I suspected it was too evil for Reddit. Killing off secret santa was lame, but threatening to sue your users is a different level. Plus, there would be no reason to threaten a lawsuit when they could just ban the account.
So, gaming this out, I don't think the person that ran SaveVideo was evil either. Assuming good faith, the most likely explanation that comes to mind is that someone fabricated a cease and desist notice.
Either that, or Reddit lost track of one of their lawyers on payroll, who got a bit too bored. (As strange as it sounds, this actually happens; I once received a C&D from Magic Leap merely for mirroring their Magic Leap developer manual to my personal site. No idea how they even found the link.)
Wow they killed SecretSanta??!
Never participated, but thats a bad business decision for sure...
Unless they come out with their own concept of course...
As a former digg refugee, I'm sorry to see the same dysfunction strike reddit.
Things seemed to start rolling downhill after they fired the AmA hostess (I don't remember her name); it seemed like a lot of the decisions since then have been more "corporate" and less "community". (As in, if it doesn't promise high returns in an easily measurable metric and time frame, it gets the axe).
Yeah, if I'm looking for a time waster, I'll start on Reddit, just by habit. Then I'll go to TikTok when I see the first one on Reddit. It doesn't take very long anymore these days.
I remember people on Reddit making fun of facebook saying everything on there was on Reddit 3 days ago. The tables have turned since then.
You're using reddit wrong if you only use "popular". There are thousands of subreddits and it's easy curate a subset of ones that fit you rather than whatever tiktok does (and then probably ships off to China for cataloging)
Agreed! I downloaded the app, saw 10 minutes of teenage girls dancing, and deleted it. My friend talked me into giving it another chance. After a few hours, it was consistently delivering videos that were exactly my taste. I've never had such a good discovery experience.
afaict it uses engagement to determine what you like, so
- watching the video completely
- liking
- commenting
- sharing
increase your account's affinity to the tags associated with that video. If you like multiple videos with the same tag, you'll start seeing many videos with that tag. So, I think searching for a few tags about topics you're interested in and liking a few videos will prime the algorithm enough to make suggestions start being relevant.
This can also be annoying - I must have liked a few vids about dnd, and now i get more dnd suggestions than I want.
I love when people complain that Tik Tok is just teenagers dancing. That tells me you haven’t really spent time on the app or the algorithm has determined that dancing teens keeps you engaged.
Their video player has got to be the worst for a company of their size/resources.
I almost always go to the comments to find a mirror instead of trying to load a 30s clip. I've got brand new hardware and a gig connection...It shouldn't take >30s to load a <30s clip!
The updated video player is unintuitive and difficult to use on mobile, and essentially unusable on a tablet in portrait mode.
It is so strange to see a company making their mobile experience WORSE these days.
Looking at the complaints on the site about the video player UI and the lack of response from Reddit to said complaints, it is speculated that some consultant convinced some Reddit executive that they needed to emulate the TikTok UI to grow their user base. This ignores the fact that TikTok is video-centric, while Reddit is comment-centric, and breaking comment functionality to emulate someone else's video functionality makes no sense at all.
I thought this was just me and my settings! I have a bunch of accessibility things set and thought somehow that was fucking with it. It’s like a dance of flipping just to push that x. Crappy design.
Even worse, many Reddit videos are screen recordings of platforms that disallow saving videos, like Tik Tok, Instagram or Facebook. This whole issue is Kafkaesque.
When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat. They tend to vertically integrate and keep anyone from using their data.
Exactly, Twitter went through the same process, locking down its API, introducing usage quotas and getting increasingly more hostile towards Twitter clients that circumvented the ad-serving side of it.
I remember it was a shitshow at the time, probably around 2012, I worked for a company that was leveraging Twitter's API for a product and we got quite nervous about the hostility.
To extend, the company would not be sustainable without the ads, so not being hostile towards it could literally put them out of business. There's a balance but ultimately they eschew ads at the start to achieve more growth, knowing they can recoup their losses at a later date. It is a bait and switch in that sense, which is in turn a very legitimate thing to be pissed about. But any company hosting content for free can only sustain with ads or some kind of charging (users, businesses). We've seen experiments with more sustainable models (Mastadon? Another thatt charged users directly, forget the name already) but I don't think any winners have emerged yet. I'm optimistic there's a better future but I don't know what it looks like.
> To extend, the company would not be sustainable without the ads
This is accurate. And Twitter runs a lucrative data sharing business. In Q1 they made $137 million from data licensing. So there are two reasons they've locked down access.
Yeah. Facebook locking down their stuff earlier than that and then again when they had the perfect excuse because of HN and the media’s relentless attacking of FB for Cambridge Analytica, were both huge blows to any remaining optimism I had. The latter is even worse because Facebook limited their data and APIs which made the app worse...by doing exactly what people on HN and similar places perportedly wanted. There’s no winning.
The Twitter fiasco was indeed a shit show. I remember being on HN once a week or so during that time but was on daily for a few weeks during that time.
I believe the alternative Twitter app for $50/year came out around that time as well before failing.
> Facebook locking down their stuff earlier than that and then again when they had the perfect excuse because of HN and the media’s relentless attacking of FB for Cambridge Analytica
Facebook started locking their stuff way before Cambridge Analytica - I'd say by 5-8 years. Even then, Fb acted like an open platform for games and quizzes, but locked down its social-graph while siphoning Google's (via one-way Messenger-GTalk/XMPP interop). That marked a turning point for Google's attitude towards openness as well, since open vs. closed systems exhibit something similar to the paradox of tolerance: closed systems will take advantage of open systems and smother them out of existence.
I did say FB was locking things down before. Things weren’t fully locked down for me personally until Cambridge Analytica. That’s when the graph became completely useless. At least it had a bit of utility before.
For Google. That may have been a turning point. But Google’s actions by and large are their own. No one does their repeated bad behavior because of a few incidents with FB or other big players. Even more, I have no doubt Google would’ve ended up close enough to where they are now even without FBM’s interoperability shenanigans.
On the other hand, FB had no reason to lock things down the way they did after Cambridge as it was already pretty much locked down. That was a perfect excuse to do something in their interest while garnering praise from everyone.
It’s easy to blame FB for everything. They are the most blamed tech company for years now. Not as nice when society is complicit with one of their lockdown times though.
"When a company grows large enough, the APIs and user-generated tools that propelled its growth get treated like a threat."
Pretty much everything that helps a company grow is seen like a threat when "it helped us yesterday, but now can help others". Just like the competition hypocrisy: small companies love competition and fully support it, then they grow and do whatever they can to destroy it.
We'll see how much longer the API lasts. reddit knows that if they kill that, they may trigger a digg-style user migration. It's also why they keep the "old" version of the site around.
I’ve been saying for years that the degradation and eventual removal of their API is inevitable. Their app keeps getting worse, their business keeps relying on the ads that make it worse, and every complaint thread is free advertising for other apps.
a lot of people (and I mean a LOT) hate the "new" reddit website and will look elsewhere if they limit the API (or do away with it entirely) for clients like slide, RIF, apollo, Sync, etc
I have pretty much stopped visiting reddit except for questions regarding iOS programming. Their website and mobile site is complete crap. Apollo is a decent iOS app alternative and if they kill the API, it's over for them.
Reddit Inc. has to give those investors their money back in someway.
The users, community and tools always get screwed in the process and they have never mattered to them as soon as the investors come in. Has happened on every social media company.
Very unsurprising of this to happen. It won't be the last.
just by sticking a watermark on their videos, making some unique authorship tools, and make their content relatively easy to mirror, tiktok has taken a massive chunk of video thoughtshare with comparatively little effort.
I really don't understand reddit adding features that are just enough to kill off competition la video hosting, but not enough to be usable... OK maybe I'm starting to understand now.
There are decent (free and paid) third-party clients that make Reddit a much nicer experience on mobile. On Android I was a big fan of Sync for Reddit, and on iOS I've been using Apollo.
Every once in a while I'll open up the official client and I'm just blown away at how bad it is. It's constantly trying to get me to watch livestreams of people doing random things unrelated to my interests. Why would I ever want to watch a livestream on reddit?
It is honestly impressive how bad Reddit's mobile app, and main websites are. Its just so horrendous and so slow and so confusing, and so bad. If you go to a post, its hard to see comments, and if you click in white space it redirects you somewhere almost at random. It takes forever to load anything.
When a million apps are better in every way and the old site is better, its confusing what they are doing over at reddit.
Apollo is attractive, but being closed source and giving all permissions to a social media account makes me a little nervous. It seems relatively time-tested, but even if the developer is benevolent it increases attack surface area.
Seconding the recommendation for Apollo. It's definitely a shock to get used to at first, but it's so customizable that it reminds me a lot of RES if there was a mobile app version of it.
+1 for Sync for Reddit. An amazing app. I've tried to use the official client for compatibility reasons, but the difference in UX is just night and day.
Unless you click on a Reddit link while inside of old.reddit.com; it will then take you to that page, but show you the default 'modern' theme. Same content, just 10x slower.
I wrote a Greasemonkey script for force old reddit and rewrite links to point to old reddit except in some edge cases, since gallery links don't work on old reddit at all (they 404).
old.reddit.com + reddit enhancement suite is a fair superior experience. If they kill that off they are toast and I think they know it. It will be a repeat of the Digg fiasco.
Once upon a time Reddit was a link aggregator. You would post a link and the author would get credit. You could save the link without Reddit.
But Reddit is moving towards first party content. Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support but many communities disallow external content. Requiring a reupload or a screenshot. This not only removes the link to the actual creator but is also a nightmare for usability, especially for disabled people where a photo may be less accessible than raw text with their browser styling.
Unfortunately this is just what the web has come to. Not only just the web. I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.
I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page? Or is it just that people don't know where to find the links? This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app. Of course the screenshot shortcut is always consistent.
It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.
Reddit has become about rapid-fire content consumption without leaving the site. Following a link and actually reading an article for 5-10 minutes isn’t as exciting as rapidly consuming a few videos, a few screenshots, and a few self posts along with the top comments for the most interesting ones.
Even on HN it’s common to read comments where the author obviously hasn’t bothered to read the linked article. Many people are more interested in the social and discussion aspects of these sites than being redirected somewhere to read an article for several minutes straight.
Imho, part of this is an industry failure to provide an interoperable way to share documents that meets the needs of the modern web - a way to copy documents by-value instead of by-reference that runs in the browser, and can be composed into an existing website.
We made sharing images dead simple. You can copy and paste them around. Download them and upload them. You can copy the hyperlink and the target site can either display it by ref or it can copy the content and display it inline. On the modern web the copy/paste works amazing for images.
Text is similar - I mean, you can't load a .txt file into most comment boxes, but you can trivially copy and paste text.
Rich documents with inline images? Nope. If you copy and paste rich text data or HTML, the images are probably going to go away - Reddit's rich text editor fails on this. Raw markdown or HTML? Getting the images in is tricky, you generally need a parallel way to upload them and need to update all their paths separately. Copying and pasting rich text is always a roll of the dice about what's going to get mangled... for Reddit? It's images that get mangled.
That's why dumb screenshots have won. Because documents don't support dumb copy/paste usefully. I can't copy/paste a Tweet but I can screenshot it.
To add to your point: on Mobile, taking a Screenshot is also
1. Really easy
2. Uniform across Apps
I've noticed that college students don't really know how to use e-mail anymore, and they will send screenshots of e-mails instead of forwarding them. Kind of makes sense, though, when only some Apps have "forward" and each one has a different way to do it.
Why fuck around with that (or copy/paste, which is a nightmare on Mobile) when you can Screenshot.
Embedding gifs is getting harder as well. I wish I could spit in the cereal of whomever at Google decided videos need to show up in image search. Even when you search for a gif you saw fifteen years ago you have to sort through a dozen webm or gifv or mp4 versions of it before finding one you can actually embed with an [img] tag.
Yeah, my wife scrolls /r/all, expands posts (some of them text posts), and closes them, possibly clicking into the comments to discuss.
If, at any point, she accidentally follows a link, it really pisses her off
It's nice to have videos, images, and short articles in a familiar layout
I know I'm much more likely to click a recipe link if it's a self-post, because recipes on non-reddit websites always seem to be gated behind multiple auto playing videos and the author's entire life story
It’s mind boggling - the primary feature of Reddit being a link aggregator - and clicking on a link breaks everything. Literally, Reddit will say “I’ve broken, please reload me” if you try to “go back” from the link you just clicked on.
All problems that are instantly solved by opening links(even within the same site) in separate tabs. One of the many reasons I never use Reddit on the phone.
Too bad websites are even making this inconsistent and broken, by using cursed webdesign to a degree that the browser can't figure out if an element is interactive before the user clicks on it.
I've never been able to make myself use Reddit, so maybe this is an obvious point, but that sounds like a fairly apocalyptic "whole point" for the exercise of an attention span. Which, I realize, is the goal, but is probably not great for the people thus enmeshed, no?
I doubt it has anything to do with attention span. I have a very short attention span, and the only reason I tend to prefer consistent interfaces is because many websites still don't support dark mode. I'd say the attention span is actually the reason I do not use the reddit redesign, because it just wastes my time at every corner and I hate UIs doing that. If your website doesn't let me consistently middle-click links it's going on my mental blocklist.
My guess is that people prefer having everything on one site because it makes the whole UX consistent. If we're being honest apps, websites etc. are wildly different to navigate and use, and when you're used to one site's behaviour and quirks it makes visiting other sites a bit more cumbersome. Especially if you're not using adblockers.
I went down that (thought) rabbit hole and it was a bit sad to realize the cat and mouse game at play, where content creators on sites (such as recipe sites) are optimizing for search results, and intentionally burying the searched for content in a way that the search engine has difficulty optimizing for, so promote their own ads (more scroll -> more ads). Then once people begin obtaining the info they want from said sites, it becomes (presumably) even more difficult for a search engine to automatically filter it out -- or even decide if it should.
I don't know how to solve the problem at scale, but would love a site that preferentially de-ranks content based on the ads it has. That is, rather than me using an ad blocker, I'd like the search engine to do that for me. That probably exists, but then it also has to be as good as Google which isn't easy. I default to duck duck go, but often (say, 10%) I can't find something I am looking for there, go to Google, and its a top 3 result. Tricky set of problems here but I'm optimistic five years from now I may be happier with my search engine of choice.
I recently came across the search engine Marginalia [1], which ranks web sites based on the ratio of text to HTML tags (more text, better score), with a very heavy penalization for JavaScript.
The most active parts of reddit's userbase showed up after facebook became unpopular and after the original reddit userbase was successfully driven off during the monetization period (2012-2015) following accepting large amounts of capital from third party corps.
Reddit's use-case now is mostly just a facebook that isn't facebook. This is exemplified by the addition of user profiles and the ability to "post" to your own user profile as well as customized profile avatars.
I agree with your description of reddit as it is. But the reason for this is that reddit stopped being reddit almost a decade ago. Sharing links is unpopular because Reddit is now Facebook.
That makes me really sad, not because due to this case specifically, but the web in general.
Practically any web nowadays try to be Facebook-like, giving fast to consume content to users, and having an unlimited scroll of pictures and autoplaying videos all over the place.
Reddit even copy some shady or dark patterns like forcing you to login in your computer or forcing to install the app in the phone just to see some post somebody sent to you. At least this can be solved just entering "old.reddit.com", but we don't know when this possibility would disappear.
I understand their website is theirs, and they rule how the things works there, but that kind or opacity makes me to never use those websites and recommend people to do that.
>> It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.
While that may be a common user preference, it's also a strategy at at large companies. Shit, even a small brick and mortar store doesn't want you to leave the store because you may find what you want elsewhere. The web as it started out is the opposite of what any company wants.
>>>It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.
I would love to see any semblance of evidence that this is true.
Reddit shoves a lot of things down your throat and forces users to do things without providing alternatives.
It's super aggressive in making you use their app (the mobile site is purposely broken), aggressive about making you create an account, and doesn't allow alternatives for sharing images in some instances.
And while we're at it (poor feature, not necessarily a preference), its search is awful.
I highly doubt these are things "Reddit's user base prefer."
The one saving grace reddit has right now are its niche communities where comments are still thoughtful and the content is still interesting. Reddit does everything it can to get in the way of that.
There's another reply to GP that illustrates this. "I prefer first-party content so I can effortlessly scroll"; It's a real shame, people like that turned Reddit into a politically manipulated 9gag where they waste hours scrolling through mind-numbing content. Self-posts? No. Links? No. Just funny images, or videos with obnoxious music stolen from TikTok, with a side of ads please.
I dread the moment when they remove old.reddit.com, but I guess it'll finally make me leave because there's absolutely 0 chance I will be using the new interface.
Also, this whole SaveVideo issue is laughable, most of the content on Reddit is already stolen from other sources.
And let's not even start on their inline video player. It frustrates me that they look to shut down and stop bots and services like this, because their video play is such complete crap.
I just hate how it is not consistent with the clicking. (Same problem everywhere). Click a thumbnail of image to expand full size. Click a thumbnail of image ling to go to site. I only wanted to expand the thumbnail and not go to the site. If after I expand the thumbnail and find it interesting, then I will want a link.
On HN, if post is not a link, clicking on title brings to comments. If post is a link, clicking on title brings to link. Can't we just have clicking on title brings to comments and a separate icon for going to external website?
When was it not about that? The content that got the most attention was always things that were easy to consume. Images with a small amount of text slapped on top were dominant when I frequented Reddit 10 years ago. The only way you could escape that was a well moderated subreddit that enforced quality content.
> It’s because the most active parts of Reddit’s user base prefer it this way.
Do they have a choice or any say at all? Reddit is known as a leading employer of a vast collection of dark patterns to manipulate and pressure and restrict what a user can or cannot do.
Is it not reddit's fault? Some sites such as imgur expand inline much like "native" videos. Is there any reason that twitter posts don't expand in the same way? Is it Reddit's fault, Twitters? I think it is pretty clear that it isn't the user's fault.
> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere
Spam.
The target site may be spammy: lots of adverts, popup/unders, taboola "chumboxes" etc.
Or, if a site can make money from inbound link traffic, there's an incentive for its owners to spam links in subreddits to drive traffic to themselves.
> This is especially bad on apps where you need to know how to find the share option separately on each app
Definitely another problem, walled gardens that you can't link into as well as out of.
It absolutely sticks. Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for. The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress.
The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
> Moderators work for free, so you get what you pay for.
Moderating a subreddit is not a job. Moderators are regular users from the community who are picked to have a say in how the community is regulated.
> The automod feature on r/web_design for instance blocks any post that has "Wordpress" in it. The reason given is that WP theme providers spam the subreddit. But it also kills legitimate discussion of Wordpress.
Good to see that you're agreeing with me, unless you believe that mods fixing a problem without resorting to a walled garden is somehow a counterexample.
> The mods don't care. Their convenience comes first.
You're needlessly overgeneralizing. Using an automated filter that's prone to false positives is not a problem at all, or refutes the point I made. In fact, it supports the fact that forcing a walled garden is needed or desirable.
Once upon a time, neat/surprising/weird/amazing sites were part of the currency of the internet. "Check out this link" was a welcome message. Sites full of links to neat stuff were really popular. You tried to fill your chat app with friends who consistently linked you to neat stuff.
Now, no more. "Check out this link" is not an enticing offer, it's assigning homework. I don't know if it's because neat stuff is no longer rare and we've collectively had our fill, or because everything got so co-opted and corrupted that we go in to every new site with one wary eye watching for the dark patterns. But one way or the other, people don't share links. They share memes instead, which ask far less of us, and are much harder to monetize.
The decline of welcome "Check out this link" messages is at least partly because everyone is getting the same links from the same sources at any given moment.
If you found it on a surface-level subreddit, a major Instagram account, a major news site, or a big podcast chances are decent that the content in question has already been seen by a fair number of people, and to them, seeing it again has no additional value.
I see this play out hundreds of times in real life where the conversations start with "Did you see...? and "I was listening to a podcast about..."
Part of it is that most links, even when the content is good, come with some amount of pain in accessing it. Cookie banners, in-line ads re-flowing the content, pop-over ads, "subscribe to my mailing list" popups, donation begging popups, long-winded articles needlessly stuffed full of SEO keywords, auto playing videos, and most websites so full of all this stuff they jank out my phone and make it heat up.
I remember the web as fondly as you do. I spent hours on StumbleUpon just finding cool websites. But nowadays even if the content is just as good (it rarely is), the websites are just so bad.
Maybe its also because good content is more frustrating to actually get to. Compared to a decade ago there's a lot more friction on a first visit to a site. All the marketing pop-ups, paywalls and surveillance consent boxes are a hassle and page load times seemed to have gotten worse. Maybe we've been gradually conditioned to avoid those frustrations unless its really worth it.
Subreddit moderators prefer first-party content instead of links, because all people do is fill subreddits with affiliate links or blogspam. Mods don't want to handle this, so they discourage external links completely.
In a lot of cases, a link will be posted, but the majority of the article text will be included in a message. So users can have a discussion without even visiting the page.
I mod a programming subreddit. 99% of our submissions are screenshots. It drives me mad. I tried to enforce pastebin / text posts only a few years ago and the community was firmly against it, so I let it go.
We even have volunteer transcribers (thank you /r/TranscribersOfReddit) who transcribe the majority of posts. The modern internet truly is a weird place.
I used to mod what is now a huge subreddit, and when I started it I made strict no memes/images/blogspam. It was lovely for a few years but then when it became big enough to become a default Reddit basically said you can't do that anymore. Now I see it commonly referred to as one of the most toxic subreddits on the site...
I wonder what the aggregate cost of text-only screenshots is. Not so much the lack of accessibility and discoverability (which are probably the biggest costs), but the energy wasted from the extra CPU cycles, the extra storage space, the increased load on networks.
Come to think of it, it's probably minuscule compared to cryptocurrencies...
In the case of Reddit, first-party content is better in almost every way.
If I can scroll through content effortlessly, then it's easy. If I have to open each link in a new browser view/tab, ugh. Embedded images on Reddit load instantly, while loading an entire Imgur page takes forever.
Not to mention that linked content is often ephemeral, whereas first-party hosting ensures it always stays viewable together with the thread.
So across usability, performance, and link rot, first-party content is a win in every way.
And if you're interested in the content's source/attribution, it's often in the comments. Even when (often) the OP doesn't post it or doesn't even have it (because they got it elsewhere), someone else does.
And now that Reddit is attempting to capture every user they can, quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet. Not to mention the website constantly berates you to use the app.
I'd sooner suffer link rot.
I also don't appreciate the progression into carefully crafted doomscrolling. Content isn't so valuable that I'd sacrifice quality for quantity.
> quality of discourse has fallen straight into the toilet.
...?
Reddit's always been a place for memes. It's never been HN.
On the other hand, there are plenty of subreddits where quality of discourse is amazing. It's really up to you, so I don't know what you're complaining about.
> carefully crafted doomscrolling
That's an awfully perjorative way to say infinite scroll. But again, the quality is there in subreddits if you want it. Your choice. I think it's great they're able to cater to different types of users looking for different things.
In the case of person-to-person: links decay but screenshots do not. A screenshot is a record that I know doesn't have any trackers and won't one day disappear. It's the information that I want to send and nothing more.
The persistence of a screenshot (or any image) depends entirely on the hosting platform, though. How many image hosts have gone down over the years, leaving niche forums with broken image links in the middle of otherwise very useful posts?
Is there any guarantee that even reddit will keep around image posts uploaded to its own servers, forever?
Person-to-person means not hosted by anyone. Sending a png screenshot over sms or imessage or signal, etc. means the image is bytes on a personal device. How the other person manages their data is their own business.
Fair point, I could have sworn your comment didn't say person-to-person when I first replied. I'll give you that point.
Personally, I still prefer links as I find them easier to sort and categorize in my bookmark library, or indeed take screenshots of the linked content if I deem it worth of it.
As it is with images, I don't really bother to sort them so I have them scattered all over. In the folder where my SMS app saves images, in the folder where whatsapp saves images, in the case of discord I rarely explicitly download and save the images outside the app, etc. Opening a link I receive opens the link in one program, my default browser, from where I can manage the link as I see fit. All these different apps have their own built in image viewers, save locations, or layers between the message and the content/image, making it much more of a hassle to manage that image as compared to a plain link.
Maybe this can be generational: people of my generation and up used to think that MD5 hash distinguish two pieces of information, kids these days can’t tell between texts and a screenshot of said text. Which isn’t fundamentally an issue I guess, maybe the whole concept of document files and file-systems are just quirks that are slowly moving towards obsolescence.
Maybe a coincidence, but my completely non-technical sister called me this week to pitch her ‘app idea’ (feature) “screenshots should have the link embedded in it”. And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android).
And ultimately that’s sad, because it should 1. Be possible to implement and 2. Should already have been implemented by the platforms.
Last week I struggled to send an Austin powers gif via signal.
Because searching via images on google & ddg forced me to a website (wouldn’t just give me the result) and then those websites did everything possible to NOT give me a gif.
I’m disappointed that this has become the reality of the internet, and I think many people on this site are in the same boat.
> And I had to explain that it’s probably not possible, except if ios or Android implemented it directly (more so iOS, I’m not up familiar with android).
PDFs with embedded bitmaps can actually do that (and are currently supported widely, but PDFs are a terrible format with way too much attack surface). Same for any other composite html+whatever formats like epub. Standardizing a non-book format name and a spec that mandates nothing more than bare xhtml & image support with no JS or CSS interpreters would probably be quite sufficient.
> duckduckgo
Duckduckgo caches/proxies the images on its desktop site, which is useful when it gives results for sites that are since dead. Often at a lower resolution, but that's what reverse image searching is for.
I created a bare-bones Firefox extension that does this but for copied text. It just appends the website URL and title to the end of the copied selection and uses Alt+Shift+C to trigger the extension.
I like saving stuff as plain text, and when stumbling upon an old quote or code snippet that I've saved it increases the chance that there is some context as to where it came from.
Here's a link to the addon, maybe someone here finds it useful.
The problem that Reddit's native vid/img upload solved was how every Reddit thread older than a year was a 404 link to imgur, a Youtube video since made private, etc.
It's essential to avoid link rot. Not long ago, old Reddit content was almost always dead.
Shouldn’t the creators of the original content have a say though? If someone made their youtube video private that probably means they don’t want people watching it anymore.
it's likely the video creator used youtube so they could create an audience much more easily. Or didn't have the technical know-how to host a video themselves. Or they didn't expect making their youtube video private in the future would be an issue, or any number of reasons.
It's much harder to imagine someone wanting to upload videos to youtube, and then considering the possibility that something might change in the future that makes them want to make their videos private, and then deciding they are going to host the video on their own instead. Unless it's a tech person or someone making extremely shady videos, this scenario is much more unlikely than the opposite
> But Reddit is moving towards first party content.
I just want to point out the extent to which marketing doublespeak has infected the world.
A person from the 1990s might think that this means redditors making new content. But in this case "moving towards first party content" means "copying the interesting part from your site, to my site, and making it so it can't be copied again".
I think its because browsers started hiding links, and apps started replacing websites. You have a generation of people that grew up without links, and many many more late adopters that didn't willingly use the internet until the 2010s.
I had to help a friend send me a link to something a few days ago, he had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't know how to copy/paste on his iPhone, and didn't realize you could get the link from safari.
...in a bit of an ironic twist, the reason he needed to send me a link was because the restaurant we were at had a QR code menu, and my phone doesn't have a QR reader.
I have a CAT s61, it comes with it's own camera app. I used to be able to do it with the camera app on previous phones that I broke, which is why I got a rugged phone. (also the IR camera and laser pointer.) I would just install one, but at a glance, all of the QR code apps seem like scams, and I haven't cared enough to do any research.
good-old `ZXing` ( https://github.com/zxing/zxing ) does the job for me nicely, supports non-QR codes, and contains practically zero BS.
The only downside IMO is the forcefully-narrowed scan window, which can cause complications with extremely large QR codes, as the pixels get a little blurry and decoding gets harder for the software.
Edit: you can find it on Fdroid or probably on the project site/page. It's not getting updates, but why would my QR scanner need those, anyways..... also Google doesn't want it to be published anymore, iirc due to it using relatively ancient APIs.
TikTok's meteoric rise has been because it's so easy to share the content you like, including exporting content.
You can easily download a video and re-host it on another platform. You can send a link to a friend and they don't need to install the app to view it.
TikTok is proving that walled gardens are counterproductive and that if you want your app to go viral, it should be easy to export and share across any platform.
Are they though? Are they making enough money to be profitable? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, reddit. They all used to be just as easy to share outside the walled garden at one point.
It's a constant push/pull of vitality vs profit it seems.
Have you recently tried to share a link with someone?
There's so much tracking shit appended onto the end of the link that by the time they get it and whatever url parsing algorithm their device uses maims it, the url is no longer in tact and trying to click it brings you to a broken page.
I make a concerted effort to remove all of that before sending, but Google et. al. are working very hard to make that harder and harder by continuing to make changes to obscure the link. I already have to copy it, and re-paste it into the mobile address bar just to see what the entire link looks like. The vast majority of users won't even know what parts of the url to trim, nor will they care enough to do it.
It's not the tracking info that breaks it, it's that when the receiving device tries to parse the long url and figure out what part is a link and what part is just text, winds up with a broken link.
I'm not able to find an immediate example but usually happens when sharing links via a format that doesn't explicitly format them as links, such as SMS
As a rule I don't install any add-ons or extensions. Because a trusted extension today can become malicious tomorrow as has happened so many times.
>There are extensions and addons that remove the tracking data for you, you might want to give them a try.
Yes, but we are talking about why the average person just sends a screenshot. Insanely long links filled with tracking data that may or may not result in a clickable link on whatever app-browser-OS they are using is the reason. There is always a workaround for people that A: understand the problem, and B: care enough to find and use the workaround. But since the average person is not likely to pick this topic to use their limited time, energy and knowledge on, they go with the easy consistent option.
Whenever there is a problem and the two options are 1. have all individuals change their behavior or 2. fix the system so the better option is the easiest, the answer is always 2.
It wouldn't just benefit users if UTM params were automatically stripped off links when they were shared, it would also benefit the marketers/analysts, since they'd have less crappy data.
Interesting point, I am making a reddit clone in China. My MVP would like the very first verion of Reddit: only link sharing, no self-post or comment.
Fundamentally Reddit is not a link aggregator but a content aggregator. Link is one way to reach those contents. It is simple and scalable. But content consumers would always prefer first party content, ceteris paribus. One link away is one MORE step away. Faster solution always wins.
> Not only has the site added native photo and video upload support
And it fucking sucks. It consistently fails to load, or stalls even at low quality. Even replaying a video often fails despite it already being in memory. And it degrades picture and video quality much more than other sharing sites. And all that without the convenient playback controls you can usually find. I don't understand how people put up with it
> is it just that people don't know where to find the links?
Speaking for my wife, she mostly browse and share stuff on her phone. It's much quicker and consistent to take a screenshot and share it than trying to discover/remember in each app what is the best way to produce a link to paste somewhere else (how many clicks to get a share link in the amazon app? how about the YT app? FB app, can you even do it?)
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button. I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere. Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page?
For the sender, especially on mobile, it takes less time to take and share a screenshot, then it takes to get the URL, copy it and paste it into a message.
For the receiver, it takes less time to receive and view a screenshot then it takes to recieve and open a link. Web page rendering times suck, so the people have found a solution to work around that.
I much prefer to receive a screenshot of what someone wants me to see, than a link. I can view picture messages much more quickly than I can view links, and I often wont click a link because I don't want to sit there waiting for a page to finish rendering.
It's either slow because it's full of adverts, or it's slow because it's stalling waiting for an advert/tracker to load that's blocked by the pihole.
For years I've been wishing for a kind of screenshot that included more than just pixel values. Like if it made a little pdf of the region you chose that rendered without fuss or external resources. There's no technical reason we couldn't have the convenience of screenshots, but also copyable text, clickable links etc.
Links sharing is also less predictable. What will the shared message look like? Will it contain useful context like the page title or will it be a giant unreadable URL? Will there be a link preview? Depends on the messaging platform (SMS and Signal no, iMessage and Slack yes). Will it even take the user to the same page? Will there be a paywall or a redirect to an infinite scroll?
A screenshot is truly WYSIWYG and is the most reliable way to know that they will see the exact same thing that you see.
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.
I've noticed this as well. I wonder if this is a desire path indicating the need for a universal "share" button on mobile? Or maybe it's a consequence of people becoming used to sharing real-life experiences by taking and sending a picture?
> I wonder why sharing of links is so unpopular, especially outside of the tech-sphere
I see multiple reasons:
- Everyone knows how to take a screenshot, but very few people know what a URL is, why it matters and why you should use it to share content
- The URL is purposefully hidden by the app to make sure other platforms can't access the content. You must use the official app, with your account, to access content.
I have stopped using Reddit for this reason. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure the communities forcing Reddit video/images are mods paid by Reddit. I used to get traffic to some of my old sites from Reddit, but then I kept finding my vids & content uploaded to Reddit and I wasn’t getting credit and lost almost all the traffic to my sites. Those sites were run exclusively from ad revenue from people visiting my content. Reddit stole my content and I had to shut down my sites because they no longer made enough money to pay for domain and hosting.
I’ll point out, I wasn’t making much from my sites. $50 was a good month.
Right-click being disabled in apps is one reason. Right-clicking being kinda hard to do on mobile is another. Also, oftentimes now a link directly copied from Google links to an Amp page on Google dotcom. And even web pages try to disable right clicking.
I hate it. Most apps don’t need to be apps. An actual regular website is so great. And if you can, just a static page is the best as far as accessibility and usability and linkability…
Also, the link will usually contain a bunch of tracking info which at best, makes it an annoyingly long mess, and at worst, makes it unclickable in whatever app the other person is using because it miss detects where the end of the link is.
> I get people sending me things that I might like as a screenshot. Great, nice jacket, if only I could click that "buy" button.
People like the psychic pleasure of browsing and collecting and making recommendations and having taste. They like buying too, but that takes place on Amazon, where that daily gratification is only $10. It’s not important that you buy the jacket.
It's about 4 seconds faster for me to look at a screenshot to understand a friends "LOL!" than click a link, have browser load page, render page, render ADS and then I scroll down to find the picture of the dog riding a skateboard.
> Is it that "link previews" are generally worse than a screenshot of the page?
Something like 90% of sites don't have proper meta tags that can be scraped for previews, and the ones that do you get blocked by Cloudflare if you try.
I share screenshots and raw videos, images with friends to avoid sending any traffic to Reddit, Twitter, etc.
I’ve written a little service I run locally that allows me to “one tap” download videos right to my camera roll on my iPhone to make getting the raw videos as painless as possible.
Reddit turning to shit is the reason why I’m commenting here today.
I got on Reddit in 2009 when it reminded me of YC/HN. text only, cooler heads prevail, it’s not completely overrun by 12 year olds and Russian trolls yet.
Yeah, I think app creators (including the big guys) have obfuscated url sharing so much that it’s less usable than just doing a screenshot and uploading that.
Tracking. Most people just assume that if you share a real link to a product, fourteen different quasi-legal shady third-party advertising profile aggregators will have that saved and loaded into your AdWords rotation and ready for Alexa to Bing you with within seconds.
I get that it's more complicated than that, and that E2E chat mitigates (but doesn't eliminate) advertising tracking risk, but a link is just so easy to track, and tracking is so ingrained into our digital experience, that it's just nice to share something and break the tracking while you're at it
Most people? Most people don’t know what AdWords is. Most people don’t think much of tracking if at all outside of when they are prompted about it. Or the one or two minor anecdotes they have of (sometimes coincidentally) seeing the same sort of ad on Amazon or Facebook.
?? I think you're absolutely wrong here. My boomer parents who can't setup a Smart TV and played blu-rays in standard definition for years absolutely know that Google and Amazon are tracking everything they do and have reached out to me on several occasions about reducing how much data Big Tech gets from them.
I think you're totally out of touch with the general populace if you think average users don't keenly feel the spying gaze of big tech.
My 92 year old grandfather moved to iOS two years ago, at age 90, to reduce how much Google got from him. Dude doesn't know a damn thing about computers, but he knows Google is spying.
I think it's valid to suggest that people don't trade links to reduce spying.
Here's my anecdote to counter your anecdote. When I try to explain stuff like this to my family members, they barely humor me. Their eyes glaze over. They think I'm crazy. My sister-in-law works in marketing so she's kind of aware of it but has made zero changes to her behavior. Other friends tell me they get more benefit than cost and accept it.
> This poll was conducted between April 16-April 19, 2021 among a sample of 1992 Registered Voters
80% on an online positive-assertive survey ran on population that small it's a completely bogus statistic.
heck I can't even fathom how people would cite this, the methodological note is three lines, doesn't tell how the participants were selected, say votes were weighted but doesn't say the weights nor the weighted parameters; they have like 72 pages of demographics, probably a couple person for each, and say the error margin is 2%
Answering yes on a poll about privacy legislation doesn’t mean that people think about it in their day to day life or make behavior changes. Look no further than annual reports of companies like Facebook and Twitter for proof of their success.
I checked the second link. Almost no one is actually independent. I am on mobile and don’t feel like doing the citation for this. But that’s one issue immediately with that one. Almost everyone votes one way for senators and president.
The phrasing of the question and prompting of it plays a huge part too. Including Trump’s name at all is huge. It makes it an immediate reactionary political question. Swap Trump for something on the left and you’ll likely get different results. Even without Trump. The prompting is worded the way it is. It’s so political it’s going to skew anything and everything.
For the first one. Your description just sounds reasonable. Why would you say no to general regulation against big tech? Besides not wanting to be a hypocrite if you’re on the right (which clearly shows a ton of them are fine being hypocrites with that 80% figure).
Change regulation to oil companies or manufacturing and suddenly those centrists and people on the right won’t be polling the same way.
Which again means this is more political than any actual knowledge of the situation. People don’t know or understand online privacy by and large. It’s such an obvious take. To argue against it with credible sources that don’t actually relate much to the topic shows how far out your thinking is. There will never be agreement because you’re not even thinking about this in the same way.
From the way you brought up the sources below which are more politically driven than anything else. As if numbers without context can show people care about tracking...I am going to wager you or other relatives at some point or another have said stuff to your relatives who are aware of big tech privacy stuff. Likely some political bias involved too. At that point they don’t know anything about any of it like you yourself admit. They’re just regurgitating what you or another relative have said [a bunch of times].
Pretty simple explanation, they let the clearly copyright infringing content in to their walled-garden under safe harbour protections, but allowing download is contributory infringement with distribution and there's no hiding from that as they can clearly easily prevent it (as they have).
Super hypocritical? Sure. Understandable? Also a yes.
Maybe, depends on the amount of effort they want to put into it. Right now, if I recall, they're just dumping the uploaded content into an S3 bucket and serving it back out (reddit-uploaded-media.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com).
They are only similar in a technical sense. The legal distinction is important because when someone views a video, there retain more of their legal rights - they can stop hosting it, for one, and people can't watch it.
When you download the video, you are asserting more control over it than the legal system believes you should have.
They're similar in an actual sense. The pretty little UI in front of us is a facade for the reality of events. Having a legal framework that rests atop the foundations of a delusion is absolutely something we should chafe at, and not just accept.
Our society needs to come to terms with the reality that you can not just "show" someone a piece of information such that they no longer have it. We can't "move" information such that one party now has it and the other does not. And we should not provide legitimacy nor legal protections to the idea that some byzantian DRM encryption scheme can "hide the message" from the person who is receiving the message.
All of these gymnastics just to fit old square ideas into new round internet holes. It chafes me and it should chafe you that we have wasted all this effort on delusions.
All of our legal decisions are facades for the reality of existence. Money is the same, especially debt - why should we not chafe at the entire concept of debt?
These models are convenient fictions so we can rally around shared ideas. One of those shared ideas is that people can own information - it's not technically true, but we as a society have decided it as useful.
You may enter into an agreement with someone, and you may break it, and you may be subject to penalties. But we don't allow chains to be placed on someone in service of a contract. We don't have debtors prisons. We see the chance to have this now with computers.
No big deal right? All seems fine and dandy if it's just internet videos and DRM. Low stakes, right? What's it gonna look like with loan sharks and pacemakers? I assume you have a line, but where is it and why is it there?
Since the redesign Reddit has been putting a huge amount of effort into keeping people on their platform. They've went out of their way to make it impossible to send a link directly to a video without external tools like the savevideo bot, any link to click will load the entire thread and they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests and merge them client-side so you can't just open dev tools to get the video link as the video link has no audio.
> they even go out of their way to seperate audio and video requests
Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, many video sites do this (YT being the biggest). It allows you to change the video source on the fly (changing the bitrate for example) without effecting the audio playback so preventing any audio glitches during the swap. People are a lot more forgiving of video artifacts then they are of audio glitches. It also allows you to have a lower bitrate copy of the original video for mobile playback without having duplicate copies of the audio.
So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video (Tools like youtube-dl will happily merge the video and audio into a single container after downloading both pieces of the puzzle).
Although, I don't use reddit anymore, I gave it up a few years ago, so maybe they have gone completely evil and the video/video track splitting is simply to annoy hotlinkers (I know they have been throwing more and more dark patterns in to their redesign, the redesign was basically the kick I needed to quit that habbit). Just giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one for now as there are legit reasons to do it.
EDIT: 1) My ref to youtube-dl is about how it will merge the 2 after giving it a single YT URL. No idea if it works on reddit, but as it works on a number of sites I wouldn't be surprised if it also works on reddit (its been years since I've been on reddit in any meaningful way, so never had the urge to try).
2) ffmpeg and avconv will merge pretty much any audio track with any video track you throw at it into a single container without the need re-encode the video. In fact iirc I think those are the tools youtube-dl will use to merge the tracks after downloading content from YT.
3) as for annoying hotlinkers, there are (imo) better ways to annoy hotlinkers then spliting the audio/video tracks. Personally my fav way is to replace the video being served to the client with a copy of Never Gonna Give You Up serverside after the hotlinking is detected - but serving the orig video when its not hotlinked, but I'm a dick :-P (a more sane and polite way would be to simpy not serve any video at all, saves wasting bandwidth).
> So maybe thats why they do it and not some evil plan to annoy you from saving the video
I guess it's a bit of both. A technically better solution that also helps your marketing is simply a win-win-situation for them.
But it's kinda ironic that the upgraded the user experience with better playback while similarly degrading it by disallowing hotlinking. Typical sidegrade.
Curiosity made me check, looks like they are just using DASH, its pretty common to break apart audio and video when using DASH so I personally still don't see any explicit malice there.
On the video I used I saw 5 video encodes (96, 240, 360, 480, and 720 - it could be that the orig video was 720 so there is no point encoding a 1080 video). So yeah, it saves then have atleast 4 dupicates of the audio if each video was in its own container also containing audio when you can mix it client side.
I also put the reddit URL into youtube-dl which downloaded the two pieces and murged them just fine.
So for me personally I'm still going to give them the benefit of the doubt on that one as its a pretty common way to do streaming video these days. But I see your point that it came with an added benefit to them that it makes it more difficult to hotlink to the video, but its still easy enough to download and rehost elsewhere.
> Since the redesign Reddit has been putting a huge amount of effort into keeping people on their platform.
On something, anyway. Whenever Reddit tricks me into opting into the redesign I'm disoriented by just how much of reddit I cannot access. Following comment chains is a chore, getting all comments to a post impossible, instead every page is a duplicate of the front page with random barely related posts getting shoved in my face I already didn't care about the last three times reddit wanted me to.
Is the only metric developers are judged by the number of (intentional or even just accidental) top-post clicks per user?
You'd think that after having been the recipient of the Digg exodus when that site tried the same thing, but I guess memories are short and that was 10 years ago already.
It's been a while since Reddit was a content aggregation site. Right now, Reddit is an ad delivery and data collection platform built around a content aggregation core, the way a mouse trap is built around a cheese cube.
Yes, there are a lot of ads w/o adblockers. You can disable them by buying premium, but you'll have a hard time blocking them in the app. Also, adblock adaption is actually not that high compared to what tech circles suggest, more in the 5-20% range [0].
Lastly, Reddit is basically the origin of organic marketing. You can't block these ads ...
I use reddit with an ad blocker on the web and I use a 3rd party client on my phone. Where am I seeing ads if I only subscribe to the subs that I want?
Reddit is 9gag now. Nothing is ever original content unless it's from a non-default subreddit. I remember when top comments were at least a paragraph. Now I see 1 word comments everywhere. It's basically becoming a forum agregator much like YouTube is now just a video hosting service. The communities are wastes of time and not worth devoting effort into. Just use them to get info you need and nothing else.
> Users saving videos is a commercial problem for the owners of those videos.
99.9% of videos uploaded on Reddit are not original content, they have been lifted from other platforms, very often by downloading them on said platforms then reuploading them on Reddit.
The hypocrisy displayed by some tech companies is revolting.
It's really smart, the location changes randomly so you can't use automated tools to crop it out. Newer clients add an end credit display too, maybe 1-2 seconds that shows the original creator's username.
I'll take a watermark over having to jump through hoops to get stuff downloaded any day.
Ability to directly link to said media would be better, but this is the world we live in...
Youtube-dl works just fine on Reddit, but for all the non-technical users this will work fine to prevent them from spreading the content and sharing a link instead.
It’s certainly not “impossible”. They could put some side channel communication in their player that YouTube-dl doesn’t implement. I can think of a bunch of ways you could do it.
It's always a game of cat and mouse, but generally, someone good enough can always quickly figure it out, and it becomes costly for reddit to redeploy new ways to prevent it.
The goal of reddit being to limit it, although I'm not sure they can really make accurate enough stats to know how many people download videos with YDL.
The save vid bot is much more visible, which is the reason they reacted I guess.
It's a terrible site these days, wouldn't be a bad thing for it to disappear anyway, and new company taking it's place. The size and speed of webpage is horrendous for something as simple as link sharing that can be done in a few kilobytes.
I really don’t miss Reddit, I’ve deleted the accounts I had there and am much better off for it. I’m not sure when the real tipping point was but that platform has really lost its way.
Reddit is very enthusiastic about handing out site wide bans these days. If you say the wrong thing on the wrong topic you can be permanent banned, whereas before you would just be downvoted or argued with.
Same for subreddits being banned. But only when it comes to speech it seems, not picture or video. So, for example, we have the odd case of "truelesbians" subreddit being banned for being trans-exclusive, but "lesbians" subreddit which is also trans-exclusive, but dedicated to pornographic imagery, is allowed to stay.
A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right.
Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker.
This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
> A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think,
Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
> It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.
I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
>Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.
No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator.
On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator.
This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators.
It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that.
>More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).
This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format.
*I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.
You seriously going to gloss over the fact that Aimee Challenor is transgender? Like that has no relevance to their "questionable conduct"? Is this just the massive chilling effect of cancel culture?
Why would I mention it? It’s not relevant, the issue is about inappropriate censorship and incompetent moderation. What difference does it make if they’re transgender or not? There’s no aspect of Challenor’s personal identity that makes a difference to the fact Reddit’s hiring and moderation practices are apparently utterly substandard.
I’m not interested in fanning what’s rapidly spiralling into the inevitable flamewar that this topic creates, but I will say that there’s never anything to be practically gained from making a fuss over other people’s (and particularly stranger’s) personal identities whatever they may be. I’m not saying that for the sake of a “chilling effect”, I’m saying it because in most cases personal identity genuinely isn’t relevant and only serves to distract from the issues at hand as has clearly happened here. Why would I include an irrelevant fact about Challenor’s identity that instantly derails any thread it comes up in?
You are right, being a moderator is a lot of pain once the subs grow beyond a certain point. Furthermore as a moderator you are almost forced into using new reddit as well as the tools are not all there in old. Painful experience.
The "truelesbians" subreddit wanted a place where biological females could discuss lesbian issues with biological females. This was not allowed by Reddit.
The "lesbians" subreddit is a place where exclusively biological females are portrayed in sexually stimulating activity with each other (mostly for male subscribers to ejaculate to). This is allowed by Reddit.
Both of these involve discrimination against so-called 'male lesbians'. The difference seems to be that the male gaze is of more importance to Reddit than female speech.
Homosexuality is, by its very definition, same-sex attraction, not same-gender attraction.
Aside from Reddit's double standard when it comes to subreddit bans, the fact that some people wanting to discuss their attraction to a particular sex is considered 'transphobic', is the wider problem here. It's not right that actual lesbians are getting harangued and then banned for not being interested in 'girldick' or whatever nonsense.
> Nice dog whistle.
Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
Why are you bringing your personal vendettas onto another platform with a new account? I’m genuinely confused and I’m unsure what you hope to achieve in contributing in this manner. I’m sympathetic that you’re passionate about this subject but I don’t understand the benefit to the rest of the HN community.
> Not really, just biological reality. People can't actually change their sex (only their gender expression), so 'male lesbian' is a statement of self-contradiction.
This is where you are mistaken. You can change your sex with a sex reassignment surgery. While gender is identity based, sex is defined via the phenotypes (physical characteristics). If you make the alterations necessary to match the physical characteristics of a certain sex, you become that sex for all intents and purposes.
You may have different chromosomes than what is standard for that sex but by no means does that mean you aren't that sex. There are plenty of women who are born female, grow up female, present female, and identify as female who find out down the line that they have a Y chromosome. The same goes the other way with men who discover they have 2 X chromosomes.
I mean hell while not the exact same circumstance, something like 1 in 2500 males are discovered to have a karyotype of 47,XXY with the actual predicted prevalence (due to low rates of identification) being closer to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 500. The previously mentioned circumstances are of course less common than this (closer to 1 in 20000 or 1 in 80000) but in the context of the global population that is still a significant number.
My point being that sex is a lot fuzzier than most people realise and the only viable way of defining it is via phenotypes, which can of course be changed with medications and surgery. Defining by karyotype causes the entire definition system to break down because while chromosomes are of course important in determining your sex, they ultimately don't define it and there are so many other biological factors that play into you ending up whatever sex you are. And this isn't a "feel good" inclusive answer, this is just the scientific/medical reality because karyotypic/genetic sex just isn't a useful definition compared to phentotypic/physical sex.
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TLDR: It's not biological reality. Biological reality is that your sex is defined by your physical characteristics and while your chromosomes play a part in deciding which characteristics you develop, they don't provide a clean or consistent determination. If you sufficiently adapt your physical characteristics, for all intents and purposes both medically and otherwise, you are the sex your characteristics match.
"You become that sex for all intents and purposes"... i'd argue that you are perceived as that sex for all intents and purposes.
Having SRS you still lack the ability to carry a baby in terms of impregnation for MTF, which most biological women are automatically capable of unless they have some extraneous condition/syndrome/etc.
In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
> unless they have some extraneous condition/syndrome/etc.
How is this any different than SRS? You can call it a condition or whatever but it results in the exact same state.
> In addition I often wonder how the cocktail of female hormones including estrogen (versus mostly testosterone in biological males) play a part in neurological development and influence as a prepubescent.
It does play a significant part however it plays an even bigger part in the actual operation of the brain itself. So people who transition find themselves much closer neurologically to the sex with which they are hormonally equivalent to than their original sex.
Now take in the consideration of trans individuals who attempt to transition during or before puberty. Is there a difference now? The lasting effects (of which none actually disqualify you from the sex you transition to) are lesser so it should be even harder to differentiate now.
The point being, a MTF individual with SRS and HRT is of the female sex and vice versa for FTM individuals. They may be their sex with additional caveats or medical considerations but they are that sex. If we want to be scientific about it there is fundamentally no difference between a transitioned individual and any number of individuals of that sex who have some disorder or circumstance that gives them the identical physical characteristics.
> You can change your sex with a sex reassignment surgery.
You can surgically change genitals and pump hormones, the gametes don't change, nor chromosomes.
> you are the sex your characteristics match.
You're conflating gender and sex. Even for medical reasons alone, biological sex is an important consideration. We can show our appearance any way we like.
You aren't necessarily though which is the point. If you medication to regulate your hormones in the way a female's hormones would be regulated, your body largely acts as if it was female. The significant majority of sex related differences from a medical perspective are almost entirely hormone driven.
he exception to this rule are genetic disorders and sex-organ specific health considerations. The genetic disorders are karyotype specific but they aren't sex specific. Likewise sex-organ related issues still apply if you don't have the same chromosomal match-up.
A 46,XX male doesn't have a Y chromosome but they still have all the standard male biology. They have some additional health considerations (mainly infertility) but otherwise they are biologically male and are subject to near identical medical concerns as an average male.
Similarly a 46,XY female has a Y chromosome but they have otherwise physically normal female biology. The caveats being often needing hormone supplements and infertility.
Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
My point being: In every case where the karyotype does not match the phenotypes, the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
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Now with that out of the way:
Is a man without their sexual organs still a man? Well how do you tell?
- By the chromosomes? Well obviously that doesn't work given the previously mentioned differences between karyotype and phenotype.
- By their sexual organs? Well in this case that doesn't work because they don't have any and/or had them removed.
- By the way they look? There are women who look like men and vice versa and this is quite subjective so it's not an entirely scientific way of making the separation.
- By their hormones? Well this is probably the best one since hormones regulate nearly all expression in the body and with hormone levels typical for a male, the body largely acts male and vice versa. But suppose we don't want to use this. What do we use?
Now do the same for a woman without their sexual organs.
In the end, if you remove the organs the only definitive differentiator between sexes is hormone levels. If you don't want to use hormone levels and you can't use sexual organs, there isn't any other differentiator that cleanly separates between male and female. Every other differentiator has N or 2^N caveats.
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So with respect to trans individuals undergoing sex reassignment surgery, if the differentiating sexual organs are removed/converted (a penis is biologically just an enlarged clitoris) and the hormones are completely replaced to levels equivalent of the sex they are transitioning to, what is left to differentiate them? Doubly so if they decide to transition before or during puberty.
Once again, biology is a lot fuzzier than people seem to realise. There is a lot of grey space and fluidity in sex just like with everything else in biology. The grey space is smaller in humans and mammals in general than in other species but it is well established in the scientific and medical community that sex is fuzzy and can change given the right circumstances.
Physicians don't suddenly stop needing know one's biological sex by virtue of reassignment surgery - if anything it's even more important. The mere virtue of having to constantly inject hormones to alter expression to a limited degree evidences what sex is in play. Some medication may react differently owing to sex, not just ratio of testosterone and estrogen.
You're reducing sex to something it isn't. I'm not sure to what end, because it helps no one.
> Is a man without their sexual organs still a man?
Yep.
> Well how do you tell?
A rudimentary exam could do it.
> the driving characteristics that determines sex in the medical community is the phenotypes/physical expression.
In terms of cursory glances only. In terms of actual examination, no. Absolutely not.
> The significant majority of sex related differences from a medical perspective are almost entirely hormone driven.
Entirely wrong.
> Hell there are even a statistically significant number of people who don't have the same karyotype in all their cells. See 46,XY/45,X0 mosaicism and 46,XX/46,XY mosaicism.
These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
> what is left to differentiate them
What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Stop conflating sex and gender. Seriously, the fact that biological sex is a thing does not jeopardize gender expression and flexibility.
But what does this exam actually entail? I am looking for an actual specific class of test or set of tests.
> Entirely wrong.
Please elaborate. What mechanism drives those characteristics if not hormones?
> These aberrations exist but are incredibly uncommon. I think I'd read of a single woman thus far with XY chromosomes.
A woman having a 46,XY karyotype has odds of about 1 in 100000 which would put the likely number of women with a 46,XY karyotype at almost 40k people across the globe. It's undoubtedly rare but that is still a lot of people. While these women have lower hormone levels without treatment, they have otherwise completely healthy female bodies which results in most women never identifying that they have the condition in the first place. Unless a genetic test is performed, it just appears as if these women have hypogonadism which can occur for any number of other reasons.
The opposite (a man with a 46,XX karyotype) is even more common with about 1 in 20000 odds which sits the population at close to 200k people. But once again, because it results in relatively little to no health issues or abnormalities beyond low hormone levels and infertility (hypogonadism), it is often either left untreated or is treated without identifying the cause.
Similarly, a male with a 47,XXY karyotype has a very similar if not almost identical experience as a 46,XX male. With odds of 1-2 in 1000, that's 4 to 8 million people who don't fit that standard sex definition.
> What do you think is driving the need for constant hormone replacement?
Remember this is talking about an individual without their sex organs. If they are removed or are non-functional, the individual almost always needs hormone replacement because without those organs to produce sex-related hormones (which effectively serve as the control switch/regulatory system), significant chunks of the endocrine system stop regulating themselves properly and the individual ends up with hormone imbalances.
In the case of SRS, the hormone producing sex organs (either testes or ovaries) as well as anything else that isn't needed any more are removed and the remaining organs are reshaped to match the form of their counterpart for the other sex. At that point all sex-hormone production is artificial/manual just as it would be for an individual of that sex who had those organs removed due to health issues (or that have those organs non-functional).
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Trust me I've looked for any medical or biological evidence that human sex characteristics excluding the primary reproductive organs (testes, prostate, penis, ovaries, fallopian tubes, vagina) are driven by anything other than hormones. I can't find any evidence to support that fact. The prevailing opinion of the medical community seems to support the fact that sex is driven by hormones and organ presence rather than any other mechanism. If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
This is common rhetoric with people who have nothing to say.
You're arguing in bad faith. Stop wasting my time.
> sex is driven
SEX IS NOT DRIVEN. Gender expression is driven. Sex is: gametes, chromosomes.
> If you can find a medical source that supports otherwise I would love to read it and this is a serious request because if by chance I'm wrong there's no benefit in me staying that way.
I encourage you to put the bare minimum effort to educate yourself on what sex is, and you'll come to this conclusion.
Male lesbian? I unfortunately understand what you’re saying. It’s also very obvious that using such a silly phrase is intentional. The bias and possible bigotry is showing.
You've been rightfully needled for trying to start a culture flame war, but to heap on here, I want to specifically call out your virtue signaling claim that reddit cares more about the male gaze than female speech (speech you yourself care so much about that you misgender intentionally):
Reddit removed all pornographic subreddits from /r/all. If you go to /r/all now, all porn subreddits are gone. You can still see the very rare NSFW post from a non-NSFW community, but for all intents and purposes all pornography has been removed from all public channels.
There's a significant difference between removing a subreddits from /r/all and banning it from the site. Besides, you can go to /r/randomnsfw and pretty much only see pornographic subreddits. Or search for them on the subreddits search. They've not gone anywhere, and are still well catered to by the administration.
To show that the male gaze is MORE important than female speech, you have to show that there's actually a tradeoff happening. AWS hosting porn doesn't degrade their ability to also host important feminist content.
Why does the existence of porn subs degrade the value of feminist subs?
You're being disingenuous. It's a massive move that will dramatically lower the traffic to the subreddits, and was also done to the far-right supremacist and abuse subreddits before they were finally closed. It's the largest "anti-male-gaze" move possible without total sitewide banning.
But you set yourself a trap with the "well catered to by the administration" because you've defined this situation such that "catered to" is the equivalent of "done literally everything but gone nuclear with a full ban".
So now I can easily point to the continued existence of outright neo-nazism, white supremacy, civil war idealism, violent right-wing rhetoric, terrorism support, and other radical examples of "normal conservative dialogue" on reddit and easily claim that neo-nazis terrorists are "well catered to by the administration" by virtue of the fact that they exist at all and are not banned.
If you search for a quarantined subreddit (i.e. one that is actually a step away from being banned) on the subreddit search, it won't show in the results.
If you search for a NSFW subreddit, it will show in the results. Porn subreddits are easily discoverable, and not even close to being banned.
The distinction is that, for example, a 'world foods' (aka 'ethnic'!) aisle in a supermarket categorises stuff efficiently that the local ethnic minority group (predominantly) may be interested in, while more widely consumed (or consumed by local ethnic majority group) foods are distributed elsewhere categorised more according to food type; compared to saying 'you are {local ethnic minority}ian so you are not allowed to purchase {local ethnic majority} foods', which would be discrimination.
Whether it applies to the example above though is I think more debatable.
r/lesbians is a porn subreddit with content restricted to female same sex porn content. This is just categorisation.
r/truelesbians was supposed to a subreddit for lesbians to aggregate and discuss stuff. What ended up happening was while it was still a lesbian focused subreddit, it became a breeding ground for anti-trans/TERF content/discussions/rhetoric and the moderation of the sub enforced those beliefs. This is what makes r/truelesbians discriminatory instead of just being categorisation. It takes a step from "don't post content that doesn't belong here" to "don't post content that doesn't belong here AND don't post at all here if you match some arbitrary biological definition we don't like or if you support those people".
You also have r/actuallesbians which branched off from r/truelesbians when they got TERFy. r/actuallesbians is inclusive of all people who identify as female but have the same original focus of providing a platform to discuss and aggregate female same sex/lesbian content/discussions. This once again is categorisation and not discrimination because anyone can post there as long as the posts are on topic. Additionally the content of the sub isn't discriminatory in this case because it's focused on a topic (about same sex female relationships) rather than focused against another (against trans individuals).
So r/lesbians and r/actuallesbians both are categorical while r/truelesbians was discriminatory on top of being categorical because of the exclusionary nature of the subreddit.
Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies.
The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place.
I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.
Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion.
I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
I'll tell you the reason that sometimes stuff gets removed for "minor infractions" is because if you don't people keep doing it and referring to those things that are minor infractions. "why can they do it but not I?". It just causes drama and I think the majority of the moderators are doing it for free on their own time.
/r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.
But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.
Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..
Some youtuber explained the breakdown of Reddit in parts with yahoo banning nsfw from Tumblr and their community suddenly looking for new safe places (hence the big banning on Reddit began at the same time)
IMO Reddit got a lot more hostile in the small communities I were part of when the PC stuff started and many negative subs got banned without warning. Could be selection bias.
But agreed the websites updates are horrible in every single way. I can't think of one new feature that did not make things worse, the only way I can use Reddit is adding the old. Subdomain manually every time
There is also the problem that the formatting syntax is actually slightly different between old.reddit and new reddit, causing a number of broken messages when browsing with the old.reddit.
I absolutely detest that, specially since they have put a giant loginwall in the mobile version of the new reddit which basically forces me to use the old.reddit. These practices are basically what I expect from a shady website, not one of the most popular ones. Reddit is really detestable and I wish we could do something to stop it from acquiring users.
Be careful with browser extensions. The edge old reddit redirect extension was malware and because they autoupdate your safety is dependent on the extension author refusing near-daily offers to sell out.
Every default sub is toxic these days. Toxic in exactly the way tumblr was. Both due to moderators and the people who spend the most time there. I would venture to say any sub with >100k users is also pretty toxic.
Shameless self promotion but I'm working on an extension to help filter out crud. I'm only in day 2 of dev work but I plan to have controls to select which categories you want removed so you never have to see political, angry, or controversial content on reddit (or any other major social media or news site):
I still use multi-reddits but the front page is a shit show of violence and outrage, things like /r/publicfreakout etc and other non-wholesome content, which are generally politically divisive.
The multi reddit allows me to browse only subreddits I like, and it's much much better this way. Digg did not have that.
I already know - it's not quite a thing. It would be possible to delete the account and not the content. Frankly, who cares if it guts a thread. Individuals whose opinions change over time, or desire said privacy should have the opportunity to fully eliminate their presence.
Individual opinions may change over time, but if expressed publicly in a community settings, they become a part of history of that community and its discussions. I think disassociating usernames from comments without purging the comments hits the right balance. Different people and communities may choose otherwise.
On that note, I wish websites, in particular and especially HN, were a bit more up-front about this. Here, the information about moderators' approach to account deletion is somewhat buried - it's at the bottom of FAQ, and important clarifications are another link away. In general, I wish all community-hosting websites put information like this front-and-center during registration, not buried in an inscrutable ToS, so that users could make an informed choice before joining (or at least as much of an informed choice as you can make, if the choice will be binding a decade later).
Sure- how about instead of delete s/username/redact. Soft delete and replace X person's username with redacted<id>. I assume the display costs are then similar.
Deleting them on HN does not delete them from the internet. Sites like Ceddit already save/archive deleted comments from Reddit (and make some old threads readable, especially when the poster of the solution deleted his account for unrelated reasons). If HN would bring on this policy, we would get a "CN" within a day; probably even something more complete than ceddit due to the smaller scale. So, in the end, it would only make HN a worse place.
When Reddit's videos started taking off (more posts using it instead of Gfycat) I got frustrated that I couldn't post the gifs/videos to Discord without requiring a click through to Reddit. I created this simple Docker container that uses Youtube-DL to download an mp4 of the video and upload it to a public Azure blob storage account I created: https://github.com/jesseryoung/vreddit-converter
reddit will be in the dusty pages of history in a few years. they are having their best time right now. but every site run by a bunch of idiots will sadly disappear. for the web, this is truly pure evil.
Reddit needed to break up its big redesign into multiple smaller redesigns that each focused on a smaller number of changes in support of fewer KPIs. They didn’t, and here we are.
Pretty much every Reddit video is an .m4v or .mp4 file that can be downloaded directly from the browser. Open the link in a browser window, then right click and choose 'Save video as'.
I downloaded one right now, with sound, from Now for Reddit app. There's a little three-dot control in the bottom corner that includes an option to save as a file.
> Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post.
Including Archive.org.
> But that’s still way better than HN. At least on reddit you can easily delete posts and accounts.
This is a topic where the interests of the community and the needs of an individual come in conflict, and I don't think there's an universally agreed-on standard practice. By community I explicitly do not mean the platform that's hosting it, though they have interests desires too - just the collection of people reading and posting.
A deleted comment in the middle of a thread is often extremely disruptive, as everything below it in hierarchy (and other locations linking to it) loses crucial context. Being able to distance yourself from your comments (through deleting the account, and thus making the comments show a "deleted user" as author), but not to delete the comments themselves, balances these competing interests properly.
If a user wants to delete the comment user should be allowed to delete the comment or account. Period!
Reasons like community interest are not strong or proper imho.
Also there’s no information about whether HN logs user IPs or any other info. Or info about how many IPs are logged. Whether they log all the IPs or last K IPs. For how long those IPs are stored.
> Then you’ll have to request multiple people who run services that backs up every reddit post.
It's less about scrubbing it from the internet, but scrubbing it from Reddit (or twitter, fb, etc) themselves. Even if some obscure content farm is hosting the comment, it's still a small fraction of visitors.
Yes, but that fraction is exactly the one you want to avoid. Someone who just reads a thread or searches for a solution will move on unhappy. Someone who wants to find dirt on you will dig through these archives and mirrors.
theres a limit for time (6 months?) for these via the website, and via the API theres a limit of 2000 or so latest comments, with no way to get the list of latest comments re-populated from older ones when your comments do get deleted. (They basically have a cassandra db for all the latest stuff, and an read only db for the old stuff. So the live db never gets updated from the old db.)
What this means is that your a lot of old comments and submissions are unable to be deleted.
Do you have a source on this? I'd love to read more.
It has already been running for a while now, and has gone back >4 years. I'm able to go in manually as well and modify / delete old comments. I've checked via incognito that they are actually modified, and then deleted.
I understand the incentive, but it reminds me of https://xkcd.com/979/ - I had it twice in the past that a good reply to a question was lost, because the commenter deleted its comment.
If you know where to look, you could probably sell that account for a small chunk of change. Of course it'd be use for linkspamming purposes, but hey, if you really hate reddit, that'd be a way to watch your old "self" sow seeds of destruction.
They* want to be the only record keepers, and it scares me. Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines" (or all the videos of a banned account), it will be as if it never existed.
*Nearly every major video host deliberately makes saving videos difficult.
>Now when they remove a video for "violating content guidelines"
This is why I'm keeping an offline digital music collection for the first time in over a decade, it's because I'm sick of this kind of behaviour from record labels. Their attitudes of deleting things on a whim as though they never existed pissed me off to the point I don't see streaming services as a viable means of keeping my music any more.
The MPA/RIAA are one of the greatest threats to the internet in general right now. They are constantly pushing for more and more power, making greater and greater demands of ISPs and hosting companies.
Even now that a global pandemic has demonstrated how essential internet access has become to our lives courts seem quite happy to insist that ISPs permanently ban people based on nothing more than unsubstantiated claims of copyright infringement.
They've turned the DMCA into an alternative revenue stream where they can shake down people (both the innocent and the naive) who are forced to hand over settlement money for protection because they most often couldn't afford an attorney for advice let alone afford one for a long battle against media giants in courts that have increasingly become pay to win.
It's frightening how much they've managed to get away with already. I used to worry about how much of our culture they were taking from us, now I worry about them taking things much more fundamental.
Yes, this sort of thing has made me quite the data hoarder. It began as a way to save bandwidth for YouTube videos I wanted to watch repeatedly but after I noticed the number of holes in my "liked videos" list I started saving everything I found worthy. Huge swaths of content are being deleted every day. Not only copyright threats but also people who've decided they don't like their old content anymore and therefore nobody should be able to see it. A goodly chunk of my formative years would be lost to me if I didn't have my archive.
That's good to see, and I hope reddit starts taking action on more of these bots. There's no good way to filter them out and they make the comments section such a chore to read through.
This bot in particular generates thousands of spam comments. Any popular thread with a video will be filled with requests to download that video. It's even worse than the RemindMe bot. People are too lazy to use an external tool, or even click the "save" button on a post.
Imagine if every second comment on Hacker News was a bot correcting your grammar, converting random measurements into metric, or forming poorly-constructed haikus. It's such a nuisance on the site.
To me, the whole point of a download is that I can preserve access. There's not a "download" link on video posts - "save" just bookmarks it to your internal Reddit bookmarks. If the post gets deleted, you still lose access.
Given that context, I think it's pretty neat that new functionality can be introduced to the site via bots. Unlike a browser extension, this automatically works on Firefox, Chrome, IE, and Edge with no extra development time; and it's significantly more discoverable since you'll see the comments.
If you don't like the feature, you can block that bot with a button click and never see that particular bot again. I use Reddit regularly and block maybe one bot a month?
I'm not a big fan of the grammar bots and such, but "save video" and "remind me" seem like genuinely useful features.
You can use RES and ignore the bots, then you'll never see them. If you don't want to use RES, you could always just block them through reddit and get the same effect. It's not hard.
There's hundreds of bots, and thousands of users who trigger them. You can't possibly block everyone typing /u/SaveVideo, or responding "Good bot/Bad bot" in the comments.
Can RES change comment counts? E.g. I see "post title, 1 comment", click to see what someone said but it's a bot. Blocking (ignoring?) the bot on reddit doesn't change the "1 comment" part.
I don't think it does, but I've never considered it that much of an issue to spend 2 seconds clicking the back button if there are no visible comments. It's not like you know who's posting anyway, so it's always a crapshoot whether it's going to be a bot, relevant comment, or just someone posting something like "+1" or "^^This".
These "bots" are spam, pure and simple. By forcing users to visibly name the "service" they want to use in public discussion threads, and the service visibly answering on the same thread, they are basically forcing the users themselves to advertise the service. But it's still spam. You get tens of mentions of the service on each reddit thread.
It would be terribly simple and probably even more userfriendly to just privately message the bot in order to activate its action, and/or much more tech-friendly to have a browser extension to do the same action. I'm quite sure youtube-dl already works with more types of "Reddit videos" than "SaveVideo" ever will, and youtube-dl couldn't care less if Reddit approves of them or not.
But, of course, thanks to the apparent power of advertising, any such service that does NOT spam everyone like "SaveVideo" and the rest is condemned to obscurity.
Net result is tens of annoying SaveVideo (and their even more spammy competitors) messages in every popular reddit thread. How do you call it when someone posts several messages in every single popular thread with the name of their service?
I really don't know why the websites (Twitter, Reddit, etc.) put up with those. Yes, Twitter has Threadunrollers and the like which is basically the same thing. Personally I consider these "business models" to be one of these plagues on the WWW that must be eradicated with prejudice. The other one being websites that just grab files that are otherwise publicly available and put them behind a loginwall/paywall (e.g. Pinterest, Scribd, Manualslib, etc.), then SEO the hell out of it so that the original file becomes much harder to find.
Reddit is literally NOTHING (absolutely nothing, zero zilch nada, is None) without the people that use it and without the content from other website they submit.
Don't get me wrong, reddit is very useful and nice. I absolutely hate Reddit the company but I still find some subs super interesting and useful. Remember, this has nothing to do with Reddit the company it self. Reddit the company it self is absolute garbage. The idea that they feel entitled enough to tell people who made the bulk of it what they should want (new design, block mobile browse, push app, and now ban download bots) is a comical.
People who work for reddit are wasting their talents, that is if they have any. I'm sure engineering wise there are talented people there, but business/design wise I'm almost certain that their value is abysmal. Reddit management is just a combination of entitled, dumb, and inexperienced.
Reddit's end is going to be like another 9gag site. At least 9gag acknowledges what they really are, but Reddit pretends as if they're fucking archive.org while they're 4chan's inferior brother but they just don't know it.
Seriously, trash company. Reddit the company and their management/strategy/design team should be a case taught in class. An exemplary case for Garbage-zero-valued-high-horse tech companies.
Doesn't the bot respond with a link to the saved video, which other users can then download without having to call the bot again? Whenever I've seen that bot or similar ones in a thread, the top one gets upvoted and duplicates get downvoted to the point of being hidden. This seems like the upvote/downvote system working as intended.
No, not really. Open _any_ video thread from the frontpage from yesterday and you will find multiple references to savevideo, getvideobot, downloadvideo, etc. All of them are different, competing bots participating in this spam race.
Not to mention websites where there is no karma or equivalent (e.g. Twitter) and you just can't skip the spam to threadunroller or videodownloader or whatever.
Clearly all of these bots show there is a serious flaw with reddit that you can not just download videos like you could with the old external video service links that reddit used to be filled with.
Especially ironic considering most of reddit videos are downloaded and reposted from tiktok.
Really though it's the fault of Reddit (or Twitter, ...) for deliberately disabling users' ability to right-click and download videos like normal. This is entirely a self-inflicted problem.
Sorry but you are the namecaller here, and wrong to begin with. I couldnt agree more regarding the download button in reddit itself. Its the spamy services I have a problem with.
The _spam_ part is their fault. There is a million ways to offer this service that do not involve spamming every other user of the platform, but of course, by the power of advertising, the "spamming" ways are the most popular.
You still get your videos downloaded, you don't spam people who is discussing in the same thread, and Reddit "gods" can't do anything to block you.
If you don't want to download a python script to your machine (why?), then use any of the million youtube-dl-wrapping websites online or one of the hundred browser extensions. I'm 99% sure "SaveVideo" is just wrapping youtube-dl anyway.
> If you don't want to download a python script to your machine (why?)
Man, classic HN short-sightedness. Not everyone is comfortable with these tools. Not everyone has a Python interpreter installed by default. Not everyone is in a device/platform that can even run Python.
These bots are just damn more convenient. Assuming you are accessing old.reddit.com in mobile (the One True Way), to download a video you need to:
1. Find the URL. With mobile browser's penchant to autohide UI chrome, there's an additional cognitive load in doing it.
2. Open a new browser tab.
3. Fumble on your mobile keyboard to type the address of your preferred save video service. (Alternatively, you Google search the name, scroll past the first "result" because it's an ad, then click.)
4. Paste the URL from Reddit.
5. Wait and download video.
In contrast with bots:
1. Fumble on your mobile keyboard to type "!SaveVideo" (or whatever command it is).
2. Wait for the notif and download video.
> you don't spam people who is discussing in the same thread
Is that honestly spammy? I rarely see more than one subthread for the bot call, it gets upvoted so people can see it easily, sometimes people do search for it first. The worst I can say is that it quickly devolves into a stream of "good bot" comments but at that point, it's just another conversation to collapse.
WRT presenting information, there are more problems with Reddit's design decisions than these bots.
I have literally _a toolbar button_ in my Android web browser that downloads the video of any page that I'm viewing right now. How can there be anything more convenient than that?
But your comparison is extremely flawed anyway. E.g. "Fumble on your mobile keyboard to type the address of your preferred save video service." Even if you claim not to know how to use bookmarks, you still have history. Basically, the "unconvenient" method you are describing is literally fewer taps away than the "convenient" method of messaging SaveVideo, which has no autocomplete at all, and _requires me to login to Reddit_. And with SaveVideo you still spam and even reveal to everyone you are downloading the video in the process.
I'm even more convinced the only reason SaveVideo is popular is because their viral spamming strategy actually works, and bazillions of people learn about it because every user of it actively spams everyone else while using it. If on every thread of Reddit I was posting a message about my magnificent browser extension/bookmarklet/website for downloading videos, how popular do you think it would get, convenient or not?
> And with SaveVideo you still spam and even reveal to everyone you are downloading the video in the process.
Unless the SaveVideo link is already there, in which case it's one click. Just because your workflow works for you, that doesn't mean others are morally compromised for doing things differently.
So, add "search for the existing link first" to the list of steps of the supposed "convenient" method. These arguments that "oh its more convenient for me anyway" do not got very far, specially when i claim its the virical advertising that makes people think it is convenient.
> I have literally _a toolbar button_ in my Android web browser that downloads the video of any page that I'm viewing right now
Well, that's you. It might surprise you to know, not everyone is you.
> Basically, the "unconvenient" method you are describing is literally fewer taps away than the "convenient" method of messaging SaveVideo, which has no autocomplete at all, and _requires me to login to Reddit_
Of course I made the assumption that you are already logged in to Reddit, because that's the type of person the usage of this bot is for anyway. If you browse without an account, this is not the bot (or service) you are looking for.
But I'm gonna humor you and count taps, tell me where I'm wrong. I'll go for the shortest actions possible. Unconvenient method:
1. Find the URL (+1 swipe to reveal address bar), copy and paste URL (+1 long tap and +1 short tap).
2. Tap on bookmarks (+1). Search for your DL service ((+1) swipe, depending how much bookmarks you use), tap on actual bookmark entry (+1).
3. Paste URL from Reddit (+1 tap minimum. If it did not autofocus to textbox, that's another (+1)). Tap action button to DL video (+1).
4. Download video finally (+1).
Total: 8 definite taps + 2 possible swipes + 1 possible additional tap if DL website does not autofocus on textbox) + the cognitive load of opening a new browser tab.
Convenient method:
1. Type command. Let's make things equal and assume autocomplete (this is a string you type frequently), score it +2 taps. Hit comment button (+1).
2. Open notifications (+1), open comment (+1), click link to download (+1).
Total: 6 definite taps.
I'll humor you further, if you had to login (and let's assume OAuth, Google login to make it equal to having a bookmark on hand) you tap on the login link (+1) and tap on the Google option (+1).
Total: 8 definite taps without the inconvenience of going out of Reddit.
Where's the "extreme flaw" in my reasoning, please?
> the only reason SaveVideo is popular is because their viral spamming strategy actually works
I really find it disingenuous of you to keep harping about a "viral spamming strategy" without mentioning that video download sites are guilty of excessive ads and dark patterns more often than not. "Use adblock!" of course, but even that is not 100% foolproof or they would annoy you by making you wait before your DL link is available. You were supposed to be seeing an ad while the wait countdown is on by the way.
I did not even count the cognitive load of these dark patterns in my accounting above (is the download link the green "GET VIDEOS" button or the blue "Save" button?) because it's too varied to settle a proper score.
SaveVideo might be a viral ad strategy but yet another difference with the ad strategy of these DL sites it is that SaveVideo is a useful trick to know for Reddit users; i.e., that ad is far more relevant. The people who learn about it might actually find use for it one day.
That's not the only reason they are popular too. It's also because...
> If on every thread of Reddit I was posting a message about my magnificent browser extension/bookmarklet/website for downloading videos, how popular do you think it would get, convenient or not?
Another aspect of these bots is that one person invokes it, the rest of the community can benefit from it. Plus, though my opinion is unchanged on the subsequent thread of "good bot" comments, the community finds that kind of behavior charming. This behavior you describe is just shameless self promotion, I'd wager you'd get more detractors than users before your account is moderated out of existence.
> Where's the "extreme flaw" in my reasoning, please?
"Extreme flaw" is your words, not mine.
In any case, we are already down to the same number of taps for both methods, and this while still assuming:
* That I'm either already logged in or that I can login in "2 taps" (very dubious, specially for old.reddit.com)
* That I can search whether there is an existing link with no effort or taps (easier with old.reddit.com, at the cost of swiping, unlikely with the new one), or that I don't otherwise care about telling everyone that I have downloaded the video.
* That autocomplete is going to work with strings such as "u/SaveVideo" or the like (it does not: most symbols and punctuation are enough to throw Android autocomplete away, the only symbols that usually work are @ and dots).
* That the bot is going to reply immediately and not make me wait an indefinite amount of time, and that I will not need to manually tap refresh N times to see when it is finished (which is the case in old.reddit.com).
And so on and so forth.
> Another aspect of these bots is that one person invokes it, the rest of the community can benefit from it.
So I would also link to the download video URL in my video downloader spam. Does that really change the argument? Would that make it "useful" instead of "shameless self promotion"?
Of course not. The difference here is that these "bots" have engineered their advertising so that they force their users to initiate it.
This is Pinterest all over again. "Pinterest" is also useful amongst their users, how do you think they made all their "collections" so large? It's just that their spammy advertising practices make it annoying for their non-users.
I would have let this slide but I really don't like it when people put words in my mouth. Check your previous post, read carefully, you are the first person to use those words :).
No it is not. You're telling us to use car tires when we are on bikes. Car tires are nice but it's useless for me when I am riding a bike.
> That I'm either already logged in or that I can login in "2 taps" (very dubious, specially for old.reddit.com)
This is a reasonable assumption because, I quote myself:
> Of course I made the assumption that you are already logged in to Reddit, because that's the type of person the usage of this bot is for anyway. If you browse without an account, this is not the bot (or service) you are looking for.
I grant you I did overlook old.reddit.com does not have OAuth. But browsers do save your login credentials, which is even faster.
> That I can search whether there is an existing link with no effort or taps (easier with old.reddit.com, at the cost of swiping, unlikely with the new one), or that I don't otherwise care about telling everyone that I have downloaded the video.
I'll grant searching for an existing link isn't the easiest thing in the world but the upvote system kinda compensates for this.
You can delete comments if you don't mind announcing to everyone you DLed a video. Or use an alt. Or if you do it rarely enough, yeah why not a downloader site.
Again, this bot is for people invested in Reddit's ecosystem.
> * That the bot is going to reply immediately and not make me wait an indefinite amount of time, and that I will not need to manually tap refresh N times to see when it is finished (which is the case in old.reddit.com).
That's why you have notifs. I mean if you need to download this video right now then, maybe this bot isn't for you. But most people don't need right now.
> Does that really change the argument? Would that make it "useful" instead of "shameless self promotion"?
>
> Of course not.
Except it does. If you add the DL link to each of your comment that also happens to link your product, you become _that guy_ who's always provides a link to the video download without being asked to. It's useful precisely because you anticipated what the user would need your services for. I'm baffled I need to spell that out.
If I stuff every bulletin board with a flyer for my computer repair services, I'm just another voice in that messy pile. But if I repair people's computers and then give them my calling card/flyer, they are likely to not find that annoying because I had a good pretext for advertising my services.
This is precisely what I am complaining about when I said that the SaveVideo spam means every other service that does not spam in the same way gets relegated to obscurity. Practically every downloader program/extension/service works with these videos...
Use a 3rd party client. On android, "Reddit is fun" and "RedReader" support downloading videos. Possibly others exist, but those are the only ones I've tried. I suspect iOS has some options as well.
