dan @ dan @lemm.ee

Posts

4

Comments

215

Joined

2 yr. ago

Honestly by completely ignoring the subject of federation, aside from acknowledging that mastodon’s creators/owners/etc have limited scope to turn evil, they’ve actually done a fairly reasonable job with this one.

Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don't know why I'm shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.

On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?

Have a look at this user's posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

Community builders are "vetted and paid by Reddit for their time": https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don't seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?

So they ignored Boost, but meanwhile they actually blocked Apollo before the deadline: https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110635856662952525

Which really does support the theory that Spez is just being stubborn and vindictive.

I'm the fucking daddy

I use it everywhere but the search results are... variable. However it's plenty good enough for most situations.

I still switch back to Google if I'm not finding what I want (using DDG's !g keyword, which is pretty helpful - just add that anywhere in a search and it'll send you to Google), but at least I'm only doing that when I'm aware of it.

What do they do?

It’s fairly reasonable to assume advertisers are leaving. This isn’t one of those controversies that has two sides, it’s just Reddit being shitty because they want to make more money, and mods, users and disabled people on the other side being annoyed with Reddit.

There’s very little for advertisers to lose by redirecting their ad budget elsewhere, but if they stick around there’s a risk that annoyance spills over to them.

It also doesn’t take much for marketing teams to make a change - they do it all the time to stay on the right side of controversies and avoid things they don’t want to be associated with.

Yeah all that information disappearing is a huge disappointment.

But realistically while Reddit Inc own that data it was always going to happen eventually. If it wasn't the demand from LLMs pushing them to lock it away so they can monetise it, it'd have been a move like Twitter blocking non logged in users, or just them purging old data to save money or something.

Or it could be a really fucking great year. It could mark the end of commercialised social media and the beginnings of truly widespread adoption of free and open alternatives.

A good quality usenet server.

I think you're just supposed to die now...

Haha that’s worth a go - there is basically zero chance of them responding to that properly.

Wow can you imagine how much carnage a letter based subject access request onslaught could be? There’s basically no way around employing people to open letters and then do a bunch of data entry just so they can email you and say “hey fill in this form”.

Edit: Could they even email you? Would they have to respond by post?

Yeah it’s 30 days, though they can push it up to 90 if they have a good reason. They have to inform you of that though.

Also if you’re feeling extra cantankerous you could try emailing them directly: redditdatarequests@reddit.com

Even though they say you have to use their form, they can’t actually force you to do that: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/right-of-access/how-do-we-recognise-a-subject-access-request-sar/#requirements

Yeah same. They might be holding back until the last minute deliberately in some 4D chess move, but like you I think it’s more likely some poor soul is preparing them manually.

The only problem with using paths is the service might not support it (ie it might generate absolute URLs without the path in, rather than using relative URLs).

Subdomains is probably the cleanest way to go.

Then I’m going to begin not fucking watching YouTube.