The common thread I’ve seen online is this:

• Google’s search algorithm sucks. I always append reddit.com to get good forum results
• Reddit’s search algorithm sucks.

These two tools are quickly becoming coupled for Google-Fu expert users. The historical forum history that goes back 3-5 years on Reddit is their goldmine. You can’t just make a new subreddit overnight when a sub gets paywalled. All of that historical data will be lost and paywalled.

I think a paywall could be an effective money maker for Reddit because they’ve basically become their own Google - in that each subreddit acts like a unique website with real, human, responses. The only problem is that reddit has a god awful search algorithm that they refuse to improve. So people use Google to essentially search reddit. The “whales” so-to-speak are the only people they need to capture. People like myself (frugal people) aren’t in their peripherals. But the people that think “I’ll pay each month for NYT” or “it’s just a few dollars for the WSJ” are going to use the same logic for Reddit: “it’s a small amount of money to have access to high quality forums on X, Y, and Z”.

In addition, this might bolster Reddit’s content even further. Since paywalled subs will automatically reduce the amount of AI content spammed on them, they will inherently increase the legitimacy of each forum.

Lastly, this will give them a path towards monetization for moderators which doesn’t require them skimming off of their own pay checks to achieve it.

Do I like this? No. Is this fair? Also no. People contributed to Reddit under the impression that their data would be available and accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. That implicit guarantee is being violated. It’s an afront to the hard working individuals that have developed these communities brick by brick.

But does this “solution” make a lot of business sense? Possibly. As long as they survive the changeover in the short term, I think they’ll thrive from this choice for the reasons I stated above.

Again, it’s going to give them a pathway for:

• Monetization
• Reduce AI spam (a big fear of all forums)
• They could make even more money off the back of this

I’m pretty much over Reddit anyways. Lemmy has been my backup social media for a while now. The Internet is still free - for now. I just hope we can all find better search engines and forums in the future. Google has been degrading. Reddit has been locking things down. We obviously need to pivot to other platforms. Or maybe just go back to the old days where you find niche forums hosted by some dude in his basement. Nothing wrong with that.

I think you’re thinking of users’ ages not posters’ age. They don’t verify the age of people watching videos and they are publicly against that. I don’t know how they feel about validating the age of people in videos.

Well I’m guessing they actually did testing on local AI using a 4GB and 8GB RAM laptop and realized it would be an awful user experience. It’s just too slow.

I wish they rolled it in as an option though.

I think it makes sense. I like ChatGPT and I appreciate having easy access to it. What I really wish is the option to use local models instead. I realize most people don’t have machines that can tokenize quickly enough but for those that do…

I hope so. I don’t want to manage two different address spaces in my head. I prefer if one standard is just the standard.

How do they prove your age? Non-technical savvy people probably just give their kids a phone and don’t do much to lock it down.

Paper waste is really something that was overstated in the early 2000s. Yes paper is made from trees. But trees are renewable compared to the silicon and carbon consumed in these electronic tags. It’s way more environmentally friendly to use paper.

Are we to judge simple supply and demand now? If they haven’t been smart enough to save for a disaster, then perhaps they deserve what they get. If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Bah. Humbug. A poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every natural disaster.

/S

If we spent half the energy on improving our lives that we spend on fucking people over, we’d have a utopia by now. Or at least less lead in our pipes.

America is a global superpower which - apparently - spends some of its most secretive efforts on petty lashbacks to Chinese propaganda. And I’ll be damned if our most secretive efforts don’t also end up costing us the most taxes (relative to their effective output). I know that Twitter opens its firehouse of data to government programs to support social media analysis. I’m sure Google and Meta do as well. They are aiding these psychological campaigns.

I’m not very pro-working but why not fire the manager that didn’t notice the employee’s lack of output? Seems suss that by just keeping a computing online, you can circumvent actually producing anything.

As always, measure output not the how or why something gets done.

Would be kind of cool to allow people to choose an install method. As someone who has experienced low bandwidth in rural homes, it would be nice to avoid the waste at the cost of possibly managing chromium versions myself.

That’s the point. The storage is a bad metric. While it might indicate poor performance, it’s not a direct indication of poor performance. The bloat and optimization comes from the usage of Electron. And people use Electron because it’s far easier to make cross-platform deployments for Web and desktop using a framework like Electron. Show me the QT/JavaFX app that mimics Signal and we can compare the cost to develop it. Electron isn’t the best choice for memory usage and reducing bloat, but it’s the best choice for quick development (in my opinion but also proven out by the market share it has)

Nah it’s literally a waste of physical resources. Crypto currency is a waste of fossil fuels. AI has its functions at least.

Yeah the majority do it and I think it’s bad.

Thermostats are easy to change out. So this isn’t a huge deal. But I don’t love the idea that tech isn’t built to be self-hosted or maintained in any meaningful way. If you’re not shipping an open source version of your software when you close up, you’re an asshole.

Yeah, self hosting isn’t for most lay people if it’s just a GitHub repo. But GitHub repos quickly become adopted by nerds like me who build tooling around it that eventually let lay people self host software with the click of a button.

Just a reminder that during the pandemic these companies were given money to stay afloat and they immediately laid off the staff and have - apparently - neglected all meaningful maintenance.

/s for stroke?

The child is alive. He may get out of prison earlier than that. Not sure if it’s possible that he’d still be responsible for back pay of the alimony. No idea how that works.

In some places, parking lots are monitored by security and you’ll be kicked out if you’re sleeping in your car in the parking lot.

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