This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It's not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit's userbase weren't going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn't the point.

Here's what's changed since the API changes were announced:

1. Reddit's responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit's administration sees them.
2. A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they're still willing to do it at all).
3. The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
4. Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They've shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.

We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there's ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.

Careful, you have to also add --no-preserve-root to make sure you get all of it out. If you leave the roots, it'll just grow back later!

(But seriously, don't actually do this unless you're prepared to lose data and potentially even brick your computer. Don't even try it on a VM or a computer you're planning to wipe anyway, because if something is mounted that you don't expect, you'll wipe that too. On older Linux kernels, EFI variables were mounted as writable, so running rm -rf / could actually brick your computer. This shouldn't still be the case, but I wouldn't test it, myself.)

Trademarks can apply to different areas. In this case, Microsoft's trademark is for services related to online chat and gaming, not for something like a window manager.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn76041368&docId=ORC20030304054014&linkId=20#docIndex=19&page=1

I think this article from the Verge explains it pretty well.

tl;dr:

• The Fed kept interest rates low from 2008 to 2021. Low interest rates made it easier to borrow money and meant that debt-backed investments like bonds had a low return, so investors favored stocks for a better yield on their investment.
• This meant tech companies could borrow a ton of money at low interest rates and raise a ton of money from investors through stock sales, allowing them to build services that weren't profitable in order to grow as rapidly as possible. This basically defined the internet as we know it today - big companies offering free/cheap services with minimal restrictions. Companies could afford to charge low fees and look the other way on things like ad blockers.
• However, now that interest rates are going up, borrowing is much more expensive and investors are less motivated to buy stock, so all that easy money has dried up. Companies are having to raise revenue by increasing prices, adding more ads, blocking ad blockers, etc.

The framing of "Go back to normal" or "Only sexy pictures of John Oliver" was clever. Lots of people are going to pick the funny option over the boring one in basically any low stakes poll, so even people who don't care much about the protest probably still voted for it.

There's also a lot more motivation for the people who are pissed about Reddit's changes vs. the people who just want their infinite feed of content back to its former state.

I bet similar scenarios play out with spez's whole "moderator democracy" idea.

This is exactly the kind of tactic that's needed now. If Reddit wants to end the blackout by force, then what else is there to do but make them regret it?

It means the creators I enjoy actually get paid, whereas with adblock they don't get any ad revenue.

The team is bringing back some of the games by integrating the Ruffle emulator for the now-defunct Adobe Flash, and more than 50 games will be brought back starting on July 25th. Over the long term, “we hope to convert many of the most beloved games to HTML5,” TNT says.

I'm not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There's no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.

Honestly, I should probably set up a system-wide adblocker, but I just use uBlock in Firefox and avoid apps that shove ads in my face.

Yes, because they died in an incredibly predictable way by going out unprepared and they brought a kid to die with them.

Much like Reddit, Twitter's first mobile apps were developed by third parties. The term "tweet" even originated with one of those apps.

I was thinking the same thing. I think the user curation aspect is what made Reddit so sticky compared to old-school forums where you had to wade through every comment one by one, but having a visible karma score incentivized people to try to make the number go up.

I think Goodhart's law applies, because karma is ostensibly supposed to be a measure of how good a contributor you are, but in practice it just measures how good you are at getting people to upvote you, which it turns out doesn't require you to make quality contributions.

Statcounter bases their data on web traffic. If you're browsing the web on your Steam Deck, I think that should count.

I don't trust ChatGPT/GPT-4 for much to begin with, but this study is not great. From Ars Technica's article on the same topic (with emphasis added by me):

While this new study may appear like a smoking gun to prove the hunches of the GPT-4 critics, others say not so fast. Princeton computer science professor Arvind Narayanan thinks that its findings don't conclusively prove a decline in GPT-4's performance and are potentially consistent with fine-tuning adjustments made by OpenAI. For example, in terms of measuring code generation capabilities, he criticized the study for evaluating the immediacy of the code's ability to be executed rather than its correctness.

"The change they report is that the newer GPT-4 adds non-code text to its output. They don't evaluate the correctness of the code (strange)," he tweeted. "They merely check if the code is directly executable. So the newer model's attempt to be more helpful counted against it."

AI researcher Simon Willison also challenges the paper's conclusions. "I don't find it very convincing," he told Ars. "A decent portion of their criticism involves whether or not code output is wrapped in Markdown backticks or not." He also finds other problems with the paper's methodology. "It looks to me like they ran temperature 0.1 for everything," he said. "It makes the results slightly more deterministic, but very few real-world prompts are run at that temperature, so I don't think it tells us much about real-world use cases for the models."

Sorry, I don't see what this has to do with my comment? I was answering the question "What is the point of Youtube Premium anyway?" and said nothing about the price increase.

Could've been UPS using USPS for last-mile delivery. The OP is also from feddit.de so maybe they're not in the US.

Eh, Windows-only software certainly seems like a valid reason to me. People are also allowed to have personal preferences.

Don't get me wrong. Linux is the only desktop OS I use. I've daily driven it on my personal machine for about 5 years and at work for about 6 months. I vastly prefer it over the alternatives, but I do put up with a fair amount of annoying bullshit (mainly graphics, sleep, and Bluetooth issues) that would probably be less of an issue on Windows (or macOS). I still use Linux because I can tolerate those problems in exchange for the benefits, but I can see why other people wouldn't want to.

Copyright and trademarks are different things. In this case it looks like it applies mainly to the Xbox "X" logo like is seen on this (hilarious) page of the filing and is only for things related to messaging and gaming, so it's not as broad as it sounds. Based on a cursory look at Google results from before July 1st, I can't find any examples of Microsoft actually suing anyone for using the letter X, either.

Programming. I honestly love writing code. I've built quite a few useful tools for myself, I've toyed around with making games, I regularly play around with new languages and libraries to see how they work, and I've also written a bunch of pointless code that has no practical purpose but was fun or enjoyable to create. All of which cost me no money and required very little interaction with other people.