Too many of you still have meta accounts, quest headsets, and sympathy for a company that can’t/shouldn’t be trusted with anything. They’re the reason for Trump being elected, the erosion of human rights, and many other atrocities on top of being a privacy nightmare. I don’t want them anywhere near the fediverse.
Then I got a job where I had to work with Meta and got an inside look at their company and culture.
I just couldn't anymore. Yes, my social life has suffered. But it's because we can't draw these kinds of lines that we're stuck with these fucks. And they are bigger fucks than you know.
FWIW, I've done business with Meta and seen their internal culture, or at least a peek at the corner of it I interact with and at the other small corners where people I know ended up working.
I wouldn't work there if I could help it, but the issues I saw are very much in line with other tech companies I know, big and small.
Meta isn't special, they just were one of those at the right place at the right time and they grew to be bigger than all of the other ones. Like all other tech corpos I know, they are made up of a mix of well intentioned and misguided people mostly struggling to navigate a self-sabotaging, entirely too large to manage corporate culture.
Meta isn't the death star. None of these tech firms are. Capitalism doesn't need your activism to be capitalism.
Yeah, I don't know where you're from, but over here if you don't have a Whatsapp account in working order you can't... do things.
I hired a company to wire my house and they won't communicate over anything else. I am in maybe five friends and family groups where every social event in my life is put together. I recently noticed a family member and I didn't have each other's numbers anymore, since we only ever communicate over Whatsapp. At work events people will show you a QR code for Facebook or Whatsapp and expect to receive the same back.
I get that a lot of people, especially in the US, don't notice, but Meta won this fight like a decade ago. I don't like it, but that ship sailed as far away as Amazon dominating online shopping.
Don't know where you live, but my experience of NL is that everyone and their dog did things via WhatsApp. Even government services, would absolutely struggle to abandon all things Meta-related entirely while living there.
I have had independent contractors offer it as an option, but most still have a phone number or have too many customers who aren't tech savvy enough to use something like that. There's really no way a reputable business in my area would survive that way.
I don't know what your area is, but everybody here is tech savvy enough to use WhatsApp. It's assumed to be just... part of how phones work. Both my elderly parents use it. My mom is on multiple chatgroups I had nothing to do with setting up. She only reaches out to me for help if she thinks something is spam or phishing. I can't stress this enough: nobody texts. Text messaging happens over WhatsApp unless you're receiving TFA notifications or automated messages from companies or the government, kinda like email.
As for the business, I'm sure if I had requested a phone call they would have called me, but it was a telecom firm and it wasn't really a big conversation. Guy just went "here's my WhatsApp, we'll ping you there" and we understood it to be the way it was gonna go. I've had delivery drivers reach out to me over it when they had my number on hand, unprompted.
Hah. During the pandemic the government here would reach out to you for vaccine appointments over Facebook and WhatsApp. I personally know at least a couple of people who dabbled in antivax stuff and wouldn't pick up the phone but still got their shots after the government reached out that way.
Not that Meta has anything to do with that, but it was funny to me to see the government embrace the vectors of misinformation to shame people into not being idiots.
I live near a major city, most people haven't had to learn anything like that over their existence: we have good cell phone reception over wifi too, perhaps that is it.
Tech is just not reliable enough for me to have any experience working with anyone who I would take seriously or who would work with anyone like that. I thought you should know your experience isn't the norm, especially in any place I have been in the USA.
Almost anyone who approached with Whatapp is seen as poor, fly-by-night, and likely a grift here. "Why not use your phone number if you are trustworthy?" Would be the opinion here.
No, wait, this isn't a "my area" as "my city" or whatever.
I mean it works like this country-wide here.
Nobody in the country can operate without WhatsApp. That's not a thing. I am not in the US and I'm telling you here WhatsApp is just how sending text messages works. For everybody. Apple or Android.
The dominance of WhatsApp in some countries is not because telephones are new to them. I hope this was a joke and not a real American view of how other countries are.
I hope you are joking to act like the Europe is American and talking so authoritatively with just personal experience and frankly you seem very naive. American have to have local numbers spoofed often in order to be scammed by these other countries.
What are the WhatsApp scam rates?
Phone numbers were required for business for the longest to incorporate, so it was a way of showing legitimacy. Even now, a physical location gives customers comfort.
Jesus Christ you just have to be right but you have lived such a small life.
I have no idea what the last handful of posts on this thread are even about, so I'm just gonna rest my case here. I feel I've made my point clearly enough.
Yes, you explained your personal and local experience and it works for you. It's hilarious that a stable phone network with a private/public partnership to maintain access in one country is not unerstood by those in countries who have only recently set up any kind of "stable" way of contacting their people.
We used postal for all federal contact for decades. It's really narrow understanding of people.
The Internet, in my opinion, is the push and pull between the weird fascination to find out when you think people outside the US started using telephones and the knowledge that digging further will not lead to anything useful or constructive.
And yet I'm writing this. Now, THAT is the internet for you.
I am reminded of when, back in school, I considered an exchange year in the US. Exchange agencies hosted a bunch of info/prep events for potential exchangees, often with former participants sharing their experiences.
Probably the most unsettling piece of advice was to expect seemingly absurd questions from students there. Examples we were given included whether we have fridges here, or electricity in general, or if Hitler's still around. (To clarify, this was late 2000s, I'm from Central Europe - hence Hitler - and those students would've been about 16.)
I also learned that "American History" is a complete, stand-alone high school subject and, from what I understood, isn’t necessarily backed up by a "General History"-type class, so that made the idea of internet-era teens asking such things somewhat more conceivable.
Going on that, I really hope you get an answer on the phone question. On the off chance that they are not just trolling, that would be some fascinating insight.
Also, obligatory-but-involuntary WhatsApp sucks so much!
Meta won. They won social media. Worldwide they're absolutely huge. Entire countries never got the "Facebook is for old people" memo, and on many Android territories the default messaging app is effectively WhatsApp. And of course there's Instagram. That one's worldwide.
The only thing I've seen threaten Meta's dominance in this space recently is TikTok. Twitter is a footnote, mostly a residual self-sustaining place for politicians and journalists to talk to each other.
Same. I never got rid of my Facebook account, though. I still have multiple work relations that will reach out to me that way, and my work phone is the one I have logged in to it. I keep it off my home browsers and personal phone.
But you can't NOT have WhatsApp. It's just not an option. If people thought it was hard to get Americans to stop using Twitter, this is an order of magnitude bigger.
Yeah, I'm in the "have to have WhatsApp" camp because it's the only way I can stay in touch with a bunch of international friends now that I don't have a Facebook account anymore.
There are alternatives, but I don't press about it because at least Meta doesn't monetize WhatsApp...for now
It’s like that in some European countries but in the USA and Canada WhatsApp has far less presence. I understand the pressure though: whenever my family and friends in Europe want to communicate they always suggest WhatsApp.
Matrix has always been a great alternative. Any service that is owned by a corporation will eventually be monetized. I never liked discord in the first place.
What's to stop Revolt from becoming the next Discord?
Edit: I just logged into my account to see that Revolt had removed a "server" for breaking foreign (unjust) laws. That seems to go against everything the fediverse stands for.
...is Discord trying to do federation? I'm confused.
Someone is in charge of Revolt, doesn't matter if it's a company or someone else. Someone is in charge of the servers. What's stopping them from ultimately selling the company? Reddit didn't start out as a corporation. Nor did WhatsApp, but after creating a trusted userbase they were sold off to Facebook to be exploited for data.
IT people love to talk about how "easy" it is to create and run your own server, but this is simply not true and they just lack awareness.
How can revolt "remove" a server since you can connect to any custom hosted server? It's like saying lemmy removed an instance.
And besides, I'm pretty sure that is something that federated instances will have to worry about too, you might not care about your local laws but the ISP or hosting provider of your server where possibly illegal data is, will care.
No it isn't. The default is to be hosted on Revolt servers. I created a "server" and I didn't set up any kind of server, so it's not running on my server. I don't really know all the technical details, I just signed in and saw a message that said the "server" was removed.
this feels like back in 2015 when I was trying to get all my friends to go from TeamSpeak to Discord because it had Text & Media Channels and you didn't have to pay for the server
You're comment makes no sense. Matrix is a federated chat protocol, and works kind of like lemmy. Matrix itself has more in common with ActivityPub, the protocol that the fediverse uses. What's more comparable are the matrix clients.
There are many, many matrix clients to choose from, and even more instances, including the option to set up your own.
Getting friends to leave facebook messenger for discord 8 years ago already, never underestimate how much the average person can ignore. For the time being I'm on discord, but if they start cracking down on small servers I'll be spinning up alternatives overnight
Funny how he repeatedly uses phrases such as “the extent that they were profiting off of our API” but has never used the phrase “the extent that we rely on freely provided content and freely provided moderation. If it weren’t for the tens of millions of people who are giving us free stuff we wouldn’t even exist.”
I have yet to profit a single dime off of Reddit. After over ten years (11th Cake Day is coming up), and nothing to show for it but piles of worthless Karma.
I'm deleting all my free content off reddit. It's not particularly exciting content, but I have answered a few questions people probably ask on Google (recipes, cleaning tips, etc) that will now be gone. Just gotta back up my most important stuff first
I nuked the past several years of gif making from my account. Felt like slicing out a troublesome family member and it still weirdly hurts to have done that.
There is a crisis of democracy in contemporary societies, every time that you invoke the direct power of the people, the status quo conservationists ban your participation and exclude you of most of the expression spaces.
How much additional shit did Facebook push to the users feeds though? People are engaging less because Facebook has added a million ads and a billion posts from people and groups you never agreed to follow. Facebook can’t be trusted for anything. They’ll game any study to support whatever outcome they wanted in the first place. It’s run by a sociopathic, lying, thief.
The Open Internet (OI) is a fundamental network (net) neutrality concept in which information across the World Wide Web (WWW) is equally free and available without variables that depend on the financial motives of Internet Service Providers (ISP).
Open is not the opposite of private. You can have an open internet where your information is not shared with third parties, i.e. private.
I find google works fine if I'm just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.
And I find that it's pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it's still just going to return the same general shit.
I'm not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it's been a year or two now, and maybe more - it's just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.
It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.
But starting a couple of years back, it's been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.
To anthropomorphize, it's as if it's developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you're looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn't matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term "movie," that's what it's going to focus on. So if you're lucky, you might get the actual movie you're looking for, but it's absolutely guaranteed that you're going to get streaming services and "18 movies with real blood" style clickbait.
It's complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for "Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me". The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don't even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It's horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.
Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.
And God forbid you look for anything involving troubleshooting your home network. Good luck sorting through pages and pages of the same copy and pasted article telling you how to restart your router.
I’ve noticed this even when trying to find the name of a song. I used to be able to search:
lyrics “a specific part of the song I remember” whatever random words I can remember out of order
and it would very reliably find songs, even obscure ones. Now the only way it works is if I happen to remember part of the name of the song, usually it’s full of entries for the same popular song that has one word in the title that I included that is definitely not what I’m looking for.
There probably aren't that manypeople using adblockers to watch YouTube. Most people just use the official app or a browser without uBlock. And those that do block ads, don't generate a cent of revenue for YouTube or its creators. Neither will actually miss the lost traffic.
There isn't really a good reason for YouTube not to try and stop adblockers.
And anyone who tries to step in to replace YouTube with a completely free product will run into two issues: It is enormously expensive to operate a video sharing platform on the scale of YouTube, and, the vast majority of creators are not going to move to a platform that does not bring them any money. This is the paradox of any free video service.
The true alternatives to YouTube are paid platforms like Nebula and Floatplane. They allow users to support creators without having to kowtow to annoying advertisers. But this comes with the astronomical burden of requiring the users to spend a few dollars a month for their entertainment.
… feel that much of the anger from our recent decision around the downstream sources comes from either those who do not want to pay for the time, effort and resources going into RHEL or those who want to repackage it for their own profit. This demand for RHEL code is disingenuous.
Then remove all open source code from your code base. I don’t mean some, I mean all. Let’s see whose code you’re repackaging for your own profit.
Yeah this is an insane take (on RH’s part). There’s not a viable product left if they remove the FOSS code.
don’t want to pay for the time, effort…
It’s Linux. If RH didn’t want to contribute to a FOSS project and take advantage of the other tools therein, they could have been coding their own OS from scratch all these years.
I can’t help but notice how similar their phrasing is to Spez trying to justify why Reddit has yanked the rug out from under their third party app developers.
Blaming anybody for profiting off Reddit without Reddit gettinga cut, when Reddit is looking to profit off of user content, without giving the users a cut.
It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.
The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.
In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.
Why would anyone want to move to another functionally similar microblogging site if Twitter still has more users?
Perhaps because the quality of the experience is better, even if the number of users is lower. As Twitter appeals more and more to the far right, those might not be the users people want to be hanging around with.
Anyone who is still on Twitter has, in my opinion, fewer issues with being a corporate puppet and being associated with all the hatred there than they have with losing views.
I don't agree with that logic because that means whenever horrible people buy off a platform, even if you do not pay for it, you are obligated to leave rather than push back. There are people who spent decades cultivating their community before Elon Musk had any interest in it. There are people who are right now pushing back against the rise of hate in it. It seems like a Catch-22 where the person either gives up their platform or they are discredited. The end result either way is that Musk's crowd wins.
This is to my eyes the core problem with centralized corporate social networks. Ultimately, where you intend it or not, your presence is in support to the core mission of the corporate entity holding the platform. Twitter has 16 years of history at this point, and I think can be viewed in three periods. First was the tech experiment to bring online interactions more into the real world. This was Twitter's shortest period. It lasted a month or so at most. In this phase, the mission was to create a bridge between online interactions and real world experiences using cell phone technology. Second was the venture capital chasing profits period. This was the longest and least successful period of Twitters history. In this phase, the mission was to make some money. I don't think Twitter had a mission beyond that, and that ultimately they tried to curate an environment that would appease advertisers and drive engagement (even if it was mostly through outrage). In this phase, I don't hold all that much against anyone who engaged with the platform. I don't think Twitter was doing anything egregiously unethical (beyond the usual bullshit every tech company does). I lost interest in Twitter in this timeframe because the outrage engagement model bummed me out. All this brings us to now...
At this point. Twitter is Elon Musk's personal messaging platform. Its purpose is to inflate and normalize Elon Musk's world view, and those of his cronies. Anyone who remains on the platform his helping him and his shift right mission, preferring to respect the requests of authoritarian right wing governments vs common sense consumer protections requested by more free governments. There are people on Twitter who disagree with this, but their presence still supports Musk in his mission. Whether you were there before Musk or not is immaterial. Its his personal platform, and it's for his mission
This is definitely an example of the risks of privately owned social media.
But to say that remaining on the platform is helping him just seems like oversimplifying the matter. What is more likely to advance the spread of his views? If the platform is left solely to his supporters and people oblivious or indifferent to the changes of the platform, or if there are still people denouncing and criticizing it? Seems naive to assume all it takes is for everyone against hate to leave one of the most influential media platforms of these times and its radicalization will have no further effects at all.
All that seems to accomplish is the peace of mind that you are not involved and experiencing the direct effects of it.
This is to my eyes the core problem with centralized corporate social networks. Ultimately, where you intend it or not, your presence is in support to the core mission of the corporate entity holding the platform. Twitter has 16 years of history at this point, and I think can be viewed in three periods. First was the tech experiment to bring online interactions more into the real world. This was Twitter's shortest period. It lasted a month or so at most. In this phase, the mission was to create a bridge between online interactions and real world experiences using cell phone technology. Second was the venture capital chasing profits period. This was the longest and least successful period of Twitters history. In this phase, the mission was to make some money. I don't think Twitter had a mission beyond that, and that ultimately they tried to curate an environment that would appease advertisers and drive engagement (even if it was mostly through outrage). In this phase, I don't hold all that much against anyone who engaged with the platform. I don't think Twitter was doing anything egregiously unethical (beyond the usual bullshit every tech company does). I lost interest in Twitter in this timeframe because the outrage engagement model bummed me out. All this brings us to now...
At this point. Twitter is Elon Musk's personal messaging platform. Its purpose is to inflate and normalize Elon Musk's world view, and those of his cronies. Anyone who remains on the platform his helping him and his shift right mission, preferring to respect the requests of authoritarian right wing governments vs common sense consumer protections requested by more free governments. There are people on Twitter who disagree with this, but their presence still supports Musk in his mission. Whether you were there before Musk or not is immaterial. Its his personal platform, and it's for his mission
This is to my eyes the core problem with centralized corporate social networks. Ultimately, where you intend it or not, your presence is in support to the core mission of the corporate entity holding the platform. Twitter has 16 years of history at this point, and I think can be viewed in three periods. First was the tech experiment to bring online interactions more into the real world. This was Twitter's shortest period. It lasted a month or so at most. In this phase, the mission was to create a bridge between online interactions and real world experiences using cell phone technology. Second was the venture capital chasing profits period. This was the longest and least successful period of Twitters history. In this phase, the mission was to make some money. I don't think Twitter had a mission beyond that, and that ultimately they tried to curate an environment that would appease advertisers and drive engagement (even if it was mostly through outrage). In this phase, I don't hold all that much against anyone who engaged with the platform. I don't think Twitter was doing anything egregiously unethical (beyond the usual bullshit every tech company does). I lost interest in Twitter in this timeframe because the outrage engagement model bummed me out. All this brings us to now...
At this point. Twitter is Elon Musk's personal messaging platform. Its purpose is to inflate and normalize Elon Musk's world view, and those of his cronies. Anyone who remains on the platform his helping him and his shift right mission, preferring to respect the requests of authoritarian right wing governments vs common sense consumer protections requested by more free governments. There are people on Twitter who disagree with this, but their presence still supports Musk in his mission. Whether you were there before Musk or not is immaterial. Its his personal platform, and it's for his mission
Well, given how saddled with debt the place was it wouldn't be hard to argue that more activity in fact only burdens him more. It's not a sustainable or profitable place. I also don't think advertisers will be to thrilled by the activity of shit constantly being flung everywhere.
But more than that, it is a social media platform, not a shop. I think there is inherent value in the people who stay there and highlight the issues going on regarding hate speech and political manipulation, rather than they all leave. That would allow hateful people to mold the platform around a whole lot of clueless people who don't realize what is going on, and might just go along with it because they are immersed in this environment. Twitter is not made exclusively of bigots, but it could become more like that over time.
Sure there is no amount of tweets that will stop Elon Musk's mad spiral. But his reputation definitely took some hits.
As far as it compares with JK Rowling, I also think it's not the same. Say, if we were to compare, as far as engagement and community goes, I wouldn't expect anyone to drop all their friends and groups they make through their shared love of Harry Potter just because the author is awful.
If anything I'm a bit suspicious from where first came this call for complete disengagement. Because if there are no voices calling for inclusivity and respect in social media platforms and fandoms, they just become breeding grounds for hate.
I think you’re overthinking this. Twitter used to be a place where I could keep up with my friends. Now, it’s a place filled with many forms of hate. Because of this, I no longer wish to use it, so I left.
I personally have no care in the world for what happens with Twitter. Why should I? It becomes overrun with bigots? So what?
Remaining on a platform filled with hate is an indicator that you’re ok with that. I am not, so I left. end of story.
This is not someone randomly joining Parler. Not only minorities don't always have the luxury to only exist where they are welcomed, they had been accepted and that was taken away from them. They already had built their following and that's being ruined. To say that trying to hold onto what they've built and resist is "being okay with hate" doesn't sound right to me.
Twitter as a place does not matter to me, but I still have friends and creators that I like that use it, and especially for artists, they need a platform with wide reach for their careers. I can preach the Fediverse and Mastodon as much as I want, but until it's widely adopted, it's not going to help them.
I'm also on Kbin so you can guess what's my stance on remaining in bad platforms.
But these are two different arguments: Whether it's sensible for people to leave, or whether they are obligated out of moral consistency to leave.
Absolutely people have plenty of reasons not want to wallow there and I wouldn't in a million years say anything bad to anyone who wants to leave. But I also wouldn't shame those who want to push back against hate, who want to protect the following they gathered, or who want to support the creators who didn't find an adequate place to rebuild their online presence yet.
What I am suspicious of is from whoever came up with this argument "if you are so opposed to bigots, how about you leave this platform" when the end result is that many of these same marginalized people targeted by hate speech might have less reach because of it.
Yeah, I'm still there. I'm not letting the right-wing trolls win. I'm there until it implodes.
Much like Reddit, if you curate your feed, stay away from the big accounts and avoid the Trending Topics and don't talk politics then it's still a decent place to be.
Yeah, I do still have my twitter account but I try to avoid going on it and only still have it because there are a few niche times where it's still unfortunately the best place to get current information on local issues (last Sunday for example there was a power outage in my area and the power company's twitter is a bit better at giving updates than their official site so I was checking both).
I really wish I could just delete my account and maybe I still will (and just create an empty dummy account for those rare cases so twitter doesn't harass me to log in). But to be honest I'm less stressed about social media in general ever since I left twitter and I suspect over time a similar thing will happen with being off Reddit.
I've been using Pocket Casts on Android and it works well. I think that I started using it 2 years ago and I haven't encountered any issues. I use the free version and it hasn't asked me to pay and hasn't shown me ads. I'm a light user when it comes to podcasts though.
They have a web player for PC, but I haven't tried it.
I'll add my vote to Pocket Casts. Been my goto podcast app for... Forever. The app is all around solid on every plattform, and you can easily upload your own sound files and they will sync between devices.
This is the one for me. I just checked and I've been using the premium version since May 2016 and it cost me £2.50. Only issue I've had in that time is the web player was failing to buffer episodes for streaming, but that has since resolved for me.
That was most likely caused by a limitation or rather security feature of the browser regarding cross-domain resources. They offer a desktop Electron-based app that works around this.
TLDR: not worth reading the article, it’s just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”. It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests lasts (edit: lasted) for “weeks” - not the more truthful “months”, not “permanent changes”, but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.
I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as “news”.
Valid, but from a truth-in-reporting standpoint, those protests went on for MONTHS and MONTHS. Which I suppose could technically be reported as “weeks”, but they could also be reported as “femtoseconds” and yet… seems to lose accuracy that way? :-P
And like, I understand that the title of the article means that it is focusing narrowly on third-party apps not the state of Reddit as a whole, but (1) the scope still includes anything that it does choose to say, e.g. how long those protests lasted, and (2) it does not mention anywhere how e.g. third-party apps compare to the official Reddit app, or what their market share is with respect to one another, which seems the two most relevant questions of all?!
Continuing on, a third question could be: do people like those apps? From the comments even in the article, it seems not… but without usage stats, even an app used by a single person counts the same as e.g. the former Apollo.
i.e., How DOES the third-party app market look nowadays, after the protests? After reading this article, I still have no idea whatsoever… All I know is that there is a list of apps, which sounds like a singular detail devoid of any context that Reddit would very much like us to know, rather than anything that I would actually care about knowing in order to get a better picture of the situation as a whole.
Some subs did not protest at all. Some users even went into subs dedicated to discussing the topic like Reddit Alternatives and anti-protested, and still others went so far as to brigade many small, entirely unrelated niche subs, taking over polls asking the actual MEMBERS of those subs what they wanted to do, making any discussion of the situation held hostage by a toxic barrage of venomous filth, often by accounts that seemed to have been created for just that purpose in mind due to their highly suspicious age. In my own sub, we had to record comments by hand b/c we felt that we could not trust automated polling as a result.:-(
Some subs shut down for merely a day or two (as mine did). A few more shut down for a little longer - measured in days to weeks.
But several subs, including some of the top ones on the entire site, shut down for MONTHS. And some even shut down permanently, only to have their decisions overturned by Reddit who sent in scabs to open them back up, months later.
So… it was a spectrum ofc, and perhaps the subs you were interested in were primarily affected for a couple weeks. But on the whole, the long tail of the protests lasted much longer than a mere few days, or even weeks, and the likes of John Olivier pic spam lasted for months.:-)
It's probably because I generally saw the sub shutdowns as a result of the protest, and not as an ongoing protest. Reddit clearly wasn't in any talks with the mods at that point and vica versa.
Honestly i'll just go with it being months. I'm basically just arguing semantics at this point.
I only ever really browsed Reddit with Apollo and I monitored the situation somewhat. I feel like the subs that could migrate easier (more techy, more text than pictures) stayed closed the longest or permanently. The ones that can’t really (like those more picture streamy ones as the sfw porn network) were open again fastest from what I remember.
So depending on interest it could have felt way shorter or longer.
I am still missing some of the subs I liked, but I don’t expect some of them to actually pop up here.
It’s always good to keep one’s shill detector up on Ars vis-a-vis Reddit given the ownership situation. I’ve so far not seen anything that rises to that level, including here, because of the audience. If you’re on Ars and don’t know what Reddit is, this story isn’t going to be of interest and thus is not going to push you to try using Reddit.
That said, this story only seems relevant to the minuscule-if-at-all-extant sliver of Ars readers who know what Reddit is and haven’t been using it only because they’ve been waiting to hear what paid apps look like eight months after the whole fiasco started. That’s not a demographic I’ve ever seen represented in the comments.
Very rarely there may be something that you need. Even so, it is becoming increasingly rare to find that knowledge. Spez decided that he owns it now, though some of us here happen to disagree:-).
Nor do you need a mobile app to use Reddit in any case:-). Anyway I think I am with you - we almost hear more about how Reddit is doing here in the Fediverse than we did back when we were on Reddit:-).
totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats
The author asked multiple devs about these things - they all had the same reply: Can’t talk about it because NDA.
more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
That’s not the stated objective of the article, which was “Exploring Reddit’s third-party app environment.”
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”.
No, it doesn’t. You don’t call it an “APIcalypse” if you’re shilling for Reddit. You don’t pull out the most critical quote right at the top if you want to shill for Reddit. (“I don’t believe Reddit’s leadership… cares about developers anymore.”) You don’t mention Lemmy, or Threads, or Tildes if you’re shilling for Reddit.
You admit that you’re biased; good, thank you. This article isn’t.
As a European I'll never cease to find it mind blowing that it is normal for a Americans that the cost to them of damn near everything is more than the cost initially shown to them.
That’s still my favorite EU legislation. The price that is displayed must be equal (or higher, discounts are still allowed) to the price that you pay. Taxes, tips, fees, everything must be included in the price.
I get the “but different states sales taxes thing”, for national advert. However even then, just make them present example price
Get the new Moborola Bazer, only 549 dollars*
price example for Buffalo new York, including taxes and fees
Since if one is going with “well the final price you pay might not be what was advertised”, make it be more representative and real. Yeah the final price might be different sometimes even lower depending on your local taxes compared to the example prices calculation locations taxes.
Local advertising or on the shelf prices? There is no excuse, you are selling in that location. You know what the taxes and fees are just add them in. Any rare special discount and discrepancy cases, well the people eligible for those know to expect the difference.
It's actually only a few things. The vast majority of the goods we purchase are clearly priced. Most states (and some local jurisdictions like big cities) do have sales tax applied to purchases of non-essential goods, but those rates are generally much lower than the national sales taxes in most European countries.
I’m seeing it more and more. Little “processing fees” here and there, some tied to COVID, some tied to credit cards. There needs to be a clap-back against this behavior.
The number of places trying to suddenly add or expect an 18% tip or something infuriates me.
Like, why the fuck are you making me suddenly opt out of an 18% tip, Subway? What the fuck would that be for? And after your prices have gone up like 50% in 3 years already??
And I'm sure a bunch of morons pay it, which is why more and more places are pushing it.
How about a “convenience fee” for making an online payment. Why should I pay a fee to make the transaction more convenient for the company who no longer has to pay an employee to take the payment in person?
It’s not about having a sales tax applied to some or all goods or about how much that’d be. It’s about not listing the final price including the tax right until you’re supposed to pay for it. How dumb is that?
I love oregon, no sales tax so the listed price is the price. Now all these idiots moved here and are making changes as to why this place was nice. Like trying to implement a sales tax and getting rid of the urban growth boundary
Now we have to pump our own gas, it was nice having someone do it for ya... if they add a sales tax and create urban sprawl like LA or Phoenix I'll loose my mind...
Just responded above about the downside of all income being taxed at far higher rates than sales tax. That said, my god the amount of ink we spilled on the Ashland UGB.
My college roommate was from Washougal. He taught me the even finer art of retaining all deposit items in Seattle for my next visit, at which time I’d pop over the 5 bridge first and then show up with an empty car.
Which, in the case of Oregon, means income tax rivaling federal, and you’re paying that on rent. The money always comes from somewhere, and I despised it far more than I worried about coming up with $1.07 for a 99-cent burger.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with sales tax either (on non essential goods). I do have a problem with it not being included in the price shown on the product.
Sales tax is the most obvious example of adding to the cost I've been shown, but it's everything. Here if there is a price on something that is the price you pay. Period.
If I have €5 and the price on the shelf is €4.90 we are all good, and I don't even need to know what country I'm in!
But is is more than that, if I take my car in to be fixed, they have to agree every cost they want to charge me in advance at no point can anything cost me more than I expected and agreed to up front.
Airline tickets, theatre tickets, hospital bills, TV ads, you name it, the price they state or advertise is what I pay, no ifs-no buts.
You’re completely right to feel that way. As an American, it’s mind blowing to me, too. I really don’t like the fact that “hidden fees” have become normal.
The tax drives me crazy. The excuse for not displaying the total price after tax is because it’s different for each state. …yet the cash register seems to be able to handle that perfectly fine. So it can’t that hard to figure it out.
Edit: after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item. So that could definitely be impossible to display before hand.
after a quick look into it, the main problem is tax in a lot of places is based on the Total amount sold, not on each item.
I’m actually confused, aren’t taxes a percentage? The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no? Or is my brain not do math good? Can someone smarter than me explain?
The sum of a percentage of all items should be the same as a percentage of the sum, no?
Suppose you buy two items costing x and y, and there’s a constant sales tax of t (say 10%, or 0.1). You’d pay t * x + t * y, or t * (x + y). You can even generalize this to Σ(t * x) = t * Σx (for x ∈ X, where X is the set of prices you’re paying).
I think the issue they were bringing up though is that tax is not applied equally to all items, and that tax may be determined by number of items sold. I don’t actually know if this is true or not, but if it is, the distributive property doesn’t apply anymore. Edit: I re-read the comment, that doesn’t look like what they were saying actually. Either way, if tax is weird like this, distributive property may not apply anymore.
Say you list a table lamp on your website at $100, tax included. Well, if you sell that table lamp to a buyer in Connecticut (where the tax rate is a flat 6.35%) then you’re required to remit $6.35 in sales tax to the state of Connecticut on that transaction.
But if you sell the same table lamp to a buyer in Aberdeen, Washington, where the sales tax rate is 9.08%, then you’d be required to remit $9.08 in sales tax to the state of Washington.
As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including tax in your pricing.
Further, US customers are accustomed to paying their local sales tax rates. We’re so accustomed to paying odd amounts in sales tax that paying a flat rate might surprise us or leave us a little confused.
This is anti-consumer bullshit nonsense. All they did was hid their only real “con” behind a wall of text. “As you can see, you are cutting into your profit margin by including sales tax”
And the last paragraph is fucking stupid too. People are too used to seeing numbers, so other numbers will confuse them!
I'm not aware of anywhere in the US where the tax is variable depending on total amount sold. Sometimes some things are excluded from sales tax. But that's per-item and not variable.
In the vast majority of the US there's no reason they can't just display the price with tax.
Granted, prices on consumer items are so fucking out of control retailers and etc just charge whatever the fuck they want and people are expected to pay it. They're gouging at 80%, 100%, 150% markups on food, clothing, services, etc versus 2 years ago and people seem to just accept it (tough not to when everyone is doing it)
Initially they got away with it because "COVID supply problems", which was frequently a lie or exaggeration. Now there's no excuse given typically; people quote "inflation" but that's a tiny fraction of it. It's just gouging companies have learned they can keep getting away with more and more.
Check out the article linked below. I’m interested in what you think after that. Especially with the states that forbid including tax in displayed prices (and why they don’t).
In Ontario Canada there is no provincial tax component on meals costing less than $4. This dates from the time you could get a simple lunch for < $4. Unfortunately it’s never been adjusted for inflation.
No reason not to show amount with tax and give people a pleasant surprise though
When I make price signs at work I make sure the price shows taxes and bottle deposits. I think my store is the only one to do that. I manage a liquor store
Tax in almost every single place I’ve ever been to in the United States is not nearly so complicated. State tax, occasional city/county tax, seldom restaurant tax are nearly always flat rates. It wouldn’t be difficult to incorporate those taxes applied for each individual item to their prices at all. Most places choose not to because it inflates the price on menus and price tags, and most people assume tax is not included in these prices.
The initial shock of charging more could convince patrons to go elsewhere if it’s not perfectly clear tax is included in the price.
Could your local Safeway put tax-inclusive prices in the circular? Sure, although there are actually laws that prohibit such local pricing (YMMV; I’ve lived in a lot of states) specifically so that people in the sticks aren’t shouldering the entire transportation bill to their IGA. This is why grocery circulars are regional, but that’s an aside. Still, different cities in the region will have different tax rates, so they can’t do tax-inclusive, and they certainly can’t have a different price on the shelf than in the circular, and here we are.
But these are small potatoes.
Now, can Tim Cook release a new iPhone and list the price in every municipality in the U.S. in the keynote? The patchwork of devolved taxing authority makes the U.S. a poor candidate for tax-inclusive pricing.
States universally abandoning income tax for VAT (ain’t never gonna happen, since VAT inconveniently hits even billionaires’ consumption [and even less likely would be pushing through VAT while retaining income tax]) could get things closer to what Europeans have come to expect, where each state would have a universal rate and consistently applied carveouts and then distribute that to lower tiers of government as some states currently do with sales tax, but the closest advertising could get to that would be “state VAT excluded,” at which point nothing has been fixed in terms of walking out the door paying the advertised price at the cost of unpopular economic upheaval.
It’s why the “Oh the Free Market will sort itself out” is such a bullshit claim.
My five year old who just got shot at the fifth school shooting this month is just gonna have to buckle down and be patient while I compare quality of service and cost of… the one hospital in town and… that one in the next county ever.
It’s funny because I’ve literally never seen a single person genuinely make that claim. Just people being mad about theoretical people making that claim. I’m sure they exist, they must with how many people claim to know someone that said it, but that line of logic doesn’t seem to be as common as people make it seem.
Republicans: “Free market!” Also republicans: “Buy American” “we need to ban Chinese companies from importing and selling goods in the u.s.” “Outsourcing labor is just smart business”
And on the free market isnt sorting itself out - the claim is usually that the gubment is still not letting the market be free enough. That's usually the claim, for example, from all the right-wingers I know for when they get cornered on why health care costs are 1000% ridiculous.
Stores can show out the door pricing of most products, they just won’t. It’s fairly common in the cannabis space because they don’t want to make change.
Variable taxes based on region. The rates don’t change within a single store, which is where all of the labels are printed. Just print the label with the tax added.
Right. Same excuse as the cable companies. They can clearly calculate the price easily when you get the bill. They can just as easily calculate it when showing you how much it costs.
So thoroughly CEO-brained he’s sabotaging his own business. He’d rather have his serfs in spitting distance than a future for his company. Truly incredible.
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