In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...
The idea that Reddit is staging some nefarious conspiracy to "poison" fediverse spaces ... is losing the whole plot.
OP's straight up writing fanfiction trying to cast a site they just left as villains in some swashbuckling coming-of-age story. It's a nine-hour-old account, and they're already embracing the Us vs Them mentality and trying to sell it with prose.
I don't know how OP managed to pick fights within a couple hours of signing up for their account, but I'd suggest that if they left Reddit for "toxicity" only to immediately find it here too ... maybe they're carrying it around with them?
This is entirely the fault of the IWF and Microsoft, who create "exclusive" proprietary CSAM prevention software and then only license big tech companies to use it.
Putting the blame on Microsoft or IWF is meaningfully missing the point.
People were responsible for moderating what showed up on their forums or servers for years prior to these tools' existence, people have been doing the same since those tools existed. Neither the tool nor it's absence are responsible for child porn getting posted to Fediverse instances. If those shards won't take action against CSAM materials now - what good will the tool do? We can't run it here and have the tool go delete content from someone elses' box.
While those tools would make some enforcement significantly easier, the fact that enforcement isn't meaningfully occurring on all instances isn't something we can point at Microsoft and claim is their fault somehow.
Specialty coffee has it's own wild suite of dogmas and rules; there's all sorts of things we're "supposed" to do - or not. Many of these have all sorts of very good reasons and even some have scientific backing....
The Roaster of the Year Award recognizes the top roasters in the world. The competition is fierce and draws applications from every part of the globe....
Worth noting they're not just 'discontinuing' coins and awards - but removing them retroactively.
This Admin comment notes that the awards themselves will be removed, so posts and comments will no longer display the awards they received; it's not just that the feature is being sunset, but all awards will vanish from the site.
Internet history pedantry, but by the time the subreddit rolled around, the term and the movement had already been coopted.
Incel started as a term for men who felt depressed about being unable to find a female partner, and the subreddit they created was originally a supportive space for them.
The term was coined somewhere between 1994 and 1997 by "Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project" as a term for people of all genders who were unable to find partnership despite trying. Alana is a woman, and is effectively universally credited with coining the term and founding the movement. The movement wasn't 'for men', the term wasn't about men specifically, and it didn't start on Reddit. It started off as more of a personal blog, where Alana documented her own experiences and struggles - the site gained followers from other people with similar experiences, eventually growing into a combined forum / support group / community.
Then it got taken over by angry misogynists and the term became associated with them, while the original group just kind of got forgotten about. That original group deserves attention and empathy as well as the term they coined; the latter group isn’t even “involuntarily celibate,” as they play a very big role in their own celibacy.
Those folks have kind of always been there, and have always been a heavily represented demographic - Alana has said in interviews that the men who joined in the early days did have some concerning views and some concerning themes were on frequent repeitition in the discussions the community had. I don't think retconning the movement to exclude those people from the "true definition" is doing either camp any favours. The "involuntary" part of the label isn't trying to engage with whether or not the barrier may stem from factors within their control, but solely confined to the fact that they want something and are not getting it. They are simply "celibate, but not voluntarily celibate".
One quip that Alana made in several interviews while defining her modelling of the community she founded was that she didn't care why someone was an incel, ie "it's OK if you're celibate because you're into horses, but that's illegal" that that person should still be welcomed and included in the community.
I just think more people should give some thought to who that term originally belonged to.
I think that in light of this, it's even more important to be accurate and honest who those people are: Not male-exclusive, not limited to this or that cause of celibacy, not specifically gatekeeping out the misogynists or the beastialists any more than any other group. Just any people who want to get laid but are not getting laid.
A search for Threads content on Twitter currently brings up zero results, despite plenty of links to Meta’s microblogging rival being posted on the platform.
Elon made it clear shortly after taking over that "free speech" was speech he happened to agree with, and he had no intentions of ethical consistency on 'free speech' when it came to speech that was critical of him or his platform. Twitter already went nuclear on links to Mastadon and similar alternative platforms earlier this year while their dumpster fire was raging.
Having just clocked out of a meeting and sprinted like four blocks to go buy a bag of coffee; it got me wondering ... Good coffee can be hard to come by and I'll take for granted a detour that most of the world would see as hilariously unreasonable. Who else?...
Video Description: Just a little fun exploring the unknown (to me, anyway) world of coffee creamers. When did it get so weird?! No links to products on this one, but many thank......
I think it's worth addressing that "the right people" are very often going out of their way to be absolutely unreachable by the average joe and are completely impossible for mere poors to meaningfully bother directly. Protest will always inconvenience average people first, because the little people are always affected more than the rich in any action, especially any that would manage to rattle the powerful in any way.
The powerful have managed to structure society and laws alike to make effectively all actions that would target them directly and spare the average joe from any collateral overspill either impractical - or significantly more illegal than protest actions that cast a broader net. The idea from the powerful is to ensure that protest must affect other citizens in order to reach them, and can't just target them directly. Targeting them, alone, is harassment, or trespass on private property, or ... etc.
Like so many of those sorts of decisions, Digg leadership ultimately assumed - incorrectly, to be sure - that their users would "get over it" in time.
They'd had minor revolts over the 2.0 and 3.0 redesigns, they'd had sitewide discontent several times during the 3.0 era due to changes in the content algorithm ... Digg had weathered several storms by that point, and I think site management simply assumed they would continue that trend.
There's a perennial issue I think for Authorities in that sort of position where you're exposed to so much baseless griping and complaining from the extremely-vocal minority that you need to gain some ability to filter out negativity and criticism, or you're crippled by it. You cannot make everyone happy and only the unhappy people will bother to express themselves, so you learn to filter out the discontent and focus on the theory, on the goals. Many times you genuinely know better than this or that upset user, and you take solace from that. But from that position, it's so easy to then also block out the more important negative feedback, the necessary criticisms, under the assumption that 'you know better' - because that's how it went the last ten, hundred, thousand, times this sort of thing came up.
Which is IMO a lot of what happened to the whole of Upstairs staff at Reddit. They got so used to users complaining and users being upset about this or that little thing that they had to develop a certain amount of resistance to that feedback - but they've reached a point where they're so resistant to all feedback about their site that they wound up losing touch with the site and its users.
I think a huge part of where Reddit went wrong and will continue to is not having and/or listening to people on staff who are skilled and qualified at simply understanding site users and site user culture. So much of their current issues could have been avoided if they had a person in a leadership position, an equal at the C Suite table, whose whole and total responsibility was understanding the users and speaking 'for' them accurately - representing them as if they're stakeholders in the company.
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
Technically speaking, that data has some cost; just that Reddit's actual cost to serve that data is far lower than what they're trying to charge Third Parties.
It didn't host child porn, but when it was shut down part of the statements Reddit gave was that they had found users of the sub were using the comments sections of /jailbait to meet like-minded people, and then were using Reddit DMs to arrange exchanges off-platform - that likely did involve CP.
It was well-known and indisputable that child porn was posted to that community not infrequently, but was being removed by mods when detected. That's why Admin liked ViolentAcrez - he ran the community specifically to prevent it from being worse. The other allegation from that era was that the community routinely featured submissions of scantily-clothed minors who had also appeared in nude image sets, as unremoved content, and the comments sections would reflect that.
I think it's completely reasonable to frame that community as "dedicated to actual CP" for all that they weren't hosting it directly. The same way that /r/Piracy is dedicated to pirating digital content, but doesn't host links to piracy because that would be against TOS. The only reason Jailbait didn't host CP directly was the fact that as you note, the FBI would have shut that shit down in a heartbeat - if not for the illegality, that's absolutely what their main content would have been.
So much of what that community was up to had been openly known and discussed by the wider reddit community for years prior to the media attention that eventually pushed Reddit to shut them down.
Beyond spez (and the fact that he is a greedy little pig boy), I’m curious about the corporate dynamics that prevent a company like Reddit from being profitable. From an outside perspective, they make hundreds of millions per year via advertising, their product is a relatively simple (compared to industries that need a lot of...
I recall from past discussions on the site about its finances that theres a few major obstacles they hit;
Huge staffing costs. Not even necessarily bloat - though there is reportedly some of that - but just that they require a shitton of staff with expensive credentials to maintain and develop the site and its' backend. As the site grows, issues with code or algorithm or features require more and more resources to scale sustainably, so development snowballs similarly. It's expensive to maintain a stable of coders or developers capable of working in that scale. And not just code - their community or sales teams are also needing a lot of bodies and competitive compensation, especially up the food chain.
Hosting costs. As more and more of reddit's content is hosted in-house, their cost to deliver content has skyrocketed. There's very good business arguments to be made for keeping that content internally hosted, but those are all long-term payoff, while the costs of hosting are all much more immediate. In a prior conversation a former employee said that reddit's hosting costs have effectively kept pace with its growth in revenue.
Poor monetization, lack of vision, poor understanding of their own community.
Reddit launched without a monetization model, the plans was to build a VC darling and sell it so that monetization was someone else's problem. Now that the platform is trying to get cash positive, they've effectively failed to come up with a Plan A and gone for Plan B: ads. It's a particularly weak option, but a 'safe' fallback option used by shitty blogs and newsreels around the world. Reddit isn't offering particularly great value, it's not offering particularly great targeting, it's not even able to offer prominent placement or assured attention. Reddit is in a very poor position to sell ads when compared to Google or Facebook.
Reddit has struggled to make ads relevant, and has struggled to discover alternative revenue streams. The most major alternate revenue option has been awards / gold, but Reddit's commitment to that space has been half-assed at best, and resented or used toxically by the community at its worst. To the users or the outside world, we've never seen any attempts to make their niche more relevant to outsiders, or to make money from site users. Instead, they've waffled somewhat noncommittally in both spaces, while not excelling in either, or in walking a balance. I think it's safe to say from the Third Party Apps that there was huge willingness from Reddit's userbase to pay money in order to engage with the site in specific ways, and willingness to spend money on the community as a part of the community. Reddit never meaningfully figured out how to tap into the enthusiasm their own site inspired in its userbase.
Which I think is in large part because Reddit never really understood their own community. Reddit started with this wild anti-commercial, anti-adweb, mentality and attracted the technologically literate and internet-savvy demographic as it's core userbase, which went on to inform sitewide culture up to today. They launched a platform with anti-ad sentiment, attracted ad-opposed userbase demographics ... and then went ad-supported. This could have been something that reddit pitched successfully to the site at the time - they could have acknowledged that folks don't like ads and made a point of framing advertisers as entities choosing to support reddit and keep it free & functional - Reddit likes supporting "it's own". They could have facilitated and supported connections between advertisers and targeted communities in ways that bypass Reddit's hostility towards ads and appeals to advertisers. Instead they just started serving ads. Likewise with awards, premium, and similar: they could have done far more to play into the gamification and the willingness to support the platform - they just failed to. And today ... site Admin, Reddit Inc, have burned all of the community goodwill that could have made those programs successful by instead forcing corporate-feeling monetization and advertising upon the community.
More than wasting money directly, they've wasted opportunities and advantages. I think one huge long-term learning from Reddit's current struggle is the importance of soft skills and social acumen in managing a tech platform whose masthead product is its "communities" - they desperately needed people on staff who understood community and who understood their userbase's values and culture.
Shu also tells me that RIF was paying a “sizable revenue share” to Reddit beginning in 2012, which was during Yishan Wong’s tenure as CEO. Shu says he says initiated the talks with Reddit to create the agreement, which allowed for the licensed use of Reddit’s trademarks. (At the time, the app was called “reddit is fun.”) Shu says Reddit terminated the agreement in 2016 — which was the year after Huffman took over as CEO.
Holy shit the lede was a little buried from the title.
RIF had a revenue-sharing agreement with Reddit starting in 2012, and they had a working model to ensure that Reddit was compensated - and profited from - the API usage. RIF voluntarily worked out a deal to share it's revenues back to Reddit. That deal was terminated after Spez took over as CEO, under his watch, and that cancellation is big enough that it absolutely would have gone via the CEO for approval. Spez decided to turn down the revenue share agreement with RIF, only to come back seven years later and complain like Reddit was somehow being taken advantage of due to the costs of app API usage.
What an absolutely meaty disclosure: the same problem Spez is complaining about now is a problem he personally caused shortly after rejoining Reddit.
There were years there when any watermark from another site would get OP lynched in the comments, and now Admin over there is sufficiently out of touch they're going to start doing it to their own content.
Bets are on that this is a stupid kneejerk test from Reddit, worried that post-migration community hubs are going to "profit from their content" the same way Reddit did to places like ifunny or 9gag during it's entire growth arc.
Someone here already has 12 subs on his own. We would be inspired to avoid the era of the power mods. Moding should involve an interest, not just collecting rings of infinity like it's a gold rush. How can it be a good practice in the long term?...
I think the bigger problem was a lack of recourse.
Some of the big mega mods were fine, or were even net-positive stabilizing impacts on communities. Just that some real loud outliers were a massive problem and there were no mechanisms to get that behavior addressed effectively if they weren't doing anything that was going to also get them banned from the entire site.
Messages / Notifications are unreadable - accessing page gives 50X error.
I have two unread messages I can't access, as going to the notifications page results in a 50x error every time....
"...is not supported in this browser", fuck you Discord (programming.dev)
Coffee News from July 2023
Coffee News from July 2023...
Be wary of spiteful Reddit users
In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...
Microsoft and IWF Refuse To Assist In The Detection And Removal Of Child Pornography on the Fediverse (gleasonator.com)
This is entirely the fault of the IWF and Microsoft, who create "exclusive" proprietary CSAM prevention software and then only license big tech companies to use it.
2024 Preliminaries Hosts Announced — U.S. Coffee Championships (uscoffeechampionships.org)
US Coffee Champs qualifier circuit for 2024 has been announced....
What's your own personal Specialty Coffee act of heresy?
Specialty coffee has it's own wild suite of dogmas and rules; there's all sorts of things we're "supposed" to do - or not. Many of these have all sorts of very good reasons and even some have scientific backing....
Application are now open for Roaster of the Year Award 2024 - deadline is Jul 26. (www.roastmagazine.com)
The Roaster of the Year Award recognizes the top roasters in the world. The competition is fierce and draws applications from every part of the globe....
Reddit discontinues coins and awards after switching to paid API (www.androidpolice.com)
Incel vs Excel (slrpnk.net)
Twitter seems to ban all Threads links to reaffirm its position as a “free speech absolutist” platform (www.theverge.com)
A search for Threads content on Twitter currently brings up zero results, despite plenty of links to Meta’s microblogging rival being posted on the platform.
What's the biggest detour you've made for coffee?
Having just clocked out of a meeting and sprinted like four blocks to go buy a bag of coffee; it got me wondering ... Good coffee can be hard to come by and I'll take for granted a detour that most of the world would see as hilariously unreasonable. Who else?...
Hoffmann - Too Many Coffee Creamers: A Taste Test (www.youtube.com)
Video Description: Just a little fun exploring the unknown (to me, anyway) world of coffee creamers. When did it get so weird?! No links to products on this one, but many thank......
Sweden charges Greta Thunberg for blockading oil port (www.bbc.com)
The climate activist blocked a port handling fossil fuels with a group of young activists in June.
Those who forget history are deemed to repeat it. (lemmy.world)
OC Coffee News from June 2023
A summary of some major high points; not comprehensive - but the stories that seemed particularly important....
What are your Top Three best roasters in your region?
Where are you located, and who are your go-to success roasters within the area?...
As Apollo and other apps close down, Narwhal seemingly agrees to one-off deal with Reddit to stay in business (9to5mac.com)
Spez talks to NY Times (www.nytimes.com)
The link is unlocked, no paywall to read...
r/pics calls out spez' history as jailbait moderator, a former sub dedicated to actual CP. the post hit the front page with 15k karma in 4h, then got removed earlier today (old.reddit.com)
😂 amazing act of malicious compliance! fuck spez
How is a company like Reddit “not profitable” yet?
Beyond spez (and the fact that he is a greedy little pig boy), I’m curious about the corporate dynamics that prevent a company like Reddit from being profitable. From an outside perspective, they make hundreds of millions per year via advertising, their product is a relatively simple (compared to industries that need a lot of...
Loving the richness of variety in fediverse
RIF developer counters Reddit CEO’s claims that he didn’t want to work with Reddit (www.theverge.com)
According to someone on a discord server I am in, Reddit has started adding watermarks to every post?
Should we establish a maximum of subs per moderators?
Someone here already has 12 subs on his own. We would be inspired to avoid the era of the power mods. Moding should involve an interest, not just collecting rings of infinity like it's a gold rush. How can it be a good practice in the long term?...