And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
He's a fucking idiot or a liar. I'd believe either. Or both.
The entire point of having this free, public API is because a free, public API can be monetized, and content scraping cannot. If you are offering a free web app, and you don't have a free, public API, someone will create scraping tools to do it. So then, instead of spending money maintaining a revenue generating API, you spend money playing cat and mouse with content scraping bots.
The fact that reddit can't figure out how to push monetization over that API has nothing to do with third party apps, and everything to do with the site having shit leadership.
As someone who legitimately has family in China and who visits them and speaks to them in Mandarin, there is 100% a chilling effect caused by CCP autocracy.
But I am eager to hear how a bunch of people who have never been and don't speak the language know more about this because they read a pamphlet.
Aren't these threads wild? These people don't want to engage in actual discussion here. They just want to remove your agency by calling you brainwashed, do the sealion "source" thing, and then ad hominem away any sources you do provide.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the world deserves a better class of communist.
These are Leninists who believe that socialism cannot do imperialism because socialism is ideological manifest destiny. Nevermind that this was more or less one of the original debates between Trotsky and Lenin on how do do "global communism."
They like to redefine words to carry whatever ideological weight they want, because it's much easier than introspection. Like how they will carry the "Nazi means anti-Russian" banner to unironically defend mass deportation children from Ukraine. "Obviously it can't be the UN definition of genocide, because you can't genocide Nazis.
I'm not interested in defending any atrocities anywhere. Or making tyrants into folk heroes.
My goal is simply to find a single leftist space on the internet which doesn't just pretend like a century's worth of real academic criticism of democratic centralism and associated revolutionary praxis doesn't really exist, and anyone who expresses such criticism must simply be poorly informed and hasn't read enough... Lenin. It's misplaced and undeserved elitism at its finest. Or just a weird revolution fetish, it's hard to tell sometimes. If you can feel my eyes rolling through the screen, it's because, as I said previously, I'm tired of having this same conversation over and over again.
I'm quite aware of this interpretation and have read plenty on the topic. It is nearly undeniable that in practice, revolutionary communist movements have legitimately produced dictatorships quite often. People need to stop making excuses for Stalin and Mao. The world deserves a better class of communist, in the same way it deserves a better class of liberal.
Like, have you read Lenin yourself?
"Civil war gives the proletariat practice at arms!"
Are you fucking kidding me? You cannot possibly be more glib about violence, or more boorishly modernist .
I was on a train to paris which hit a person. The train made an extremely abrupt stop which spilled a bunch of drinks and made an old lady fall down. Then after about 5 minutes they made an announcement in French and we heard everyone gasp audibly, before they repeated the announcement in English.
When we got off the train, after a considerable delay, they had set up a tent around the track and the train and - I swear I am not making this up - gave us croissants, before putting us on a bus to the nearest train station.
To this day, I am still unsure if the strangest part was the fact that my vehicle turned another human into a fine mist, or that I was compensated for this inconvenience with a croissant.
The difference is that most western liberals will eagerly acknowledge the horrors of that clusterfuck and denounce it entirely. Tankies on Lemmy will not engage in the same critical thought regarding this Russian genocide.
It's an extremely low rhetorical bar, but a notable one nonetheless. Whenever you attempt to engage this kind of introspection around here there is a zero percent chance of being rewarded with good faith discussion. It's mostly just conspiracies, and being called brainwashed.
And you shouldn't minimize Russian crimes, or their openly stated motivations to eliminate Ukrainian identity because of your indoctrinated contrarianism.
This you?