At the time, there was a lot of popular sentiment, on reddit itself, that the internet should be free and it should allowed to continue so long as it was legal.
Nah that is most likely very true. If they go public that would also be quite obvious as they have to release all their financials.
A lot of giant organizations are not/were not making money for a long time, including Snapchat, Twitter, Uber, etc.
i haven’t found any info for syncing accounts across instances (to prevent this loss) or if this is even possible at low level
Not possibly or very difficult from what I heard.
what happens with comments and pictures once a federated instance goes down? say, if i selfhost and i crash without backups, does my content and posts disappear?
Everything is stored in a database, so crashes are no different than any other site. It comes back and its accessible again.
what kind of capacity planning would I need to selfhost say, a decade worth of reddit browsing? assuming I only care about my posts and what I save, would they be accessible for me?
You mean like host an instance for just your own account? The smallest instance for $5 a month should be enough.
How the fuck can you paywall LIKES?
Oh btw the whole "gold" feature for example, absolutely useless. They charged $5 a more for a lie. The feature would tell you who liked you, not mentioned is that if someone likes you they'll be in the top of your list of people to scroll so its absolutely useless lol.
This is why I’m so blatant on actually moving to federated services. These do not need to be run by megacorps since costs can be distributed through instances.
Tinder advertised a ton globally with the message of "Single, Not Sorry". Does Tinder know if being single is actually good for everyone? Is this a message you'd blatantly tell all your friends without knowing them? If there was a study saying this was harmful, would they care enough, cut back and tell people to use the app less/more considerably? No because like I said, if it interferes with profits, these kind of considerations will never be talked about.
Few other things. We released a feature where you pay $3 to see if someone responded to you, and the other user would know. Clearly you're fucking yourself over doing that but they don't care. We released a feature where you can see if someone is online, because it increases engagement.
You'd never see shit like this in any organization or community run by people.
There is nothing explicitly sinister there. I liked everyone there, everyone was really nice. In a sense that highlights the issue that this is an inherent problem with corporations. No one was explicitly trying to do harm, in fact people were trying to do good in terms of bringing saftey for women, advertising for racial/trans equality, etc. The problem I see is everyone is so focused on growing the platform and profits, that no one is thinking about what theyre doing wrong.
There are no explicit algorithmic tricks either, and there doesnt even need to be. The matching algorithm is actually dead on simple. But because the core metrics are profits and user engagement, even the corp running random experiments will end up naturally turning the platform more and more into a cash cow, with no regard or care as to what its doing to people.
What I mean is there doesn't need to be a room full of people thinking about how to exploit peoples psychology to use the app more, just the fact that the core goal of the whole organization is to make money, any actions it takes will naturally lead to that. If there's ever a compromise between humane values or profits, it will be profits.
Tinder. It was and probably still is, a great place to work. One day at the height of BLM, someone posted an article how another one of Match's companies was removing ethnicity filters in their app to keep out racists. I said wait, who are we to making these kind of societal decisions? Why are we removing users personal decisions because we don't like it? It turned out into a huge argument but it got me really thinking. Were not philosophers, sociologists, etc. Its a couple people from a very certain background making decisions that affect millions of people globally. Who are we to decide?
Then I thought about the fact that these kind of decisions were not even made for ethical reasons (which I don't even trust them to get correct), but were fueled entirely by money. Every single decision was entirely based on how much money it earns Tinder, with zero regard as to how it affects its users, in a very personal and important aspect of their lives. All the KPIs were money, internal projects called "Project Whale", zero discussions on relationships, experiments to get users addicted to the app as possible, etc.
If there ever was a decision that would help people but would compromise profits, profits will win, and if there ever is a concern that a decision is hurting users, it wont ever enter into the discussion.
Reddit, facebook, Tinder, Twitter, etc is all the same in this regard. Corporate tech is a terrible future.
I like this about the reddit UI where you can click anywhere on the vertical bar to collapse them. Collapse should be easier than the tiny button imo