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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • May I ask why? That seems unsustainable to expect to be able to get the same amount of entertainment and utility from creators without helping compensate them.

    Also, I would argue monetization has had to increase because of people using adblockers and the Silicon Valley mentality of “grow first, make money later.” Now that interest rates are high, social media companies are being forced to make money wherever they can since money isn’t cheap anymore.

    If this is purely companies already being profitable and trying to just suck as much money as possible from their user base, then I would agree with you. But Twitter has been rumored for months to be close to having their lights shut off, and Reddit apparently isn’t profitable. Idk about YouTube, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re not profitable and/or wouldn’t be able to exist without Google being its parent company today due to their other businesses diversifying their revenue streams.


  • I guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is justified in doing this imo. Video hosting isn’t cheap, especially providing 4K & 8K. They’ve gotta be able to support costs somehow, and if you’re not paying for Premium, you should be paying with ads. You’re also preventing the content creators from being compensated for content that you find valuable, useful, and/or entertaining.

    I know ads are annoying, and I hate them just as much as you do. But a big reason why we have people who make super niche videos that help you learn how to fix something on your car or those regular videos that you watch every week is because the creators are able to get compensated for their work. Are you really saying that utility and entertainment isn’t worth 30 seconds of ads and it’s better to not support them at all?

    Part of the reason we’re in this enshittification era of social media is because of the expectation of social media to be free. We need to learn from our past mistakes. It’s not sustainable.




  • While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.

    What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.

    For developers:

    • Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
    • Lied about making the API cost reasonable
    • Gave developers very little time to adjust
    • Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
    • Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer

    For moderators:

    • Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
    • Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions

    For users:

    • Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
    • Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
    • Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do

    Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”





  • Yet I often tend to think way too long on even smaller digital expenses, like an app for €2, but I will happily pay €10 for a coffee and a croissant at a train station like it is nothing.

    I think about this a lot too. I spend $10 on a drink that’s gone in a half hour, and I’ll never remember having months from now, but spend lots of time questioning whether it’s worth it to pay for apps I use daily.

    I regularly pay for a VPN, cloud storage, and music/video streaming. I find myself most willing to pay extra for no ads on streaming services I use a lot, even if I only pay for a month here or there (YouTube, Peacock, Hulu). I used to pay for Proton (VPN, Email, Cloud Storage, and Calendar) before iCloud implemented E2EE. Sometimes I’ll pay for news.

    I find a lot of the apps I use I wouldn’t benefit from paying for extra features for, and if I would benefit from them, I wouldn’t have enough free time to use it to justify paying for it. A lot of my needs are covered by the free and/or stock apps.



  • Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What’s more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.”

    Terrifying. Thank you for posting.