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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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That is the thing though. When you trivialize it to "they're doing it because they can", you aren't approaching with good faith and are starting from an antagonistic stance. Which is a good recipe to guarnatee things get even shittier because if you are going to get the exact same response for being "kind of shitty" and "punting a baby off a roof" then...
Like, the reddit API bullshit is something that basically everyone here is aware of. And it was definitely shitty. But also understand that everyone runs adblockers, advertisements/sponsorships in general are increasingly "weird", and people were actually spending money to pay for third party apps that blocked ads while using reddit servers/content. It is massively shitty (and part of why I "left") but it also was a very "real" problem without a good solution.
I think the way reddit made it clear they did not care about users and just cared about having "the content" means they can go fuck themselves. But... how the fuck does it make sense for them to provide a service that other people charge for?
Your take on Reddit's API changes genuinely suck since it was a complete 180 in policy with no middle ground and tons of disrespect from Reddit's higher-ups.
That being said, I agree with your principles. Companies and people make decisions based on the cards they're dealt with. Oftentimes, those cards are dealt by other people with their own deck of cards. Somewhere down this chain, you can find a company or person who purposefully dealt a bad hand to the next guy in the chain out of greed, spite, or even incompetence. You really can't get mad over the last guy in the chain because they can't change the decision made by someone 10 layers before them.
Oh trust me, you can. It doesn't do any good but you can. You can cultivate a deep and burning, passionate hatred. It gives you superpowers. I gained the superhuman ability to cope and seethe while housing rocky road
I firmly believe that in five or ten years (... if the world hasn't ended by then) we'll have a "leak" that will reveal the behind the scenes negotiations between reddit and the app makers. Because even as it was occurring there was a decent amount of back and forth until it became "Reddit are trying to kill me, your best friend, by charging me rates that I can't afford". And then all hell broke lose which led to all the "Well, fuck it, reddit doesn't need you either" level responses.
Which gets back to: When you approach "enshittification" from an actively antagonistic stance? There is zero benefit in providing a middle ground. If you are "literally hitler" whether you are reasonable or not and being reasonable doesn't even properly stem the bleeding? Why bother.
Its why the various youtube messes have actually gone "okay". Yes, you have people like Rossman who make it their brand to basically say "Fuck this company and I am going to actively attack them and encourage you to drop them while relying on them for income". But the vast majority of "voices" had to take a more nuanced stance because... they need youtube to exist to make money. Which means the vast majority of Voices tended to be "Okay, this is bullshit and youtube is kind of a hellscape with ads so I am not going to blame you for running an ad blocker... even though I literally need you to watch those ads so I can make rent. Also, I get a LOT more money from youtube premium viewers. Just saying..."
And that is why... Youtube Premium has a LOT of supporters (myself included). Because we watch a lot of youtube and can "justify" it. And youtube music is probably the second best service based on almost any metrics/feature requirements.
Maybe I am just old and grumpy. But I remember all the various webcomics and (what we would now call) blog sites that had variants of "Please for the love of god whitelist us in your adblocker. We need those ads to pay for server expenses. We go out of our way to curate good ads and if you see a bad one, let us know and we'll remove it from the rotation within 24 hours. But please, let us keep drawing stupid shit" that were almost universally responded to with "too hard. Adblocker on