This… is dumb. Reddit gets traffic from people using it as a secondary search engine to get relevant answers.

Most people on the Internet view it from mobile. Reddit already makes their mobile experience genuinely awful despite this. Blocking it entirely?

The herding to their mobile app is so transparent (and DEFINITELY through stick, not carrot) I’m morbidly curious to see what horrible things they planning to put in their app that they know users will loathe, that requires their alternatives to be zero.

It’s going to be satisfying watching them slowly tick green.

I think they’re very good if you use your computer for a whole lot of typing and nothing else. Using a DVORAK keyboard instead of a QWERTY one will also improve your WPM and QoL when typing, once you’re used to it. If you’re a writer or a programmer, it’s worth considering.

But much like DVORAK vs QWERTY, any non-typing tasks become affected. It’s awkward playing PC games, for example, when some of your shortcuts for inventory/map are far enough from your kb hand to need your mouse hand. You also don’t have much range to choose from, so may have to make compromises on things like keypress feedback, simultaneous presses, unit price, etc.

I learned to touch-type on a tented keyboard with a mild split. When I replaced it, I got a ‘Wave’ keyboard - not split, but slightly tented, and had depressions and curves to match the wrist and the finger lengths at rest on the home row. Both of them were membrane keyboards (full-depth keypress). Despite being a membrane keyboard, the Wave was still as chunky and loud as most mechanical keyboards.

But now, I’m just using a generic full-length mechanical keyboard (partial keypress) with relatively quiet switches, one chosen as a good compromise between gaming (sensitivity) and typing (feedback). I’ve changed my resting position a little so that my wrists are still in an A shape (not an H shape), but I’m finding the keys much more comfortable.

The old ergonomic keyboards didn’t give much choice and in hindsight the feedback on the keys on the Wave felt AWFUL compared to what I use now. A split/tent mechanical keyboard might be different, but then price becomes a consideration. Swapping to a mechanical keyboard made the biggest difference to my comfort typing. (And don’t let tall/loud keys fool you - not every chunky keyboard is mechanical.)

Yeah, not surprising tbh. They tested the change in smaller countries like NZ first, which allowed them to determine if it was worth doing the same elsewhere.

Password sharing is really common, but I don’t think enough people realise - if they give a shit about what they use and where it comes from, they’re the minority. That goes for almost any service, not just streaming. The people willing to change their habits to protest are always going to be less than the entrenched people who can be pushed, inch by inch.

Most Netflix users just want something to watch with minimal effort and without having to try or think about it. So if the password doesn’t work, they shrug, they accept it, they make their own account, and their routines stay the same. In fact I’m willing to be that of the new Netflix users, a majority of them are probably also subscribed to at least one other streaming service, too.

Convenience is a commodity, and users have different price points.

The issue you’ve described though is not about self-driven technology. It’s that ‘driving’ is the only form of transport, and thus the only way that anybody can ever be independent.

It’s that too many areas design their infrastructure around the personal car, and make it impossible to get around without them. With them, it means sitting in traffic for hours at a time (because everybody else is in a car, too). Stretches of noisy rumbling multi-lane roads that don’t have walkways or crossings. Bike lanes are non-existent, or pressed up against fast-moving car traffic. And because walking/cycling isn’t an option, we have more people driving than ever - children being driven to and from school or sports, driving down to a store 100m a way to pick up eggs, etc.

Cars spend ~95% of the time parked somewhere, and 4% of the time moving a single person. They’re incredibly inefficient, and yet they’ve been painted as a symbol of ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’ that seems massive amounts of land converted into parking spaces to accommodate something magnitudes larger than a person, one per person.

Cities that design around subway trains and bus lanes from the get-go have far smoother commutes. Smaller villages designed around trams and cycling are quiet, pleasant, and walkable. Both of them offer independence to a population that cannot drive - either practically or financially.

If self-driving car-sharing was available already now, then I’d be more likely to agree. Car-sharing (not ride-sharing, but hiring cars per minute via app) is the best way for car-based infrastructure to migrate towards lower traffic. Ripping up roads for trains is expensive, but knowing you can use a town car to visit your friend, then a van to help them move, and park neither of them in your driveway, will really help.

But right now self-driving cars are a passion project. They’re not actually practical, they’re just exciting and expensive. If accessibility for our blind, elderly, and impoverished population is the concern here, then billionaires funding the self-driving cars they can’t ever afford is not the answer.

Be usable and intuitive on mobile, including NSFW, no subscription (one-time purchase is ok), no/limited unobtrusive ads, no excessive data consumption. That’s what the 3p app I used was.

I don’t socialise on Reddit. Whenever I do, I almost always regret it. But I do kill time while in queues, or on the bus, or on break at work. That needs to be on mobile. Or to ‘kill time’ at home. That needs to include NSFW. And I want to be seeing the content I went there to see, not miles of ads and promoted posts. And I definitely don’t have the budget to pay for it over and over and over. Mobile data is also capped and very expensive here.

It’s still usable on desktop, but… I don’t use desktop on the bus. It’s still available on mobile, but… I don’t want to load 5 different resolutions of each video on my limited mobile data.

RSS seems really handy tbh, and yet I’ve never gotten around to ever using it. I looked up what the term was, went ‘oh neat’ and continued to ignore each time the RSS icon appeared on a webpage.

Maybe I should look into an RSS reader. Seems I could pull from multiple different sources and curate something far more interesting/relevant to me than, say, Google’s ‘Discover’ page.

Either it doesn’t get engaged with, or the people who engage with it have the reading comprehension of a carrot.

I noticed you didn’t explicitly say in your post that you don’t kick puppies, so let me assume that you believe that is acceptable and then vividly describe what a horrible person you are. Also,

Time to start over

…now that I’ve pulled a tiny portion of comment out of context to make it easier to attack, how dare you.

There’s an extension I used to use called ‘StayFocusd’. It’s intended for blocking distracting websites, you choose your only rules, and it’s really strict about enforcing them - you can only change blocking rules on days that aren’t today, for example, to stop you from temporarily unblocking a website. You can either block them completely, or give them a daily limit.

You could install that and put Reddit on it. If you really need Reddit for something (say, getting a relevant search result in a sea of SEO), you’ll still be able to bypass the extension to view it. But it will make you type a paragraph accurately to make sure it’s a conscious decision. You can’t simply disable the extension.

So far I am loving that the communities I’ve subscribed to on Lemmy are not only interactive, but that the people interactive are genuinely contributing discussion and perspective! It’s sooo refreshing. I fucking love it.

As we get more people joining I’m sure that will slowly change; if Lemmy gets easier for people to join then it will change. If Reddit goes down completely it will definitely change: most casual redditors probably won’t move unless Reddit itself no longer has the content they want.

But right now? Ahh… I’m enjoying Lemmy more than I have Reddit in well over a year.

I understand that Reddit needs to monetise. It’s not a link aggregate site anymore, hosting video/image files is expensive, Reddit operates at a loss and the 3p users cost them even more. They have reason to be dismayed that they operate at a loss while 3p apps using their API do not.

And I understand their concern with adult content. They can’t control if 3p apps will display it with or without checks, but Reddit hosts it; limiting it on 3p apps is probably the better choice to them than removing it from their site entirely. After all, they’re operating at a loss; they can’t afford the fines and fees. Sexual content is heavily legislated.

But goddamn. Limited negotiation with devs, adversarial communication (to the point of outright animosity), frankly absurd timeframe, the use of accessibility as negotiation for the blackout… there’s no good faith anymore.

Reddit is user-generated. The users are the content, their engagement is Reddit’s product. Users that don’t want to engage with their platform give them less sellable product. The users that engage the most (commenting, contributing, moderating) are the minority, and also the ones most likely to use 3p tools.

Reddit has good grounds for wanting to monetise. There are good reasons for bringing devs to the plate about how to do that. Devs were readily agreeing to covering their costs in calls, and expecting to negotiate what the revenue margin should be. Mutually equitable arrangement.

But this was handled so fucking badly, communicated so fucking badly (by one of the devs too tbh), that an equitable arrangement cannot possibly be reached anymore. Nobody wants to bargain in good faith anymore.

Now all the users want Reddit to cancel all the changes, publicly apologise, and remain operating a loss. Now Reddit wants devs to shut up and pay up, and blame them for the situation they’re in.

Now everybody loses, because devs close apps, high-activity users contribute less or outright leave, and Reddit decays down into a pit of low-interaction lurkers picking over ad-bleached bones, until it’s considered so unprofitable and unrecoverable that it is shut down entirely.

Yeah, I found that interesting. I generally don’t attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, and I imagine either (or both) of these is likely:

1. The ‘evasive’ language made everything feel implied, that when pressed to outright admit his intentions he falls back. He was evasive, evasive, evasive, pressed, fell back. Still he did not clarify he was selling Apollo, only that ‘go quiet’ meant ‘pay me off and Apollo stops making calls’. It’s possible Spez did not believe him and was trying to deescalate.
2. Internally discussing the outcome of the call with other members on staff, they may have felt (1) was true, or Spez accepted the explanation but other staff didn’t; they discussed the implications of each possible intention; and they collectively decided they should probably treat it as a threat since it remained ambiguous. It’s possible Spez did want to believe him but other staff didn’t.

The conclusion doesn’t have to be that Spez believed him, then personally as an individual decided “oh, actually, fuck it” and decided to lie about it anyway. In fact I’d say that of the three possibilities, that’s the least likely.

I imagine his intend was to imply - or at least put pressure on - the idea of Apollo actually costing them $20mil was an inflated number. The idea that it was a real and on-going cost, and had been for a decade, and he’s basically daring them to buy Apollo. Because if that number was real, they should leap at the chance:

If you want to rip that band-aid off once. […] Beautiful deal.

I believe that’s why it was ‘mostly a joke’ - he never expected them to take it, he doesn’t believe it actually costs them that much. It’s not what he’s taking from them - it’s what they feel entitled to take from the users, and they blame him for being in the way.

Personally I agree it doesn’t cost that much - I believe they believe it does, but only because they look at Apollo’s userbase and activity, and decided “oh boy, if we could sell ads to those users and sell their data at those rates, this is how much we would make” and decided that means Apollo is somehow costing them that. I don’t think ‘opportunity cost’ is an appropriate concept to price on, because it relies on obviously false assumptions.

Apollo is definitely costing them server bandwidth, as are the other apps. And it seems all the devs were ready and willing to cover the costs, even negotiate how their users could still be a revenue stream. But Reddit believes they were owed the same profit of Apollo’s users that they would make off of their own, and I think that’s nonsense.

After all, if somebody pirates Photoshop, it’s stupidly naïve to think that every single one of those users would be willing to pay Adobe $80 a month (in some countries that’s more than they make in 3+ months). And if somebody goes to a friend’s house and watches a Blu-Ray with them, it’s absurd to expect they mail a check for $20 to their local theatre.

The expectation that somebody using something convenient/free would use it just as much if it was demanding/unaffordable is… like, they’re not stupid, right? They can’t possibly be that stupid to think that was even attainable profit for them. I just don’t understand why they think that ‘opportunity cost’ is real.

I listened to the recording, and read the transcript, and I can… I can see it. Not overtly, not intentionally - but the dev did not communicate clearly at all.

Twice the Reddit representative asking him to repeat himself, and still he failed to actually specify his intentions. The wording in the transcript never actually expanded what the dev was saying (‘buy out Apollo’). The evasive language made it sound like a shakedown, ‘pay me $10mil to make this all go away’.

I linked the dev’s own transcript above, but the actual quotes from the dev:

I could make it really easy on you, if you think Apollo is costing you $20 million per year, cut me a check for $10 million and we can both skip off into the sunset. Six months of use. We’re good. [Low voice:] That’s mostly a joke.

Okay, if Apollo’s opportunity cost currently is $20 million dollars. At the 7 billion requests and API volume. If that’s your yearly opportunity cost for Apollo, cut that in half, say for 6 months. Bob’s your uncle.

I was just saying if the opportunity cost of Apollo is currently $20 million a year. And that’s a yearly, apparently ongoing cost to you folks. If you want to rip that band-aid off once. And have Apollo quiet down, you know, six months. Beautiful deal. Again this is mostly a joke, I’m just saying if the opportunity cost is that high, and if that is something that could make it easier on you guys, that could happen too. As is, it’s quite difficult.

Now, we know that what the dev is doing is essentially offering to outright sell Apollo to end the demand it represents to Reddit. He doesn’t expect them to take it, but a lot of users asked if it were possible, and he’s suggesting it anyway.

But the wording of all of this never specifies ‘buying Apollo’. It sounds like he wants Reddit to like… pay him his ‘protection fee’. I’m sure he means ‘go quiet’ as in like, ‘go quietly into that good night’ (shut down) or ‘stop being so demanding’ (be retooled), in fact he later clarifies he means the latter and the Reddit representative apologises profusely.

But man, that was worded so poorly, and he was given two opportunities to clarify, and he just… didn’t. Only when the Reddit stand-in asked if he was suggesting Reddit buy his silence and compliance did he clarify that wasn’t at all what he was saying.

It was completely unintentional, no doubt. But it was miscommunication of the highest order, and it damaged the lines of communication so irrevocably it probably incentivised Reddit to cease negotiations completely.

That’s a great point; the echo chambers. Supported by the lack of the downvote button, it’s one of the most impactful things Beehaw can do in fostering its goal of community.

Any platform that measures success by engagement (eg: for ad traffic) tends to evolve into either of two extremes: content that makes you feel good, or contact that makes you feel afraid/angry. Usually both: something to get angry about and degrade each other, and then share to your echo chamber to yes-man each other. Very little constructive discussion takes place.

Echo chambers deny people the growth opportunity that being exposed to diversity of experience and opinion brings. It entrenches people into ideas, including [self-]harming ones. Even good/benign ideas at their core can rapidly become steeped in tribalism, supremacy and animosity, particularly in conjunction with content that is engaging because it sparks anger or fear.

The most powerful things humans create are the things they create together. The most progressive decisions we make are the ones we make for the collective other. The easier it is for humans to form into competing cliques (especially as encouraged by algorithms), the more divided we become. People with similarities will draw arbitrary lines over their differences, enforced by algorithms and divisive moderator principles.

A community doesn’t require that we all agree to thrive - only that whenever we disagree, we know we all still belong.