1,293 karma · joined April 15, 2022
Fundamentally the issue is that cars are huge visibility blockers. It is completely inconceivable that a cyclist could stop or slow to let a pedestrian cross, and the driver behind them would not see the pedestrian.
Without clear sight lines, drivers would need to communicate. But fundamentally drivers have extremely limited means of communicating information to those around them, and all of them are ambiguous. Hazard lights can mean a million things, including either "please pass me" or "it is extremely dangerous to pass me". In my city they most commonly mean "I want to park in this bike lane." Honking can mean a million things too, and sounds angry, aggressive, and startling. You can't really use your words, in a car, unless all of you have quiet engines, quiet tires, and roll your windows down. It is very hard, in most lighting conditions, to see the driver if they are trying to signal with their hands, because of sun glare, window tinting, lighting differentials between the cabin and the exterior.
So, the car in front blocks your ability to receive information about what's in front of them, while also being unable to communicate any helpful information themselves.
I deeply disagree with this take. I am living in a world in which boxes of metal fly around my unprotected flesh at high speeds, and "will I make it home safe today" is not only a dice roll for my life, but one in which the odds are getting worse by the day. One thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is a pervasive culture of fear among people who walk, since they need to keep their head on a swivel and be prepared to save their lives at a moment's notice from someone else's negligent behavior in a motor vehicle. Another thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is that many people in more walkable areas choose to walk less, or not at all, due to that danger. Another thing that keeps these numbers comparatively low is the proliferation of exurban developments in the past four decades in which walking anywhere is an absolute nonstarter.
It is interesting, perhaps, that pedestrian deaths used to be worse. It is not a consolation, nor is it the "real story."
I would say the "real story" is that pedestrian deaths are rebounding in the U.S. even though in European nations pedestrian deaths continued falling significantly after 2009.[1]
[1]https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/10/10/exactly-how-far-u-s-s... (one of the images appears to have had an image link break, so refer to https://web.archive.org/web/20201101012509/https://usa.stree...)
We are in the middle of an alarming rebound that has significantly outpaced population growth.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/pedestrian-deaths.html
And if you have the misfortune of getting hit by a bigger car while not being in a car yourself, you are likely to be critically injured, permanently disabled, or dead. The way to adapt is to drive more, or avoid places with motor traffic. All of these add to the risk and economic cost.
I don't agree on this point. They are invested in a plot of land, not the people. A house that sits empty for most or all of the year has an extremely adverse opportunity cost to the community even if it generates capital gains for the owner. In fact the best deal a speculator can get is to acquire an empty plot of land and do nothing with it while the land appreciates from everyone else's efforts making the locality more valuable. Putting your life somewhere constitutes an investment in the community. The best deal a resident can get is to have a happy and prosperous life there. Hence why I don't find the reason compelling - the incentives are too misaligned.
I agree there are arguments, but I don't like them. Ultimately the way you determine constituency is going to affect what interest group blocs are represented at the ballot box. Absentee property owners can already vote in their place of permanent residency, so I don't think this deprives them in any way of democratic representation.
The right being acquired by being in the locality. Homeless people can and do vote.
One can argue it is difficult to verify someone is telling the truth about residency or argue whether six months is a good choice of time period - those are valid implementation questions, but I strongly believe that in a just system, you need to be there.
Suppose a locality is bitterly divided over an issue that affects everyone, and elections centered on that topic come down to the wire. In my county, that issue is upzoning.
If you suppose that elections centered on this issue come down to the wire, it strikes me as unjust to run elections under a system where votes are up for sale, and the outcome of the election can be swung by people who have spent no time in the locality.
I can't think of any compelling reason to do this.
Google Maps looks like it supports combining public transit and bicycle, since you can select bike as a connecting mode to/from public transit, but then it never proposes bike routes. Apple Maps doesn't pretend to be able to do this. It is annoying, because mixing and matching bike/bus/train is a very common way of getting around in the DC area.
It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.
In my case, I've replaced my Reddit time ~50% with HN and ~50% with... something else, like doing work.
For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.
This would be, "I can no longer provide the service you bought, so I will refund you, cancel the subscription you have, and introduce a totally different subscription that accounts for the new upstream costs."
I would not expect Apollo to do this now after Reddit swung at Christian the way it did, but I'm curious to know if there was ever a semi-graceful way to handle it even on a short timeframe or if Christian was contractually boxed in.
edit: fixed very important typos
Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?
Reddit is/was also arguably a huge group of villages. It still feels that way, if you are only subscribed to sensibly small subreddits and you experience it through the prism of old.reddit and third-party apps like Apollo. Reddit doesn't think that that model is the future, though, and the mainstream Reddit experience has evolved away from that and toward the algorithmic feed model.
I would be wary in assuming that Discord's interface and community model will remain the same as it seeks ways to monetize.
[1]https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
1. You avoid all of this drama. Christian makes a post that says, "Reddit offered me a lot of money and I said yes because I want to have a lot of money. It's been a pleasure working with them and it's been a pleasure developing Apollo for you. Peace out." Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
2. Reddit could rather enshittify Apollo gradually, and/or fold Apollo's subscription model into Reddit's own model to maintain a premium power-user experience. It is an absurdly well-polished app, even if you added advertisements to it. It is a better user experience if the app gets worse slowly than if it disappears all at once and forces everyone to migrate to a new app. Reddit ran this playbook with Alien Blue and it worked out.
I've lied about my birthday while signing up for websites before. I've also made ad-hoc email addresses with forwarding to conceal my main email address. I've given fictitious phone numbers and I've used the names of fictional characters. I do this because I benefit from the service but I don't trust the provider to use my information responsibly.
Not a logical leap to go from there to feeding fake data to extensions when they request data that the user deems unnecessary for their functionality.
If I download $usefulWikipediaCompanionExtension whose functionality only depends on access to *.wikipedia.org but whose manifest demands permission on all sites, I'd like to be able to tell my browser "if I'm not really on Wikipedia, only show the extension a blank page."
Christian has already shared his correspondence on Reddit with this. He pretty clearly sought and received regular assurances that when and if Reddit moved their API to a paid model that it would be at a reasonable cost and with a flexible timeline to accommodate third party apps.
After telling him no such big moves were happening in 2023 they changed their mind, set punitively high prices and gave barely a month's notice.
I am not absolutely certain that this will produce a viable competitor but I would give it better odds than anything else in the past. It is not only a direct, immediate hit to the enjoyability of being on Reddit for any reason: it also heralds worse changes to come. Deprecating RES and old.reddit is the next natural step.
Honestly I would say that apps like Alien Blue and later Apollo made the difference in making Reddit as big and durably popular as it is now. Killing them, especially so visibly and messily, will cause an immediate exodus of some app users and a slow drain of the others. It certainly will not grow Reddit.
Did I miss something? I downloaded and used Apollo for free for a time, then later bought Pro for like $5 a couple years back. There is/was a subscription tier, Ultra, which for a time had a lifetime option, but it was never a particularly necessary expense and I have always enjoyed Apollo without it.