Some of these are good, some are just needlessly assertive nonsense. Especially the two where it's actively refusing to acknowledge fault or apologize for it, which is standard PR crap. Refusing to apologize and instead saying "thanks for your patience" is what I expect to hear from my ISP when they miss their scheduled install, not from a coworker.

There's nothing wrong with being a normal human being that is capable of admitting their own shortcomings. If never saying sorry means "being a boss" then that explains why there's so many sociopaths as CEOs.

"Hope that make sense?" Vs "Let me know if you have any questions."

The latter is saying "here's the explanation, figure it out, bother me again if you can't". The fromer, while poorly worded, is being helpful, actively attempting to make sure the person understands before leaving them to it. It's both a kindness and doing your due diligence.

Reddit's value as a social media platform drops as it's value to advertisers rises. The karma system is democratic, the userbase shapes the visual content on the site, that's was makes it useful. The more mutilated it becomes in service of extracting money from advertising, the less genuine it is, and the less people will seek to use it.

Spez would like to believe Reddit is a cow that can be milked forever.

In reality Reddit is a pig that Spez seems to believe he can get bacon from forever. Except to get that bacon, you have to kill it, and you can only do that once.

Nixon invades Cambodia, campuses across the country erupt in protest, armed troops deployed to deal with the unrest on an Ohio campus, guns pointed at students to intimidate them into dispersing...hmmm, can't remember what happened next...everything calmed down, I think, right?

Edit: Autocorrect betrayed me.

PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.

It's not just about it being open source, it's about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That's the only person you want running something like that.

And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.

Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don't understand why. It's beautiful.

Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.

He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn't started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.

We don't need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.

headlines have focused on the detrimental effect this will have on ad blockers, which will need to adopt a complex workaround to work as now. There is a risk that users reading those headlines might seek to delay updating their browser, to prevent any ad blocker issues; you really shouldn’t go down this road—the security update is critical.

It's almost like tying together feature updates with security updates was a deliberate choice by tech companies so that they could tell users shit exactly like this.

How can there be any real market choices when software literally tells users "for your own safety, you must abandon the things you want, and take the things we give you". How can consumers influence the direction of the product if they never have the option to decline that direction?

Rolling Stone first out of the gate with the true elbow-drop of a headline this news deserves, and a beefy polemic to back it up.

This article, along with every other news site's, has been sitting there primed and ready to release for years and years, needing nothing but a minor edit to add the relevant details of his passing and the date. Someone at Rolling Stone is delighted today to have finally hit "Publish" .

And too right they should. It's a great day.

I think we can count on Biden's campaign being stacked with young, media-savy people, like it was last time. A lot of his 2020 stuff was pretty well done, you could tell he had a pretty in-touch team that knew how to present him well. Literally all he has to do is not get in their way, and they can ride Dark Brandon memes into 2024.

That's fantastic news. It's so lame how there hasn't been any serious move to take wikis off Fandom and make them independent or even just on another platform. Fandom is just the worst, and it's terrible that Google suggests it as the top result now over the independent wikis.

Like, Bulbapedia is head and shoulders a better resource than the Fandom Pokemon wiki. It's been around forever, it's very active, it has far more information, yet Google always suggests Fandom first anytime I do a Pokemon related search. It's gross.

If anyone ever gets annoyed at Wikipedia asking for donations, go spend time on Fandom with ad blockers off, and remember that's the end result of public information wikis relying on ads.

There's a clip from The Batman ( the animated show) I can't find at the moment, but it basically involves Batman clearing a room of thugs by offering them jobs. They all walk out, without a punch thrown.

In the real world, no one that has Bruce Wayne's degree of wealth is a truly positive influence on the world on the whole. There are no ethical billionaires. But within the context of the DC Universe, Bruce has been routinely demonstrated as using his wealth in the most socially conscious, progressive, and generous ways. He is always shown in stark contrast with the likes of Lex Luthor.

I know there’s a ton of skepticism about Meta entering the fediverse — it’s completely understandable,” Cottle says. “I do want to kind of make a plea that I think everyone on the team has really good intentions. We really want to be a good member of the community and give people the ability to experience what the fediverse is.”

Your intentions mean exactly nothing when you're being paid by Zuckerberg.

It also doesn't actually matter what you intend, because the problem isn't just what the platform can do, it's about Meta being in this space and trying to stake a claim in it. We came here to escape you. Go the fuck away.

It's also because Burning Man, at least in the last decade or more, just turned into another affluent, rich white people and influencer event. Whatever it was to start, it's effectively glamping now.

Sure, there are definitely some genuinely good people there, lower middle class, saved up and took their only vacation time they get all year to spend a few days there, and it sucks this happened to them. If those people end up in the hospital and the shitty insurance they get from work does fuck all to help mitigate the expenses, I'll even get angry on their behalf.

But the majority of them? They spent a lot of money, money most people don't have the luxury of getting to spend, on a pointless self-indulgent festival in the fucking desert, and this time it's come back to bite them. My sympathy is extremely limited.

They'll be miserable for a few days, get out, dry off, and go back to their easy lives. Their affairs are taken care of back home, they can miss days of work, their hospital stays will be covered, etc.

It's kind of like the Fyre Festival. Those people got fucked over hard, but those people were also not the kind I particularly pitty. Spending a lot of money on an experience only to be miserable for a few days is not a tragedy. What happened to the poor people that lived there is the tragedy.

Edit: Also just want to point out OP is trying to call this a "tragedy" when there's only been one suspected death, the cause of which is unknown as it hasn't even been confirmed yet, but the overall mood is positive, and by all accounts everything is being managed. They're trapped, not dying.

https://apnews.com/...

I don't think it's that big of a deal if it's an event or 1p release but I can see why people wouldn't like it tbh,

For the love of all things holy, can you people, for once in your lives, oppose something on principle? This weak-ass justification, this "it ain't that bad" shit is exactly why we end up with something far worse in a few years. They count on this.

Do you know what Microsoft learned from the Xbox One launch? They didn't learn not to be anti-consumer, they just learned that they need to do so slowly and gradually. The mistake they made was going too hard too fast, and creating kickback. They learned to implement little things, the things that "aren't that bad". And then another one a few months later. And another one after that.

It's called boiling a frog. It works because of the average person's passivism.

So please, I'm begging you, think forward. Develop some pattern recognition. Stop downplaying the minor things just to be contrarian and defend a billion dollar company from perfectly valid criticism.

Reading these comments, seeing so many excuses, sarcastic responses, and handwaving, makes me realize a great deal of users really need to develop some imagination.

This is not about privacy. It's about data that can easily be used for targeting and profiling users, and how that creates countless avenues for targeted harassment and wide scale retaliation. It's about all of the innumerable ways public vote information can and will be abused to manipulate scoring across the site with targeted/automated shadow banning and shared blocklists. Raise your hand if you trust every single admin to never abuse such a tool to curate the outward appearance of an instance to fit a narrative.

For a different example: I could say something about how great Nazis are right now, and have a bot programmed to read every single person that downvoted me, add those names to a shared blocklist, and viola, I've made myself and all my alts invisible to the people that would challenge me on a massive scale.

I promise you this is going to be a big issue as tools for this site get more sophisticated over time.

Problem is the entire concept of a site like reddit being "for profit" in the first place.

I know we all wax nostalgic about the old non-centralized Internet with its various small websites and forums, but one thing I do genuinely miss from those days was that those places existed because the people running them wanted them to exist. They had ads or took donations to keep the lights on, but no one was looking to get rich. Passion, not profit.

The decentralized internet was run more by people, the centralized internet is run by board rooms.

That's why I like the idea of the fediverse. That is why this place feels familiar to those early days.

Are we seriously sitting here, in the shadow of the open internet's apocalypse, complaining yet again about Firefox's UI?

It's like Superman trying to rescue you from a fire and you complaining about his breath.

There's no UI in the world that will make the internet bareable without functional ad blockers.

I can't imagine having to move state to keep my job, but having to move from California to Florida especially feels like an outrageous demand. Not just because of distance but because...I mean, are you fucking serious?? Florida? You want me to move from the biggest, bluest, mostly progressive state...to Florida?

There's no amount of compensation in the world that would make me do that. That's borderline self-harm.

Honestly?

No. Not really.

I spent 10 years with that site. I've put so much content on it. I've put up with all of spez's shit at every turn, I've watched the site slowly turn into Facebook and shouted my displeasure at a brick wall, I've watched the admins ignore literally every criticism and request for years, and now, finally, their bullshit has come back to harm them. They've been sheltered from fallout of their decisions for so long, this is a long overdue comeuppance.

Watching it burn is cathartic. I'm absolutely not done enjoying the fireworks. Keep it coming.

Be prepared for a lot of hand-wringing about "security".

Apple, Microsoft, and Google all learned in the last couple years "security" shuts down any arguments, and they use it at every turn to justify whatever they want, regardless of the actual dangers or alternative mitigation methods they could take.

If our modern software security means anti-competitive behavior and user lock-in tactics are OK, then that's a problem with our security practices, and we need to reevaluate some things.

Some of the communities that closed down in response to the API changes explicitly shifted to Discord

Sigh

Legitimately one of the most annoying things out of all of this is how so many tech writers have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to explaining the feelings and behavior of reddit communities. Like they don't ever seem to interview anyone or ask direct questions to understand what is happening, they just take a cursory glance at comment threads and pinned posts, and assume they understand what's going on. I can't count how many articles I have read that get the facts about this whole situation right but still seem to completely misunderstand it.

They did not "shift" to Discord, they used already established Discord channels in lieu of the subreddit, until the subreddit came back.

Many subs already had parallel discord channels, but users don't use one or the other, they use both. Because Discord is a fundamentally different kind of platform. It's exactly the same way that many forums back in the day would also have chat rooms attached. Same community, using two different methods of online communication, at the same time, for different purposes. No one would ever have suggested IRC was equatable to a forum.

All that happened was when the subs closed, users congregated in the Discord to stay connected. It was never going to be a new permanent home. They were not seeking a new home, that's the critical part. I've seen very, very few people suggest Discord as a permanent replacement and if they are it gets shot down. They were simply waiting out the protest on Discord until they could go back to Reddit or, if an alternative showed up, go there. It was a bomb shelter.