I guess this will be an unpopular opinion, but YouTube is justified in doing this imo. Video hosting isn’t cheap, especially providing 4K & 8K. They’ve gotta be able to support costs somehow, and if you’re not paying for Premium, you should be paying with ads. You’re also preventing the content creators from being compensated for content that you find valuable, useful, and/or entertaining.

I know ads are annoying, and I hate them just as much as you do. But a big reason why we have people who make super niche videos that help you learn how to fix something on your car or those regular videos that you watch every week is because the creators are able to get compensated for their work. Are you really saying that utility and entertainment isn’t worth 30 seconds of ads and it’s better to not support them at all?

Part of the reason we’re in this enshittification era of social media is because of the expectation of social media to be free. We need to learn from our past mistakes. It’s not sustainable.

DuckDuckGo. Google if DDG isn't cutting it.

Generally agree, but this document is also from January 2021. Apple brought E2EE to almost all aspects of iCloud in December 2022 including iCloud Backups. It's opt-in, so theoretically, if you were having a conversation with a contact who didn't opt-in to E2EE but backed up their iMessages to iCloud, the government could still access your messages via that contact even if you opted-in to E2EE, but still.

Thank you! Sure, I’ll do my best lol.

While essentially killing off 3rd party apps is disappointing, I could’ve understood and been willing to switch to the official app and maybe even pay monthly for no ads and more features.

What made me leave is how poorly Huffman and the company treated the developers, moderators, and users.

For developers:

• Reddit went back on their word about no API cost changes this year
• Lied about making the API cost reasonable
• Gave developers very little time to adjust
• Treated developers and their apps as freeloaders instead of as a source of growth for Reddit when they didn’t even have an app yet
• Blatantly slandered Apollo’s developer

For moderators:

• Reddit treated moderators as if their input didn’t matter despite providing free labor for the site
• Framed them as being power hungry for disagreeing and protesting Reddit’s decisions

For users:

• Reddit treated users as if their input didn’t matter despite Reddit being a user-generated content site
• Treated their contributions to the site as Reddit’s property, not their own
• Essentially said users are just a bunch of whiney babies who are powerless, have no willpower, and will visit the site no matter what we do

Also, even besides Huffman showing his true colors as being a total asshole, it just makes Reddit’s poor leadership SO evident. How do you become such a popular site with free content and free moderators, and still can’t make money? How do you manage to turn a great Reddit third-party app into a buggy mess of an official app? Why are you constantly prioritizing what you think users want instead of just listening to them? And now you essentially just told all of us: “fuck you, I own you and your content, and I am entitled to to make money off of you.”

No, I’m not saying you or MacRumors are wrong. I’m saying Spez is being Spez, lying directly to the public’s faces while doing exactly what he says he’s not doing.

This is literally a copy and paste from another article with Huffman posted TODAY:

While the company does “respect the community’s right to protest” and pledges that it won’t force communities to reopen, Reddit also suggests there’s no need for that.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-interview-protests-blackout

Yeah it’s funny how I always got warned about how “the internet is forever” when it comes to being care about what you post on social media, which isn’t bad advice and is kinda true, but also really kinda not true. So many things I’ve wanted to find on the internet that I experienced like 5-15 years ago are just gone without a trace.

Yeah sorry, I keep having this issue where I start typing in a thread and then magically the thread changes to a different one, even though I still saw comments from the thread I intended to post in. I noticed as soon as I posted.

Your logic is 100% correct. I just started gaming again recently for the first time since childhood, and my natural reaction is still to say I beat the game because that’s what I used to say back then, but it does feel weird. Especially because, like you said, games are setup to be more of an experience now. I’m so used to games being near impossible to finish or the last battle to be extremely difficult since that’s what I grew up on. But that last battle/task seems a lot more manageable nowadays, so it almost feels like I don’t deserve to say I beat the game lol.

Yet I often tend to think way too long on even smaller digital expenses, like an app for €2, but I will happily pay €10 for a coffee and a croissant at a train station like it is nothing.

I think about this a lot too. I spend $10 on a drink I'll never remember having months from now, but spend lots of time questioning whether it's worth it pay for apps I use daily.

I regularly pay for a VPN, cloud storage, and music/video streaming. I find myself most willing to pay extra for no ads on streaming services I use a lot, even if I only pay for a month here or there (YouTube, Peacock, Hulu). I used to pay for Proton (VPN, Email, Cloud Storage, and Calendar) before iCloud implemented E2EE. Sometimes I'll pay for news.

I find a lot of the apps I use I wouldn't benefit from paying for extra features for, and if I would benefit from them, I wouldn't have enough free time to use it to justify paying for it. A lot of my needs are covered by the free and/or stock apps.

AI is starting to feel like another financial bubble to me.