This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.
New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.
What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.
But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don't bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie's stream...
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
This right here is a big deal. Even if an instance goes down or gets attacked, the easy choice is to just browse from another instance till it is back up.
Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you’ll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It’s much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
Thank you! I can't believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That's so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.
I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.
I don’t have specific info on what’s harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I’m at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It’s absolutely wild.
Edited to add - they don’t specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.
Yeah, don’t be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.
Some apps won’t work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.
How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android’s app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?
When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can’t actually phone home.
I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it’s in beta, for those reading who haven’t used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn’t come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something
Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it’s not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.
For example, you can’t rotate your app UI if you’re not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.
Not saying you’re wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn’t on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.
Device boot time could be used for a user that clears their cookies to track and match sessions. Using that, and matching it with other information could give very reliable ways to fingerprint users.
This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it’s not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.
As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.
This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to track you down. It’s probably just for crash reporting etc.
Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.
A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.
Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I’m sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn’t mean that they’re using it to track you.
The emergence of every website being gated, requiring an account and sla subscription. Also the rise of rediculous personalized advertisements and user tracking.
Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory)[1] web and social web)[2] refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and devices) for end users.
I always hated that crypto shit stole the name web3/web3.0. I think for a short period it seemed decentralized apps were calling themselves web3.0 but now it's just the fediverse I think. I like calling it the true web because the fediverse is very much like the old days where we had niche sites with their own communities, it's just that the content isn't locked into each site and we don't need a million different forum accounts to participate everywhere. Like the old days but supercharged with new tech.
Ehhhh. This could just be their current stopgap because of all of the NSFW swaps happening. I think you are extrapolating too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I could totally see Reddit enacting this policy in their “infinite wisdom” and quietly rolling it out. But you are drawing too much from this screenshot. We need more context.
Oh there’s no doubt they’ve slowly made it more of a pain in the ass to not use the app (while also making the app worse) but this specific screenshot is too much missing context for OP’s claim to be assumed. It could be true but we don’t know enough.
I do remember seeing this popup way before the whole API & protests debacle. The warning doesn’t even make sense, how will switching to the app to see the same content be safer?
I figured you needed to login (to apply your block list, filters, NSFW prefs, etc), but merely seeing the desktop mode of the website lets you through (not even using old.reddit). So this is another cheap way of forcing you to their cancer app.
Now you can’t even SORT comments without using the app. They are really taking all pqges off Elon’s book on ruining a website.
That was specifically for NSFW subs. What OP is showing us is not an NSFW sub. Hence the post.
I do not know why people think I tacitly approve of these changes. I do not. But what OP is claiming may or may not be true. We do not have enough information. It’s a completely separate matter from whether or not I think Reddit has been trying to funnel people towards their app, which clearly they have been for quite some time.
Yeah this is par for the course on NSFW subs, which are it's makes partial sense (log in to see it). But having this on just random subreddits is a pretty terrible development. Sounds like they're just testing the waters before every subreddit requires an about l account
Because Reddit wants us to use their app. I don’t think it should be necessary so I’m not sure why that question is directed at me or if that’s even what they’re asking tbh. But yeah obviously they want folks on the app.
I think their point is, if you’re correct and this is to protect people from unexpected NSFW content, viewing through the app would still just expose them to the unexpected NSFW content anyway.
Is this for posts that mods haven’t manually approved, or is it completely random which posts have not been ‘reviewed’? I swear I’ve seen this on posts with thousands of upvotes that surely must have been approved by then…
I go there for a couple of smaller subreddits I still visit (barely starting out on Lemmy, tough). But a lot of content seems to be slowing down, like 2 day-old threads on the home tab (I only go on desktop with adblockers).
This is obviously anecdotal, and have no numbers to back it up. We’ll have to see how it goes into the future. Reddit just keeps pissing off their core users time and time again.
My anecdotal experience is pretty much the same. My home country’s sub (the only one I really look at “new” on) slowed down a lot since the Reddit blackout. Before, you could expect a new post every 15 minutes or so. Now? A whole day can go by with one or two new posts. It’s weird. I still see the usual names in the comments, but posting in general is extremely slow. My “Best” tab in the homepage (this is old reddit mind you, I don’t know if that’s a thing on nuddit) also holds the same few posts at the top for the entire day, whereas it used to cycle a lot faster before the blackout.
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