A refugee who likes technology, geopolitics and interesting videos.
I did the UI/UX for Memmy which you can find at [email protected]
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.
This was a very well written statement and gives me a lot of hope for the future of the platform. I’ll be more than happy to invest my time and effort into it.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Some bloke put that sign up and went. “I don’t see anything wrong with this!”