Yeah that’s totally galling. Shrinkflation for online services.

You know some shiny-suited corporate asshole got a huge bonus for coming up with that though.

Shit no! You know what you can’t change if/when they inevitably leak your data? Your fucking hand.

I mean. Sorta.

When you use some service you have some expectation that they’ll treat you fairly and predictably. Sure their Eula let’s them do whatever the fuck they want legally but that doesn’t change the fact that if they opt take certain actions (like arbitrary taking people’s usernames) then they risk losing user trust.

If the admin just took your username one day would you just quietly accept it? What if they edited or deleted your comments? Would you just shrug and say “well it’s their site they can do what they want” and just walk away?

Look what happened when Spez got caught editing posts on Reddit, for example. Massive user outcry.

Dude’s allowed to be annoyed about it.

I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.

Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.

They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.

Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.

My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.

This form of protest is valid and I support it.

Firefox is awesome now. It was great, then it lost out a bit to chrome, but it’s back to being awesome. If anyone’s reading this and isn’t using Firefox, please switch!

And importantly, their import mechanisms are great. A typical user can switch with basically no effort. Next time they ask you for help, switch your parents too, and your siblings, and that neighbour who keeps referring to the internet as “the google”. Set them up with Firefox and ublock origin and they’ll be set.

Wow. I don't mind paying for stuff if it's good. But seriously $5/month seems pretty expensive, and you only get 300 searches. $25 for unlimited searches, which seems like an insane amount of money.

I use Firefox over Brave simply because I have much more trust that Mozilla won’t suddenly turn into dicks.

(Also because Firefox is awesome now, and because competition in the browser world is a good thing, but it’s mainly the probably-not-being-dicks thing)

I can only imagine we’re going to see it replaced with something altogether more exploitative.

The admin that posted that has been working on blockchain/crypto/NFT stuff for the last year… I can only imagine they have some awful plan relating to that.

we're seen as evil because we're helping DRM exist and we're ensuring people make money out of games

No, you’re seen as evil because your software is an inefficient and invasive security risk that makes games significantly worse, and compromises/punishes your paying customers in the quest for more money.

I no longer pirate games (thanks to Steam), but I’ll never buy one with Denuvo.

Fuck allllll the way off.

Wow, not only did they try to do an astroturfing job on their own site, but they also fucked it up. I don't know why I'm shocked, they fucked everything else up lately.

On a related but different subject, did you know that even before the blackouts Reddit were paying people to make random low effort posts in various subreddits?

Have a look at this user's posts prior to the blackouts: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/

And read this (which was posted after he got accused of being a karma farming bot), note the admin comment confirming it: https://old.reddit.com/user/WelshCai/comments/130zbw6/i_am_a_community_builder_for_reddit/

Community builders are "vetted and paid by Reddit for their time": https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4418715794324-What-is-the-Community-Builders-Program-

Despite claiming they work with mods, the mods of those subreddits don't seem to be aware of this, as evidenced by this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leeds/comments/138gi40/reddit_community_builders_please_read_details/

Who knows how many people they pay to try to influence the site?

So they ignored Boost, but meanwhile they actually blocked Apollo before the deadline: https://mastodon.social/@christianselig/110635856662952525

Which really does support the theory that Spez is just being stubborn.

It’s fairly reasonable to assume advertisers are leaving. This isn’t one of those controversies that has two sides, it’s just Reddit being shitty because they want to make more money, and mods, users and disabled people on the other side being annoyed with Reddit.

There’s very little for advertisers to lose by redirecting their ad budget elsewhere, but if they stick around there’s a risk that annoyance spills over to them.

It also doesn’t take much for marketing teams to make a change - they do it all the time to stay on the right side of controversies and avoid things they don’t want to be associated with.