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You're wrong about multiple things here.

Regular moderators can effectively shadowban inside their subreddits by using AutoModerator and telling it to remove all posts made by certain users.

Reddit Gold has literally been renamed to Reddit Premium and is described officially as both a "premium membership" and a "subscription": https://www.reddit.com/premium

January 22, 2008 is when the built-in feature to make self-posts was added: https://www.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/666ne/testing_self/

A somewhat related story about why text posts on reddit are called "self posts" (copy-pasted from a thread from 5 years ago where someone asked why, linked near the top of the explanation):

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It's actually a bit of a long story, but it's kind of an interesting part of reddit's history. Some of my details are probably off, but this is how I understand it.

A long, long time ago, reddit only supported submitting links. Link submissions were pretty much exactly the same as they still are now, including having a comments page that you could go to with an address like the page we're currently on: http://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2bmy3l/what_does_the_s...

If you look at that address, one thing to notice is that it includes the submission's ID in base-36, which for this post is "2bmy3l". If you go to http://www.reddit.com/r/all/new and look at the links to the comments pages of the newest posts, you'll notice that their IDs are increasing. For example, at the time I'm writing this, the newest IDs are 2bo3uw, 2bo3ux, 2bo3uy.

Since the IDs are increasing, you can predict which ones are coming up. You know that the next ID after those ones should be 2bo3uz. So some person decided it would be funny if they pre-constructed a link like this: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/<id>/this_post_w... and then checked which IDs were coming up, filled in the "<id>" spot with one that should be used soon, and submitted it.

If they got their timing right, they'd end up with a link post that actually went nowhere. Clicking it would just take you to its own comments page, since they had managed to predict the url that the comments page would have. This was a "self post", a post that linked to itself.

So this was a pretty neat trick, and when it was successfully pulled off for the first time, it got a whole bunch of attention. Unfortunately, reddit's never been very good at just seeing some new popular thing as a novelty and moving on. No, of course pretty much everybody wanted to get their own "self post". The majority of the new submissions to the site were suddenly just people trying to make a self post, completely drowning out all the real submissions.

It was causing a gigantic mess, so one of the admins at the time decided to get people to stop by taking all the fun out of the game. They made it so that you could just choose to make a self post. You didn't have to guess the ID or anything, you just selected that you wanted to make a self post and automatically got one. It didn't have the option to add additional text or anything yet (that came later), it was just a title that linked to its own comments page.

So that's how self posts came about, and where the name originated. A quick solution to a mess being made by users that eventually turned into one of the most important pieces of reddit.

It's been really interesting to see how quickly the original Zoom response of "there's nothing wrong with this, everybody does it" ended up being reversed.

I wonder if there's a known exploit for the Zoom server specifically, or if Apple discovered one while looking into it. It seems strange for them to go to these lengths in this case when it sounds like other software has been using a similar technique too. Maybe it's just the reinstallation aspect that makes Zoom's case exceptional?

That's me, yes. And you're setting me up so perfectly here that I almost feel guilty about it:

A few months after I left reddit, I started a non-profit and have been building a new HN/reddit-like community site that can stick to the principles I believe are important (including being entirely user-supported with no investors or ads). The announcement post is probably still the best explanation overall: https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes (HN discussion of it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093)

The site's been public to view (but still needs an invite to register) for a few months now, so anyone can have a look: https://tildes.net

Feel free to email me for an invite if anyone's interested, the address is in the blog post. It's not intended to be difficult to get an invite, I just want to keep the growth under control while we keep building up a base site culture and features.

You can also just change the command to something like :%s/regex/replacement/gc

The "c" modifier makes you confirm each replacement, and you can y/n for each of them.

Note that Liberapay had to change payment processors, and in the process they changed how the payments work (https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-status-update-a7...).

I get the impression that they're getting into a state now where there's probably an "expectations mismatch" between what people expect to be doing when they set up a recurring donation compared to how Liberapay actually works.

As the blog post mentions, now you can say "I want to donate $5/month" and you put in $60 to cover a year, but you have to pay that full $60 immediately, and the recipient also receives the whole $60 (minus fees) right away as well. After that point, there's not really any way for the donator to change their mind and stop donating after a few months, so it's more like a one-time donation with a reminder but still being presented as a smaller recurring one.

I think the problem is that overall it will end up encouraging people to make smaller donations for shorter time periods because they won't necessarily want to commit for many months or years' worth up-front. Then that means that they have to be sent reminders to re-donate more often, which feels more annoying and will probably result in people just letting their donations lapse more often than repeatedly renewing them.

There's quite a bit that could be added, without even touching the site's overall mechanics at all.

The markdown support is extremely minimal and doesn't support a lot of basics like quotes (which causes many people to "quote" by using a code block, which has issues).

A basic private messaging system would be really helpful in a lot of cases. Right now people always have to post email addresses publicly.

It would be nice to have some built-in visibility into things like title changes, link changes, etc. that mods do, instead of needing them to comment manually about everything they do.

They could implement some scraping to automatically add the year to older stories, instead of users needing to flag it and get the mods to do it manually all the time.

And so on.

Lots of people posting random feature requests in here, but is HN even developed any more? The last significant changes I remember were two and a half years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12073675) and I think even those were the first ones in a long time.

Not sure, the 1000 limit is in the file from its very first version 10 years ago: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/commit/33fd4e9684ca...

1000 probably seemed like a lot at the time or had reasonable performance, and it's just never been changed.

Hi HN - I left my job at reddit about a year and a half ago, and a few months later decided to try starting a non-profit and work on building a new site that would be able to address a lot of the issues that I felt were hurting online communities.

I've kept it very quiet until recently, but have started telling people about it and inviting them to the alpha over the last couple of weeks. The site's still very minimal at this point (imagine a slightly-more-functional HN with separate "groups" for different subjects), but you're definitely welcome to invites. Since HN doesn't have private messaging (Tildes does!) please send me an email if you're interested in an invite, and feel free to ask questions here.

Tuvalu makes "several million dollars a year" from .tv domains [1], and their total GDP is only ~$35M, so at least in Tuvalu's case it's in the range of 10% of their GDP.

[1]: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16340072

It's not the actual codebase, it's kind of a branch that has to be manually updated (by cherry-picking across commits from the "real" one). It used to be kept in pretty close sync with the code live on the site, but it seems like they don't care about updating it any more. There are things that have been live on the site for close to a year now that aren't in the open-source repo.

There's a similar saying referred to as Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy: "Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge."

There's also another related topic on TVTropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CowboyBebopAtHisC...