> However, the Internet Archive expanded its library project during the covid-19 pandemic. It launched the National Emergency Library, allowing an unlimited number of people to access the same copies of ebooks. That’s when the publishers banded together to file the lawsuit, targeting both online libraries.
The digital copy could be checked out by many people at the same time.
One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has really nosedived over the last decade. There are too many spammy merchants in the marketplace now. You cannot just trust the name or description - you need to look at the reviews (or other websites) these days before you feel confident about your purchase.
It’s a classic case of mismatched incentives - the Retail org is just focused on increasing sellers and listings because they have reviews to bail them out, but Devices really need quality results which Retail is not motivated to provide. Their recent focus on mimicking Temu and Shein is only going to make things worse.
>> One other reason is that the quality of Amazon listings has really nosedived over the last decade.
I stopped using Amazon years ago when I had four purchases of completely different and random items all turned up to be counterfeit. One was a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, the other was a pair of Lucky brand jeans, the other was a pair of Ski goggles and the last thing was a Topo Designs backpack.
I've also noticed that when I came back looking for something simple like a charging block for a new phone, I had pages and pages of Chinese merchants who all had similar looking products but just different brand names stamped on them.
But I agree with everything you're saying, its not just logging on, finding what you need and ordering something. It takes ungodly amounts of due diligence to make sure what you're buying is a) a legit product and b) its not some suspect seller that's paying people to write fake reviews.
There's a video on YouTube of some guy gathering pee bottles discarded by Amazon drivers/contractors, created a fake drink, and got it listed on Amazon to the top spot.
It's currently a DOS by the crashing component, so it's already broken the Availability part of Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability that defines the goals of security.
But a loss of availability is so much more palatable than the others, plus the others often result in manually restricting availability anyway when discovered.
I think the wider societal impact from the loss of availability today - particularly for those in healthcare settings - might suggest this isn't always the case
What is the importance of data integrity? If important pre-op data/instructions are missing or gets saved on the wrong patient record which causes botched surgeries, if there are misprescribed post-op medications, if there is huge confusion and delays in critical follow-up surgeries because of a 100% available system that messed up patient data across hospitals nationwide, if there are malpractice lawsuits putting entire hospitals out of business etc etc, then is that fallout clearly worth having an available system in the first place?
Huh? We're talking about hypotheticals here. You're saying availability is clearly more important than data integrity. I'm saying that if a buggy kernel loadable module allowed systems to keep on running as if nothing was wrong, but actually caused data integrity problems while the system is running, that's just as bad or worse.
If Linux and Windows have similar architectural flaws, Microsoft must have some massive execution problems. They are getting embarrassed in QA by a bunch of hobbyists, lol.
If you're planning around bugs in security modules, you're better off disabling them - malware routinely use bugs in drivers to escalate, so the bug you're allowing can make the escalation vector even more powerful as now it gets to Ring 0 early loading.
Isn't DoSing your own OS an attack vector? and a worse one when it's used in critical infrastructure where lives are at stake.
There is a reasonable balance to strike, sometimes it's not a good idea to go to extreme measures to prevent unlikely intrusion vectors due to the non-monetary costs.
In the absence of a Crowdstrike bug, if an attacker is able to cause Crowdstrike to trigger a bluescreen, I assume the attacker would be able to trigger a bluescreen in some other way. So I don't think this is a good argument for removing the check.
That assumes it's more likely than crowdstrike mass bricking all of these computers... this is the balance, it's not about possibility, it's about probability.
iOS already supports OTP, it’s just buried in Settings > Passwords > Set up verification code. Once you do that, it’s seamless - it autofills in all my site and works beautifully in chrome/edge/firefox even in my PCs
There are plenty of reports about how Tesla has made this difficult. Tesla parts are difficult to obtain even for Tesla’s own service centers: there are frequent months-long waits. “Certified” non-Tesla shops get parts at a lower priority, non-certified shops simply cannot order most parts (just basic stuff like bumpers)
We're quickly entering a world where car manufacturers are trying to extract profit from subscriptions (see: BMW heated seats, Toyota remote start, Ford BlueCruise, etc). On top of that, most cars are now shipping with an encrypted CAN bus, which lands us right back in the same "trusted computing" quagmire as every other consumer electronic device.
Framework is great, but their existence doesn't change the harmful antirepair practice of other companies. Similarly, the ratio of servicable cars on the road won't change the fact that offering less service is cheaper, and forcing first-party repair can even be profitable.
> their existence doesn't change the harmful antirepair practice of other companies
Their existence doesn't but their success does. If and when Framework becomes large enough to steal a significant portion of marketshare from less repair friendly companies, they will adapt or die.
I wish you were right, but historically I don't think anything suggests a change. There has always been a market for repairable and rugged laptops, but their market share loses out to expensive and easily replaceable machines. Skimping on repairability lets you focus on some other feature that you can market instead, which will almost always seem sexier than "the topcase costs less than $500 to replace".
There are success stories here; IBM and Panasonic didn't struggle to find customers for the Thinkpad and Toughbook respectively. But the market was never forced to "adapt or die" as you put it; in fact, the rugged and repairable machines were now the ones that had to adapt. How can you compete against a monopoly on repair pricing?
Interesting, I've seen people using tesla drive motors in electric conversions, so maybe that's easier if they're controlled by some 3rd party hardware, because you're just fighting the motor not the whole car as a system.
> Privacy taken too far, however, can lead to bad outcomes. To mitigate the potential of Code being used for nefarious activity, Code users are limited to $250 USD per payment, up to $1000 USD per day.
This is a joke. Everything seems to be designed around their proprietary app, so why bother with a blockchain and custom currency at all?
The substance is causing the anti-social behavior though, it’s putting people in a state where they’re not able to control their behavior or reason rationally about how it affects them and the people around them. In such a situation, you cannot just focus on the outcomes, you need to control the inputs as well.
Their pricing is just absurd. Reddit's official app and webpage is garbage, and instead of working with amazing developers like Christian to add whatever functionality they need to increase their revenue, they're doubling down on bad decisions and alienating their users. Pure hubris... they've forgotten their own history and why the Digg exodus happened.
Seriously, _what_ are they gaining by eliminating access to third-party clients? If they want usage data, they already have all the API calls. If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US. Which is honestly kind of stunning. Reddit is presumably much less than that, but they might be reasonably gunning for a number better than Pinterest, with an ARPU of ~$1.50[1].
To put the pricing post into the same context, we're talking $7.50 per Apollo user/quarter, which is closer to what Facebook makes per user than Pinterest.
That said, presumably 3rd party client users are especially active and would skew higher ARPU than the average Redditor, and it wouldn't surprise me if they were more likely to live in developed countries.
I dunno. I started running the numbers expecting to be outraged, but the cost doesn't seem crazy far from what Reddit could conceivably hope to earn off these users. I doubt Reddit is monetizing anywhere near that well right now, but if they're pricing the API in a forward-looking way, rather than planning to ratchet it up every quarter inline with monetization efforts, it could make sense.
> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
My first though was that maybe 1% of users buy something in a given year, but that's $24k to acquire a customer and is so far from reality that my perspective must be way off.
>> Facebook's average revenue per user (ARPU) is ~$10/quarter[0], and 6x that in the US.
> Can someone explain this to me? Why is it so high? Even if every single person on Facebook buys a product because of ads once per year, doesn't that mean companies are paying $240 to acquire a customer in the US? Is it worth that?
1. I wouldn't be surprised if lots of businesses lose money on their Facebook ads, but either don't realize it or Facebook has enough churn that it doesn't matter if the quit (e.g. a revolving door of unsophisticated local businesses spending money on Facebook because it's the biggest game in town).
2. A lot of advertising is broad "brand awareness," and I imagine it's actually very hard to determine if it's actually working in many cases.
Not quite $240, but Netflix apparently spends about $100 for customer acquisition [1] (data is a few years old). I imagine the other streaming sites have similar unit economics.
In consumer finance, CACs are even higher. For standard credit cards it’s around $200 but can be over $1000 for premium cards.
Our CAC is higher than $240. Lots of services are. When you start thinking about a customer being worth multiples of their revenue (not even profit) it makes a lot of sense.
Also, online advertising can lead to in store sales. When you look at those dollars people spend a couple orders of magnitude more than $240 on stuff every year.
Meta's reach is gigantic, their data is detailed and expansive. You're actually paying less on average when spending on Meta platforms than you are elsewhere, and likely getting more back. This is why companies are comfortable with throwing an ad campaign on Meta platforms just to get email signups, there was a blog on Shopify where a smaller company talked about spending $5000 for a newsletter ad, and per new subscriber they only spent $1.50 on the ad campaign. Even though technically they've really lost money on such a situation, they feel comfortable doing it again on calculations for future revenue.
The most successful marketing campaign of all time is the marketing team convincing everyone that marketing works.
Of course the money is all being spaffed for nothing. It doesn’t take a degree in applied ecosystem analysis from Aberyswyth Technical College to figure out that Coke spending 50m on a christmas campaign doesn’t sell anymore Coke.
A another way to estimate how many conversions is looking at the average price, at average conversion rates. Right now average cost for 1000 impressions is about $10 based on revealbot, for the US. If the conversion rate was 0.1%, $240 a year revenue per user means 24 conversions per year, that the average US facebook user is buying two products per month. 0.1% is on the low end
I would doubt it. There aren't going to be many companies publicly discussing their CACs, and if it did exist what would someone do with the information?
My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10/mo) there is an equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please users who simply want to pay nothing.
Reddit doesn't supply a valuable service. They basically just ran and squatted on the concept of "internet forum" and used VC/network effects to bully almost all the normal forums into (temporary) nonexistence.
Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more
Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a software package you acquire and run on your own servers. No one really asked for a centralized system where you didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward to go back to that original idea.
They don't really offer a service, though. They just built a toll gate and tricked people into needing to cross through it. An ever-increasingly annoying, crappy toll gate at that.
Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.
Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities
I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits size without subreddits, or the like.
I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.
Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by any measure, but I do see them as the most serious competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out on the more focused subreddits.
I had the same thoughts, that Reddit's reasons must stem from opportunity cost.
The Apollo developer does however address this in his post and he claims that Reddit's ARPU is only $0.36/quarter. Reddit has likely been doubling down their efforts on Ad Targeting, etc and perhaps forecasts much higher.
Christian's reddit post only addresses ads though, but Reddit has been trying to diversify and create multiple products and revenue streams. They have gold for purchase and if I recall they were trying to launch some Clubhouse-esque product. Point is, it's hard to push any of these things if so many users are on 3rd party clients that don't support such features.
Cool, that assumes those users will continue to use Reddit after the third party apps have been killed.
For me, I don’t think that will be the case. I almost exclusively use Reddit on mobile though Apollo and Reddit’s own app is absolutely garbage (unpleasant to use and heating up my phone burning through the battery).
I used to pay for Reddit premium, but I stopped after realising that Reddit wasn’t providing me a better experience for it.
> If they want more ads, they can change the APIs to inject them.
Reddit wants freedom to arbitrarily change the design of their app and placement of ads, etc. Ads are a huge (primary?) source of revenue for them.
If they are tethered to supporting third party clients, it's harder to make reasonable estimates of how many captive users will see ads or new features.
Reddit could enforce ad presentation in third party clients, but to appease advertisers Reddit has to make guarantees around visibility. It's not enough to check if third parties are calling the correct API, they will actually need to regularly audit all third party clients.
It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views
Except that's not what Reddit is doing here. They're charging 3rd party clients ~21X what they lose in ad views, pricing them completely out of the market.
This is a story practically as old as the internet at this point. Grow with open API and third party client ecosystem, but ultimately shut the hatches and revert to single in-house client stacks to maximize control of the user experience and advertising opportunities. Mainly the 2nd part.
To look to the Twitter example, even when I used a third party Twitter client before Elon came onboard, old Twitter were regularly playing silly games with issuing auth tokens to third party clients, for all of the same reasons.
At this stage I view third party clients as nice to have for major free web service APIs, with the expectation one day it will probably stop working. Reddit doesn't owe anyone a public API, as much as I will miss third party clients (big Narwhal user here).
Maybe, but I'd still take the other side of this bet sadly. Is there any data on usage rates for third party Reddit clients? Anecdotally, I don't know anyone outside of tech who would even notice this change, really.
Reddit was the only thing that resembles social media I ever used. Was a long time RiF user, as I absolutely hated the default interface. Even moderated a couple of subreddits back in the day (although I sort of dropped Reddit in the past couple of years, so I may be out of the loop).
My fellow mods and all prominent users I interacted with (the vast majority of them not from tech as it was not a tech focused community) were all well aware of 3rd party clients, and many used them.
This is very anecdotal, but amongst Reddit more "intense" user base, I would be surprised if 3rd party client usage was low.
On Google Play I see 100M+ downloads of the official Reddit app. 5M+ downloads of Reddit is Fun, 1M+ each for Boost, Bacon, Sync, and Relay. Many more in the 100K+ range. Thats maybe 10% at most.
I wonder how many power users, heavy users, or content generating users use unofficial apps. The passive lurkers are great for ad revenue, but the people who comment make the site worth browsing.
Debatable - supporting a small number of users on the public API may be a legitimate technical debt issue, and a running cost as the API can't change without a lot of documentation, release planning to support all those third party stakeholders etc. Your future internal work has to remain compatible with legacy design choices if you don't want to shutdown/change the existing public end points - the list of issues has potential to be pretty big. Public APIs by their nature can't introduce major change too often without upsetting existing communities.
If the API is solely for your own consumption, this can be simpler, and of course third party clients are harder to monetize as the kinds of ads you can serve are going to be restricted to what you can force a third party client to receive and render.
If the number of users on third party clients is really low, all of the above can carry more weight in internal business case style discussions too.
Seems to me just better to entirely stop supporting the public api than to make the costs so ridiculously high. I mean then you're _still_ supporting it, yet you've basically scared almost all customers away. Charging a ridiculously high amount seems maybe like the worst approach of all.
I think you've probably described exactly whats happening - they do want to stop supporting the public API, but only for third party clients. There are other API access use cases they want to support. If the pricing kills third party clients but not the new use cases, that seems like a design choice to me.
They would instead rather charge far more money for data access for things like AI training etc, Twitter have also made similar changes to their own API to prioritize high bills for AI training use cases, not third party clients. That's at least how I see this change. The high pricing for these customers also removes the need to worry about the ad tech situation as is the case in the third party clients - you can just offer them an ad free feed at these prices for the training requirements.
I suspect the internal at Reddit desire to have less third party clients may well predate the AI discussion too, given almost all companies in this position eventually want to wind down those clients as history has shown again and again, for all of the reasons discussed in this thread.
A big claim like this requires a source and not handwavy estimates from the person who is impacted by this change (and upset for good reason!).
Otherwise I will ignore this claim because we simply don't know what ad revenue per user is, and we don't know what Reddit's projected future revenue per user is, which I would also expect to be covered by this pricing.
> It really isn't worth the time or effort if you can just charge third parties the cost to cover loss of ad views.
I really want to be the fly in the room looking at their grafana for monthly active users and see what happens to it in the coming months.
I’m someone with ADHD and obsessive behavior is kinda one of the main symptoms of it. I think with this change, it’s not going to be hard for someone like me to drop it.
I suspect that because of these changes, Reddit is also going to make it harder for search engines to index them - which is going to further reduce how useful Reddit is for information discovery.
This is going to hurt reddit, and I personally don’t think the growth is going to be as strong as it has been once they take these actions. Social media sites depend on their users, and arguably only a small portion of their users create content. And a smaller portion that than create useful content. Once you’ve pissed off and pushed away that small %, you’re not recovering.
I’m guessing this is some decisions made by MBAs who have learned some theoretical stuff, but don’t realize their courses haven’t really covered businesses like Reddit, Twitter, StackOverflow etc. They’re in for a rude awakening.
Remember that Tumblr effectively died once they made some decisions.
I feel like there's a major difference here. Services you mentioned never really had any third party clients, while Reddit has pretty much built itself upon them.
Yes. I don't see how this is a problem. It is their service which is subject to change at anytime. Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
Realistically, it was only a matter of time. Also predicted here: [0]
> Either make money and pay for access to the API or shutdown.
I agree. And I think people should also keep in mind that OSes also have APIs as well, and should be wary of systems that try to prevent user freedom.
Then again, I've been running Linux for ages now. And I don't have to worry about anti-user garbageware on a forced update coming my way, or updates that de-feature my system.
Why not let users bring their own keys? I wouldn't mind paying $2-3 to use Apollo. Apollo has to also pay 30% of their revenue to Apple so their subscription fee will be way higher and not feasible for most users.
This also seems like the most reasonable solution to me, the guy who is generally supportive of Reddit trying to make money.
But having worked on platforms like this, this solution opens up yet another support vector. A cost that works for the most potential buyers may not be high enough to actually pay for support requests.
That's a good point. Apollo does charge a one-time fee to create posts. They also have a subreddit so the community offers support. I think Apollo should pivot into a feed app that connects to Reddit, Twitter, RSS feeds, Substack, etc. and lets users bring their own keys.
There's an obvious solution here, which is to stop participating on platforms that are ad-funded. Charging user subscriptions and fees to businesses should be sufficient to cover costs. If it's not, maybe it shouldn't exist.
An obvious way to fund ad-free platforms is as a public good / utility.
Nowadays with the brain damage that has been inflicted by adtech social media over decades it is hard to imaging mass adoption of such a publicly funded outlet. People have become literally social media junkies. Unless you do a tiktok like race to the bottom you can't disrupt the incumbents.
But establishing the principle is important even if its a small audience. 2% of billions is still a large population. Just like public TV being typically of higher quality (where it exists) such platforms could be really interesting, worthwhile places.
If the experiment succeeds one can start thinking of introducing user fees and other funding mechanisms and eventually maybe restoring sanity and delegating the targeted adtech industry in the darkest corner of hell where it belongs.
I feel like this is Conway's Law at play. People would create high quality paid apps if the users that want to pay for them could find them, but if somebody makes something that's perfect for you, how do you discover that it even exists? The organizational structure of the web is the problem.
Google and social media platforms have shaped the web to be entirely advertisement driven. If they were capable of showing you things you wanted to buy, without the creators paying to be seen, they'd never make any money.
Almost anything you ever want to do, someone else has already done well, but despite that, it's hard to find snippets of code you can include in your projects. It's easier to just write it all yourself. If the usefulness of ChatGPT is an indicator of anything, it should be an indicator of how much is out there that you never get to see. The sad part is realizing that that's intentional.
Their ads platform is damned near useless compared to their competitors. It's a wonder they have any revenue at all.
Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
> Their moderation is wildly broken, frequently leading to blanket account bans of anyone participating in a thread close to content deemed inappropriate.
I reported someone in the news sub. Paraphrasing but apparently reporting someone for saying "they should all burn to death" (talking about govt officials) 1: isn't ban worthy, and 2: is "abuse of the report button" and led to me getting a 3 day ban.
I used to have a (long) list of posts/comments that they refused to remove after I reported them. Most of these were (at least to me) _very_ obvious cases of being against the TOS (and the law).
I messaged this list to the admins. I emailed it to their support team. Never got a reply. Not even support answered my email.
Whereas I had 3 accounts permanently suspended for calling someone an idiot on /r/idiotsincars for "harassing speech". I have other accounts, but they took out 1 old account and a squatted account. Like, really? For using the term "idiot" on a subreddit with that very word?
I have here, Masto, and a few other places that at least have mostly sane policies. All I know is that reddit is definitely on the decline. And this whole API debacle is going to be their own Digg V4 moment.
There is no sane middle ground on most of reddit. There are subs where you'll get reprimanded far quicker for "annoying mods" by bothering to report anything, and then there are the other subs that are so uptight and intense that your comments can only be fluff anything else gets slapped down for one of the vague rules it has. Good luck debating subreddit mods for their vague rules, you'll just annoy them and admins do not care in the slightest to resolve these petty things.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.
Lol I had the sane thing happen, then when I asked the mods what happened in got reported to the admins for harrasment. There's no way tho discuss, just a brick wall. Wild been on that site an embarrassingly long time without issue
I got permabanned for having an alt account with auto generated name...that contained 88 in it because "hate group symbolsim".
Literally a name reddit generated for me and I paid no mind to it.
Fun fact, reddit uses browser fingerprinting to ban all your accounts afterwards.
Also fun fact, there is a way to get innocent users banned as a result too.
You can't report to the moderators, they're just anonymous users that for some reason wants to work for free for Reddit. Often times they have their own agendas, I've used third party sites to show deleted comments that makes it clear some mods support calls for violence against certain groups, depending on which subreddit it is.
I've reported threats of violence similar to what you describes over at https://www.reddit.com/report and they removed it after a day or two, even comments that were highly upvoted.
I got banned from a sports related subreddit for spreading misinformation by saying, "Helmets do not and cannot prevent concussions." The mod's justification was, "That is the entire point of helmets."
Perhaps the mod has taken too many to the ol'noggin.
I mean for Reddit that is "abuse of the report button". It's a very tame comment compared to a lot of what's posted and considered acceptable. What did you expect or think should have been the outcome of reporting that?
Far from it. They have great recent user growth and everybody is appending “Reddit” to the end of their google searches in the quest for non-gamed search results
It's not a sustainable position though. Advertisers aren't idiots, the market will adjust as it makes sense to adjust. You already have bot accounts flooding certain keywords on reddit with product placement. If everyone ends up on reddit, that's where the SEO spam crap you see today will follow them. If everyones on twitter, it goes there. If everyone goes to mastodon, so be it, there be the bots. It almost doesn't matter what the service is exactly, once it hits a critical mass it gets enshittified just because of the business opportunity it presents.
Primarily because google has become completely useless. I get more accurate search results with Yandex, Brave, and bing, in that order. That’s how bad it is. And I hate Yandex. They’re always making me do captcha challenges.
Reddit Admin itself will blanket ban accounts in entire sub-threads with no recourse or explanation.
Participate in a well informed debate on monetary policy, but some idiot downthread went on an anti-semitic rant?
Your account will be banned. Your ip address will be blocked from creating additional accounts. You will receive a link in a message to the message you wrote for which you were banned, but since it was deleted it will be a worthless link. You will receive a link to a form to appeal your ban, which goes straight to dev/null.
Yeah they track quite a lot of bits of data for users. It's the very reason why most new users are found bemoaning how annoying it is to start posting on reddit.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
This is has always been an interesting aspect of Reddit.
On the one hand, this is fine: Reddit is supposed to be a collection of independently moderated sub-communities with their own rules and administration. On the other hand, you have a unified identity and content history across those communities, so it's a lot easier for one community to take action based on your history in another, which is a strange dynamic.
I actually think Facebook Groups are onto something with the way post history and profiles work: each Facebook Group a user posts in creates a separate sub-profile for that user which is specific to the Group. Users in that Group can see a user's post history in that Group, and that user's "main" profile depending on their privacy settings, but a user can't walk "across" to see a user's post history in other Groups unless they search from that other Group.
I feel like per-subreddit post histories along with a global user profile would help move Reddit more towards the "sub-community" vision if that's the direction they want to go.
The issues Reddit have are:
* Cross-stalking, as discussed above.
* Content discovery. This is the same problem every user-generated content platform has. What sub-communities get surfaced on the logged-out front page? Cross-pollinated to existing users? Every type of content will be objectionable to someone, so deciding what to show is always going to be a lightning-rod issue with advertiser dollars at stake.
* Global moderation. What's "bad" enough to get a user banned from _all_ of Reddit? What happens when that user is completely banned (do all of their old posts disappear?) Should large-scale content moderation like spam be handled at a platform or a community level?
Not to victim-blame, but which subreddits? I pop into new subreddits from time to time, and I don't know that I've ever been banned from a subreddit in my accounts 14+ year history. I'm also less sympathetic if the bans were because you posted somewhere like the_donald (I can't think of a more timely controversial sub) vs somewhere innocuous like r/gaming or r/technology.
Ikr. I feel like there's lots of problematic folks? doing a lot of heckin wrongthink out there in the current climate? and its making me feel like so unsafe?
A moderator's job is to keep their subreddit a functioning community. It seems entirely reasonable to me that they might notice a pattern and cast a wide net to save themselves a lot of hassle.
None of those social media are rudderless, just that, money’s circulating in hyperspace and the lower dimension slice of those just has to be mostly consistent on time axis. We are looking at a cross section at ballast deck of a ship.
You cannot just "change the APIs" to inject ads—ads require a lot of external verifiable measurement and have specific requirements over display and placement that third-party apps can't provide. Injecting ads into existing third-party apps would mean putting specific requirements for measurement SDKs (binary third-party code from trusted adstech vendors) and developing a lot of new APIs for reporting that that third-party developers would have to implement
Reddit wants to make money on the backs of their unpaid mods. I really don’t like them, but: Reddit has a ton of infrastructure costs they need to cover due to the centralization of these communities.
I do not like telegram or discord communities due to history issues. Same with Facebook. Reddit posts popping up on Google searches is really great.
I really wish we could go back to forums. The thing Reddit gave us was a central place to find communities as well as a unified login and feed. I feel like an aggregator of forums could help with finding communities. Forums that support oauth and rss would help bridge the gap of unified login and a central feed. The nice thing about forums is that their infra costs only need to scale with their community.
Think like someone who wants to run a business to make money and has no interest in the site as a community for a moment. Why would you ever elect to have no control over the site's presentation?
It's not "their" data in the same way that last mile network access isn't "their" (telco's) pipes.
If value in a platform comes from third parties choosing to use the service, and those third parties are free to use alternatives, then platforms should be very careful about how greedy they get in exploiting their users.
Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
> Most of the platform value actually comes from future, continued use.
OpenAI should start a clone, make it nice, and train their LLMs off of it. If discussion boards have immense future value from hosting humans interacting, clearly the cost of hosting them is worth it.
Seems to me this is more them trying to push ads on people; apps like Apollo do not serve ads (or, as a long time user of Apollo, I've never seen them). I think this has been a long time in the works, before all of the LLM buzz.
If that's the real issue, then offer two licenses. One that allows you to use the data to train an AI. Another that doesn't and says that if you do they will permaban your API access and sue your pants off.
Third-party client apps can keep doing what they do, knowing that attempting to use the data to train an AI would destroy their business forever. Companies that want to train an AI can use the other license and pay big stacks of money.
But I wonder if they really fulfil this goal. How do they solve the unsolved problem of allowing scraping / SEO (Google, Bing etc.) but not teaching their LLMs?
It's obvious or an open secret that Alphabet/Google and Microsoft will use their web copy for teaching their AI.
> It followed that company A's service qualified as an unlawful transfer of data to a third country because their parent company was located in the US, violating relevant data protection law (Article 44 GDPR).
> The Chamber explained that a transfer in this context must also be assumed when data can be accessed from a third country, regardless of whether this actually takes place. The fact that the physical location of the server that provides such access was located in the EU was irrelevant.
I think this is an interpretation of GDPR that most companies are not prepared for. You could write an implementation that restricts access to EU data, but if the parent company is not in EU, I guess the implementation could always be changed to allow access. Ergo, GDPR violation?
> However, the Internet Archive expanded its library project during the covid-19 pandemic. It launched the National Emergency Library, allowing an unlimited number of people to access the same copies of ebooks. That’s when the publishers banded together to file the lawsuit, targeting both online libraries.
The digital copy could be checked out by many people at the same time.