Not to mention, the “just google it” comment is also terrible even if it was made in good faith considering how bad Google seems to have gotten at providing actual useful search results. Hence, why so many people add “Reddit” to the end of their search query, just making everything full circle. You’re providing the content people are googling by making your post.

Yeah, I’m really loving the downvote feature being gone. I’ve been on another forum that had a noticeable decrease in toxicity when they removed their dislike reaction too.

I guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is justified in doing this imo. Video hosting isn’t cheap, especially providing 4K & 8K. They’ve gotta be able to support costs somehow, and if you’re not paying for Premium, you should be paying with ads. You’re also preventing the content creators from being compensated for content that you find valuable, useful, and/or entertaining.

I know ads are annoying, and I hate them just as much as you do. But a big reason why we have people who make super niche videos that help you learn how to fix something on your car or those regular videos that you watch every week is because the creators are able to get compensated for their work. Are you really saying that utility and entertainment isn’t worth 30 seconds of ads and it’s better to not support them at all?

Part of the reason we’re in this enshittification era of social media is because of the expectation of social media to be free. We need to learn from our past mistakes. It’s not sustainable.

Generally agree, but this document is also from January 2021. Apple brought E2EE to almost all aspects of iCloud in December 2022 including iCloud Backups. It's opt-in, so theoretically, if you were having a conversation with a contact who didn't opt-in to E2EE but backed up their iMessages to iCloud, the government could still access your messages via that contact even if you opted-in to E2EE, but still.

While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.

What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.

For developers:

• Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
• Lied about making the API cost reasonable
• Gave developers very little time to adjust
• Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
• Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer

For moderators:

• Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
• Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions

For users:

• Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
• Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
• Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do

Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”

No, I’m not saying you or MacRumors are wrong. I’m saying Spez is being Spez, lying directly to the public’s faces while doing exactly what he says he’s not doing.

This is literally a copy and paste from another article with Huffman posted TODAY:

While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout

Yeah it’s funny how I always got warned about how “the internet is forever” when it comes to being care about what you post on social media, which isn’t bad advice and is kinda true, but also really kinda not true. So many things I’ve wanted to find on the internet that I experienced like 15 years ago are just gone without a trace.

AI is starting to feel like another financial bubble to me.

Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What's more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”

Terrifying. Thank you for posting.

Sorry for your situation. Trying to sleep when it’s too hot is no fun. I recommend getting as much air circulation as possible. It makes a big difference. Fans will be your best friend. And switching to lightweight sheets, blankets, and sleeping nude might help. Good luck!

I really hope so. I really miss that feel of the old internet. It's nice to have an online community where you get to know other users just from seeing their posts regularly. And obviously, I'm all for decentralization at this point after seeing how bad consolidation and centralization of websites has messed up the internet at this point. I still use one forum regularly that's very active and two others less often that are smaller but have enough active users.

Obviously, if reddit dies, I could see them making at least a small comeback. But I'm not sure how sustainable they are. It would require several different website owners to make their own websites with different topics of focus. Enough people would have to be able to find the websites in the first place for them to be successful. Like most of the internet, Google as a search engine seems to have gotten worse over the past 5-7 years and it's harder to find websites, especially smaller, newer websites like a brand new forum. If it's hard to find, you're going to be struggling with the network effect for a long time which will cripple growth even further.

Additionally, without the automatic sorting that reddit and lemmy has, the format of static pages of replies also feels a bit dated now. It's harder to discover useful/helpful/quality posts without reading through pages of replies. Plus, I don't know how much money small website owners can realistically make off just putting ads on their website nowadays. But I'm rooting for them. I really am.