Reddit basically has a completely new userbase. It’s not only by age of user. I don’t think people have really appreciated the rate of attrition has been near total. The old userbase of tech savvy STEM college degree holders have effectively abandoned the platform.

They’ve managed to sell the platform on a whole new set of users. So it looks like the site has kept on plugging along. But really reddit has successfully relaunched itself. Based on the idiosyncratic lingo I see most often. The bulk of users came from Facebook. They don’t know the traditional redditisms so they use vernacular from the platforms they’ve migrated from.

There’s a difference in attitude when they keep doubling down and proving their critics right. That’s how misbehaved children act. Except when you’re not a child but full grown adults who refuse to budge like when mommy used try to give you that cough syrup you don’t want it so you twist and turn your head with your mouth sealed up tight. Yeah of course people are going to laugh at you. People laughing at you on social media is no excuse. What the hell even is this logic. This is not much more than a thinly veiled reddit tier pseudo-intellectual reply. Complete with the “ill be downvoted but”, “btw I’m actually voting liberal”, and the pièce de résistance using Black people as a rhetorical cudgel.

Btw I’ll get downvoted for this reply but whatever.

I refer to it as the social graph. When a site starts using metadata to map how users are related on a social platform. And then implementing features based on that. It’s not a buzzword but that’s the technical root that stems everything that makes an enshittified Facebookified site.

Unfortunately when reddit started becoming a social graph based site, the technical literacy of the user base also plummet. So nobody knew wtf a graph structure is.

The popular feed for Canada became voat. The far right subreddits are the top posts every single day.

What are they doing that makes software in the Mac universe that much more memory efficient?

I went from 8GB to 32GB on my laptop. It was second only to going from HDD to SSD. The difference was nowhere near as apparent though. My usage experience went from being able to tell when the kernel was hitting swap space to not having to care at all anymore about the how the kernel is doing with memory management.

You’re assuming your own country is impervious to climate change. It’s the dirty poors bringing their problems to you, right? How dare they.

They talk as if they’re protecting our privacy when it’s really a global surveillance net. The spin doctoring is insane.

Yeah everything is broken with anti-patterns meant to kill competition.

I keep a separate Google Chrome install with no addons for government and banking. Websites break things so badly unless you’re leaving yourself wide open to all their privacy snooping and what not.

For random web browsing the annoyances don’t matter as much. It’s unacceptable when it comes to important things. It’s all by (anti-)design.

Google hasn’t been dogfooding in a long time have they? I wonder what products Googlers use.

The calamity of another great war may not be nuclear weapons but weaponized ad tech. Maybe then will the average person comprehend the gravity of the situation we live in right now. Maybe it will be so horrifying that no conventional weapon of mass destruction would be needed to cause a digital dark age as people throw away these privacy nightmare devices.

That isn’t unpopular opinion unfortunately. Otherwise the world wouldn’t the way that it is right now. We live in a surveillance apparatus that shapes our behavior. Nobody really cares except for the fringes of society.

If you poll people if they care about their privacy of course they will say yes. That is a rather superficial question. When you start polling in meaningful manner such as the uses of personal data the more the opinions become mixed. Some people really do think tracking and ads can provide them useful services. Such a rapacious form of capitalism is the prevailing mode of our time.

I think to some people the concepts of behavioral modification is too sci-fi to be believable. The topic sounds too much like ramblings of a conspiracy nutter about mind control. For others probably they think they’re smarter than psychological conditioning.

One the biggest problems with the internet today is bad actors know how to manipulate or dodge the content moderation to avoid punitive consequences. The big social platforms are moderated by the most naive people in the world. It’s either that or willful negligence. Has to be. There’s just no way these tech bros who spent their lives deep in internet culture are so clueless about how to content moderate.

You would think adversarial actors would find this problematic in their own way. Does no one remember anymore way back when reddit was exposed as being an American state apparatus? Reddit owners its earlier more naive era used to share site metrics. They inadvertently revealed that large amounts of activity comes from a US military base. Then they wiped evidence and disavowed all knowledge that any of that ever happened. And now the narrative on there is that other state actors are the ones in control of that platform. How convenient.

White hat actors could be using such open access to data to reveal whats in the data. That’s what the big social platforms are so scared of themselves. Not only is it their financial bread and butter. Contained within is who know how many skeletons piled up over the years.

Everyones privacy these days is basically long gone. There’s illusion that internet platforms are in any way shape or form fair or balanced because of the paper thin concept of internet votes == democracy or something. Yet a lot of people stubbornly persist. It’s past due time to shine a light on the adversarial actors run amok. Show us the anomalies in data that reveal how the typical real human user is powerless against adversarial actors.

I’d like to think it would be the last straw for the whole concept of social platforms at least the way that it is now. Who knows though. It’s also shown us how dumb people are. They could very well just “meh” and go back to mindlessly infinite scrolling.

Bloatware has spiraled out of control. It’s a consequence of coding becoming easy and accessible. Programming is no longer the domain of idealistic nerds. It is possible for anyone to make garbage tech wares.

There’s got to be more metadata involved in fingerprinting. The type of content you’re looking at. Maybe even deriving some sort of signature from your mouse movements.

Popular tech (a la pop sci or pop psych). Brave uses the right techy sounding buzzwords to appeal to the pseudo power user.

It’s apathy, resignation, tech illiteracy. People think they’re powerless against a god machine. They think “the algorithm” is a black box which can’t be deciphered by mere mortals. Except for the few ordained priests known as software engineers. In reality is a practical application of graph theory. Edges and vertices linking their private data to various tags/labels.

It’s not like Google engineers are hard up for cash. I know I know… it’s never enough for the rich…

What happened to the ethos of the original internet cultures that were so dominant. It’s like large swaths of that generation grew up and sold out to become the oppressors. And the other portion are being crushed by that system.

I vaguely remember some snapdragon exploit a couple years ago that was supposed render a whole bunch of devices unlockable but as far as I can tell nothing ever came of that.