This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
If you install the duckduckgo browser and turn on app tracking protection, you’ll see just how much data is harvested from mobile apps, which is genuinely scary.
This is why these sites are pushing the mobile app. It’s much harder to prevent trackers through an app than it is through a web browser.
I just installed this and am trying the app tracking protection (it’s in beta, for those reading who haven’t used it). Shockingly, Candy Crush Soda doesn’t come up with a list of junk being tracked. whew or something
Here’s a screenshot from Discord:
Some of that seems unnecessary (device boot time). But it’s not all scary spooky tracking. Some permissions/information is required for certain features.
For example, you can’t rotate your app UI if you’re not allowed to know screen orientation. Or maybe they do a low power mode if device battery is low, or a warning that the app might not function well if the OS or device is old.
Not saying you’re wrong or that Discord is right. Just pointing out that a long list of permissions isn’t on its own a bad thing, if those permissions are required for specific features, and not just for the sake of data harvesting.
This is why though I appreciate what DDG is doing, it’s not informing users about the context of what these permissions are used for, leading to a lot of fear over the wrong things. The data may not even be leaving the device but the implication DDG makes is that it is.
As a side note, I prefer to use DNS66 to filter data and ads by domain, then manually set my Android app permissions as needed.
This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to track you down. It’s probably just for crash reporting etc.
A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.
Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I’m sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn’t mean that they’re using it to track you.
Do you happen to have a screenshot of the data that is harvested? I am genuinely curious.
I don’t have specific info on what’s harvested, but I have had mine active for a while and I’m at 300k tracking attempts blocked in the last 7 days. It’s absolutely wild.
Edited to add - they don’t specify what is being attempted, just what each company is known to track generally.
Yeah, don’t be shocked. Without the blocker every app makes one successful attempt and just tracks, with the blocker they attempt again and again like a hamster running against a wall.
Some apps won’t work with the blocker. I tried to block Chrome and after a while none of the apps I have installed would work, until I unblocked it.
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don’t bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie’s stream…
This FrEe SerVIcE MusT JUst WurK, Rheee
The spice must flow
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
It wasn’t that uncomfortable anyway, just go into another instance.
I literally only noticed because people made posts on other instances about it lmao
I generally just browse by Top Day for All instances, unlike on reddit where i only looked at my subscriptions.
There were weekend ddos attacks?
lemmy.world I think? depends on your instance
Also blahaj or something
I think that was due to an update, not an attack.
He’s just trying to protect people from inappropriate content. We all know how harmful inappropriate content can be for children unless it’s paired with targeted advertisements, which mitigate the danger.
Someone should answer the phone because we all fucking called it.
What’s next in the Reddit bingo?
The removal of old reddit?
Limiting the number of posts we can see per day as a normal user?
Buy upvotes?
The slippery slope logical fallacy doesn’t count when there is actual factual evidence.
reddit and twitter are literally competing to see who can destroy their platform first and unfortunately they’re both winning
The enshittification proceeds apace. Fuck u/spez.
Centralized control and ad based model ensures this always happens… Cable teevee, now web2.0…
About time the pleb base start thinking bigger picture and voting with their feet and wallets.
My operating assumption here is that Reddit can collect more data to sell if people are logged in and use their app.
Does not matter if you destroy 75% of the usefulness of the system if the remaining 25% can be more effectively monetized.
Old thread, but as best I can tell, old.reddit.com is still going strong. No forcing you to sign in, no padding out the ass.
Libreddit and Teddit may be dead, but Kddit still works. Eddrit also does the trick, but occasionally gets overloaded.
This isn’t new, tell your phone to show desktop site to bypass all their mobile bullshit.
all to sell some ads
Isn’t the stated reason to prevent AI scraping? As much as I dislike them both, given how these LLMs like ChatGPT work it actually seems reasonable.
eh I feel that excuse is bullshit - a scrape is the same as a web view. ai doesn’t need to scan the same content more than once. reeks of b/s to me
For now old.reddit still works.
Honestly I’m amazed. Old Reddit is still functionally unchanged over the past several years and honestly a great experience. And Reddit must know exactly how many people are using it because they’re visiting an alternate domain.
Can’t imagine it has much longer…
It’s only a great experience for some. The vast majority of people, attention, eyeballs, and money go to things like tiktok and Instagram.
I wish there was a way to accelerate widespread adoption of Lemmy.
Reddit has been awesome, but the community deserves a decentralized platform free from bullshit like this.
It’s probably for the benefit of Lemmy that the grow is slow, it gives the servers plenty of time to upgrade. It’s already been struggling somewhat with the influx of new users, it may have become totally unusable with 100x, 1000x the user’s etc.
Be patient.
Having tried /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim, I was going to point out how I didn’t get the screen you got. However, /r/nyt gets this message. As an aside, /r/politics, /r/eve, and /r/valheim are verified while /r/nyt is not is interesting to me. Upon further testing, /r/nytimes works. Seeing how /r/nyt has 411 subscribers, while /r/nytimes has 8,431 subscribers, I think smaller, less well known subreddits will run into issues while larger subreddits or subreddits that are more well known will have no accessibility issues.
It’s also interesting that this block doesn’t exist if you navigate to old.reddit.com/r/nyt instead of just reddit.com/r/nyt. You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
old.reddit.com on the Firefox Android app looks bad, but I wonder if someone could make an extension to automatically redirect users to old.reddit.com when navigating to reddit.com, as well as an extension that changes the layout of the page to something more mobile friendly, similar to RES but for your phone’s browser. That might make reddit usable on mobile without the official app until old.reddit.com goes away or they try to implement some sort of user agent string check.
You think they would have just repurposed the page that asked if you if you were over 18 before going to a nsfw subreddit for this task, but old.reddit.com seems completely overlooked as of now.
Doubt it was overlooked. I moderated a larger subreddit and I can tell you that the stats for old.reddit are tiny compared to the rest so it’s not worth the cost of implementing. Further if you use old.reddit you probably already have a dislike for the app and will rather abandon the content then install the app. Finally old.reddit is used more by old-school redditors which tend to be the vocal minority that will complain about the change the loudest. So overall, ignoring old.reddit is propably the smarter decision from reddits perspective… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I always thought old.reddit going away was what would get me to leave the site…
Strangely impressed it managed to outlast me.
I called this happening right when Spez said he wanted to emulate elon. The other shoe has dropped
I assume eventually all subreddits will be locked to non registered users on mobile…and PC
Yeah. Users who can stomach it should be sneaking back and pointing more refugees to Lemmy. Honestly it should be bots being like “If you like r/pics stay here BUT if you like r/pics and hate Reddit’s policies? Try c/pics@lemmy.world” and just have the bot script for communities the fediverse has equivalents for. We’re growing still but it’s not like I’m seeing much Lemmy mentions in the discussion threads yet. That ship is sinking though.
”…I’m not seeing much Lemmy mentions….”
This is working as intended as Reddit is actively suppressing and shadowbanning any comment or post that mentions Lemmy or hyperlinks
F /u/spez is only following Twitter who’ve already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.
