crowsby

Which is also when they regularly try and get you to mistakenly click a button to make Edge your default browser. Scummy dark patterns.

Aside from the fact that "Joe Biden's" DOJ is correct here, the fact that both this case and this argument were originally established in 2015 under the Obama administration is what truly makes this article outrage clickbait.

This is what I believe too. With interest rates rising, companies have been under a great deal of pressure to show profitability, and especially with Reddit aiming for an IPO, it seemed (superficially at least) a great idea to badger their userbase into adopting their mobile app, where they could be monetized to a much larger extent.

So of course they made the conditions of using their new API incredibly onerous.

The whole point was to discourage developers from using it. And then by cherrypicking a handful of select 3rd-party developers to offer more amenable terms to on the downlow, they can show that they were just being reasonable good guys, and doing their best to work with everyone, and that it must be the developers at fault if they decided to walk away and abandon their users.

So yeah, they've managed to get their app center stage, and the only minor tradeoffs have been:

• Launching/boosting a fleet of competitors (lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/tildes/etc)
• Driving their very talented 3rd-party app devs into making apps for said competitors
• Creating a massive breach of trust between Reddit Inc and its unpaid volunteer mods
• Squandering any remaining goodwill Reddit once had in the tech community
• Driving away folks who enjoy using 3rd-party apps
• Ruining the image of the CEO
• Negatively affecting the overall community to the point where it's both a more hostile and unpleasant site, and simultaneously less moderated.

I'm just grateful to see that just when folks were beginning to doubt if Lemmy could actually serve as a Reddit alternative, we've been able to prove that we're equally if not more adept at insular slapfighting over petty bullshit and assuming the worst about others' intentions.

I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.

I see we've unfortunately brought over the trend of defaulting to assuming the worst intentions from Reddit, with a side portion of baseless accusations. While I'm disappointed that the community was removed, I think it can be easily explained by:

• Speed Run the Content Moderation Learning Curve
• The reality that, right or wrong, any significant legal action brought against them would be game over for the instance and personally devastating for the humans involved. Conde Nast they are not, and if Joe SIIA decides to put them in their crosshairs, the legal situation would be financially devastating.

It's reaaaaaally really easy to sit in the peanut gallery and talk shit about how they're cowardly acquiescing when it's not our neck in the noose.

That being said, I feel like recent acts of defederation are only serving to highlight that the way forward in the fediverse is going to be having accounts on multiple instances in order to get the full breadth of offerings. In my case:

• I initially signed up on lemmy.ml since that was, at the time the "main" instance.
• Oh hey, kbin looks cool. I'll sign up there and check it out.
• Oh hey, people are saying that the lemmy.ml admins are evil commies or some shit. Welp I better make an account on lemmy.world in case anything goes sideways.
• Oh hey, now I'm probably going to also need an account on dbzer0 as well, dope.

Well, they have a podcast for one.

I can do you one better with a Tampermonkey script that will replace every reference to his name on every webpage to either "the biggest twat on the planet" or "this dipshit", depending on which works better syntactically.

// ==UserScript==
// @name         Text Replace
// @version      0.1
// @description  Text Replace
// @author       SiameseDream
// @include     *
// @grant        none
// @namespace beepboop
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
    'use strict';

var replaceArry = [
    [/ Elon Musk/gi,' the biggest twat on the planet'],
    [/Elon Musk/gi,'The biggest twat on the planet'],
    [/ Mr. Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
    [/ Musk/gi,' this dipshit'],
    [/Mr. Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
    [/Musk/gi,'This dipshit'],
    // etc.
];
var numTerms    = replaceArry.length;
var txtWalker   = document.createTreeWalker (
    document.body,
    NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,
    {   acceptNode: function (node) {
            //-- Skip whitespace-only nodes
            if (node.nodeValue.trim() )
                return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT;

            return NodeFilter.FILTER_SKIP;
        }
    },
    false
);
var txtNode     = null;

while (txtNode  = txtWalker.nextNode () ) {
    var oldTxt  = txtNode.nodeValue;

    for (var J  = 0;  J < numTerms;  J++) {
        oldTxt  = oldTxt.replace (replaceArry[J][0], replaceArry[J][1]);
    }
    txtNode.nodeValue = oldTxt;
}
})();

In practice it looks like this

Doubtlessly true, but by the same token I suspect they're running better than ever without Elon around to "help". Their employees certainly seem to think so.

I mean I do analytics on site engagement metrics professionally, like as my job that pays me money, and based on that and past instances of r/place, I can make an educated guess that:

• They were desperate to improve July usage numbers because projections were looking shitty after the events of the past month.

• r/place has traditionally been a good way to juice engagement numbers

• They pulled a lever they knew would generate the results they needed

Is it temporary? Sure. But this buys them some time and August's numbers are August's problem.

Here's are the stats from a previous instance of r/place:

Social platform Reddit re-introduced its collaborative social experiment r/Place on April 1, leading to the highest daily active users (DAUs) its mobile app has ever seen

So yeah, they'll get the juice they need, probably, but the fact that they were compelled to even need to pull that lever says a lot, imo.

I don't think there's going to be a good way to know. Semrush is showing a relatively steady decline since January 2023, but I don't trust third-party tools for that. And I doubt that Reddit would make its first-party analytic data public if it looks bad, so in that case the default move is to either cherrypick or create a metric that appears favorable, a la Elon Musk's brand new Twitter metric of median picoseconds of verified user screen time per albatross fart or whatever.

From a qualitative standpoint, both the content and general vibe seem markedly worse than a month or two ago. It's made it easy to stop using it as my default online platform.

But in any case, I don't think it's worth it to get too invested in either its success or failure.

there’s a special place in heaven for kanban lovers that’s what i always say