deminature

Getting rid of moderators turns reddit into 4chan. If you want that, fine, but there's already a website for unfiltered hate speech and spam.

Depending on the outcome of the AMA with spez tomorrow [1], and how much it ends up inflaming the situation, that may well happen.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/144ho2x/join_our_ce...

Pissing off the people doing thankless free labor to keep your subreddits moderated and site functional seems like a poor choice. This is going to be quite an event when it kicks off Monday.

Steve appears to have assumed there is no recording, so he can represent the conversation dishonestly. Unfortunately, there is a recording, so we can all hear that it wasn't a threat and that the reddit representative admitted that on the call. The optics of ineptly smearing Christian look terrible for Reddit management.

Yes it does request location, it says in the image I linked above. Advertising identifiers are declined roughly 20% of the time according to Adjust:

>In iOS 10, Apple introduced "Limit Ad Tracking" setting for users who do not wish to be tracked by advertising networks. If the setting is enabled the system returns a default all-zero id for that device. As of December 2020, it's estimated that approximately 20% of users turn on this setting.

Of course they can track you to some degree either way, however the official app is using an IDFA (advertising identifier) [1] whereas Apollo is not, which makes tracking in the official app significantly easier.

The official app is also hoovering up other deanonymizing data like user location, which helps narrow down ad targeting even further. It's obvious why Reddit prefers you use their official app instead of a third-party alternative.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identifier_for_Advertisers

The iOS privacy permissions are different between the official app and Apollo:

- Official app https://i.imgur.com/fjgKlVo.png, see 'Data used to track you'

- Apollo app https://i.imgur.com/icykgJP.png, see 'Data not used to track you'

3rd party apps do not track users, which is a problem for an advertising-based business like Reddit.

The official app collects far more data points to identify users for ad targeting than the third party clients do (check the permissions asked). They may have decided there's no way to effectively monetize third-party app users to the levelling of targeting that their ad platform requires, so these users will always be a cost center instead of a profit center.

Then again these users are likely to disproportionately be posters and commenters, the people who create free content that keeps the broader userbase engaged, or are moderators keeping the site running for zero compensation, so pissing them off seems ill advised.

Based on this thread [1], where an admin accuses 3rd party apps of being inefficient API consumers but refuses to explain why, it's clear Reddit just wants these apps gone and isn't interested in whether anyone is alienated or upset by it.

The looming IPO and showing as positive user monetization numbers as possible is undoubtedly the motivation for this, unfortunately goodwill with the userbase that has taken years to build is getting trashed in the process.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/13wsiks/api_upda...

5$/month for premium is fair to remove ads, Youtube has a similar but more expensive option in their app. Removing the ability to use third-party clients altogether is dumb.

I doubt the reason is morality, it's to hamstring 3rd party apps so they are baseline inferior to the official client. It's sabotaging the competition so anyone seeking a 'full' reddit experience is forced to use the official client, regardless of whether it is the best app or not.

The answer here is for reddit to make an actually good app and win the market back by simply being the better alternative. The fact that they've decided they can't compete with apps written by individual developers and need to resort to crushing them by fiat is sad and ridiculous, especially for those individual developers who have painstakingly carved out their niche over years.

Presuming they cannot make better software, surely the answer is inserting ads in the API feeds instead of destroying the 3rd party ecosystem entirely (and potentially losing thousands-millions of users)?

The SEC has made it clear which parts of securities law Coinbase is violating in a Wells notice issued in March https://assets.ctfassets.net/c5bd0wqjc7v0/6G5AjtDvRqRdiwlijK....

It's not reasonable - the SEC has already provided clarity on crypto to Coinbase however they don't like the answer, because the answer potentially involves them being regulated out of existence.

Being 'sherlocked' [1] is a time-honored tradition of 3rd party devs getting their lunch eaten by Apple. Anyone publishing an app knows they can be put out of business without notice if Apple likes your idea too much.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/13/all-the-things-apple-sherl...

Fair enough, in that case this is Digg v4 levels of arrogance. Tons of moderators depend on 3rd party apps to moderate [1]. These people are providing free labor on an industrial scale to reddit and it might be wise not to frustrate their work.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_r...

I'm trying to take the most charitable interpretation possible instead of assuming malice on the part of reddit, but it's difficult to interpret it any other way than they have decided to kill 3rd party clients and not be upfront about their intentions.

It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.

3rd party reddit apps rival reddit's own app in terms of popularity, and will be significantly hamstrung by these changes if NSFW content can only be accessed in the official app. Lots of non-porn content is marked NSFW. It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.

VS Code has a quasi-IDE implemented for a bunch of popular languages including a debugger [1]. Sublime is a straight text editor, with limited debugging capability. Sheer usefulness beats performance, so VS Code won the editor war.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/debugging

VS Code is a great success of Electron-based apps but also has massive memory usage and performance bloat that comes with this style of app, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19144039

Sublime Text is implemented natively (C++) and uses a fraction of the resources to accomplish similar functionality. I know we live in a period of plentiful system resources where RAM usage no longer practically matters, but using 1.5GB RAM for a few files open seems insane, even more so that this is now normalized.

Maybe unpopular opinion but PWAs generally just suck compared to their native counterparts. There's always something perceptibly 'wrong' that makes them an inferior user experience, even if only marginally so. I worked on PWAs for a while and users complained endlessly even if they can't articulate exactly why.

Technologists are enticed by the cost and development time savings of PWAs over native, but users resent the diminished user experience that almost always comes with it and repay you with poor ratings/reviews.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35449473

Apple's App Store has a specific rule that excludes many PWAs from being approved, you may have a tough time convincing a reviewer that it should be allowed on the store https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#min...

Years of experience

Still dead as a doornail, despite misleadingly now being labelled as a 'partial outage'.

And yet despite these numbers, somehow the most prominent open source software is relentlessly impersonated and Google is the facilitator, FTA: https://twitter.com/wdormann/status/1616497407390355456

It's clear this will never be prioritized without regulation as scammers money is as good as anyone else's and open source projects cannot afford to sue Google to force action.

This is not some impossibly intractable algorithmic problem to solve. Simply actioning malware reports on the ad would be sufficient. If an ad receives hundreds of reports over the course of months, there's problem something wrong with it and should trigger a human review, at which point the malicious intent of the ad is obvious. Why include a report button on ads at all if its effectively a placebo button?

I'm not talking about advertising on someone else's brand, I'm talking about advertising AS someone else's brand, or malicious impersonation. The most basic vetting of advertising would catch this, but apparently this is not occurring.

Why are they accepting ads for a product from anyone but the verified maker of the product in the first place? Surely there's budget in that river of ad money to do the most basic due diligence?

They've allowed a prominent malware ad to appear on any search results for Blender for months despite numerous reports. They're not taking action on these bad actors.

https://old.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/105tht4/be_aware_o...

The W6800X Duo was released in the Mac Pro update in December 2019 [1] and is long overdue for a refresh. If anything it's impressive a card from 2019 is still competitive with top tier cards released in late 2022.

[1] https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro