Spez (Reddit CEO) just put out an announcemen talking about how they’ll verify humans via a new rectal probe in collaboration with Meta AI that 3D scans your log factory.
That sounds tempting, but still won’t make me rejoin reddit.
The only way I’ll ever rejoin Reddit is if they fire that piece of shit, Spez, and every other piece of shit who had a hand in the monetization of their API access which destroyed third party apps like Apollo; and if they change that monetization, either making it free or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.
They did the whole thing with their API completely backwards, on purpose, to shut out the third party apps – when they could have still been able to make money by doing it properly and not alienating a lot of their userbase.
And now that Reddit is effectively a right-wing cesspool of lies and bullshit, just like Twitter has become, even if they fix what they broke, it may not be worth rejoining.
or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.
Isn’t that what they’re doing? I’ve used Relay Pro via API until recently by paying for it.
The only reason I don’t use that anymore is cause I went de-googled, so no play store subscription and thus no API access anymore, and since I can’t stand the original app I came here.
They made the prices so insane that most 3rd party apps couldn’t justify the higher subscription price
No, they made the third party app developers pay the license fees, not the users. If they changed that since I left, then that I’m ignorant of. It made zero sense to force payment from the developers and every sense to simply create a two-tiered API where maybe only a read-only front page works (no commenting) unless you’re a paid subscriber to Reddit, which could be available via an authorization scheme on the logged-in user. It’s simple to do. But they decided (at the time) to screw over the third party developers directly by forcing them to pay.
Thing is, even Christian (the guy who made Apollo) said a nominal fee makes sense and he would have been fine paying that, but he would have had to pay literal millions of dollars within like a month’s notice in order to keep going, and have to pass that exorbitant cost onto his users who ALREADY paid him for yearly subscriptions/etc.
Simply put: Reddit should only have charged users directly, via subscription to Reddit, in order to use a fully-featured API irrespective of which client they use it through.
Spez is a greedy piece of garbage.
Hmm, it’s truly not ideal, but while I certainly don’t want to defend them (just playing devil’s advocate a bit here lol), IMO application-based payments do make more sense than user-based. I assume way more people use more than 1 account than there are people who use more than 1 client. If that assumption is correct, the current system is very much in favor of the majority of users.
But it’s indeed a bad solution for the 3rd party app devs to act as some kind of middleman for the payments. The only better alternative I can think of would’ve been to let users add their alts to their subscription, but that would need a system to detect and punish shared subscriptions.That the fees are too high might be true, I don’t have any insight on that - but Relay Pro has tiers from (in Germany) €1.09 to €5.49 (+ optional higher tiers for application support), the 5.49 tier being with unlimited API calls.
This surely isn’t cheap, at least in the category of social media apps, which is 99% free (but usually ad-supported, which Relay isn’t), but not unfeasible. Generally speaking, i.e. regardless of category, ad-free usage (which is what API access is from reddits perspective) for €5.50 is actually cheap. Most apps and services charge around the same or more for that.That being said, I was obviously not in favor of that change either. And Reddit sucks at communicating what specifically they’re gonna do. But I also gotta say, the way it turned out in the end wasn’t too bad/unfair - at least not in my experience as a paying API user. Might be (and probably is) a different story for the developers, as the amount of shut-down 3rd party apps indicates. Reddit should’ve just worked out something together with these devs, then I’m sure the backlash and outrage wouldn’t have been half as large.
Either way, I’m happy to be here now.
Well, I suppose with my suggestion, which in my view is the correct path they should have taken, any alt account would also have to be a paid subscriber to Reddit if they wanted to access the full API with that account. I don’t really see much justification to support alt accounts on the same subscription.
And you hit the nail on the head about Reddit trying to make the third party app developers be payment middlemen. It made zero sense to me if it wasn’t for greed or to squeeze out those app developers so they could force their user base to their own mobile application which was considerably inferior at the time, but allowed Reddit to show advertisements.
It was apparent to me that they did this to make their impending IPO more appealing to potential investors because it shows that “line goes up” — which is the only thing investors care about and why the enshittification of good things always happens.
If you can feel my bitterness, it’s because I deleted my 15-year Reddit account in July 2023 that had a couple of posts during the account lifetime that made it to the front page. Which, for a nobody like me, was kind-of cool. However, while I’m not over Spez being a greedy piece of crap, I am quite over being on Reddit and, like you, am very happy to be a part of the Fediverse!
fitting translation for “meta”
Funny how this ties nicely into Meta’s lobbying for age verification and how it’s suddenly a conversation we keep seeing crop up. The pattern recognition tools in my brain see nothing but constant red flags these days.
They flooded the web with bots, advertisers are backing out because of it, and now both Spez and Zuck are panicking.
I’m totally with you, I would also add that recently meta said that they wanted to add facial recognition to their “smart” glasses.
they said that “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”
Source:
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-distracted-2026-2?op=1
They flooded it with bots, what do you mean?
I think like Bitcoins creation hardwares technological advancement made it inevitable. Google made the tech, basic AI research, which became modern AI when they threw more compute at it.
Bitcoin was made inevitable by the Great Financial Crisis, not by hardware advancement. Its proof-of-work is based on hashcash from the 1990s. The computing power spent is arbitrary, a consequence of its creator underestimating how quickly Bitcoin would catch on.
Well I think it was the hardware crypto implementation that allowed it, as you could check cryptographic keys far faster, which is what creates the gate.
The only thing I miss from reddit is my favorite small niche subs.
Invisible bicycles.
Where people take photos of people on bicycles and Photoshop out the bicycle. You can request or do the edits.
Forbiddensnacks
Photos of stuff that looks like delicious food but is not food.
There was another with short videos of animals in sync. Like chickens or dogs .
Oh and another that was photos of cats, sitting on clear glass. The photos were from the underside.
There was another photoshop battle one. Where there was a prompt and then everyone would submit a photoshopped mash of the prompt.
But I bet AI has ruined that one.
What is this. People posted pictures of stuff that the community tried to figure out what it was
Retro futurism. Just posts about that.
I think I miss forbidden snacks the most.
Im also someone with a million hobbies. So I really miss those. Some are here too. Bigger ones like 3d printing and photography but not stained glass. Not sure if there is one for Blender. I should check.
Subs for specific games like remedy games, zelda. Animal crossing.
Honestly I’m from the time where there used to be forums for these things and I liked forums just fine.
I get that smaller population means less niche communities.
I’m okay with it. But I will be honest and say I miss my niche indie subs. I hate that it’s been ruined. And that it’s dead.
Facebook groups still exist though and many are acceptable. Especially for the indie games and hobbies.
my little hometown somehow had a subreddit. i don’t know how
I miss r/fitness. It was big enough but good enough to learn a lot and get motivation.
I miss the TV episode discussions. Even if I wasn’t following live, I could go read the thread and feel the shared excitement and read the theories and there was always something I hadn’t noticed that someone else had.
I miss those the most.
Same. I admit I circled back recently purely for the hype of Hazbin Season 2.
Fortunately, this season was shit so I didn’t spend long on there this time lol
The good news is that if the fediverse gets an influx of Redditors, maybe we’ll see some of those niches pop up here too. Reddit’s impending identity theft coupled with the insane enforcement of rule 1 they’ve been doing lately is what got me to make my account here.
Exactly. For me it was Cats (all animals, really) and Guitars.
Political discussions are far better on Lemmy.
Similar vein to forbidden snacks was don’t put your dick in that. Yeah I miss the niche subs too, don’t miss the rest of the bullshit tho.
E. Ask historians was also high grade.
Same style of stuff I miss. Mainly instrument related subreddits, books, and boutique blu-rays. However I don’t miss Reddit itself at all. Especially with how right wing brain rot it became. It felt like hanging out in a Facebook comments section.
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I think people should experience smaller communities, they are often much higher quality in terms of the actual social interactions (though, we’re starting to get our share of trolls and toxic people).
I think there was a big shift for reddit in 2016 after they bought (and then shut down…) AlienBlue and then launch their official app. That moment it felt like when the number of users just exploded, but with that, the quality of posts (and average age of the user) dropped.
Lemmy/the fediverse reminds me of 2010-2015 reddit (which is a good thing!)
I remember when Reddit was run out of spez’s Somerville apartment on a little PC. No subreddits, just one top page. Terrible performance and no users. Everyone was at either Slashdot or Digg. Even Kuro5hin by then was dead. Reddit beat Digg because Digg got stupid and abused their community. Reddit is a million times worse now than Digg ever was.
Yup! I was a part of the mass Digg exodus.
I figured that would happen again with reddit, but to my disappointment the internet is a much different place than it used to be.
There was a competitor of Digg to flee to. Reddit, and the other social media platforms, solved that problem with anticompetitive practices to prevent a migration they previously benefitted from.
Back when Reddit was funny and not a bot hive
I remember /r/AskReddit being THE spot, and it was great to read on the go since it was just text. All the novelty accounts were awesome, RamblesOffTopic being a favorite of mine haha.
…and r/conspiracy was 80% stuff like birds ain’t real and the rest I always assumed was people posting ironically… now I’m not so sure that that was an accurate assessment.
and r/F7U12. It wasn’t just a meme it was an entire meme language, kids these days with their gifs and their template sites… smhing my head
I use user tags pretty heavily, and it is amazing how small Lemmy truly is. I recognize a lot of individual users, and the tag even links back ti whatever post/comment I originally used to tag them.
That’s how the OG Internet communities were. There would be like 500 total people maybe and you’d see them randomly throughout the week as they were online. You don’t know everyone but you recognize most of the names/pfps.
It cuts down on a lot of toxicity when you can actually know who is a jerk and who is probably just having a bad day. It makes the community a bit more empathic and less reactionary.
Indeed!!
As a side tangent, I used to get so mad on old forums when someone would update their avatar lol I didn’t recognize names, I recognized their picture. So if they changed they might as well be a new user until I recognized we’ve spoken before, haha.
I know! I paid an artist, from the forums, to draw my avatar and paid them to update it for holidays and stuff so it was consistent.
Also, you gotta have a good signature. Why not a live updating image of what is playing in your media player, that could not possibly end badly.
Are you getting user tags from a third-party Lemmy app? I don’t see that feature in the web interface.
I think they must be - though I can’t figure out which one, haha.
I can’t figure out how to do it via the website, or Voyager / Mlem on iOS.
In Voyager, you need to enable the feature under Settings -> User Tags.
Voyager implements it entirely on the client; it’s not a feature of Lemmy. Therefore it isn’t available via the Lemmy website.
However, PieFed does have backend support for user tagging. On a PieFed account, you can tag users through the website or through Mlem.
5 more users. I assume that’s the number of users still stupid enough to still be using reddit. I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
I profoundly apologize to the stupid community who are not using reddit.
apology accepted
I wouldn’t say users are stupid to still be using Reddit. There’s still alot more activity there and alot of subs still haven’t switched over yet. But if they start requiring identity verification, I think we’ll see alot more switching. Right now, I do both to get the best of both worlds. If I have to give them my identity, they get cut out.
Ooh, yay! I just swung over myself after my eighth account permaban (with no link to alleged offending comment) within 24 hours of posting about how one of the admins is in regular contact with Ghislaine Maxwell while she’s in prison🤔
You have a link to this administrator of Reddit being in contact with Maxwell? Inquiring minds want to know
A Google search later and here we are:
Haven’t read this thread specifically but I see it’s four years old. Plenty of goings on by the Internet sleuths since then. Believe /r/Epstein is where a lot of where I read was? May have to do some archive digging, since my accounts have been fully nuked just for mentioning this information, with absolutely no links provided by myself. Can’t imagine the threads are all surviving it as well.
Posts in the sub are a non-starter. The maxwellhill thing was debunked when it was pointed out that the account was active when Ghislaine was attending well publicized events. You guys are falling for right wing bullshit.
It’s funny how they don’t show you the comment.
I just got permabanned within a minute or so of posting something like “The only way to get Trump out of office is for 100,000 people to drag him out.”. Appeal denied even though I said it was hyperbole.
I still like the sheer volume of content on Reddit but they are getting worse all the time.
I got banned from here as well for saying verified facts with evidence. Its all the admins discretion in the end, and they’re political.
Have you considered a more reasonable instance? I used to be on .world myself. Used to…
Check their modlog, they were banned for being a bigot.
I don’t think this should be an hyperbole. Get to work, now.
Yeah… I had a 3 year account had been suspended a couple times for “suspensious activity” which I chalked up to my use of a VPN, multiple OSs, and still browsing mobile with RIF and revanced. Normally I just had to change my PW and refresh RIF but this last time when I did that I kept getting a login error no matter how many times I reset it. Turns out even though it still knee was email to send the requests too the account was like fully nuked. Everything is just gone.
It’s really weird to me how literally anything they say or do is immediately interpreted in the worst possible way here, on Lemmy.
Let’s get real for a second.
Is there a bot problem on the Internet in general? That’s a resounding “yes”.
Do we want to do something about it?
According to OP - no, not at all.
I mean, if OP considers malicious everything that Spez listed, the only remaining course of action is inaction and hoping for the best.
There is a bot problem but ID checks are invasive, and you can stop the bots with things like Hcaptcha Passive and Turnstile which use POW to waste the CPU cycles of bots and look for signs of things like Selenium and Puppeteer controlling the browser.
FFS, do you guys just not understand a thing you’re reading, or flat out refuse to read anything on Reddit?
Who says anything about ID checks or HCaptchas?
Passkeys and hardware attestation are also good as they require a fingerprint or face and bare metal hardware instead of a VM, but Spez also wants to introduce things like the Worldcoin Orb and IDs as well which are too invasive IMO.
You’re right in theory, but it’s Spez we’re talking about. I tend to consider that the following is a rational reaction to Spez preparing to take any action about anything in any context:
Ironically the only thing that will ever work is identifying a user to a person in one form or another. Otherwise it’s just a never ending arms race.
“We can’t let the terrorists win!!”
You’d really hand over your government ID to Spez? Lmao
Did you not read anything from the linked post, or did you fail to understand it?
Who says anything about government ID?
The whole text sounds racist AF
Can you explain? I read it and didn’t see anything racist.
Like fuck AI, but the general vibe is that bots are anthropomorphic and we should exclude them by the same reasons we previously were excluding black folks.
The general vibe is that LLMs are glorified magic 8 balls that tell you what you want to hear. Honestly I’d rather listen to a magic 8 ball over an AI because it’ll actually disagree with you.
You cant be racist towards an object or a piece of tech BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
BECAUSE THEY ARENT SENTIENT NOR ARE THEY A RACE.
They are not, but you still can be racist towards them
Explain how you can be racist towards something inherently raceless and non-sentient? That’s like saying you can be racist towards a fucking furby.
For some reason, most of the responses welcome that decision!? I guess the others were banned.
Without bots their most popular text based subs like AITAH or TwoHotTakes would be empty.
Can’t forget /r/worldnews which is literally just an israeli bot farm
“Am I The Asshole for doing what I want with my own life?”
99.99% of posts in that sub
Every other website:
Websites should copy VKontakte and make the user line-up several words in Cyrillic. It’s the hardest one I’ve ever had to pass, it has to be exactly in the right place 😂
Like a sliding puzzle from Hell.
Doesn’t that make it a bad test? It should be easy for humans and hard for machines.
Or Cloudflare.
I’m not sure I understand how cloud flare is supposed to help? It clearly doesn’t actually work. My Arr stack has an automated cloud flare bypass that seems to have a decent success rate.
It’s best to use something else like Hcaptcha passive or FPJS Pro alongside it.
I was waiting for this move, it was the final straw. now I’m here, happily writing a comment in the fediverse through blorp (foss).
Blorp dev here. Let me know if there is anything I can do to make the app even better for you!
This is one of the things I love. Talk about something you like, creator shows up. Wholesome.
Keep it up, you’re awesome!
The app is fantastic first off, my only issue is randomly the comments just don’t load, despite good connection and posts loading fine, but force stopping and reopening the app fixes it so idk. But def still my fav Lemmy app
Out of curiosity, why foes F-Droid warn about anti-features?
The F-Droid maintainers added that. It’s probably my fault for not explaining my app well. At the time, I just really wanted to get Blorp on F-Droid, so I didn’t make any sort of argument against the anti feature labels. After that, my focus was mainly on improving the app itself, and I never went back to ask them to change it.
But you’re not the first person to mention this. I should probably fix it.
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hey, nice to meet you here! I was wondering if it’s a problem that only I have or if it’s still in development but I have issues playing videos inside blorp. Could you please help? I really like blorp’s UI and I don’t want to change.
Nice to meet you too! Could you be more specific? Which type of video are you trying to play? If you’re unsure, could you send me a link to the post? Either here of via private message.
Video playback could definitely be improved in general, though it’s a bit tough because there are like 5 different types of video embeds and they all work a little different.
for example, I tried to play this video but it didn’t work.
not sure if the problem is on my side or not.
https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/44647866
EDIT: I forgot to thank you for your help and time, it’s nice to see devs so dedicated to their projects
If Reddit loses all the bots, they will literally lose more than half of their activity, especially in an election year.
