joecot

> Having a tombstone on Reddit pointing people towards a specific instance is good but it’s still hard to be the definitive community when the namespace isn’t as restricted any more. Maybe that’s better?

I don't think that's much different than reddit itself tbh. So many subreddits splinter into "Foo"/"TrueFoo"/"TrollFoo"/"Foojerk" etc as it is, as groups have fights and run off. Often the original "Foo" is dead, with no tombstone marker to the real active subreddit. Lemmy and kbin will involve a lot of the same, with just different instances with their own "Foo" instead of "xxFooXX".

I've been very much hoping that Apollo and the rest just pivot to being amazing Lemmy/kbin clients, with multiple instances pre-configured to use. That would be the biggest coup of all. Which is exactly what I thought had happened when I saw a title of "Apollo Remastered".

'Oh, you're going to price us all out? You don't care about third party client users? That's fine, I guess you won't care if hundreds of thousands of users suddenly have a client for a different site installed when they go to open reddit.'

Romans didn't consider opium an addiction as much as a medicine. Same as many of the drugs we now consider illicit. Marcus Aurelius was taking opium every day for "stomach issues" (krohns or similar perhaps?) and "nerves".

As an aside, when I see people beat themselves up for not being able to face their struggles with the stoic reflection of Marcus Aurelius, I want to remind them that unlike them, Mr Aurelius was extremely wealthy, one of the most powerful men in the world, and absolutely blasted on opium for most of his day.

So to be clear: you're fine with all the moderators leaving, but you don't want to moderate, but you also don't want there to be no moderation. You would like an arbitrarily "good" moderation you agree with completely, from someone else. Fantastic. Online community in a nutshell.

I think the general reddit community underestimates how important moderation is. Yes, you have some moderators who go overboard, push a personal agenda on something that's supposed to be a neutral subreddit, etc. But subreddits without active moderation very quickly (in order of increasing tragedy) lose their focus, get overtaken by spam, or become hangouts for Nazis. reddit closes unmoderated subs for a reason.

Also a large chunk of the people who complain about moderators are actually upset that moderators stop their subreddits from being overtaken by Nazis. If you want completely unmoderated anonymous public discourse, go to 4Chan and see how it goes there. Though even that is moderated.

The problem is that reddit's entire system depends on unpaid labor from volunteer moderators. And they just pissed a lot of those moderators off.

Yeah, reddit can reopen those subreddits if they want to and kick the mods. But who are they going to get to moderate it? They can't afford to hire staff to moderate themselves, reddit is already unprofitable. Are they going to do an application process for scab mods? That will be an extremely unpopular fiasco.

The end result is either reddit capitulating, or becoming an absolute shell of its former self. Most likely they will compromise, charging third party apps for API access but an amount that is feasible. That is capitulation, because the entire point was to kill the third party apps entirely. There's a reason that all their compromises so far revolve around still supporting the third party moderation and accessibility tools. They want the moderators, they need the moderators, they very much want to be done with third party clients.

Correct. In general it's a good capitalist scheme. Start with a mostly open platform, court third parties into making tools that make it significantly better, get your user base. Then kill the third parties to consolidate power.

It worked for Facebook. It worked for Google Chat. It's failing for Twitter, and for reddit, for the same reasons. They did it too quickly and without the finesse needed to prevent a revolt. Instead of cranking the pricing, they needed to do what Facebook and Google did -- slowly degrade the integration system until it was unusable, start restricting features, add features incompatible with third parties, etc, until the third parties all give up and the API dies a seemingly natural death. reddit just doesn't have the foresight or planning to pull off most plans, including nefarious ones.

But it didn't work for Gmail. Despite Google's best efforts, email still exists outside Google. If we want to avoid playing this Fark->Digg->Reddit game again, we need an open standard that doesn't rely on a single company, like email.

Because it hasn't worked before. They bought Alien Blue, made it the official app, failed to iterate on it, and eventually gave up on it. Now they've made a new reddit app, which is also not good. No reddit official app is going to look good compared to the the third party ones, partly because their profit making attempts are at odds with good user experience, and if they buy the third party ones they've already shown they can't improve them. So they want the comparison to go away so reddit stops being embarrassed by third parties.

Which is the real reason that reddit is killing both the third party apps and the mobile site. Same reason that Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok make the mobile site as painful as possible. If you're using a website in a browser, the user has control. If you're using their app, the company has control.

> Starting high, creating a lot of negative reactions and almost killing any real market for profitable apps on your platform seems to be the opposite of smart

It's really dumb if the point is to keep all the third party applications that made your platform popular. It's much smarter if the point is to kill them all in favor of your first party app, that you are promising your VC investors will have tremendous growth leading up to an IPO, and you don't want your site to look like the bad guy by killing all the third party apps.

They just handled it poorly. If the reddit app actually had the moderation tools they've been promising for years, I doubt the moderator outcry would be anywhere near this bad.

And if you watch you'll notice, even during the blackout, reddit's messaging is all about the things you can still do besides use the third party apps. They're making the API still free for moderation bots. They're working with apps that provide accessibility tools for reddit. They're working with the services moderators use for moderation. They're appealing to the moderators. They've made no mentions of working with: Apollo, BaconReader, or RedditIsFun. The point was to kill the third party apps.

I agree that taking the subs private for 48 hours is a good first step. And I agree that subs staying private indefinitely is a good next step.

But if neither make headway, just going unmoderated is the logical next step. Yeah, reddit could take over moderating the subreddits. They can also do that if they're set private. But they don't want to. They outsourced that to volunteer moderators so they could get free labor. If they want to run their own moderation, and submit their own content, the reddit corporation can have fun with that.

A better protest would have been for the moderators to all stop moderating. Turn off their automod filters, allow all posts. Show reddit what happens when their volunteer moderators just stop.

That's if the bot is coded well. I've cut off bots from sites and services before, only to have them start to DOS because their response to an error was to just try again, immediately and forever

If the point was to be profitable, I would get it. But that's not the point. The point is to lock down their users into their app so they have a more solid looking IPO. But the guy planning the IPO is repeatedly saying that reddit isn't profitable.

If they wanted to make money, they could've charged an amount for the API that covered their costs and made them a profit. Or they could've required the apps to show their ads. Or they could've said that the free API access is now only for reddit gold subscribers. They're instead charging an amount for the API that clearly no app can afford, not negotiating at all, and locking nsfw content out of the API (it's already locked out of the mobile site).

The point is to lock down the users. Not profit, at least not right now.

I think it's moreso that we need stronger decentralized options to be adopted. Google embraced both email with Gmail and jabber with Google talk. With Google talk they eventually reached a high enough usage rate that they closed it off, and effectively killed jabber, because there wasn't a large other service using it. With email though, they couldn't do that. They've slowly made it harder to interact with Gmail from outside Gmail. But email lives and can't be locked down.

I think the protocol needs some work, but I think ActivityPub and the fediverse, with Mastodon and Lemmy and the like, are the way forward. Centralized sites will always have this problem, because they spend VC money for growth, and eventually those investors expect their money back. If a site is just one part of a large ecosystem, investors can't push the site to close off like this for a profit and control.

Since it was a read-only api, I'm assuming they used the readily available json endpoints that require no authentication. reddit blocked it in any of the ways you can block a good faith actor -- by user agent or IP address.

The point is to kill third party applications. Social media companies watched Facebook do it with little outrage, and quite a bit of upside -- they completely control the user experience, all by squeezing out 3rd parties slowly and without fanfare. Twitter and reddit want to benefit from that as well, but don't have the political savvy to pull it off without protest. But the goal is the same, complete control of the user base and how they access the site. API access is a tenet of Web 2.0 up until a company realizes it's more lucrative to lock their users in harder.

The initial plan was 2 days. Then Spez did his AMA where it was clear they were not interested in compromising, not planning to change anything, even seeing the enormous protest forming.

So while some subreddits are still planning on 2 days, a growing number of them are going dark indefinitely until reddit rolls back this plan.

Making some amount of profit on it isn't enough. They want to lock down the user experience.

Same reason Google started Google Talk with Jabber, then closed off their ecosystem. Same reason Facebook embraced third party apps, then shut them all down. Same reason Twitter is locking down their API currently. At a certain size companies want to decide the user experience without outside interference, and they don't want to share.

If you read reddit on BaconReader or a similar app, when you pull up the app you will see 10 posts from subreddits you subscribed to. If you pull up the reddit app, you will see 2 posts, 2 ads, and 2 suggested posts you don't care about. Even if reddit charges for the API, the existence of these alternate clients that work way better makes reddit look greedy and bad, like they don't care about their users' experience. So they wanted to kill those alternative methods of using the site. In the process, they look extremely greedy and bad, and like they really don't care about their users' experience. Yet Facebook went through the same process, and they mostly kept their users. And shutting off the 3rd party systems meant they got to decide the entire user experience without having to compromise with anyone.

They might end up backtracking because of the boycott, and charge a reasonable amount for the API to make a profit. That would allow the 3rd party apps to keep running while not losing money on them. But that is the compromise. The goal was to kill the apps.

reddit wants to kill the third party apps, straight up. Third party apps hurt reddit's ad revenue. The mobile website hurts reddit's ad revenue.

Given that listing, I expect he talks about how they resolved all the other issues that were brought up with their API changes -- accessibility, mod tools, etc. They're going to work to not cause problems for those use cases. But they want to kill the third party apps, and it doesn't sound like they're budging on it.

That's the thing. A privately owned company can keep its morals if it has them, because the owners don't answer to anyone else. But as soon as a company accepts Venture Capital funding, or goes public, morals go out the window. The original owners no longer have control, and can't decide what the goal of the company is anymore. The goal is now to make money in whatever method is possible.

Remember this whenever you see founders say that they didn't betray their original agreements. They betrayed those agreements as soon as they accepted VC funding or public trading, because that's when they agreed to lose control of the direction of the company.

It's all the consumers' fault, except for the part where the bank leadership was making exceptionally risky investments, and also actively and successfully lobbied to be allowed to work around reserve rules designed to explicitly keep this from happening.

Pumping government money into private markets always works this way.

A good example of this is the TV digital converter boxes, when we switched the airwaves from analog to digital. Those boxes were only 10 or 15 bucks or so. But then the government gave everyone vouchers for 40 bucks for a converter box. So, guess what? All the converter boxes were 40 bucks, or more. Because they could be. It was free money. The money would've been far better used by the government just giving the converter boxes directly.

The same reason Russia invaded Ukraine even though it made no sense. The same reason Republicans put up Trump even though it made no sense. If you have 0 morals, you can gain a lot of power by riling up your base with empty promises of nationalist glory. But eventually your base expects you put up or shut up, even if it doesn't or never has made sense.

Is there maybe a linter you can use with C and then use as a required status check on merge requests in GitHub / Gitlab?

Stand up comedy with bad unfunny jokes, and situational comedy that is just people talking about their day, with an ill timed laugh track thrown in occasionally. I don't know if it's as funny as Seinfeld, but it seems at least more coherent and funny than Big Bang Theory

The difference is that there's no reason to keep the expensive 4k account.

The Premium plan is 4k streaming, and up to 4 devices. But now they want to keep those two features bundled, while limiting your ability to stream to 4 devices (because now they'll all need to be in the same house). Sharing my account was my reason to suck that up and pay 20 bucks a month for 4k streaming.

Now only I can watch it, or in OP comment's case only his mom can watch it, so there's no reason to not just switch to the basic plan with 720p for 10 bucks a month. Point is, there will be cancellations, but also a ton of people halving their subscription cost. It's going to hurt Netflix on both ends.

If we limit it to people who are using non-prescription drugs, without judgement, this will be the Game Changer they describe. First Heroin, but now cocaine, and even black market cannabis, are being tainted with fentanyl. For that set of people, stopping an accidental poisoning is much more important than potential complications with pain medication later.

They're specifically targeting Critical Role. It's a serial youtube and twitch series of professional voice actors playing D&D together, with Matt Mercer as the DM. They've been running since 2015, and they're massively popular. Millions of people watch who never play D&D, but also many more people started playing D&D because of the show. It's had such an effect that some long time players complain that newer players expect the game to be like it's on the TV show and they can't agree on playstyle anymore.

But the point is, Critical Role is a behemoth in the RPG space now, and while their popularity helped massively increase D&D's popularity, they're also making buckets of money. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro get none of that money, though they certainly gained more revenue from the free advertising of their game. Hasbro got greedy. This entire gambit was about coming for some of that money, not really about other publishers at all. And that gambit backfired massively, and drove tons of creators and fans to other games.