Some bloke put that sign up and went. “I don’t see anything wrong with this!”

My wallet has already burned through enough. The last thing I needed was a Steam Summer Sale to start.

Absolutely love the colours in this one. Almost looks like yin and yang.

As they mention in the article they anticipated a much slower collapse and likely prepared for that. But at the rate it’s currently going, it’s quite astounding. The fragmentation and internal strife in Russia are certainly not over.

I did read one article that made a reference to this more being an “end of the beginning” rather than the “beginning of the end”. Which I agree with. It hasn’t collapsed the federation overnight, but it’s certainly weakened it a hell of a lot.

The whole lot doesn’t seem bright at all. Then they basically drove through to Moscow like they were having a leisurely stroll and lost one truck. Russia looks so pathetic right now.

I’d be shocked if this was true. I would think that would be the first FSB tactic that they would’ve performed. It’s a classic one in movies as well. It’ll be absolutely insane if this is what stopped the coup.

I’m in Australia and have never boiled tap water before. Sometimes during major storms or flooding you get a boil water alert but these are usually advisory and monitoring shows that in most cases the water is still within legal limits. Of course though you should still boil the water if an alert does go out.

Apparently the Titanic caused all the maritime laws to be rewritten for vessels. It’s very ironic that 100 years later we’re likely going to have something similar for submersibles caused by an accident at the same location with a similar name.

You’re correct. They wouldn’t have felt a thing. They would’ve been alive and then the next millisecond they were not. The pressure is insane at those depths.

We learnt from MH370 that there is a lot of noises in the ocean that are plausible for what you’re looking for but not what you’re actually looking for. The ocean is a noisy place and it’s getting much louder as well over time.

No, I haven’t spent any time on Reddit since the closure, except for looking at r/Pics and their John Oliver err, protest. I haven’t spent too much time on Lemmy though, that’s because I’ve been busy helping out with an app for it :P

Memmy! It’s getting updates rapidly and it’s looking very good so far. It’s going to be cross-platform shortly as well. Also has a lower bar for contributors compared to Mlem. A redesign is also in the works.

Memmy! It’s getting updates rapidly and it’s looking very good so far. It’s going to be cross-platform shortly as well. Also has a lower bar for contributors compared to Mlem. A redesign is also in the works.

I’m posting from it right now! Works great. Don’t forget about the community for it in lemmy.ml

I’ve used SimpleLogin for awhile and it’s worked very well for me, everything shows up and everyone receives their mail as expected, very happy with it. AnonAddy is another alternative, although I personally haven’t tested that one. They’re both pretty cheap and recommended by PrivacyGuides. SimpleLogin was purchased about a year back by Proton. Who run Proton VPN, ProtonMail and a few other products iirc. https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/#email-aliasing-services

I actually went to go and hunt down the sound and it turns out that I sent it to a friend. I mentioned that the last part sounded like a tyre screeching but they believed it was too consistent to be a tyre screeching. A few others that I asked had the same opinion of that. One thing that I can think of that has a very consistent screeching noise from a long distance is probably a train slamming on its brakes? Although it came from a direction where there isn’t any trains running at that time.

https://www.whyp.it/tracks/104097/screaming-ish-sound?token=AWqwT Have a listen for yourself and see if you can deduce it.

No, not rural. But someone pointed out that someone may have seen a spider and in Australia, that’s not particularly an unlikely occurrence.

It’s in Australia so it’s quite possible that someone found a spider. I’m pretty sure a murder would’ve appeared in the news around here so that’s mystery solved. I hope.

I haven’t had anything creepy happen to me personally that I can recall, but I do have something that did terrify me for a bit.

This was around a year ago but I was in the bathroom washing my hands after using the bathroom, this was very late at night, about 2:00am. That’s when I heard some sort of noise that caught my interest. I was wearing noise-cancelling headphones so I was surprised that I heard this. I took them off and heard nothing afterwards, so I just chalked it up to my mind playing tricks and went back to my bedroom.

However, the sound did sit with me. It’s one of those sounds that is engraved in your intuition. So I went to check the camera footage around the time that I heard the sound. I went back a couple of minutes and played back the footage, waiting to hear anything. After going through a few minutes, I was ready to give up on it, since it was just wind noise and distant traffic. That’s when I heard this absolutely most long horrific blood curdling scream that I have ever heard in my life. It sounded like a woman and it genuinely made me freeze for a good few seconds.

I was in absolute shock and didn’t know what to do about it. I sent it to the local police station and they said they’ll investigate to see if anything came up around that time. I checked the news for a few days after in the local area and nothing about a murder or domestic violence incident came up. This area is usually pretty safe, so it was definitely a shock.

Looking at it from the view of Reddit, their original excuse for charging for API access was due to the usage of it for machine learning with training their models. LLM’s (Large Language Models), such as LaMDA (Bard, Google), GPT-4 (OpenAI), need an enormous amount of data inputted into them and Reddit has a large amount of high quality conversations, making it an invaluable source for them.

However, because Reddit’s API was free, they didn’t get a cent of this. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t like this and wanted to profit off of this in some way. So they decided to charge for the API data access.

However, there is a clear issue with this as the Reddit API was used by third party apps, that don’t abuse the API and use it to operate their Reddit clients.

It’s quite clear now that the intention was not purely based on LLM’s as there was a large number of solutions that Reddit could’ve used to charge for API access for those wanting the data and those who are simply operating third party apps.

• They could’ve made a system where app developers can apply for a specialised API key to be used for third party apps.
• They could’ve made different pricing tiers for those who are operating third party applications with adjusted rate-limits for mass-scraping compared to generalised browsing.
• They could’ve allowed third party apps to have their users use their own API key that they get from Reddit themselves.
• They could’ve worked with developers to add advertisements for their apps unless a premium subscription was purchased from the developer.
• Many, many other ways they could’ve handled it other than this living PR nightmare.

Client developers were absolutely more than willing to discuss these options, yet they were thrown a ton of hurdles by reddit.

So why do they want you to use their app?

• They get engagement data, since your usage can be completely tracked by them when using the app, such as how long you’re looking at posts for, your engagement with specific topics, etc.
• They can show you advertisements, this is their primary source of revenue.
• They can promote their other revenue schemes, like purchasing coins and NFTs.
• They can wall parts of the app off, like preventing you from downloading videos and forcing you to share the link to reddit, thereby creating engagement.
• They can show investors the number of app downloads and their apps growth. This also makes it more likely that they get promoted in the various app stores. They probably get disdain every time they see Apollo being promoted many times by Apple, even in WWDC presentations, over their main app.

These are a few examples of reasons that Reddit want you to use their app and there are most certainly many more. However, their argument has a fatal flaw, in that the value of Reddit does not come from their platform, but it comes from the data within it.

Social media follows this rule usually, 90% are lurkers and 10% are contributors. However, it depends. You might have a 1% of contributors that are prolific contributors that produce most of the sites content, or you might have a very small portion of contributors, like 0.01%. Think of the number of YouTube users and how many actually post videos themselves, or even contribute to the comment section.

Reddit contributors will be more likely than the average lurker to use a third party client or adblock on their browser. The revenue from these users is net-loss on paper, however, in reality, they are contributing significantly to the content that the revenue-generators will be viewing. If this content didn’t exist, there would not be a lurker to view the content, they’d simply go elsewhere.

Reddit doesn’t see it this way, they see these users as revenue losers that need to be migrated to their official app so they can begin to generate revenue. However, as mentioned, the huge backlash indicates that this was a terrible idea. Especially considering that unlike a platform like Twitter, Reddit is divided into sub communities managed with volunteer labour. As with the contributors, these individuals are much more likely to be using adblock or a third-party client. The Reddit app is rubbish, Reddit themselves have admitted this. Power users are going to try and find an alternative method of browsing that they find is better, which they have done.

Reddit absolutely knows this. /u/spez made an indication in his main post for his AMA that old reddit is not going away. They likely have engagement data for this and know that many contributions are made through old reddit. However, old reddit still gives them revenue and it’s still their platform. They added advertisements a few years back. https://safereddit.com/r/changelog/comments/c5clgh/ads_are_now_in_feed_on_old_reddit/

TL;DR Reddit wants money, but those who don’t use their app don’t generate money, on paper. In reality, they do. But it’s hard to convince investors of that.