This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
I’m a bit late, but it can be bypassed by using old reddit.
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don’t bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie’s stream…
This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.
Future incidents probably will still happen
It’s not a question of if, but when. The only secure computer is one that’s a mile underground, encased in concrete, and with no network connection.
And even then, it’s still not a 100% safe bet.
The most secure computer is one that’s turned off.
It wasn’t that uncomfortable anyway, just go into another instance.
This right here is a big deal. Even if an instance goes down or gets attacked, the easy choice is to just browse from another instance till it is back up.
I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao
I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.
We’re kinda get vaccinated for the future with all this stress testing
The spice must flow
He who controls the memes controls the universe
It does help when your opponents are stupid
There were weekend ddos attacks?
lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance
Lemmy.ml also apparently went down for some amount of time.
Also blahaj or something
I think that was due to an update, not an attack.
Well there’s your problem right there
Don’t hate us cuz you ain’t us reddibros.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.
What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.
But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
But we’ll see I suppose.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.
New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.
I completely agree. I hope Lemmy will steadily add features.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you’ll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It’s much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it’s in beta, for those reading who haven’t used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn’t come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something
Here’s a screenshot from Discord:
Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it’s not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.
For example, you can’t rotate your app UI if you’re not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.
Not saying you’re wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn’t on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.
This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it’s not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.
As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.
This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to track you down. It’s probably just for crash reporting etc.
Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.
A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.
Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I’m sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn’t mean that they’re using it to track you.
Certainly not all scary. I don’t work with these that collect the data but wonder if it isn’t just some deviceData.collect() function or something.
Device boot time could be used for a user that clears their cookies to track and match sessions. Using that, and matching it with other information could give very reliable ways to fingerprint users.
Christ.
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.
I don’t have specific info on what’s harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I’m at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It’s absolutely wild.
Edited to add - they don’t specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.
Yeah, don’t be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.
Some apps won’t work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.
Examples: I turned on the duckduckgo protection, opened the official app and visited a couple posts.
https://files.catbox.moe/sqbg87.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/nj7y8d.jpg
Thank you! I can’t believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That’s so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.
I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.
Yea its pure insanity and greed. This is just one of many examples of why I have dual piholes on top of ad blocking extensions.
How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android’s app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?
When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can’t actually phone home.
The Mozilla VPN app has a feature to block some ads and trackers on your internet connection. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features
Just search TrackerControl on the Fdroid store.
Just wish duck duck go had PWA support. It would be my default browser if so.
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Centralized control and ad based model ensures this always happens… Cable teevee, now web2.0…
About time the pleb base start thinking bigger picture and voting with their feet and wallets.
What is the alternative to web 2.0?
fediverse… you are here
I always hated that crypto shit stole the name web3/web3.0. I think for a short period it seemed decentralized apps were calling themselves web3.0 but now it’s just the fediverse I think. I like calling it the true web because the fediverse is very much like the old days where we had niche sites with their own communities, it’s just that the content isn’t locked into each site and we don’t need a million different forum accounts to participate everywhere. Like the old days but supercharged with new tech.
What is web 2.0?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.
Someone misspelled “predatory” at the start of that paragraph.
The emergence of every website being gated, requiring an account and sla subscription. Also the rise of rediculous personalized advertisements and user tracking.
We can go back to old HTML4 and CSS1 websites without any JS. What a sight to behold
apace? I’d say it’s breaking new speed records
Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
The removal of old reddit?
Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?
Buy upvotes?
The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn’t count when there is actual factual evidence.
He’s just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it’s paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.
No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it’s a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative…
One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.
His Royal Doucheness
I prefer King Steven the Turd…
I read this as Stephen King and became very confused
I’m now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I’m in a happy place.
Still go to reddit sometimes. It’s night and day compared to here. Everything on reddit is rage bait in one form or another.
I go to reddit for porn and that is it.
Make an account on lemmynsfw.com
It’s just as good as reddits porn
I’m gunning hard for Lenny, but let’s be honest with ourselves, ok?
It absolutely isn’t. Not yet. In both quality and quantity, we’re still lagging way behind, especially for niche or non-straight content.
Reddit is still the best place for Sounding… As a friend has told me
Not enough Widowmaker lewds on Lemmy yet to ditch Reddit unfortunately.
Lemmy very unfortunately doesn’t have either the breadth or depth or Reddit porn yet. If it does get there it won’t be for years yet.
That’s wild to me. I’ve been on Reddit for 17 years. And porn is not something I thought was such a huge point. Mothers same goes for this place. The platform just doesn’t seem to lend to that type of consumption. But never less, porns a huge part.
Same but I still follow comicbook creators and comedians on twitter.
I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped
I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC
I’d guess it does the news website thing. Scroll down and get meet with a create account blocking barrier.
Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like “If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit’s policies? Try c/[email protected]” and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We’re growing still but it’s not like I’m seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.
”…I’m not seeing much Lemmy mentions….”
This is working as intended as Reddit is actively suppressing and shadowbanning any comment or post that mentions Lemmy or hyperlinks
Ah, trying to stop the Exodus by any means necessary. Lol. Time to find a good thread to get my old account banned on then!
F /u/spez is only following Twitter who’ve already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.
I’m not saying that isn’t happening but it must be happening selectively because the small niche subreddit I moderate still has the post up where I announced and linked to the Lemmy community I made. I just went to the subreddit in my browser while logged out to verify that it’s not in the shadows, but I could see it.
Yeah, it should be obvious that you won’t have much success using Reddit as a platform to direct users away from Reddit. They’ve made it pretty clear by now that they aren’t free or open. Makes me wonder what other topics they’ve done this more subtlety for, or will do in the future.
If you want to direct people to Reddit alternatives, you’ll probably have the most luck on platforms that aren’t Reddit.
Though I do wonder if Twitter and the meta platforms will also block it, since they are competing with the fediverse as well (though meta in a EEE kinda sense, so they’d need to walk a finer line since they are supposed to be embracing right now).
YouTube might be a place to do it.
Enshittification continues…
Remember, corporations are never your friend. I remember when redditors thought spez was “one of them”.
They’re doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it’s been shocking decision after terrible change
Let’s dump Reddit for ever for good.
all to sell some ads
All to make the company look like it has revenue so they can scam people on their IPO
sigh :(
Isn’t the stated reason to prevent AI scraping? As much as I dislike them both, given how these LLMs like ChatGPT work it actually seems reasonable.
eh I feel that excuse is bullshit - a scrape is the same as a web view. ai doesn’t need to scan the same content more than once. reeks of b/s to me
The content continues to change. When I have a specific programming question they don’t help me figure things out based on the documentation alone. Seeing discussion about such topics definitely helps it as knowledge continues to evolve.
Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.
The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣
But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.
