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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…”
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.
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I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao
I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.
The spice must flow
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were weekend ddos attacks?
lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance
Also blahaj or something
I think that was due to an update, not an attack.
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Centralized control and ad based model ensures this always happens… Cable teevee, now web2.0…
About time the pleb base start thinking bigger picture and voting with their feet and wallets.
Libreddit and Teddit may be dead, but Kddit still works. Eddrit also does the trick, but occasionally gets overloaded.
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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I’m a bit late, but it can be bypassed by using old reddit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For now old.reddit still works.
Honestly I’m amazed. Old Reddit is still functionally unchanged over the past several years and honestly a great experience. And Reddit must know exactly how many people are using it because they’re visiting an alternate domain.
Can’t imagine it has much longer…
It’s only a great experience for some. The vast majority of people, attention, eyeballs, and money go to things like tiktok and Instagram.
Ehhhh. This could just be their current stopgap because of all of the NSFW swaps happening. I think you are extrapolating too much.
Don’t get me wrong, I could totally see Reddit enacting this policy in their “infinite wisdom” and quietly rolling it out. But you are drawing too much from this screenshot. We need more context.
Nope. It’s because it’s easier to harvest data through the app, so they funnel people towards it.
Oh there’s no doubt they’ve slowly made it more of a pain in the ass to not use the app (while also making the app worse) but this specific screenshot is too much missing context for OP’s claim to be assumed. It could be true but we don’t know enough.
I do remember seeing this popup way before the whole API & protests debacle. The warning doesn’t even make sense, how will switching to the app to see the same content be safer?
I figured you needed to login (to apply your block list, filters, NSFW prefs, etc), but merely seeing the desktop mode of the website lets you through (not even using old.reddit). So this is another cheap way of forcing you to their cancer app.
Now you can’t even SORT comments without using the app. They are really taking all pqges off Elon’s book on ruining a website.
That was specifically for NSFW subs. What OP is showing us is not an NSFW sub. Hence the post.
I do not know why people think I tacitly approve of these changes. I do not. But what OP is claiming may or may not be true. We do not have enough information. It’s a completely separate matter from whether or not I think Reddit has been trying to funnel people towards their app, which clearly they have been for quite some time.
To be clear I just tried what the OP showed and could see the same thing, i forgot to add it in my comment
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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)_/¯
I always thought old.reddit going away was what would get me to leave the site…
Strangely impressed it managed to outlast me.
all to sell some ads
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
