this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
32 points (92.1% liked)

Reddit

17683 readers
269 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules


Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.



Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.



Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



:::spoiler Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.

Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it's only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.

top 29 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago

I'm a bit late, but it can be bypassed by using old reddit.

[–] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you'll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.

This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It's much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.

[–] Tot@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it's in beta, for those reading who haven't used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn't come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something

Here's a screenshot from Discord:

[–] vahtos@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it's not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.

For example, you can't rotate your app UI if you're not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.

Not saying you're wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn't on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.

[–] Funwayguy@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it's not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.

As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.

[–] Metallibus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn't mean that it's being used to track you down. It's probably just for crash reporting etc.

[–] Metallibus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.

Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I'm sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn't mean that they're using it to track you.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is DuckDuckGo Browser able to see what data other apps are trying to collect? I would have expected Android's app sandboxing to block that sort of thing. Does the device need to be rooted or something?

[–] kn0wmad1c@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago

When you turn on app tracking protection, it activates an always-on VPN that funnels the trackers to a deadzone so that they can't actually phone home.

[–] LopensLeftArm@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don't really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we're (along with other competitors, we're not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.

[–] sadreality@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don't bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie's stream...

This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we're going to come out much stronger for it.

Imagine the alternative--the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.

That could've theoretically killed us. Now it won't happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking "yep, security is important, that's true..."

[–] AlpacaChariot@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it's much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what's happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.

[–] rwhitisissle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

spez and Musk burning their services to the ground

Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn't really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don't have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.

[–] whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.

Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn't particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.

There is already an army of repost bots which aren't going away. The bots don't care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.

And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can't repost the same stale content perpetually.

I don't think reddit is going to just die. But it's popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it's a shell of its former self.

[–] lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they've turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it'll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.

[–] rwhitisissle@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Man, we don't live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it's in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can't say. But I can say that reddit's been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn't, but they seem to believe that it's more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they're probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as "Television 2.0" and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can't behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.

[–] Candelestine@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.

But we'll see I suppose.

[–] rwhitisissle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It used to move quickly. We're not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There's a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that "won the war," so to speak. What's the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There's nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.

[–] astral_avocado@programming.dev 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There were weekend ddos attacks?

[–] lobut@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] m4xie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

I think that was due to an update, not an attack.

[–] reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

He's just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it's paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.

[–] brax@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Old thread, but as best I can tell, old.reddit.com is still going strong. No forcing you to sign in, no padding out the ass.

[–] qwed113@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.

Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.

[–] 13esq@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

It's probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It's already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user's etc.

Be patient.