Bozicus

I think my toilet is better than Reddit's app. And my toilet has a broken thingamajig that means I have to take off the lid and move a lever to get it to flush at least twice a week.

...but... but... I don't have any rayon sweatpants! This is a tragedy, and I must go out and buy some immediately! [/s]

Just about the only good thing I can say about Steve Huffman is that he's not (yet) as bad as Musk. But how long that lasts... I don't know, lol, I'm glad I already left Reddit.

I think they were wrong on purpose, tbh. It's the kind of thing that would be embarrassing for Reddit to admit when they're going for an IPO.

Also, it's amazing how much money a large company can spend when it wants, even if its bank account is so far in the red it's upsetting bulls. Small companies, on the other hand, can't spend money they don't have. There's a lot wrong with this picture, but the net effect is that Reddit probably can hire full-time mods for r/IAmA if they want.

I love that. Decreasing the overall number of posts also decreases the number of places ads can appear in that sub, and the number of eyeballs available to see the ads, since no one is going to spend as long on a less-active sub as they would on an active one.

They can get all the data they want without the API, and I think they will from here on out. But if a site happens to provide data in a convenient API format for free, they might use it. Or they may not, I don't know what evidence Reddit used to decide that the LLMs training on Reddit data was doing it via the API. It's possible that all Reddit ever intended to do was kill third party apps (and it seems like they're still settling for killing most, and maiming the stragglers).

To be (un)fair, the ToS is toilet paper on most for-profit websites.

+1 on remembering the smaller-scale "weird web," and being interested in going back. It's not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won't come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.

I don't know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It's corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.

I think this is the explanation. I have also seen some anti-Reddit coverage on Wired, but it would not be hard for a Wired editor to convince someone to do an "it's already fine again" article, especially if the writer hadn't been following the drama. It's not that hard to cherry-pick facts to make Reddit look like it's not on fire, even though it kinda is.

Oh, I see. I suppose I should expect that kind of reverse valuation from organisms that inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen.

I'm just waiting to see if any of the big AI companies they claim are going to pay actually do. I'm willing to bet money that API usage levels dropped off a cliff as soon as the new pricing took effect, and that there will be no big payouts from Microsoft etc

I like it, tbh. "Malicious plural" is a grammatical construction you don't see every day.