It was, yeah. The market crashed pretty much over night too. Really obvious in hindsight, but if you’re making six figures from reselling the things you’re probably too close to really notice the wider picture.

and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

I think they might mean bricked up, as in the windows have been bricked over?

Or maybe they’re associated with buildings built during a certain period that are now mostly empty due to a boom and bust cycle?

Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it’s so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they’re non-specific about the unit you get, so it’s very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.

We (i.e. those of us who work in the industry and care about such things) really need to work on messaging to get through to normal people.

For instance, people are genuinely freaked out at the idea of Facebook listening to them through their phones. It really hits a nerve. Now that isn’t happening, but what is happening is even worse. Facebook are able to predict your behaviour, your thoughts, so well that it gives the illusion that they’re listening to you. They’ve spent decades training their models on your behaviour, your content, both on their website and across the entire web and beyond. And they’ve fucking nailed it.

That’s far far more scary than them listening to you. They know things about you that you don’t even say out loud. It’s terrifying.

I’ve been on reddit a long time, over 17 years, and I’m a member of some private subs that happen to have some quite influential users in them. It would be really interesting to open those up to the public to see what reddit influencers are saying in closed spaces, and the amount of gaming etc. that goes on between prominent users you see all across the site.

Admittedly, at least the subs I’m in are relatively quiet these days, but in years gone by they’d basically decide what was going to be popular, who was going to mod which subs etc.

This is almost certainly true. But what I can’t figure out is that Reddit needs Mods for the subs. And surely mods, and potential mods, are more engaged and informed.

There’s always been this implicit understanding that Reddit gets free moderation across the whole site, something other SM sites spend millions if not billions on each year, in exchange for those mods having autonomy, control, and a sense of ownership of the subs they mod. That social contract has completely broken down.

I’d guess mods get into modding for one of two reasons. One is power/influence, which is now seriously diminished, and the other is because they care about the community, and they must now be wondering whether Reddit Inc is the best place to host such a community when it appears to be so hostile to users.

They should make sure all the posts are about the iPhone, the internet phone made by Linksys in the late 90s.

What’s chef’s kiss perfect about these is that they’re all using Spez’s words against him. There’s no doubt whose fault this is.

I’m still genuinely shocked that he decided to call people who are offering their time to the site, for free, to moderate it landed fucking gentry. How utterly out of touch, and frankly dumb, can you possibly be? Other social media sites pay millions a year to moderate content and Reddit gets it for free, and this is how he treats them. It’s insane. The guy’s an imbecile.

I heard that /r/steam was all about actual steam now, not the gaming store. /r/scams is taking 14 days to approve new posts, gifs and pics are John Oliver only. I’m sure there are more, I’ve not looking at reddit in over a week (my main is a 17 year old account and I’ve been a daily user for most of that time), that’s that I’ve seen on here.

I think it’s a bit more than enjoyment. People felt a sense of ownership in the communities they helped build. And whilst they were always contributing to Reddit inc they still felt some control. Now that Spez has gone full on world’s dumbest capitalist and keeps yelling about companies having to pay for “his” data, data which he didn’t pay for himself, it’s really exposed what’s always been true. That Reddit is just another company, it’s not your friend, it’s not a community.

Yeah this is the thing. I would have happily paid it before spez revealed himself to be an irredeemable piece of shit. Now, I’ve no interest in filling his coffers. Policy needs to change and he needs to go, no negotiation, I don’t trust him and I don’t think he’s a good steward for the site.

If the AMA taught us anything, it’s that spez doesn’t actually use reddit. Let alone understand it.

Unfortunately, there isn’t really a proper iPad version of Apollo. It was on the dev’s to-do list but obviously he’s never going to get round to it now, which is a real shame. The scaled-up iPhone version you do get on iPad is still probably the best iPad version of reddit though, not that there’s a great deal of competition. It’s not the best way to experience Apollo though.

Alternatively, Elon just found out how many people are blocking him.

Having played a bit of Zelda recently, micromanaging weapons. Oh, I’ve got this metal broad sword and I’ve used it to to stab an unarmored fleshy bad guy and oh it’s broken after three stabs.

I get that weapon degradation is a real thing that happens, as they become blunt or potentially fragile, but Zelda BOTW and TOTK take it way too far to the point of it being a real chore. I thought they’d fix it after all the BOTW complaints but TOTK is just as bad.

The best on-boarding experience I’ve ever had was with a remote company. I think it’s more that companies still haven’t adapted properly to remote working, or have paid lip service to it. If a company does it well, it can be excellent, I’d argue better than in-person because it’s more inclusive.

What I struggle with a bit is that making apps accessible on iOS is pretty straight forward. You almost have to go out of your way to not do it. I don’t have experience in Android development, but would imagine it’s at least similar? So I can only conclude that it’s something reddit really doesn’t care about. Not even an after-thought. So I’m sceptical of any company with that sort of mindset being able to do a good job.

Agreed on RedReader. I wouldn’t be putting any time, effort, or money in to developing a reddit app or bot right now. The writing’s on the wall.

Probably depends on how you define success with these things. The valuation of the company is down a significant amount since it was purchased and recent reports had ad revenue also down a significant amount too. Whether the owner cares about those things is probably up for debate, and evidence would suggest he might be looking for something other than money out of it, like influence, or just a play thing. I’m not sure the owners of Reddit are motivated by the same things, I think they just want to be richer. Time will tell I guess, it’s difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentional acts from the outside.

Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.