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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Lets also not forget the massive amount of OS versions, hardware variants, resolutions, and localisations apps like Discord need to auto-adjust themselves to work with. If it fails it will absolutely need that info in the report so devs can fix it.
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.
Certainly not all scary. I don’t work with these that collect the data but wonder if it isn’t just some deviceData.collect() function or something.
Device boot time could be used for a user that clears their cookies to track and match sessions. Using that, and matching it with other information could give very reliable ways to fingerprint users.
Christ.
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.
I don’t have specific info on what’s harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I’m at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It’s absolutely wild.
Edited to add - they don’t specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.
Yeah, don’t be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.
Some apps won’t work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.
Examples: I turned on the duckduckgo protection, opened the official app and visited a couple posts.
https://files.catbox.moe/sqbg87.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/nj7y8d.jpg
Thank you! I can’t believe that. So it basically wants to know literally everything about you. That’s so disgusting and creepy. We need privacy laws that protect against stuff like this, yesterday.
I can see them requesting city, but beyond that, this is wayyyy too much.
Yea its pure insanity and greed. This is just one of many examples of why I have dual piholes on top of ad blocking extensions.
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?
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.
Just search TrackerControl on the Fdroid store.
Just wish duck duck go had PWA support. It would be my default browser if so.
The Mozilla VPN app has a feature to block some ads and trackers on your internet connection. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
The removal of old reddit?
Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?
Buy upvotes?
The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn’t count when there is actual factual evidence.
The removal of old reddit?
Yep, they will absolutely do that. Only a matter of time.
I’m 100% out once that happens. Well technically I pretty much am currently. I may look at r/all for a couple minutes then head over here for a good portion of time.
The comments on Reddit have declined since the purge, it’s unbelievably shitty now.
How has it survived! Definitely getting the axe!
Honestly, I’m surprised Old Reddit has lasted this long at all, even before all this.
Buy upvotes?
The sad part is, I can absolutely see this happening. Not as an outright “gib money get updoot” but something more roudabout but effectively the same thing.
“Be heard louder with Reddit Premium! Your comments on posts will be displayed closer to the top for others to see!”
To reiterate, the above is just something I mocked up. May not be upvotes, but still rigging threads by paying Reddit money. I just wouldn’t be surprised at this point.
A new tier: reddit ultimate
With reddit ultimate you get all the benefits of reddit premium plus you get the ability to link your online and offline personas as well as a weekly free loot box.
Loot boxes (8USD each or 10 for 50USD) may contain one of the following perks:
- a week of free Reddit ultimate.
- “3 nuclear downvotes”, like a normal downvote but counts as 50.
- “karma MSG”, for 12 hours all karma you get or lose is counted twice.
- “look into the shadows”, get a complete list of all your shadow bans.
- “STFU”, mute all chats for a week.
- “sacrificial lamb”, remove any or all non-ultimate users from your followers.
- “heeeere’s Johnny!”, banned from a sub? Guess again, and this time you can’t get banned by non-ultimate mods for a week.
- 5 gold awards, appears in 17 out of 24 loot boxes
A as a new democracy oriented initiative, for 50USD you get to dethrone one mod for a month.
The loot boxes would actually be able to get me back, not to buy them of course, but to see the havoc it would bring to r/Conservative.
Include me in the screenshot when this happens!
It’s sort of what World of Warcraft did with gold.
The gold farms were making TONS of money selling illegal gold in much the same way upvote farms are making a killing.
Upvotes are free for them to give, and they would have a money printer on their hands.
The slippery slope is only a fallacy when you’re making leaps. To go from enacting exorbitant API fees to removal of old Reddit is a logical step so doesn’t make for a fallacy. Intent also plays a part for the same reason. If you can prove that enacting exorbitant API fees was for the purpose of restricting user access then limiting number of posts for users not logged in is a logical step. Slippery slope gets a bad rap but it can be a valid point and not a fallacy when done properly.
People get “slippery slope” wrong. Not every sequence of events is a slope.
The idea of slippery slope is that one small action is said to kick off an unstoppable chain reaction. It doesn’t just mean that A leads to B. It means that A inevitably leads to B, even if it didn’t intend to, and B happening can’t be stopped once A happens. And maybe even the people that wanted A don’t want B but can’t stop it, because we’ve slipped and we’re sliding uncontrollably down the slope. That’s the whole concept, that we’re stuck sliding.
Reddit doing one restrictive action, and then later choosing to do another restrictive action, probably doesn’t apply. There’s seemingly no slope, just an easily foreseeable sequence of events.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
See what stupid shit Musk pulled with Twitter a month ago, and that’ll be what Reddit does in a few days.
Reddit will go away for non logged in users.
Old reddit and New reddit will probably cease to exist when sh.reddit is ready.
What’s the difference between new.reddit and sh.reddit? They look nearly identical, but with different margins and padding.
I don’t really know because I haven’t spent much time with it. I do remember either in one of the mod summits or somewhere that Spez admitted that new reddit was bad and that they were already working on the next version of reddit, which is what sh.reddit is supposed to be. New reddit is an abomination and I’ve only ever used it for settings old reddit does not have.
But to be honest with you, I haven’t really spent any time on sh.reddit because you used to not be able to log in to it.
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if they removed the ability to comment.
Well have a look at this and reflect on what beautiful behaviours it will bring forward:
Crypto is #4 in trending topics.
Reddit is Twitter now.
lmao I can’t believe the doomers were right and reddit tied itself to crypto bullshit. Absolutely unreal.
That whole crypto thing is scary as hell.
Unless you hold your secret keys then you don’t really own your money.
Everything you listed is on the table for them. I hope they do it so it dies quickly.
Anyone can easily buy upvotes.
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.
Had me in the first half
No wonder King Steven was so incensed when the Landed Gentry cut off access to the site from commoners; it’s a privilege he reserves as a Royal Prerogative…
One wonders when His Royal Doucheness is going to invoke Prima Nocta.
His Royal Doucheness
I prefer King Steven the Turd…
I read this as Stephen King and became very confused
I’m now only on lemmy and YouTube. Never got into tictok or Facebook, left and deleted reddit and Twitter. I’m in a happy place.
Still go to reddit sometimes. It’s night and day compared to here. Everything on reddit is rage bait in one form or another.
I go to reddit for porn and that is it.
Make an account on lemmynsfw.com
It’s just as good as reddits porn
I’m gunning hard for Lenny, but let’s be honest with ourselves, ok?
It absolutely isn’t. Not yet. In both quality and quantity, we’re still lagging way behind, especially for niche or non-straight content.
Reddit is still the best place for Sounding… As a friend has told me
Lemmy very unfortunately doesn’t have either the breadth or depth or Reddit porn yet. If it does get there it won’t be for years yet.
Not enough Widowmaker lewds on Lemmy yet to ditch Reddit unfortunately.
That’s wild to me. I’ve been on Reddit for 17 years. And porn is not something I thought was such a huge point. Mothers same goes for this place. The platform just doesn’t seem to lend to that type of consumption. But never less, porns a huge part.
Same but I still follow comicbook creators and comedians on twitter.
I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped
I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC
I’d guess it does the news website thing. Scroll down and get meet with a create account blocking barrier.
Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like “If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit’s policies? Try c/pics@lemmy.world” and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We’re growing still but it’s not like I’m seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.
”…I’m not seeing much Lemmy mentions….”
This is working as intended as Reddit is actively suppressing and shadowbanning any comment or post that mentions Lemmy or hyperlinks
Ah, trying to stop the Exodus by any means necessary. Lol. Time to find a good thread to get my old account banned on then!
F /u/spez is only following Twitter who’ve already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.
I’m not saying that isn’t happening but it must be happening selectively because the small niche subreddit I moderate still has the post up where I announced and linked to the Lemmy community I made. I just went to the subreddit in my browser while logged out to verify that it’s not in the shadows, but I could see it.
Yeah, it should be obvious that you won’t have much success using Reddit as a platform to direct users away from Reddit. They’ve made it pretty clear by now that they aren’t free or open. Makes me wonder what other topics they’ve done this more subtlety for, or will do in the future.
If you want to direct people to Reddit alternatives, you’ll probably have the most luck on platforms that aren’t Reddit.
Though I do wonder if Twitter and the meta platforms will also block it, since they are competing with the fediverse as well (though meta in a EEE kinda sense, so they’d need to walk a finer line since they are supposed to be embracing right now).
YouTube might be a place to do it.
Enshittification continues…
Remember, corporations are never your friend. I remember when redditors thought spez was “one of them”.
One of them… who was a mod on r/jailbait.
This is something that really needs to be brought up regularly.
There are plenty of valid criticisms beyond character assassination. It is my understanding that any mod could add any user as a mod of their subreddit.
It’s easy to get corrupted by money and success. Has been shown a myriad of times in any stage of human history.
In the beginning, spez might have been “one of us”, but he gradually shifted away from that while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.
while the goodwill of his community towards his persona was upheld.
He probably really was one of us. To be honest, most of Reddit had no idea who tf spez was before this. Anytime he did something terrible, it would be big then disappear in a week.
Then, since he was so removed from a redditor’s in the day to day, all would be well and he’d be forgotten. The local mods and reddit admins were who everyone would direct their hate to.
Mortals defending profits for corporations over humans rights. What could go wrong?
Well, they don’t always start out as “corporations”. He may have been one of them, till the glamour of profits came into the picture.
he never was. It was always a business. Do you remember they started the site with faking users? They were always a for-profit company. It’s kinda cringe to think he ever was one.
Let’s dump Reddit for ever for good.
Haven’t you done that already?
I would if it didn’t have certain subs that don’t exist here (yet).
Start one!
Easy to say. Not easy to do.
They’re doing great work on their destroy any positive community sentiment Speedrun, it’s been shocking decision after terrible change
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it compares to Twitter’s attempt, Elon Musk seems to have a lot of natural talent at bad decisions.
A techbro saw Elon’s dumpster-fire handling of twitter and went “Yes, this makes sense!” Oh Spez, this is why we don’t idolize idiots.
all to sell some ads
All to make the company look like it has revenue so they can scam people on their IPO
sigh :(
Isn’t the stated reason to prevent AI scraping? As much as I dislike them both, given how these LLMs like ChatGPT work it actually seems reasonable.
eh I feel that excuse is bullshit - a scrape is the same as a web view. ai doesn’t need to scan the same content more than once. reeks of b/s to me
The content continues to change. When I have a specific programming question they don’t help me figure things out based on the documentation alone. Seeing discussion about such topics definitely helps it as knowledge continues to evolve.
Having tried /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim, I was going to point out how I didn’t get the screen you got. However, /r/nyt gets this message. As an aside, /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim are verified while /r/nyt is not is interesting to me. Upon further testing, /r/nytimes works. Seeing how /r/nyt has 411 subscribers, while /r/nytimes has 8,431 subscribers, I think smaller, less well known subreddits will run into issues while larger subreddits or subreddits that are more well known will have no accessibility issues.
It’s also interesting that this block doesn’t exist if you navigate to old.reddit.com/r/nyt instead of just reddit.com/r/nyt. You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
old.reddit.com on the Firefox Android app looks bad, but I wonder if someone could make an extension to automatically redirect users to old.reddit.com when navigating to reddit.com, as well as an extension that changes the layout of the page to something more mobile friendly, similar to RES but for your phone’s browser. That might make reddit usable on mobile without the official app until old.reddit.com goes away or they try to implement some sort of user agent string check.
You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
Doubt it was overlooked. I moderated a larger subreddit and I can tell you that the stats for old.reddit are tiny compared to the rest so it’s not worth the cost of implementing. Further if you use old.reddit you probably already have a dislike for the app and will rather abandon the content then install the app. Finally old.reddit is used more by old-school redditors which tend to be the vocal minority that will complain about the change the loudest. So overall, ignoring old.reddit is propably the smarter decision from reddits perspective… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They’re simply trying to prevent any nut job spinning up /r/watchpeopledie15 and generating a press wildfire again
That’s not a bad thing. I wouldn’t consider watchpeopledie healthy for anyone.
I have the extension “Old Reddit Redirect” in my firefox mobile. You need a version with custom addon collections enabled (beta or a fork like fennec on fdroid), then you can install every addon by adding it to your collection, and most of them work.
If RES or an equivalent addon could produce a good mobile layout you could use them in the same way, but I don’t know about that.
Looks like more efforts to sanitize the place in prep for an ipo.
The execs are almost certainly ready to cash out and retire from that annoying gig 🤣
But just wait until a wallst level CEO gets hold of the reigns.
I can’t even imagine it being about the IPO anymore.
There might have been some concerns about profitability numbers for an IPO, but I don’t think that’s something you can right in a hurry. If the investors didn’t like “N quarters of losing money”, will they be that much more impressed by “we slashed and burnt big chunks of the platform, but we don’t really have any clue if this will stick?”
More importantly, they had a strong narrative they could sell investors: They were the “anti-social media social media”. Users remained largely in control of their curation, the content was less ephemeral and more indexable. They were perfectly positioned to differentiate themselves as other big players went whole hog on the “the algorithm is mostly standing between you and what you want to see” models.
Does that narrative hold up when their user base is either fleeing or feels held hostage?
It’s 100% about the IPO. Other large websites have gotten into trouble with the credit card companies by offering porn. It’s why Pornhub removed unverified amateur content, OnlyFans considered not allowing porn, and probably others. Your platform absolutely plummets in value if people have a hard time spending money there. Hiding unverified subs sounds exactly like this kind of move.
Except the “unverified” sub in the OP is r/nyt. Last time I checked, the New York Times doesn’t offer that much porn…
Porn is definitely more profitable than journalism, maybe they should try it
Generally less deceptive, too!
But how would any admin know that until they verify it is actually nyt content?
I thought unverified content was removed because of rampant unchecked abuse. Ah, maybe it was that that spurned the companies to make pornhub remove it.
That was the excuse the credit card companies used to not allow pornhub transactions anymore. But even after they removed that content the credit card companies didn’t come back.
