skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would gladly volunteer to replace a mod for a very popular subreddit. No one should be moderator for life, time for new ideas.
I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.
Vastly better to sell than to shut down.
It’s quite possible that people are just flagging these stories because it’s not interesting enough to facilitate 20 discussions without it turning into threads with 500 comments rehashing the same arguments.

Reddit might be a big deal to you but many people over here just don’t care and they don’t want to see topic after topic about a site they don’t care about. And it’s going to have the same impact on the ‘future of the internet’ as the demise of Digg. Not a whole lot really, sites come and go, in a year nobody cares. Remember MySpace?
Where's the non-profit foundation to replace them? Has someone already started it?
I think it would be more comparable if YouTube had an API that the developers had built their apps on, that mods and power users had come to rely on, and YouTube shut the API down or demanded ridiculous fees for the use with a 30 day notice.

The Apollo dev initially sounded okay with the idea of changing to a paid API access model, but when the pricing and timeline came out, things went from a reasonable change to a swift boot for a lot of apps.
This was my original take as well, but I now suspect the reason for all this and their refusal to accommodate the app ecosystem is that they don’t want third party apps at all. They want users on the official app where they can monetize the additional profile data in ways beyond their ad platform.
Thank goodness, the German cookies prompt scared me.
Yes, and it's provably happening but there's still an army of people willing to deny rapid extinction of many species. At what point will you be convinced?
I don't really agree. the hard part of networking is being worth talking to for the other person. people will happily overlook a little awkwardness if they think you might be able to help them in the future. you don't have to put in a lot of work to "maintain" the relationship either. just do your best to help them if they ever reach out, and they'll probably be willing to do the same for you.

for me, "networking" is mostly just adding coworkers on LinkedIn. it seemed pointless at first, but a few years later I have first degree connections at most desirable tech companies who would be happy to give me a referral. I find it's usually pretty easy to get a referral even from a second degree connection.

I think you are describing a kind of person who is so good at networking that their network is the main thing of value that they have to offer. this is very hard to achieve as an introverted/shy person, but imo it's not necessary when you have other valuable skills.
I agree. Reddit has behaved very badly, but the kneejerk people demanding a cheaper than opportunity cost API have distanced themselves from sanity. It's one thing to say that one thinks reddit is making a miscalculation against its own financial interests, but it's an extreme form of selfishness to demand that someone else sacrifice earnings to provide perpetual unfettered platform access to things that were put on the platform of posters' own accord without coercion.

It's a true shame that your approach was not the chosen one. It would have been the right call in my view. But it's not anyone's right to get a particular outcome, and so many people commenting seem to think otherwise.
Fair points. That being said, I'd value the participants more so than the run-of-the-mill lurker. One creates the content for the lurkers to consume.

Reddit makes money on the lurkers, but the NEED the commenters and mods to maintain the website as a whole. A straight count of users does not at all reflect who contributes the most value to the website.
so the people that bring value to reddit.
This blog post linked from the issue is a much easier read:

* https://blog.tox.chat/2023/03/redesign-of-toxs-cryptographic...
Does it matter if it is growing or shrinking? The users are getting usage, and the maintainers are providing a service. Is there a profit motive being unfulfilled?
It's astounding we are still here.

It's been 13 years since I blogged http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom this.

Luckily, my prediction wasn't correct and the app stores on PCs didn't gain much traction. So there's still a way out. But, admittedly, the relative ratio of phone users vs total computer users are growing and so the mindset I was afraid for is indeed dying out. Cyberpunk novels featured people who can't even read any more just click icons. Are we getting there? Maybe but luckily much slower than I thought.
Agreed... I wanted to understand what it was all about, but really struggled to follow. They talk about the whole thing taking around 24 hours, but some part took over 30. Also that it ran on a 4GB of RAM machine, but they needed larger ones to do all the parsing.

Also in the end, unsure of what the actual results are. Maybe I missed clicking on something.
Mastodon, Lemmy, kbin, and the fediverse in general, are right now experimenting an unprecedented growth in number of instances, users, and activity.
Gambling is depravity? What? Has HN suddenly become a puritanical news site or something?
The problem there is I think people are sick of seeing 15 small recurring charges on their credit card statements every month. It's death by a thousand paper cuts.

There needs to be some sort of universal pay per view model that works across any site.
I have a conspiracy theory that a lot of domain registration companies like GoDaddy sell the domain name searches to squatters (sometimes themselves). The larger cloud companies don't have so much incentive do this. I always look up domains from the terminal.
Sideloading comes with plenty of downsides.

It's a source of malware and viruses. It prevents the ability to unsubscribe in one place. It allows apps to use private APIs which Apple can't prevent (i.e. Obj-C dynamic dispatch) thus opening up all sorts of attack vectors e.g. "phone" apps that record conversations etc.

And I assure you that it wouldn't be a tiny percentage of users if companies like Facebook would use it to do a run-around Apple's privacy controls. Sideloading could unlock tens of billions in lost advertising revenue to many companies.
Let's be real with ourselves, this has nothing to do with 3rd party apps and everything to do with the plethora of awful automoderating tools that have ruined Reddit.

Reddit moderators are almost all a cancer to that site. They do it for free and are threatened that their power tripping fiefdom tools are going awy. Ironically reddit even said most of those tools would hit the free tier anyway.

If spez had balls, he would run a script that opens all of the hidden subs, disable the ability to hide/delete subs, and show these jannies erm mods the door.

The site has become an absolute cancer with discussion being heavily dictated. I welcome a mass exodus of those "mods".
Crime is the perfectly sensible default assumption for cryptocurrency apps in 2023. Accusing people of anti-cryptocurrency bias is like saying someone has anti-forest-fire bias; there are certainly scenarios where such a bias could be unfair, but the burden of proof is on you, not the other guy.
I would also bet that the majority of Reddit users care more about having an open subreddit than the mods do as well.
I've been using DuckDuckGo as my main search engine however I do find myself adding the "!g" bang a lot. It's hard to escape the google grasp.
"Boy do I miss the good old days, where devices were programmable by their owners instead of just e-waste consumption slabs."

Boy I miss the good old days when you had to build the board in your computer before these interlopers could buy pre-built computers.
Ugh. Not everyone wants a science project. I know this is hard for many techies to understand but not everyone loves tech for the sake of tech. For many these are just tools no more special than any other tool and if they don't do useful work they are a burden.
Seems fine to me. I’m still on it. It’s still active, I still see content. So some community is dark? Who cares. If i wasn’t subbed to it I don’t really care.
Federated social media, and maybe a public cloud infrastructure as an alternative to things like AWS?
Workers Resisting the Office Grind Are Suddenly Lonely at Home
One thing Id really like to see is cross OS transfer. I feel Im locked in to my OS because of Signal right now as Ill lose messages. There are some messages I dont want lost and sadly having them in signal is a bummer.

This is where whatsapp just excels
People seem to forget the history of cellular. Apple refused to let carriers bloat up phones with uninstallable shovelware that had been on every phone before them, and they only relented because it represented a market opportunity too big to ignore.

It takes something the size of a corporation to fend off other corporations. And it’s not as if many have not tried and failed to break the phone OS duopoly; the walled garden aspect of iOS is a fairly small obstacle.
Political organization on the internet definitely has its downsides too. In fact, as the activity has proliferated it's consumed the internet at times and that's been disappointing, to the extent that astroturfing occurs. On top of that it seems that politics has gotten more homogenous in viewpoints since it proliferated; people are now repeating talking points more than nuanced ideas. There's also a lot of harassment and bullying that occurs due to politics prevalence on the internet. When you go into real life the experience is generally very different and opt out by default.
I bought one and was really disappointed - the visual didn't feel as 3D as I expected. Their marketing videos make it look like things really feel like they're coming up out of the board, and to me it just felt like the board was sort of a TV laid flat on the table. Things were 3D only in the same sense that they are on my monitor.

Also some really bad UX stuff - you have to have the glasses plugged into an Android phone or Windows PC. I have a Windows laptop, but the cord to plug in was so short I almost pulled it off the table a couple of times. I Googled, and that was a pretty common complaint that came up, which is just such a silly thing to get wrong.

The controls also weren't that good - when pointing sometimes it'd just lose track of my controller. I tried with a few games and never had a particularly good experience.

Overall, this was one of those things where the marketing made it feel like I should expect a magical experience, and the reality was very disappointing. Thankfully, they have a return policy - it's buried in their site and confusingly worded, but I was able to ship the thing back to them and get a refund.
oddly specific...

Don't know about Azure, but my AWS support tickets have always been answered with very helpful diagnosis.
Nice idea, but somehow not too much fun when you constantly lose. I think a better game mechanism might be how many correct vs. incorrect ones you can get in a time period.
It was only a matter of time.
Christian isn't the only person with a dog in this fight, and none of what you just said at all negates Reddit's dishonesty throughout this entire situation.
Unfortunate, but it was pretty obvious this would happen. The blackouts lasting only 48 hours was a mistake anyways. The only way I see them changing course is if enough people:

1. Delete the official app

2. Stop buying reddit awards, subscriptions, etc.

3. Mass delete their comments (Ideally after backing them up so that they can restore them later)

4. Stop visiting reddit all together

From reddit, this could easily be solved by offering "Reddit Pro", where you pay X per month, get perks and gives you an API key that you can use in any third app you like. Everyone is happy.
I use porkbun.com. Their site is simple. When you click the "Checkout" button you're taken to a confirmation page with a "Continue to Billing" button. There are discreet links you can click to add email/web hosting, but no interstitials to click through.

Edit: fixed autocorrect of domain name
back out the changes, bring them back in 6 months at a much lower price

then slowly increase the price
I had a lot of issues with the wand, and you're right to question the accuracy of it. The system lost track of where I was pointing several times, and overall it was just not great.
At the end of the day, if you don't care enough to participate you are obliged to accept the outcome that results. If you don't like the results, it's time to participate, continue to watch, or pack up.
It's funny how the pic they keep posting says "recognize any of these third-party app icons?" Well no, I actually don't. Probably very few people do. Oh, you say the bots are going to break too? Sounds good to me.
Which is it? This https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347711 just said they will force them.
GP was talking about desktop, not which android is not, but to give a serious answer: I can run a full linux terminal on android, run vscode-server (has to be in a VM, but still) and edit and compile my code. All without needing a connection to some remote "cloud".

If apple would just get over themselves and allow sideloading (or, gosh, a terminal!), it would go a long way to improving iOS usability for creatives.
Huh? The protest is to make it possible to keep things working. It's bizarre to see the amount of complaining about mods making or breaking a sub and then at the same time the amount of people calling their actions impactless or leading to derelict communities. Which is it? Do users and Reddit need them or do they not?

The only option after fucking over volunteers is that Reddit can start paying people to moderate and keep their platform working. Give it to someone else willing? Good luck with that. Hand your house keys to a stranger, you're gonna love the new interior design.
They don't link to the study, but the image accompanying the article doesn't inspire much confidence. What are the lines? All the dots are almost identical with only one or two being slightly bigger or smaller.

More fundamentally, what makes them think the results have anything to do with language other than culture and life experience? If they did this in Germany, native Arabic speakers will have (mostly) moved during their lives, presumably traversing a bilingual and bicultural life (that might demand more bicameral connections) relative to the German subjects.
Are there any websites like HPCFactor that are still up and running for PalmOS or Windows Mobile?
Except it extract $ from the poorest in the state. People who need the money the most.

You don't see lottery signs in the rich neighborhoods of Los Angeles. You only see them in the poor ones.

So that money that it generates? We're still paying for that, as those people now need more help to get around.

And I say 'we', but I'm out.
But unmoderated subreddits will get banned, so isn't Reddit actually shooting itself in the foot?
For a more precise background* I don't believe a representative democracy, where we must abandon all power to someone else who we hepe will do the right thing is a model we should be pursuing. Polls are not a good thing per se, they're only better than the worse methods.

What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you're talking about ? How can you discuss the form of society we're building if you don't want to discuss and be told how to think ?

Now, I understand that what I'm asking for is out of the norms, because we're not used to decide collectively and run our own lives, the entirety of our education and our lives happens with someone else taking decisions for us. It's comfortable, we don't need to think too much, especially when we agree with the decisions. Here is the occasion to do it differently. Why not do it ? And if picking an instance is too hard, why not pick a random one ? We want to have the best thing for us individually, but we want to be told what it is. We want to not be subjects to the whims of the owner of a platform, but we don't want to understand where we're setting foot and prefer a generic instance that will be for everyone. Hust lite reddit, but different. That's not building, that's consuming, and if you're only there to consume, do you really want a democracy ? It sounds like a benevolent dictatorship is better.

In short, I don't believe actual democracy can happen without understanding the situation.
Then name one, choose any book that would be totally unappealing to a teenager/early college (so no Dune, Hitchhiker's, Martian, Clockwork, GoT, American Gods, Good Omens) but is fun and exciting. There are books that are for everyone except young children, and there are books that are trying to appeal exclusively to adults. The former are great, the latter are a slog.

I'm sincerely hoping to be proven wrong.
Hope you don't forget your password. That's a fun experience.
They've had at least one experiment where they blocked the web version as well and tried to direct people to the app:
https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/135tly1/helpdid_reddi...

HN discussion at the time:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
My native language is Portuguese and I'm currently learning German. The separable verbs are quite a challenge for me, especially in longer sentences. I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in German there's this need to keep the content in the working memory for possible supplementary info, and only at the end you can figure the meaning. Until the sentence finishes, there's this tension, this suspense.
You could counter that the whole point of Kafka is scalability. There are many much more trivial solutions for message passing not at scale
There’s nothing preventing me from using third-party mapping software on the iPhone. That’s not my point.
Yandex is pretty useful as a last resort for things banned elsewhere

also: https://search.marginalia.nu/
Wouldn't it make sense for third party apps to get the content by just scraping the Reddit website instead?
Sounds like you may need to find some different subs to participate in. Majority of experiences with mods in mine have been between very okay and positive.
The older Harris Corporation AM and FM transmitter manuals was what came to mind when I wrote that. As equipment got modernized, there was less for the operator to know, so they get shorter and shorter over time. Look at the SX-1 AM manual under "Principles of Operation" to something like the HT-35 FM manual under the same.

Also.. early computer manufacturers like MITS had manuals in a similar vein for their Altair 8800 box but you can find many examples in this space, there's a stub of a Wikipedia page just for it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_operation
There is a shortage of primary driver-ready mobile computing devices which respect the user's privacy. The choices here are Android devices with custom ROMs + microG and daily prayers that Google doesn't go out of their way to break it (which they can very well do since it breaks ToS) or go nuts with SafetyNet or hardware attestation features and lock you out of a lot of (crucial) apps - or worst case just nuke your account if they detect you use such programs. Or alternatively iPhones.

I'm unsure why side loading would break the dynamics of their walled garden either. All that does is give both customers and developers the choice of forfeiting the benefits like discoverability, comfort and likely a bunch of App Store-exclusive APIs like IAPs and in return allow access in cases where Apple doesn't approve. I can already guarantee that most developers won't budge an inch from the App Store as the lack of discoverability and the annoyance of downloading an app file and clicking through Apple's warning popups just to install it would effectively kill their app.
Apple’s market position had nothing to do with it, just their ability to restrict Facebook’s app. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on an open platform through similar technical means? Whose to say that we couldn’t do it better?
I suppose this will be a litmus test on how valuable long-established moderators are to the platform.

At the end of the day, they are volunteers who are now boarding themselves behind the property of their digital landlord so the risk of eviction isn't really all that surprising.

I've seen endless complaints from users who feel personally offended by being muted/banned from a community and a common response to their complaints is "if you don't like it, go to another site". If the moderators are not happy with the direction of the platform, they are free to vacate the property willingly or have an admin spend :30s removing them.

The relationship has always been unilateral in favor of the people who actually work there.
anyone can make a redditrequest - doesn't mean it's actionable. per the r/science request

> As of right now, that subreddit currently has recent human moderator activity, so it is not available for Redditrequest at this time. Please note that not all moderator activity is visible to others who are not mods of that sub. But feel free to message the mods and let them know that you'd like to help out, though they are not required to add you.
> Also, please note that if there is not active moderation in the future, it will become available for Redditrequest at that time.
They should have a manual backup export to an encrypted format and make you responsible for the key
I could roll my own or use an Android device that I rooted I suppose.

The problem there is I have to use inferior hardware (IMO) and I won’t be able to as easily interoperate with my preferred laptop hardware and software.

30 years ago I had the time to fuck around with hardware and OSs. Work, kids, and life are more important to me now and I consider the options provided by Apple to be good enough and a solid middle ground for where I want to spend my time today.
So maybe it's naive to think reddit wouldn't just seize control regardless of the "rules" (although I've seen plenty of posts from mods that mention this possibility). But that's not relevant to the question which is whether or not the moderators are moderating - as reddit is still using the rules as a pretense. I say to the mods, make it an easy answer, re-open the subs and remove every post that isn't a copy-paste of a stickied statement, something like that. Make them admit the rules were a convenient excuse for something they'd do anyway.
Localrf – Nerf from casual shaky videos
Care to explain why did you pick porkburn? We have to switch to a different provider since google is sunsetting this product.