Spyke

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Reddit is ending Reddit Gold and users are furious

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That’s what’s great about all these companies. They take credit for, and try to derive value from, things they didn’t actually create. Reddit keeps on talking about “their” data that was created by users, for free, and moderated by other users, also for free. Yet it’s somehow theirs and they can sell it?

Twitter didn’t invent hashtags. They were user created annd eventually incorporated in to the service.

These services add very little value, but they believe they add it all.

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Infuriating Password Policies

The biggest red flag is when they try and stop you from pasting your password (or anything else for that matter) breaking password managers.

There are years-long arguments on social media with companies who do this with actual security experts telling them they’re hurting security (including referencing organisations like the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre) and their only response is “we don’t allow pasting for security reasons” but they can never explain how it helps security - because it doesn’t. It drives me mad.

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Part of the Social Security website (ssa.gov) only works during certain hours

I particularly enjoy the "if you need immediate assistance" note for a telephone line that's open even fewer hours than the website. it's positioned as an alternative to the site, but absolutely isn't. Also, if that message is only displayed when the site is closed, there are no hours when the phone line is open but the site is closed, so who's it helping? You couldwrite it down and call it when it's open, but the site is also going to be open then, several hours earlier in fact, so is less "immediate" than the site that's closed.

privacy

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Google engineers want to introduce DRMs for web pages, making ad-blocking near-impossible in the browser

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and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).

They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.

Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.

reddit

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/r/kbinMigration created.... and quickly banned by reddit

Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.

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Am I missing any?

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It might be the best PWA I’ve ever used. It’s incredible. And so close to feature parity with Apollo this early. I’m blown away.

I use LunaSea for sonarr and radarr on iOS. Worth trying if you haven’t already.

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It is possible to achieve the 6 nines?

It’s really hard. And really expensive. I used to work in five nine environments, life or death type use cases, and my rule of thumb was that you double your cost for every extra nine you add.

When we got to five nines it was multiple hot standbys with a custom control and orchestration plane - literally custom hardware we had to build. This was for local installations, so not modern cloud environments (it was over a decade ago), but many of the challenges are similar, like session handling, transmission replay and caching, locking, clashing, routing, jitter, latency etc.

reddit

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/r/scams forced to reopen

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I think it's a bit more than enjoyment. People felt a sense of ownership in the communities they helped build. And whilst they were always contributing to Reddit inc they still felt some control. Now that Spez has gone full on world's dumbest capitalist and keeps yelling about companies having to pay for "his" data, data which he didn't pay for himself, it's really exposed what's always been true. That Reddit is just another company, it's not your friend, it's not a community.

movies

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Why barbie is more popular than Oppenheimer?

Hasn’t seen Barbie yet asserts that 1) Another movie is better and 2) the movie they’ve not seen is “woke shit”.

Yep, about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone who uses the word “woke” unironically.

Also, i strongly suspect you’re not getting your opinions from trailers, but rather from the typical brain dead right wing mouthpieces who completely missed the point of Barbie, because of course they did.

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dont be a spaz

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I think that's true, but I also think it's true that he had decided beforehand, as evidenced by his copy and paste issue giving away he had pre-prepared answers.

I'm really not sure what anyone thought would be achieved with that AMA, given the way it was approached, other than possibly trying to give users a space to simply vent in the hope it would draw a line under things.

reddit

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Reddit is telling protesting mods their communities ‘will not’ stay private

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I've been on reddit a long time, over 17 years, and I'm a member of some private subs that happen to have some quite influential users in them. It would be really interesting to open those up to the public to see what reddit influencers are saying in closed spaces, and the amount of gaming etc. that goes on between prominent users you see all across the site.

Admittedly, at least the subs I'm in are relatively quiet these days, but in years gone by they'd basically decide what was going to be popular, who was going to mod which subs etc.

reddit

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/r/kbinMigration created.... and quickly banned by reddit

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Probably depends on how you define success with these things. The valuation of the company is down a significant amount since it was purchased and recent reports had ad revenue also down a significant amount too. Whether the owner cares about those things is probably up for debate, and evidence would suggest he might be looking for something other than money out of it, like influence, or just a play thing. I'm not sure the owners of Reddit are motivated by the same things, I think they just want to be richer. Time will tell I guess, it's difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentional acts from the outside.

memes

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Hotel > AirBNB

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Enforcing is unfortunately really difficult because the incentives are too strong. We have rules here which are meant to prevent AirBnB and similar by limiting the number of nights any domestic property can be let in a year. So all the hosts just jump from site to site and change the descriptions slightly to get around it. And it's so brazen. They use the same photos and everything. The really organised ones have whole buildings and when you book they're non-specific about the unit you get, so it's very difficult to actually track which ones are rented at any point, particularly when the enforcement teams are so underfunded.