2,615 karma · joined July 28, 2022
Don't know how you would even write code in your own style. As soon as you start altering it, the result is different. It's more/less efficient.
Deleting accounts and histories offers a major benefit for people, which is that if they are somewhat addicted it's easier to stay away from when you no longer have an old account to feel connected to that encourages you to keep returning. This is likely the primary reason for most people, and not that they particularly care about content written.
The nice thing about redact specific to the reddit module is the edit before deletion, that way reddit can't keep monetizing your comments/posts. Useful for people who posted personal content as well, who thought their selfies or artwork or whatever got deleted with account deletion but remained up.
The only bit I don't agree with is viable competitors, the problem is a little deeper, in that even if there was a viable competitor people still won't move because it's not an exact clone and continuation of their profile (follower numbers, interaction expectations, etc). The rest of your assumptions remain, but I think this is a bit important to talk about so we don't mislead people into creating clones that never take off when they could be creating something new that will take off.
I get the want to simplify things, but it's already simple enough:
1. Reddit brings out absurdly priced API
2. Developers don't want to pay that much
3. Reddit then behind the scenes berates developers, claiming they are trying to blackmail millions of dollars, to the apps serving harmful ads, to posting about how the apps aren't "good citizens" and instead are scraping wildly
4. Developers push back and announce app closures
If it was about "showing ads", they would have budged on price a long time ago, added in guidelines to use the API and serve ads, etc. This is about controlling user data, tracking every bit they can, leveraging their content, and then monetizing the fuck out of it in the age of AI.
For example, a web clipper operates on multiple domains, but it can avoid it by using activetab permission instead and then offering optional permissions if it wants when you click on the clipper extension icon.
If you want something to be done automatically on multiple domains, this is not possible without that permission. Not unless you want to annoy users with prompts.
People often drink coffee slowly and without a straw, this leads to staining but not tooth decay. However the slow part contributes to the teeth not getting a chance to neutralize acidity normally. This gets worse when people then brush their teeth after their morning coffee to prevent bad breath, which the abrasiveness combined with the acid environment does cause havok.
Both of them can be avoided in a variety of ways, to reduce both staining and decay.
But it does signal an important aspect about the current iteration: the share icon hides way too many choices that don't make any real sense for being under the share icon. This is something Apple should absolutely work on ASAP because it's becoming a bloated list. Seriously, why is find under the share icon? How absurd this has gone on for THIS long.
>One study found, for example, that a third of social psychologists admitted that they would be unwilling to hire a known conservative to the faculty, and nearly half thought that their colleagues would be unwilling to hire such a person.33 Subsequent work suggests that those findings are not limited to psychology, and that conservative scholars might have a similar willingness to discriminate against liberals.34 On the whole, there does not appear to be a robust pipeline of conservatives desperate to get into academia.
This is substantially different from what you are suggesting, this idea that there is a natural bias when it seems to be a supply problem (and a dismissal of academia entirely, as the article links together the larger conservative push against higher education). Can't hire that which does not exist or believes your field is a farce.
HN is simple and works, from a user perspective. I don't have my hands on the codebase, but I imagine it's kind of fun to work on precisely because it isn't "close to the metal". DX is just as important as UX is, you have to strike a balance.
Not sure there's much correlation between frameworks and apps becoming complicated or losing touch with their userbase. Using AdWords as an example, I'm like ~75% sure they went from one framework (Google Web Toolkit) to another (AngularJS).
Which is the bigger problem, someone coming to a niche place to debate, or someone who believes adding reddit to their google searches is going to provide them with better insight? I'd say the latter: they aren't conscious of the BS being pushed onto them.
Also kind of funny your comment is an exact demonstration of what I mean, that self-reinforcing style of "comedy" coupled with a nonsensical assumption.
This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche group of people who use Reddit.
This becomes self-reinforcing as well, everyone else will feel alienated even if they do get over the hurdle of commenting, while those who fit the aforementioned mold will feel at home. Can't get much of a pulse, unless you specifically want to know what a very certain demographic feels once you filter out all the fanboyism and astroturfing.
I do agree everyone has a different workflow, but also you're a really good example of why the productivity is so massive despite the very little improvement to productivity brought on by these additional services: everyone is so desperately trying to convince themselves a better workflow is right around the corner. That someone else has a superior workflow, you just have to use that new app or service. Repeat every time a new gimmick comes out.
We think we write to remember, but it's really the act of letting go as the article gets into as a theory, that really lets those notes become effective to us. We can revisit these notes at a later date, with fresh eyes, having forgotten about it entirely. It adds value, not because the original idea or note was particularly great, but because of what we are then combining it with (action and experience).
This is also why blindly making notes isn't effective as a form of memorizing. You are writing just to write, you have to revisit them blindly in a new way for them to become effective with a new combination. As if you are a chemist creating a new concoction previously thought impossible.
So let your notes app become a giant trash pile. It's better for you, and they should do their job with proper search anyways. Don't spend time optimizing for note link graphs or any of that BS that doesn't help you and you absolutely will stop caring about those "features" in 5 months anyways. Such features are just productivity industry nonsense to make you feel productive while the content remains elusive to your mind.
It's your email, social account, ip/location, browser fingerprint info, search terms, information from their partners (ad networks, apps) and cookies, subs you visit, what you upvote/downvote/save/report, which page on reddit you're coming from/going to, etc. They use these to then determine blocks/shadowbans/counteract your votes and so on.
Has this resulted in a substantial quality increase on reddit? Oh absolutely not, you'll get chatgpt bots, people harassing you, completely unrelated comments, report abuse, etc. but they'll never give up that much data.
They've created systems that makes it obnoxious for everyone involved.
Tiny subs excluded, but at that point the form of reddit just doesn't suit smaller communities well. The way reddit sorts best, new, top, plus a bunch of obnoxious automod filters keeps smaller communities (even if "small" in this sense is 50000 followers) feeling absolutely dead.