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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38170 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Following up from my Reddit API post from last week, Spez (aka Steve Huffman, Reddit CEO) hosted a disastrous AMA yesterday clarifying on the updated terms of API access. Which means, starting from July the 1st, the rate for apps that require higher usage limits is $0.24 per 1K API calls (less than $1.00 per user / month for a typical Reddit third-party app). They "promised" to talk with Pushshift to restore access to verified moderators, allow API access for bots and developers, third party apps, etc. However, apps like Appollo have announced that they aren't happy with the pricing and won't continue to operate anymore because doing so would now cost them $20 million. In reference to this, Steve replied to one of the comments, only to be exposed by Christian Selig (aka iamthatis), Appollo CEO:

Spez: His “joke” is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place—saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally; recording and leaking a private phone call—to the point where I don’t know how we could do business with him.

iamthatis: Please feel free to give examples where I said something differently in public versus what I said to you. I give you full permission.

It turned out to be a bigger disaster than I'd anticipated. No one's buying the profitability claims, because most of this labour is carried out by unpaid volunteers and dedicated users for free. No access to pushshift means harder time for mods and academics who rely on it, as noted by user SarahAGilbert here. Over 3000 subreddits, including the big ones like r/videos, r/music, r/gaming and r/pics, are going on blackout. Some of them, indefinitely. Probably the largest blackout reddit will ever see. Boy am I glad TheMotte moved offsite.

So I am still not sure what to think about this in Schmittian terms. Will this hamper the power of jannies to continue to turn Reddit into a woke echochamber?

Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that. The best this could do, barring that, is make it a mostly-empty woke echo chamber.

Nothing, short of a Musk-at-Twitter style purchase and purge, can do that.

I really do find it hilarious that people think Twitter is that much different with Musk at the helm as far as Trust & Safety goes. It's basically more of the same, but Musk found a great way to appeal to right-wingers by talking about "free speech" and stuff. Twitter was already the most free speech media, nothing in T&S really changed much except for Trump being unbanned.

What is the point of posting something so easily disprovable?

The guy who said that subreddits always banned for wrongthink has the possible excuse of not being old enough to see it first-hand, but noticing the decline of twitters censorship requires a much shorter memory.

because it's pretty obvious unless your idea of "free speech" is literally just posting slurs. 4chan has more rules and will ban you for a lot less than Twitter ever would

I really do find it hilarious that people think Twitter is that much different with Musk at the helm as far as Trust & Safety goes. It's basically more of the same, but Musk found a great way to appeal to right-wingers by talking about "free speech" and stuff.

much more crypto spam, more ads . I see major signal boosting and recommendations of anti-woke content .

Twitter was already the most free speech media, nothing in T&S really changed much except for Trump being unbanned.

hardly. conservatives were getting banned for all sorts of dumb or contrived reasons pre-musk

Leagues of people who were banned are now posting there unimpeded. That alone is not "more of the same".

Community Notes are great too, if only because they wrest away control of the idea that "fact-checking" is a leftist thing.

there's definitely more signal boosting of certain content on twitter now. just a few weeks ago there was a kerfuffle over musk retweeting interracial crime statistics

Musk also allowed the showing of "What is a Woman" (and apparently got rid of or lost ANOTHER Trust and Safety head over this). And he signal boosted it on his own account. And he posts anti-trans memes. Saying nothing has changed on Twitter is ridiculous. I expect it all go back once his new MSM CEO takes over, but for now it's different.

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