nefarious

I think this article from the Verge explains it pretty well.

tl;dr:

• The Fed kept interest rates low from 2008 to 2021. Low interest rates made it easier to borrow money and meant that debt-backed investments like bonds had a low return, so investors favored stocks for a better yield on their investment.
• This meant tech companies could borrow a ton of money at low interest rates and raise a ton of money from investors through stock sales, allowing them to build services that weren’t profitable in order to grow as rapidly as possible. This basically defined the internet as we know it today - big companies offering free/cheap services with minimal restrictions. Companies could afford to charge low fees and look the other way on things like ad blockers.
• However, now that interest rates are going up, borrowing is much more expensive and investors are less motivated to buy stock, so all that easy money has dried up. Companies are having to raise revenue by increasing prices, adding more ads, blocking ad blockers, etc.

First sentence of the article:

Reddit is bringing back r/Place — a collaborative project where individual users can edit pixels on a giant canvas

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/place

TIL! Thanks for the clarification.

I think that might be the codecs’ fault. At least for me, my headphones sound terrible in headset mode on all the devices I’ve tried, regardless of whether they’re running Linux, MacOS, iOS, or Android.

Statcounter bases their data on web traffic. If you’re browsing the web on your Steam Deck, I think that should count.

I’m not sure Twitter is a Cloudflare customer. There’s no Cloudflare infrastructure referenced by the DNS entries for twitter.com.

This feels short-sighted. The odds of the protest having a major and immediate impact were always low. It’s not like the suits were going to have a sudden change of heart and realize they were alienating their users. The majority of Reddit’s userbase weren’t going to suddenly leave the site forever. But that wasn’t the point.

Here’s what’s changed since the API changes were announced:

1. Reddit’s responses to user concerns and protests have alienated even more users than the initial changes themselves, showing users exactly how Reddit’s administration sees them.
2. A whole bunch of mods, devs, and contributors who put in a lot hard work improving Reddit for free are now much less motivated to do so (if they’re still willing to do it at all).
3. The protest raised awareness of federated Reddit alternatives, which have grown substantially as a result. A lot of those people who helped improve Reddit for free are now turning their attention to kbin and Lemmy instead.
4. Reddit is on a clear trajectory. They’ve shown they will continue making user-hostile decisions and antagonizing their userbase in pursuit of further growth.

We now have an established alternative to Reddit that has reached a critical mass for growth. A lot more people are now working on making the fediverse better, and communities are forming that will attract new users on their own. From now on, every time Reddit makes another move like this, more people will move over (or get closer to moving over) and Reddit will drop in quality even more as a result. If there’s ever a Digg V4 moment (maybe when they kill old.reddit), the fediverse will be much more prepared to take on the mass exodus that results.

Gotcha. I honestly just paid for Obsidian Sync, so I haven’t really evaluated the other options myself. I just know I’ve seen people mention that it was non-trivial or impossible to set up things like Git or Syncthing for syncing.

Adding another +1 for Obsidian. I’ve tried a whole lot of note-taking apps over the years and Obsidian is the best I’ve ever used by a pretty significant margin.

That said, there’s one caveat to note about self-hosting: if you’re on iOS, there’s not much of an option for syncing besides their paid Obsidian Sync service. I think there are some hacky workarounds for this, but they don’t seem great.

Another option to consider is Joplin. I used it before Obsidian, and while it’s not nearly as slick as Obsidian, it is fully open source, cross-platform, Markdown-based, and supports syncing with a variety of protocols out of the box. I had it set up to sync to a directory on my NAS using WebDAV and it worked reasonably well across all my devices. It also feels more Evernote-like to me than Obsidian and there’s a built-in option to import an ENEX file if you want to move your notes over.

Much like Reddit, Twitter’s first mobile apps were developed by third parties. The term “tweet” even originated with one of those apps.

I had wondered about this. I figured that all of these surveillance capitalist adtech/analytics companies would have to have some metrics on this.

What would be really nice to know is how the numbers look now that the blackout has been over for a while. A 6.6% drop is pretty tiny if it only lasted a day or two.