tinfoil-hat
Active Member
- First Reddit closes it's API
- Then ReadHat goes Closed Source
Now Youtube seems to double down
Am I the only one that sees a pattern there? What can we do against this madness?
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Big Tech attacking it's users
- Thread starter tinfoil-hat
- Start date
-
- Tags
- big tech closed source privacy
Now Youtube seems to double down
Am I the only one that sees a pattern there? What can we do against this madness?
mrcrossroads
Well-Known Member
I rarely use youtube but I guess a lot of people still do.
Maybe not for long after this.
If a website blocks me from their content unless I sign up, it is their loss, not mine. They lose my eyeballs, and I go elsewhere. It happens all the time. I just close the tab or window.
Twitter does not have content that convinces me to sign up. Never did. Probably never will. In fact, I do not have an account on any website solely for the purpose of viewing their content. The drawbacks to me are not worth it. I close the window and move on. I do not install an app on my phone in return for a free taco, either.
The same is true for Reddit and RedHat. People vote with their eyeballs, time, and dollars.
All of those places value me much more than I value them.
Twitter does not have content that convinces me to sign up. Never did. Probably never will. In fact, I do not have an account on any website solely for the purpose of viewing their content. The drawbacks to me are not worth it. I close the window and move on. I do not install an app on my phone in return for a free taco, either.
The same is true for Reddit and RedHat. People vote with their eyeballs, time, and dollars.
All of those places value me much more than I value them.
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This is not totally accurate, you can still get access to the source code but you have to have a subscription, it's still obliging to the letter to the GPL but not to the spirit of GPL. So technically RHEL is not closed source.
Terminal Velocity
Well-Known Member
The future of the internet is a commercial totally controlled ecosystem. Will come a day where people would contemplate with amazement that once upon a time could navigate among many sites even made by common people like you and me. We are still in the infancy of the internet era, there are lots still yet to come
Also, Reddit didn't close its API. They're just charging for some users of the API - which is pretty normal considering the costs incurred by Reddit. Mod tools, tools to help with disabilities, etc. will not be impacted by the change.
Bandwidth, at least good bandwidth, is far more expensive than it should be. Amusingly, back in the day, we predicted it'd be cheap. It is much cheaper, but it's still expensive at the levels Reddit uses. Then, you have a zillion third party apps making millions of connections (literally) in a week - or less. Heck, it's "expensive" at the levels I use.
I'm not picking sides as I don't really care. I am simply sharing some of the reasons behind Reddit's decision.
If you don't mind some speculation, I wonder if they're planning on going public and looking to boost revenue so that they have a better IPO. That's pure speculation.
Bandwidth, at least good bandwidth, is far more expensive than it should be. Amusingly, back in the day, we predicted it'd be cheap. It is much cheaper, but it's still expensive at the levels Reddit uses. Then, you have a zillion third party apps making millions of connections (literally) in a week - or less. Heck, it's "expensive" at the levels I use.
I'm not picking sides as I don't really care. I am simply sharing some of the reasons behind Reddit's decision.
If you don't mind some speculation, I wonder if they're planning on going public and looking to boost revenue so that they have a better IPO. That's pure speculation.
Yeah but they are asking so much for the api that even third party app developers can't even afford it and in that way putting third-party apps for Reddit out of play.
wendy-lebaron
Active Member
Wait, Google could... ban... people?
(I wanted to insert ROFLMAO emoticon here instead, like could be done with the "likes".)
They have already banned me. GMail is so messed up one finishes creating an account, then goes to type in his/her password correctly and the stupid thing refuses to submit. Only because of this somebody in my family lost a government benefit that is being desperately needed right now. I was trying to get a few dollars off my Internet subscription... and failed only because I was dumb enough to give them my GMail address and not the other one that I had at the time. Want to guess from where this other one is? You would know from reading enough of my posts. No I didn't want it...
Also when I attempted to choose Chromium (not Chrome) over Brave or Firefox, those other ones sometimes try to force me to fill in a captcha, complaining that I'm "generating too much traffic".
Gee I wonder why where I live mobile phones are being gifted, !sometimes with tablets!, which carry Android which cannot do something very necessary like scanning a document to convert to PDF. If it could be done, then I just don't know how and I have to learn to tell somebody else who cannot use one of those junk devices.
(I wanted to insert ROFLMAO emoticon here instead, like could be done with the "likes".)
They have already banned me. GMail is so messed up one finishes creating an account, then goes to type in his/her password correctly and the stupid thing refuses to submit. Only because of this somebody in my family lost a government benefit that is being desperately needed right now. I was trying to get a few dollars off my Internet subscription... and failed only because I was dumb enough to give them my GMail address and not the other one that I had at the time. Want to guess from where this other one is? You would know from reading enough of my posts. No I didn't want it...
Also when I attempted to choose Chromium (not Chrome) over Brave or Firefox, those other ones sometimes try to force me to fill in a captcha, complaining that I'm "generating too much traffic".
Gee I wonder why where I live mobile phones are being gifted, !sometimes with tablets!, which carry Android which cannot do something very necessary like scanning a document to convert to PDF. If it could be done, then I just don't know how and I have to learn to tell somebody else who cannot use one of those junk devices.
I looked at their prices and compared them to others and they're pretty similar. I think the sticker shock is due to the API has been free until now. The app makers can't afford it because they're literally making millions of API calls. One app maker said that they made as many as three million API calls in a single day.
The conspiratorial me wonders if a part of this is so that they can just rid themselves of many 3rd party tools so that they can replace them with tools of their own and then charge for those.
I'm not sure that I agree with Reddit here, but their fees are pretty close, lower in some cases, than all sorts of other services. Reddit is like $32,000 lower than Twitter.
The place I use to automatically post articles on Twitter is now charging a whole dollar for it - per month. (Speaking of which, I need to set up a subscription and pay them, even though I get almost zero traffic from Twitter.)
Again, I'm not sure that I agree with Reddit - but I can see reasons why they'd do so. People really don't like to pay for things they're used to getting free.
When you don't use a VPN, your internet traffic comes from your internet service provider. When you use a VPN your internet traffic is encrypted between your system and the VPN provider, but after that, the internet traffic looks the same, except that it comes and goes from the VPN provider's internet connections. From a website's point of view, it either comes from your house (no VPN) or it comes from the VPN provider's systems (when using the VPN).
Your computer can be infected with malware the same way whether you are connected with no VPN or with a VPN in use. It doesn't matter and the malicious website does not care. If you open the wrong email attachment, it will infect your computer whether or not you collected your email while using a VPN.
VPNs disguise where you are actually coming from, so hackers use them to cover their tracks. That is why some banks refuse VPN connections. It is not the "double_vpn", It may depend on which VPN provider you chose, too.
I agree. When I get home, I change the dealer's plate frame for a plain one. Four screws and done.
What bothers me is that in some parts of our country, the dealers drill holes in the trunk or a prominent back panel. Next, they rivet a plastic "chrome" dealer name / logo to the car body itself. You can see that dealer nameplates deteriorate over time - just look for an older car.
If a dealer did that in my state, nobody would buy their cars. The dealers know better and never do it. A car like that would sit on the lot forever. I truly wonder why customers accept it as normal and okay in those states where the practice is common. If I lived in one of those areas, I would make "no nameplate" a part of the deal, in writing.
