"We don't know what they are until we charge you."

Mr. Rathschmidt added that some apps are more efficient and require significantly fewer A.P.I. calls and that “Apollo is notably less efficient than other third-party apps.”

“The vast majority of A.P.I. users will not have to pay for access; not all third-party apps usage requires paid access,” he wrote, adding that access is “is free for moderator tools and bots.”

That is some shoddy reporting there. Selig is cited earlier in the piece, so to let that quote stand unchallenged either means an editor didn't see it or ... well, I'd rather not get more confirmation from the Times on that front.

This, I did not know:

Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests.

In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.

The mods DON’T have the right to make the decision for me, restrict the content that I posted to a site they do not own, or otherwise interfere with my right to enjoy the archival content that they did not create.

Source?

That's certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.

I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I'd gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.

Agree and disagree ... when we say "people shouldn't have to learn anything to use a technology," that shifts any focus on better education to dumber services.

37?! Try not to willfully retain any documents on your way to the parking lot!

Agreed on the last point. That's part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren't about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.

But I feel you're begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I'm hoping we'll find that it works.

Unrelated, online ads seem to go out of their way to insist that there's nothing to be learned from print ad stacks. Which is a shame, because I've personally placed an irregular shape ad in the middle of a broadsheet page and placed stories around it in the manner least like to confuse readers. Guess what the verdict was back then?

Several issues here, but the top one is: no definition of "news."

You might think that's readily apparent, but I guarantee no one else draws the line between news and entertainment exactly where you do. This is unfortunately by design because outlets that make no differentiation get more clicks — and people who have consumed zero news believe they had a Thanksgiving-size portion of it and are well-informed.

That probably came across more snarky than intended. It actually felt softer than "Where'd ya read that?"

Here's the thing: Nowhere is it stated that you have the right to view content you posted in perpetuity, to say nothing about things posted by others. And mods have free reign to do whatever they want despite community wishes even if they rarely exercise that right.

Essentially, this whole situation has exposed a lot of realities with regard to users' rights on corporate platforms that you're in fine company in being aghast at.

Gmail could get the ax tomorrow. Will it? No ... but it's folly to expect it to continue forever because tomorrow's covered. The internet was the starting point of "you'll own nothing and love it" with your data. This is one of the results of the Faustian bargain.

This is what happens when there's a Raspberry Pi shortage.

It's unclear how useful aggregate post and comment totals are in terms of measuring the effect of the blackout on content.

I feel comfortable saying that 80% of Reddit content on my subscribed subreddits has no impact on my day or understanding of life. Thus, the question becomes what 20% has been lost.

Are you saying your threshold for ads and empty foreshadowing hype is somehow under 99%? I sure do love me an ad-blocked, sponsor-blocked video that still somehow manages to waste 10 minutes to learn "no" or "I don't know, either."

The president certainly is recognizable ... thing is, he's a dead ringer for Joe Biden.

Love the icon set, really love that @[email protected] gets more than just credit.

When you accidentally post in /r/ama instead of /r/AmItheAsshole ...

Since the source graph gets wonky immediately before the crop, there's not really enough here to compare against from the before-times (last week).

But what is here looks like a very large problem on the comment front, with each peak being lower than the last and and the latter two nadirs following the same pattern. The presumed "small number of power users" were having a noticeable impact more than 48 hours earlier. (and, hey ... good on them for using 0 as the axis)

Cartels gonna cartel.