As another example, the Path of Exile community moved off onto their own community-run wiki domain, but the Fandom variant (which is woefully out of date) continues to be one of the top results when searching for a PoE wiki page.

In some regards that's inevitable, but it clearly shows what Fandom's priorities are.

Fandom purchasing Gamepedia and moving everything onto Fandom Wikia was so awful. I'm so upset the Dota2 Gamepedia wiki is now on Fandom, and I'm sure many other communities feel that way for their own community run and community led wiki pages.

Not that I was particularly warm about Gamepedia either, but at the bare minimum I didn't feel like the page was all ads and no information. Fandom wikis are explicitly set-up to drive as many eyeballs as possible onto advertising and engagement, and are holding actually relevant information for the visitor as a hostage to get those eyeballs. It's information masquerading as a social media site.

The Runescape community convincing Jagex to cover the hosting costs and moving all their wiki pages to their own set-up has been such a huge boon for their community. It is super unfortunate that for many communities, the community-led wiki pages are a huge trove of information but the companies/games/groups these communities coalesce around have shown little to no interest in merely just financially supporting the endeavor.

Some examples:

2012 winner

As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.

2003 winner

They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white … Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn’t taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently.

2016 Adventure Dishonorable Mention

The sea roiled like water in a pasta pot about to boil, an apt simile thought Captain Samuel Turner, because if they didn't fix their engine soon he and his crew would be floating face down like overcooked manicotti—bloated, white, limp and about to be consumed by something that wished it were eating ahi tuna instead.

What a thinly veiled way to insinuate that she won't participate in good faith, given that good faith participation intrinsically means recusal.

The "numbers" are called Discriminators and served a variety of purposes:

• Identity wise it meant multiple people could have the same username text. If you wanted to be John, you could be John#6754 and someone else could be John#1298 and both of you could be John! Now there is only one john.
• It provided parity. EVERYONE had it, therefore no one is better or worse than other excluding particular number combinations. If you were John#5363 and hated the discriminator, well everyone else had one, versus someone behind john, and then someone having to be john_87 because there's already a john

You argue that being able to use effectively the same username everywhere is a good thing. The unfortunate reality is the rollout Discord used alongside the limited number of permutations (combinations?) of short usernames makes this impractical. For example, a friend largely goes by a 4-char username, and the switch by Discord means they can't use that 4-char username on Discord anymore. It's easy to say like "well, just add something to the end", but that is exactly what discriminators did.

At the end of the day the benefits weren't as compelling as the losses (it would suck to have one's identity impersonated or username stolen, or now most folks with short usernames have to stop friend requests cause they are getting spammed with them, or the fact these accounts are valuable and can be sold).

It is understandable that some people don't really care about the matter and that's fine, but it doesn't make the frustrations others feel less important.

Right there is inherent inertial momentum with upvotes.

I'm still on the fence, because understandably the potential (and actual) for abuse makes downvotes very unproductive as a feature, but there are also situations where they are very powerful.

It takes significantly more effort to refute a wrong position than it takes to make it. Downvotes serve as an explicit balancing point against that in ways that a well written response does not. Additionally, nested comments usually get less upvotes than their parent comments.

It is what it is I guess.

Reddit doesn't (at least as far as I know) store a history of edits, so what is saved on the database is what your comment literally is. The reason people suggest overwriting comments is because the comment itself has value (for a variety of reasons), so overwriting the comment with something valueless (in the sense that it has no value for Reddit) is better, so the database itself is updated with that valueless comment.

After that whatever you do with the account is up to you.

I think there are two different kinds of blackouts here. Most subreddits have opted to fully blackout by going private, but some have instead decided to not take the subreddit private but instead prevent new submissions and instead have a stickied submission explaining why no new comments/submissions can be made.

Larger subreddits might prefer the latter because it allows them to have one submission rise up through Reddit's /r/all or /r/popular, increasing visibility. Going fully dark by going private doesn't easily elucidate the reason as well as having a single submission doing so, and does a decent job when a number of the exact same submission flood the front page and nothing else from those communities.

By and large, anything you post publicly available online is copyrighted to you even if you did not necessarily file out all the paperwork needed to be so. Having a good track record and sourcing of your original work will do good, but ultimately there's not much that can be done about it being "stolen" in so far as someone taking a copy of it, posting it elsewhere, and claiming credit.

If you want to vigorously hold onto your ideas then you just don't want to talk about them to anyone but people you trust. You can't copyright an idea and there's nothing stopping someone from being successful with an idea you posited. The Inheritance series of novels by Paolini is consistently criticized as a fantasy rewrite of Star Wars but there's not much LucasArts et al. can do with that.

If you're interested in building a portfolio of work, then sharing your writing is a way to advance that goal and therefore sharing is in your interests. If you just want to share some writing because you want others to read it, and have no particular considerations about monetization, I would avoid obsessing about the plagiarism/theft thing. Not that it isn't important, but it's not an immediate consideration.

Do not make publicly available anything you hope to monetize.

I don't like the kind of A/B testing that large corporations do, but I'm not so certain that this particular user experiment Reddit is running would qualify for rigorous IRB review in most academic settings.

Firstly, let's talk about consent. An IRB can make a determination to waive the requirement to obtain informed consent for research. The IRB must find and document:

(i) The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;
(ii) The research could not practicably be carried out without the requested waiver or alteration;
(iii) If the research involves using identifiable private information or identifiable biospecimens, the research could not practicably be carried out without using such information or biospecimens in an identifiable format;
(iv) The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects; and
(v) Whenever appropriate, the subjects or legally authorized representatives will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.

Secondly, some kinds of research can be waived from documenting informed consent:

(i) That the only record linking the subject and the research would be the informed consent form and the principal risk would be potential harm resulting from a breach of confidentiality. Each subject (or legally authorized representative) will be asked whether the subject wants documentation linking the subject with the research, and the subject’s wishes will govern;
(ii) That the research presents no more than minimal risk of harm to subjects and involves no procedures for which written consent is normally required outside of the research context; or
(iii) If the subjects or legally authorized representatives are members of a distinct cultural group or community in which signing forms is not the norm, that the research presents no more than minimal risk of harm to subjects and provided there is an appropriate alternative mechanism for documenting that informed consent was obtained.

Insofar as the kind of UI/UX A/B testing which is employed poses minimal risk to the participant and the waiving of the need to obtain informed consent has no adverse effect on the participant, an IRB is likely to make a determination that consent can be waived. It would not surprise me that Universities themselves utilize UI/UX A/B testing for their own websites, both external and internal facing, for improvement. I doubt many would explicitly file a with their IRB to conduct such an experiment, but some may reach out to inquire if there are explicit concerns.

However, at a level even above informed consent, is a question of whether the research is actually subjected to IRB review to begin with. There is a classification of research that is exempt from human subjects review, and some kinds of research do qualify for human subjects review exemptions.

For UI/UX A/B testing, this particular section will have some application, considering a lot of UI/UX A/B testing only cares for aggregate responses to human behavior:

(2) Research that only includes interactions involving educational tests (cognitive, diagnostic, aptitude, achievement), survey procedures, interview procedures, or observation of public behavior (including visual or auditory recording) if at least one of the following criteria is met:

(i) The information obtained is recorded by the investigator in such a manner that the identity of the human subjects cannot readily be ascertained, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects;
(ii) Any disclosure of the human subjects’ responses outside the research would not reasonably place the subjects at risk of criminal or civil liability or be damaging to the subjects’ financial standing, employability, educational advancement, or reputation; or
(iii) The information obtained is recorded by the investigator in such a manner that the identity of the human subjects can readily be ascertained, directly or through identifiers linked to the subjects, and an IRB conducts a limited IRB review to make the determination required by §46.111(a)(7).

Now, one can make the argument that the kind of profile information websites like Reddit have on you is identifying. In practice, "personally identifying information" has specific definitions and the information that Reddit has on you is unlikely to satisfy that criteria.

Finally, this particular set of charts is a helpful reference for whether research even qualifies for IRB/human subjects review to begin with, and walks through the decision points. Notice that one specifically starts with a question of whether the research contributes to generalizable knowledge...

In short, if you ran the exact same experiment Reddit is running in an University setting for an university website (for example, testing whether making visitors create an university website account [????] to view an article published by the University press versus not having to do so makes a difference in engagement metrics), I doubt you would be run out of the University by the IRB. Perhaps the IRB might have a stern word if you failed to check-in with them prior, but even so I'm not confident that will be the case (I'm more inclined to believe the IRB member who you first reach out to will kindly tell you to sod off).

Now with ALL of that said, I still dislike the fact businesses run these experiments. It's definitely not ethical in the sense that businesses should not be aggressively using its everyday users as guinea pigs for their experiments, but just merely being a shitty thing to do is not sufficient by itself to merit the full IRB process.

Summarized from a recent call between Reddit leadership and some Reddit-partnered moderators/developers, there will be free non-commercial API access. As you need to provide your own credentials to authenticate when using PRAW, if you qualify under whatever is ultimately defined as "non-commercial use" you may continue to use PRAW.

Now, as to whether Reddit's recent actions bode any confidence for you in putting into any effort leveraging their API and/or other tools, that's a separate (and probably worthwhile) question to ask.

Whether PRAW's maintainers want to keep PRAW maintained in light of these announcements is also a separate question too.

The unfortunate underlying issue is the API pricing is by and large not sustainable. Even if a third-party application has not announced they cannot continue operations, the lack of announcement does not mean they plan to or continue. I can see the want of biding time and waiting in this circumstance, but ultimately I don't see any third-party application staying active in an above-board manner if the API pricing is launched as is.

Apollo, RIF, and Sync announcing they are shuttering adds additional pressure to the matter.