The Verge posted the actual memo that was released, you can find that below and the article here

Hi Snoos,

Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

To me, this looks like it was absolutely destined for a public release/intended leak. The victimisation says it all with them crying that their employees are going to get attacked. This is a simply absurd statement.

Any indicated statement from a CEO of a community forum that insinuates that their users, who are currently undergoing a completely peaceful protest, are in fact, volatile enough to attack employees simply doing their job has completely lost the plot. Their position as CEO is completely untenable.

Thanks Reddit for throwing extra wood on the fire. I was getting concerned that it wasn't raging enough.

As they mention in the article they anticipated a much slower collapse and likely prepared for that. But at the rate it’s currently going, it’s quite astounding. The fragmentation and internal strife in Russia are certainly not over.

I did read one article that made a reference to this more being an “end of the beginning” rather than the “beginning of the end”. Which I agree with. It hasn’t collapsed the federation overnight, but it’s certainly weakened it a hell of a lot.

This was a very well written statement and gives me a lot of hope for the future of the platform. I’ll be more than happy to invest my time and effort into it.

Apparently the Titanic caused all the maritime laws to be rewritten for vessels. It’s very ironic that 100 years later we’re likely going to have something similar for submersibles caused by an accident at the same location with a similar name.

Looking at it from the view of Reddit, their original excuse for charging for API access was due to the usage of it for machine learning with training their models. LLM's (Large Language Models), such as LaMDA (Bard, Google), GPT-4 (OpenAI), need an enormous amount of data inputted into them and Reddit has a large amount of high quality conversations, making it an invaluable source for them.

However, because Reddit's API was free, they didn't get a cent of this. Unsurprisingly, they didn't like this and wanted to profit off of this in some way. So they decided to charge for the API data access.

However, there is a clear issue with this as the Reddit API was used by third party apps, that don't abuse the API and use it to operate their Reddit clients.

It's quite clear now that the intention was not purely based on LLM's as there was a large number of solutions that Reddit could've used to charge for API access for those wanting the data and those who are simply operating third party apps.

• They could've made a system where app developers can apply for a specialised API key to be used for third party apps.
• They could've made different pricing tiers for those who are operating third party applications with adjusted rate-limits for mass-scraping compared to generalised browsing.
• They could've allowed third party apps to have their users use their own API key that they get from Reddit themselves.
• They could've worked with developers to add advertisements for their apps unless a premium subscription was purchased from the developer.
• Many, many other ways they could've handled it other than this living PR nightmare.

Client developers were absolutely more than willing to discuss these options, yet they were thrown a ton of hurdles by reddit.

So why do they want you to use their app?

• They get engagement data, since your usage can be completely tracked by them when using the app, such as how long you're looking at posts for, your engagement with specific topics, etc.
• They can show you advertisements, this is their primary source of revenue.
• They can promote their other revenue schemes, like purchasing coins and NFTs.
• They can wall parts of the app off, like preventing you from downloading videos and forcing you to share the link to reddit, thereby creating engagement.
• They can show investors the number of app downloads and their apps growth. This also makes it more likely that they get promoted in the various app stores. They probably get disdain every time they see Apollo being promoted many times by Apple, even in WWDC presentations, over their main app.

These are a few examples of reasons that Reddit want you to use their app and there are most certainly many more. However, their argument has a fatal flaw, in that the value of Reddit does not come from their platform, but it comes from the data within it.

Social media follows this rule usually, 90% are lurkers and 10% are contributors. However, it depends. You might have a 1% of contributors that are prolific contributors that produce most of the sites content, or you might have a very small portion of contributors, like 0.01%. Think of the number of YouTube users and how many actually post videos themselves, or even contribute to the comment section.

Reddit contributors will be more likely than the average lurker to use a third party client or adblock on their browser. The revenue from these users is net-loss on paper, however, in reality, they are contributing significantly to the content that the revenue-generators will be viewing. If this content didn't exist, there would not be a lurker to view the content, they'd simply go elsewhere.

Reddit doesn't see it this way, they see these users as revenue losers that need to be migrated to their official app so they can begin to generate revenue. However, as mentioned, the huge backlash indicates that this was a terrible idea. Especially considering that unlike a platform like Twitter, Reddit is divided into sub communities managed with volunteer labour. As with the contributors, these individuals are much more likely to be using adblock or a third-party client. The Reddit app is rubbish, Reddit themselves have admitted this. Power users are going to try and find an alternative method of browsing that they find is better, which they have done.

Reddit absolutely knows this. /u/spez made an indication in his main post for his AMA that old reddit is not going away. They likely have engagement data for this and know that many contributions are made through old reddit. However, old reddit still gives them revenue and it's still their platform. They added advertisements a few years back. https://safereddit.com/...

TL;DR Reddit wants money, but those who don't use their app don't generate money, on paper. In reality, they do. But it's hard to convince investors of that.

Yup, this is in the latest build. I’m planning on having the instance selection be available in the account screen in the future, although I called it hubs to make it more user friendly.

The whole idea of it was to be hopefully easy to understand for new users whilst having functionality that veterans would enjoy. Newbies will hopefully appreciate the guide and veterans should appreciate the instance selection for new and old accounts.

The background is just something I grabbed quickly from Unsplash. I’m planning on changing it in the future to something more appropriate. It was originally just supposed to be a placeholder :P

I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out but I’m always looking for feedback on possible ways to improve it or things we should do differently.

The main focus of the redesign and the rebrand was to make things more user friendly and applicable to a larger audience. Hopefully this makes it much easier to bring new users over to the Fediverse!

I haven't had anything creepy happen to me personally that I can recall, but I do have something that did terrify me for a bit.

This was around a year ago but I was in the bathroom washing my hands after using the bathroom, this was very late at night, about 2:00am. That's when I heard some sort of noise that caught my interest. I was wearing noise-cancelling headphones so I was surprised that I heard this. I took them off and heard nothing afterwards, so I just chalked it up to my mind playing tricks and went back to my bedroom.

However, the sound did sit with me. It's one of those sounds that is engraved in your intuition. So I went to check the camera footage around the time that I heard the sound. I went back a couple of minutes and played back the footage, waiting to hear anything. After going through a few minutes, I was ready to give up on it, since it was just wind noise and distant traffic. That's when I heard this absolutely most long horrific blood curdling scream that I have ever heard in my life. It sounded like a woman and it genuinely made me freeze for a good few seconds.

I was in absolute shock and didn't know what to do about it. I sent it to the local police station and they said they'll investigate to see if anything came up around that time. I checked the news for a few days after in the local area and nothing about a murder or domestic violence incident came up. This area is usually pretty safe, so it was definitely a shock.

I’d be shocked if this was true. I would think that would be the first FSB tactic that they would’ve performed. It’s a classic one in movies as well. It’ll be absolutely insane if this is what stopped the coup.

Hi there o/ Glad to hear that you’re enjoying the app! (especially the UI :P)

This is definitely something that has been considered and will likely be implemented soon. We didn’t actually know about it until a few users told us about it on our Discord server.

Also quick note, you don’t need to tap the top, you can just swipe from the far left side at any point.

Give us a shout if you have any other suggestions or concerns surrounding the app. We may not reply to all of them, but we definitely read them.

We learnt from MH370 that there is a lot of noises in the ocean that are plausible for what you’re looking for but not what you’re actually looking for. The ocean is a noisy place and it’s getting much louder as well over time.

I’ve already discussed this with other users on the Discord server and I’ve agreed to switch it. The reason it’s there was for reachability when scrolling. However, feedback has shown that people prefer to have the community name over the username so it will be moved soon.

It looks good in the marketing (it always does) but we should all remember that it’s Bethesda making this. Then again, I can’t even name a developer that I would say “hell yeah, this is gonna be awesome!” at this point. The very sad state of the industry.

Absolutely. It's only a matter of time before someone sees the value in the information/data that is here and begin indexing the entire fediverse/site and working on SEO for it.

There are countless examples of indexers for GitHub for example, if you do any searching for questions related to coding. Pretty much every issue and repo has been indexed.

When reddit first popped up, posts from it came up in search results very rarely, now it's pretty much at the top of many searches, since it's a bastion of knowledge and community groups.

It's really only a matter of time if things do go well here.

It took me awhile to see that they’re owls, but damn I’d kill for that during winter right now.

At times, the U.N. report reads like an Orwellian novel. "Almost all interviewees described either injections, pills or both being administered regularly, as well as blood samples being regularly collected in the [vocational education and training center] facilities. Interviewees were consistent in their descriptions of how the administered medicines made them feel drowsy ... None of the interviewees were properly informed about these medical treatments."

They're still calling this shit may?

What kept me at reddit was the content, not the company. If the content moves here, then this is where I'll stay. If most content remains at Reddit, which would be unfortunate. Then I'd probably try to juggle both, depending on how my time goes here.

So far, it's been rather positive. I've got most of my daily dose of community conversation, but I'm missing that video streak at the moment.

I actually went to go and hunt down the sound and it turns out that I sent it to a friend. I mentioned that the last part sounded like a tyre screeching but they believed it was too consistent to be a tyre screeching. A few others that I asked had the same opinion of that. One thing that I can think of that has a very consistent screeching noise from a long distance is probably a train slamming on its brakes? Although it came from a direction where there isn't any trains running at that time.

https://www.whyp.it/... Have a listen for yourself and see if you can deduce it.

I’m posting from it right now! Works great. Don’t forget about the community for it in lemmy.ml

How can someone put this up on a wall without noticing that Greenland has been annexed by Canada, Texas has annexed Canada and the Mediterranean has moved to India.

This is on their roadmap, although it’s labelled a feature. I think it should be more urgent since it ruins the UX.

https://github.com/users/buresdv/projects/4/views/2?pane=issue&itemId=29947134