making it so it can't be copied again".
I had to help a friend send me a link to something a few days ago, he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't know how to copy/paste on his iPhone, and didn't realize you could get the link from safari.
...in a bit of an ironic twist, the reason he needed to send me a link was because the restaurant we were at had a QR code menu, and my phone doesn't have a QR reader.
It is possible it does. The default photo app on Android is a QR code reader, at least on Google Pixel phones.
I open the photo app and then point it at the QR code. After a moment or two text appears which allows me to open the QR code link.
I only realized this in the last month or two...
Edit: you can find it on Fdroid or probably on the project site/page. It's not getting updates, but why would my QR scanner need those, anyways..... also Google doesn't want it to be published anymore, iirc due to it using relatively ancient APIs.
Now, no more. "Check out this link" is not an enticing offer, it's assigning homework. I don't know if it's because neat stuff is no longer rare and we've collectively had our fill, or because everything got so co-opted and corrupted that we go in to every new site with one wary eye watching for the dark patterns. But one way or the other, people don't share links. They share memes instead, which ask far less of us, and are much harder to monetize.
If you found it on a surface-level subreddit, a major Instagram account, a major news site, or a big podcast chances are decent that the content in question has already been seen by a fair number of people, and to them, seeing it again has no additional value.
I see this play out hundreds of times in real life where the conversations start with "Did you see...? and "I was listening to a podcast about..."
I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.
And it fucking sucks. It consistently fails to load, or stalls even at low quality. Even replaying a video often fails despite it already being in memory. And it degrades picture and video quality much more than other sharing sites. And all that without the convenient playback controls you can usually find. I don't understand how people put up with it
You can easily download a video and re-host it on another platform. You can send a link to a friend and they don't need to install the app to view it.
TikTok is proving that walled gardens are counterproductive and that if you want your app to go viral, it should be easy to export and share across any platform.
It's a constant push/pull of vitality vs profit it seems.
Something like 90% of sites don't have proper meta tags that can be scraped for previews, and the ones that do you get blocked by Cloudflare if you try.
Usability is non-existent.
Super hypocritical? Sure. Understandable? Also a yes.
If Reddit forces this, I assume browser extensions are the next step that they can’t mitigate. If the browser needs to play it, it can be ripped.
I assume from a legal point of view that is a-ok. They can't do anything about it therefore they can't be expected to do anything about it.
Somehow if you call downloading something "streaming" and promise to delete it it is no longer downloading.
My own personal views, of course.
When you download the video, you are asserting more control over it than the legal system believes you should have.
Our society needs to come to terms with the reality that you can not just "show" someone a piece of information such that they no longer have it. We can't "move" information such that one party now has it and the other does not. And we should not provide legitimacy nor legal protections to the idea that some byzantian DRM encryption scheme can "hide the message" from the person who is receiving the message.
All of these gymnastics just to fit old square ideas into new round internet holes. It chafes me and it should chafe you that we have wasted all this effort on delusions.
These models are convenient fictions so we can rally around shared ideas. One of those shared ideas is that people can own information - it's not technically true, but we as a society have decided it as useful.
No big deal right? All seems fine and dandy if it's just internet videos and DRM. Low stakes, right? What's it gonna look like with loan sharks and pacemakers? I assume you have a line, but where is it and why is it there?
Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, many video sites do this (YT being the biggest). It allows you to change the video source on the fly (changing the bitrate for example) without effecting the audio playback so preventing any audio glitches during the swap. People are a lot more forgiving of video artifacts then they are of audio glitches. It also allows you to have a lower bitrate copy of the original video for mobile playback without having duplicate copies of the audio.
So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video (Tools like youtube-dl will happily merge the video and audio into a single container after downloading both pieces of the puzzle).
Although, I don't use reddit anymore, I gave it up a few years ago, so maybe they have gone completely evil and the video/video track splitting is simply to annoy hotlinkers (I know they have been throwing more and more dark patterns in to their redesign, the redesign was basically the kick I needed to quit that habbit). Just giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one for now as there are legit reasons to do it.
EDIT: 1) My ref to youtube-dl is about how it will merge the 2 after giving it a single YT URL. No idea if it works on reddit, but as it works on a number of sites I wouldn't be surprised if it also works on reddit (its been years since I've been on reddit in any meaningful way, so never had the urge to try).
2) ffmpeg and avconv will merge pretty much any audio track with any video track you throw at it into a single container without the need re-encode the video. In fact iirc I think those are the tools youtube-dl will use to merge the tracks after downloading content from YT.
3) as for annoying hotlinkers, there are (imo) better ways to annoy hotlinkers then spliting the audio/video tracks. Personally my fav way is to replace the video being served to the client with a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up serverside after the hotlinking is detected - but serving the orig video when its not hotlinked, but I'm a dick :-P (a more sane and polite way would be to simpy not serve any video at all, saves wasting bandwidth).
I guess it's a bit of both. A technically better solution that also helps your marketing is simply a win-win-situation for them.
But it's kinda ironic that the upgraded the user experience with better playback while similarly degrading it by disallowing hotlinking. Typical sidegrade.
On the video I used I saw 5 video encodes (96, 240, 360, 480, and 720 - it could be that the orig video was 720 so there is no point encoding a 1080 video). So yeah, it saves then have atleast 4 dupicates of the audio if each video was in its own container also containing audio when you can mix it client side.
I also put the reddit URL into youtube-dl which downloaded the two pieces and murged them just fine.
So for me personally I'm still going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one as its a pretty common way to do streaming video these days. But I see your point that it came with an added benefit to them that it makes it more difficult to hotlink to the video, but its still easy enough to download and rehost elsewhere.
Sounds like they are optimizing for a metric, rather than for a goal.
On something, anyway. Whenever Reddit tricks me into opting into the redesign I'm disoriented by just how much of reddit I cannot access. Following comment chains is a chore, getting all comments to a post impossible, instead every page is a duplicate of the front page with random barely related posts getting shoved in my face I already didn't care about the last three times reddit wanted me to.
Is the only metric developers are judged by the number of (intentional or even just accidental) top-post clicks per user?
Lastly, Reddit is basically the origin of organic marketing. You can't block these ads ...
[0] Not a perfect source, but Statista cites 700 million users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/435252/adblock-users-wor...
The Reddit 'gods' may have decreed that this bot must die, but of course the real god of Reddit - and of all social media - is, of course, Mammon.
99.9% of videos uploaded on Reddit are not original content, they have been lifted from other platforms, very often by downloading them on said platforms then reuploading them on Reddit.
The hypocrisy displayed by some tech companies is revolting.
I'll take a watermark over having to jump through hoops to get stuff downloaded any day.
Ability to directly link to said media would be better, but this is the world we live in...
It's impossible to detect YDL because it identifies itself as a browser.
Meanwhile, just try to advocate for GFYcat instead.
The goal of reddit being to limit it, although I'm not sure they can really make accurate enough stats to know how many people download videos with YDL.
The save vid bot is much more visible, which is the reason they reacted I guess.
An apropos comment from that thread
You mean [deleted]
Some subs just don’t have those active people that make it gold.
I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place.
I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
CTRL+F "delete"
Individual opinions may change over time, but if expressed publicly in a community settings, they become a part of history of that community and its discussions. I think disassociating usernames from comments without purging the comments hits the right balance. Different people and communities may choose otherwise.
On that note, I wish websites, in particular and especially HN, were a bit more up-front about this. Here, the information about moderators' approach to account deletion is somewhat buried - it's at the bottom of FAQ, and important clarifications are another link away. In general, I wish all community-hosting websites put information like this front-and-center during registration, not buried in an inscrutable ToS, so that users could make an informed choice before joining (or at least as much of an informed choice as you can make, if the choice will be binding a decade later).
The problem is the site owners. They are growing increasingly user hostile.
But agreed the websites updates are horrible in every single way. I can't think of one new feature that did not make things worse, the only way I can use Reddit is adding the old. Subdomain manually every time
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
I absolutely detest that, specially since they have put a giant loginwall in the mobile version of the new reddit which basically forces me to use the old.reddit. These practices are basically what I expect from a shady website, not one of the most popular ones. Reddit is really detestable and I wish we could do something to stop it from acquiring users.
Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.
Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation.
r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people".
You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals).
So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit.
The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit.
Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
Meanwhile, /r/actuallesbians continues unhindered, cause it's not transphobic.
> 'male lesbians'.
Nice dog whistle.
Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense.
> Nice dog whistle.
Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
This is where you are mistaken. You can change your sex with a sex reassignment surgery. While gender is identity based, sex is defined via the phenotypes (physical characteristics). If you make the alterations necessary to match the physical characteristics of a certain sex, you become that sex for all intents and purposes.
You may have different chromosomes than what is standard for that sex but by no means does that mean you aren't that sex. There are plenty of women who are born female, grow up female, present female, and identify as female who find out down the line that they have a Y chromosome. The same goes the other way with men who discover they have 2 X chromosomes.
I mean hell while not the exact same circumstance, something like 1 in 2500 males are discovered to have a karyotype of 47,XXY with the actual predicted prevalence (due to low rates of identification) being closer to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 500. The previously mentioned circumstances are of course less common than this (closer to 1 in 20000 or 1 in 80000) but in the context of the global population that is still a significant number.
My point being that sex is a lot fuzzier than most people realise and the only viable way of defining it is via phenotypes, which can of course be changed with medications and surgery. Defining by karyotype causes the entire definition system to break down because while chromosomes are of course important in determining your sex, they ultimately don't define it and there are so many other biological factors that play into you ending up whatever sex you are. And this isn't a "feel good" inclusive answer, this is just the scientific/medical reality because karyotypic/genetic sex just isn't a useful definition compared to phentotypic/physical sex.
---
TLDR: It's not biological reality. Biological reality is that your sex is defined by your physical characteristics and while your chromosomes play a part in deciding which characteristics you develop, they don't provide a clean or consistent determination. If you sufficiently adapt your physical characteristics, for all intents and purposes both medically and otherwise, you are the sex your characteristics match.
Having SRS you still lack the ability to carry a baby in terms of impregnation for MTF, which most biological women are automatically capable of unless they have some extraneous condition/syndrome/etc.
In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
How is this any different than SRS? You can call it a condition or whatever but it results in the exact same state.
> In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
It does play a significant part however it plays an even bigger part in the actual operation of the brain itself. So people who transition find themselves much closer neurologically to the sex with which they are hormonally equivalent to than their original sex.
Now take in the consideration of trans individuals who attempt to transition during or before puberty. Is there a difference now? The lasting effects (of which none actually disqualify you from the sex you transition to) are lesser so it should be even harder to differentiate now.
The point being, a MTF individual with SRS and HRT is of the female sex and vice versa for FTM individuals. They may be their sex with additional caveats or medical considerations but they are that sex. If we want to be scientific about it there is fundamentally no difference between a transitioned individual and any number of individuals of that sex who have some disorder or circumstance that gives them the identical physical characteristics.
You can surgically change genitals and pump hormones, the gametes don't change, nor chromosomes.
> you are the sex your characteristics match.
You're conflating gender and sex. Even for medical reasons alone, biological sex is an important consideration. We can show our appearance any way we like.
he exception to this rule are genetic disorders and sex-organ specific health considerations. The genetic disorders are karyotype specific but they aren't sex specific. Likewise sex-organ related issues still apply if you don't have the same chromosomal match-up.
A 46,XX male doesn't have a Y chromosome but they still have all the standard male biology. They have some additional health considerations (mainly infertility) but otherwise they are biologically male and are subject to near identical medical concerns as an average male.
Similarly a 46,XY female has a Y chromosome but they have otherwise physically normal female biology. The caveats being often needing hormone supplements and infertility.
Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
My point being: In every case where the karyotype does not match the phenotypes, the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
---
Now with that out of the way:
Is a man without their sexual organs still a man? Well how do you tell?
- By the chromosomes? Well obviously that doesn't work given the previously mentioned differences between karyotype and phenotype.
- By their sexual organs? Well in this case that doesn't work because they don't have any and/or had them removed.
- By the way they look? There are women who look like men and vice versa and this is quite subjective so it's not an entirely scientific way of making the separation.
- By their hormones? Well this is probably the best one since hormones regulate nearly all expression in the body and with hormone levels typical for a male, the body largely acts male and vice versa. But suppose we don't want to use this. What do we use?
Now do the same for a woman without their sexual organs.
In the end, if you remove the organs the only definitive differentiator between sexes is hormone levels. If you don't want to use hormone levels and you can't use sexual organs, there isn't any other differentiator that cleanly separates between male and female. Every other differentiator has N or 2^N caveats.
---
So with respect to trans individuals undergoing sex reassignment surgery, if the differentiating sexual organs are removed/converted (a penis is biologically just an enlarged clitoris) and the hormones are completely replaced to levels equivalent of the sex they are transitioning to, what is left to differentiate them? Doubly so if they decide to transition before or during puberty.
Once again, biology is a lot fuzzier than people seem to realise. There is a lot of grey space and fluidity in sex just like with everything else in biology. The grey space is smaller in humans and mammals in general than in other species but it is well established in the scientific and medical community that sex is fuzzy and can change given the right circumstances.
Physicians don't suddenly stop needing know one's biological sex by virtue of reassignment surgery - if anything it's even more important. The mere virtue of having to constantly inject hormones to alter expression to a limited degree evidences what sex is in play. Some medication may react differently owing to sex, not just ratio of testosterone and estrogen.
You're reducing sex to something it isn't. I'm not sure to what end, because it helps no one.
> Is a man without their sexual organs still a man?
Yep.
> Well how do you tell?
A rudimentary exam could do it.
> the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
In terms of cursory glances only. In terms of actual examination, no. Absolutely not.
> The significant majority of sex related differences from a medical perspective are almost entirely hormone driven.
Entirely wrong.
> Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
> what is left to differentiate them
What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Stop conflating sex and gender. Seriously, the fact that biological sex is a thing does not jeopardize gender expression and flexibility.
But what does this exam actually entail? I am looking for an actual specific class of test or set of tests.
> Entirely wrong.
Please elaborate. What mechanism drives those characteristics if not hormones?
> These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
A woman having a 46,XY karyotype has odds of about 1 in 100000 which would put the likely number of women with a 46,XY karyotype at almost 40k people across the globe. It's undoubtedly rare but that is still a lot of people. While these women have lower hormone levels without treatment, they have otherwise completely healthy female bodies which results in most women never identifying that they have the condition in the first place. Unless a genetic test is performed, it just appears as if these women have hypogonadism which can occur for any number of other reasons.
The opposite (a man with a 46,XX karyotype) is even more common with about 1 in 20000 odds which sits the population at close to 200k people. But once again, because it results in relatively little to no health issues or abnormalities beyond low hormone levels and infertility (hypogonadism), it is often either left untreated or is treated without identifying the cause.
Similarly, a male with a 47,XXY karyotype has a very similar if not almost identical experience as a 46,XX male. With odds of 1-2 in 1000, that's 4 to 8 million people who don't fit that standard sex definition.
> What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Remember this is talking about an individual without their sex organs. If they are removed or are non-functional, the individual almost always needs hormone replacement because without those organs to produce sex-related hormones (which effectively serve as the control switch/regulatory system), significant chunks of the endocrine system stop regulating themselves properly and the individual ends up with hormone imbalances.
In the case of SRS, the hormone producing sex organs (either testes or ovaries) as well as anything else that isn't needed any more are removed and the remaining organs are reshaped to match the form of their counterpart for the other sex. At that point all sex-hormone production is artificial/manual just as it would be for an individual of that sex who had those organs removed due to health issues (or that have those organs non-functional).
---
Trust me I've looked for any medical or biological evidence that human sex characteristics excluding the primary reproductive organs (testes, prostate, penis, ovaries, fallopian tubes, vagina) are driven by anything other than hormones. I can't find any evidence to support that fact. The prevailing opinion of the medical community seems to support the fact that sex is driven by hormones and organ presence rather than any other mechanism. If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
This is common rhetoric with people who have nothing to say.
You're arguing in bad faith. Stop wasting my time.
> sex is driven
SEX IS NOT DRIVEN. Gender expression is driven. Sex is: gametes, chromosomes.
> If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
I encourage you to put the bare minimum effort to educate yourself on what sex is, and you'll come to this conclusion.
Reddit removed all pornographic subreddits from /r/all. If you go to /r/all now, all porn subreddits are gone. You can still see the very rare NSFW post from a non-NSFW community, but for all intents and purposes all pornography has been removed from all public channels.
So much for reddits dedication to the male gaze!
But you set yourself a trap with the "well catered to by the administration" because you've defined this situation such that "catered to" is the equivalent of "done literally everything but gone nuclear with a full ban".
So now I can easily point to the continued existence of outright neo-nazism, white supremacy, civil war idealism, violent right-wing rhetoric, terrorism support, and other radical examples of "normal conservative dialogue" on reddit and easily claim that neo-nazis terrorists are "well catered to by the administration" by virtue of the fact that they exist at all and are not banned.
If you search for a NSFW subreddit, it will show in the results. Porn subreddits are easily discoverable, and not even close to being banned.
(Try it yourself: https://old.reddit.com/subreddits/search?q=asshole&include_o... versus https://old.reddit.com/subreddits/search?q=911truth&include_... - you'll see it's not possible to find /r/911truth in the latter search.)
Why does the existence of porn subs degrade the value of feminist subs?
Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker.
This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
> It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator.
On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator.
This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators.
It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that.
>More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format.
*I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.
I’m not interested in fanning what’s rapidly spiralling into the inevitable flamewar that this topic creates, but I will say that there’s never anything to be practically gained from making a fuss over other people’s (and particularly stranger’s) personal identities whatever they may be. I’m not saying that for the sake of a “chilling effect”, I’m saying it because in most cases personal identity genuinely isn’t relevant and only serves to distract from the issues at hand as has clearly happened here. Why would I include an irrelevant fact about Challenor’s identity that instantly derails any thread it comes up in?
You have actual moderation tools, you can pin posts etc. People even visit the front page of the sub every now and then.
Actual forums would be the best solution, but alas...
The multi reddit allows me to browse only subreddits I like, and it's much much better this way. Digg did not have that.
Works on mobile as well.
Those reddit save sites put both together.
I don't get why Reddit won't allow videos with sound to be easily saved.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nuke-reddit-histor...
But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
Including Archive.org.
> But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
This is a topic where the interests of the community and the needs of an individual come in conflict, and I don't think there's an universally agreed-on standard practice. By community I explicitly do not mean the platform that's hosting it, though they have interests desires too - just the collection of people reading and posting.
A deleted comment in the middle of a thread is often extremely disruptive, as everything below it in hierarchy (and other locations linking to it) loses crucial context. Being able to distance yourself from your comments (through deleting the account, and thus making the comments show a "deleted user" as author), but not to delete the comments themselves, balances these competing interests properly.
For HN per se, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23623799 for mod take on the topic.
Reasons like community interest are not strong or proper imho.
Also there’s no information about whether HN logs user IPs or any other info. Or info about how many IPs are logged. Whether they log all the IPs or last K IPs. For how long those IPs are stored.
It's less about scrubbing it from the internet, but scrubbing it from Reddit (or twitter, fb, etc) themselves. Even if some obscure content farm is hosting the comment, it's still a small fraction of visitors.
What this means is that your a lot of old comments and submissions are unable to be deleted.
It has already been running for a while now, and has gone back >4 years. I'm able to go in manually as well and modify / delete old comments. I've checked via incognito that they are actually modified, and then deleted.
So the time limit is fine for old comments if you can get them via the API, but the API will only retrieve a certain amount (I think 2K) of comments.
Maybe the website limit was just adding new ones?
*Nearly every major video host deliberately makes saving videos difficult.
This is why I'm keeping an offline digital music collection for the first time in over a decade, it's because I'm sick of this kind of behaviour from record labels. Their attitudes of deleting things on a whim as though they never existed pissed me off to the point I don't see streaming services as a viable means of keeping my music any more.
Even now that a global pandemic has demonstrated how essential internet access has become to our lives courts seem quite happy to insist that ISPs permanently ban people based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement.
They've turned the DMCA into an alternative revenue stream where they can shake down people (both the innocent and the naive) who are forced to hand over settlement money for protection because they most often couldn't afford an attorney for advice let alone afford one for a long battle against media giants in courts that have increasingly become pay to win.
It's frightening how much they've managed to get away with already. I used to worry about how much of our culture they were taking from us, now I worry about them taking things much more fundamental.
This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post.
Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.
Reddit's tools are not up to the task.
Reddit is such a disaster nowadays, especially with the "new" design, it's just a matter of time until it will get disrupted.
Given that context, I think it's pretty neat that new functionality can be introduced to the site via bots. Unlike a browser extension, this automatically works on Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Edge with no extra development time; and it's significantly more discoverable since you'll see the comments.
If you don't like the feature, you can block that bot with a button click and never see that particular bot again. I use Reddit regularly and block maybe one bot a month?
I'm not a big fan of the grammar bots and such, but "save video" and "remind me" seem like genuinely useful features.
It would be terribly simple and probably even more userfriendly to just privately message the bot in order to activate its action, and/or much more tech-friendly to have a browser extension to do the same action. I'm quite sure youtube-dl already works with more types of "Reddit videos" than "SaveVideo" ever will, and youtube-dl couldn't care less if Reddit approves of them or not.
But, of course, thanks to the apparent power of advertising, any such service that does NOT spam everyone like "SaveVideo" and the rest is condemned to obscurity.
Net result is tens of annoying SaveVideo (and their even more spammy competitors) messages in every popular reddit thread. How do you call it when someone posts several messages in every single popular thread with the name of their service?
I really don't know why the websites (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) put up with those. Yes, Twitter has Threadunrollers and the like which is basically the same thing. Personally I consider these "business models" to be one of these plagues on the WWW that must be eradicated with prejudice. The other one being websites that just grab files that are otherwise publicly available and put them behind a loginwall/paywall (e.g. Pinterest, Scribd, Manualslib, etc.), then SEO the hell out of it so that the original file becomes much harder to find.
Yes, I know you're a troll. Just saying.
Not to mention websites where there is no karma or equivalent (e.g. Twitter) and you just can't skip the spam to threadunroller or videodownloader or whatever.
Especially ironic considering most of reddit videos are downloaded and reposted from tiktok.
One bot with +70 that's somewhat visible, a couple just barely above the "load more comments" filter with +3.
#2 result - https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/ofl4jt/i_...
No bots without clicking to load more comments.
Really though it's the fault of Reddit (or Twitter, ...) for deliberately disabling users' ability to right-click and download videos like normal. This is entirely a self-inflicted problem.
u/getvideobot u/RedditMP4Bot u/redditmp4bot
When I expand for comments, I basically see _all_ of the bots mentioned.
Don't get me wrong, reddit is very useful and nice. I absolutely hate Reddit the company but I still find some subs super interesting and useful. Remember, this has nothing to do with Reddit the company it self. Reddit the company it self is absolute garbage. The idea that they feel entitled enough to tell people who made the bulk of it what they should want (new design, block mobile browse, push app, and now ban download bots) is a comical.
People who work for reddit are wasting their talents, that is if they have any. I'm sure engineering wise there are talented people there, but business/design wise I'm almost certain that their value is abysmal. Reddit management is just a combination of entitled, dumb, and inexperienced.
Reddit's end is going to be like another 9gag site. At least 9gag acknowledges what they really are, but Reddit pretends as if they're fucking archive.org while they're 4chan's inferior brother but they just don't know it.
Seriously, trash company. Reddit the company and their management/strategy/design team should be a case taught in class. An exemplary case for Garbage-zero-valued-high-horse tech companies.