A-fucking-men.
Been bitching about this for years to deaf ears.
Old enough to remember when folks took pride in how few lines of code they could write to get something done. Not unreadably dense undocumented code. Just lean, clean, and efficient.
There's still a place for large complex software, but 99% of business apps that just move text strings, datetime values, and decimals around from point A to point B aren't that place.
I mostly agree with you.
But I also think it's important to think of the neighbors we disagree with very differently than how we view right wing politicians and corporate executives. Our neighbors may have some shitty opinions and ignorant positions, but they might be decent people at heart. No right wing politician or billionaire CEO is going to be decent at heart.
That will work for now. But the open web is under attack.
More and more content is being locked inside of apps, pay walls, etc. Google search sucks because they only show you paid promoted content. Thus WEI bullshit is just another step in the direction of taking away free and open access. If this shit is left unchecked, mainstream websites will stop working with open web browsers like Firefox.
Their goal is to charge fees and subscriptions for everything. And to take away freedom of choice and open access. They don't want to compete with value or quality content. They want to remove our ability to even use the competition.
Please be careful, as YouTube is owned by Google, and getting banned by Google is potentially devastating for some people. Google's products and services dominant the web and mobile, unfortunately.
I'm not saying you will get banned, just pointing out the potential risk.
The whole thing is a cluster. Ad blockers are a necessity IMO.
The people who charge $300 for textbooks are surprised people don't want to pay $300 for textbooks. Typical.
I have stopped using Brave. Fuck those guys.
I just wish Firefox would update less frequently. It's way too often.
"Disagree and commit" = do what I say or quit. Worker exploitation has many douchey buzz phrases.
There's a theory that societies experience 40 years of progress followed by 40 years of regression in an endless cycle. I hope the theory is wrong. I can't take decades of these idiots running things.
Cringe is far too overused IMHO. Especially online.
If something is "lame" it's probably unoriginal, derivative, boring, or annoying.
I was only vaguely aware of this guy. When he released his ratcheting driver gadget a while back, it popped up on a YT review channel that I do watch. Out of curiosity I looked into it.
This Linus guy immediately struck me as a weasel and a d-bag. I don't have any super powers of observation. People should trust their instincts better. Human instincts are bad compared to animals, but one thing we're all pretty naturally good at is detecting scumbags. Listen to your instincts, folks. His "charm" is as real as CheezWhiz.
More power to the protest, but I am skeptical that it will do much good. I think reddit has strayed so far from its original mission and values that today it is nothing like the platform the reddit founders originally envisioned.
I think the reddit executives have probably already run the numbers on this and don't care if every single user & mod who uses 3rd party apps and the API walks away from their platform. At this point they only care about the IPO and what they need to do to increase shareholder value after the IPO.
They may even see the exodus as a positive. They may think of these power users and API-utilizing mods as a drag on their bandwidth and worse, they are users who seldom if ever see any ads and increase their ad-viewing numbers.
Will the quality of reddit content suffer? I think it very likely will. It's already been going downhill for a while now.
However, the executives mostly don't care about content quality, either. As long as the free content they get from their users doesn't stray into illegal and controversial waters, they are happy. If the content is mediocre memes and cat photos, they are quite happy with that. The goal is to serve as many ads up to as many users per hour as possible. They are banking on millions of "casuals" to stick around and scroll through the content and see those ads. Content quality is way down the list of their concerns.
My guess is the suits are are no longer interested in an "engagement" platform in the same way that Twitter and Facebook try to be (in their own ham-fisted and evil social-engineering ways). At this stage of the game, reddit just wants to be a mindless app that bored people can scroll while in the doctor's waiting room, the airport, in the bathroom, or wherever they are and need to kill time.
Have the reddit suits made a miscalculation here? Will the exodus make reddit another "not cool anymore" type of platform like Digg that almost everyone abandons? Will the mass exodus only leave bots and karma farmers behind to talk to each other? Maybe, I don't know. It's hard to predict that kind of thing. But I think the execs are willing to roll the dice on this because short-term profits are all they care about since they will be going public. If the bots and karma farmers fool the people buying ads, reddit will just roll with that.
(You'd hope anyone buying ads on reddit would check to make sure their investment is actually increasing their sales...but there's a lot of poorly managed businesses out there).
Either way....for those of us who enjoyed old reddit (and Digg before that, and Usenet before that) I think the path forward is a new platform such as this one.
So their cynical move is to send more traffic to reddit at the same time reddit's quality has gone down the toilet. Sounds like Google alright.