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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you’re making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn’t make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.
People get “slippery slope” wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.
The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn’t just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn’t intend to, and B happening can’t be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don’t want B but can’t stop it, because we’ve slipped and we’re sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That’s the whole concept, that we’re stuck sliding.
Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn’t apply. There’s seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.
Buy upvotes?
The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright “gib money get updoot” but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.
“Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!”
To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn’t be surprised at this point.
It’s sort of what World of Warcraft did with gold.
The gold farms were making TONS of money selling illegal gold in much the same way upvote farms are making a killing.
Upvotes are free for them to give, and they would have a money printer on their hands.
