At least part of it is that JavaScript is not really a batteries included language like Python or Java to even PHP.

You can’t really do anything productive without relying on a third party library.

Basically credit card theft.

Over twenty years ago, when I was pretty young and inexperienced, I answered a newspaper ad for IT/programming at a so-called "startup." It sounded great.

My first day was in someone's living room-turned office and I didn't actually have any real idea what the business was. I was told it was a financial company, but it was taking off like gangbusters. Relatively quickly, within days actually, we moved into a very nice class-A office building. The owner was a remarkably charismatic man and being in his presence made you feel warm and understood and like you had a world of possibilities around you. I felt like a badass: I had a good-paying job, worked in a beautiful and prestigious office, and had a boss who made me feel great.

I found out, however, he was basically just running a scam. Between about 2-4am, he would have TV spots running, selling naive housewives, unemployment breadwinners, alcoholics, etc a "system" to earn huge sums of money very quickly. His system? You find people selling notes. You find people who want to buy notes. You introduce them and take a commission. A huuuuuuge commission.

Was that illegal? I don't know. I kind of doubt the people in the ads were real, but my paychecks were clearing.

I learned that when his sales people (who worked late at night, when the infomercials ran) took orders, they would record everyone's credit card info. Then, the owner directed us to automatically sign them up for things they didn't ask for -- recurring subscriptions to his membership-based "note marketplace" website. This was before the Internet was so mainstream, and many people buying this package didn't even have a computer.

If people tried to place an order, and one credit card was declined, he'd just have them quietly try another card we had on file for them, without asking. If anyone complained, they'd obviously just refund the whole charge to avoid pissing off the credit card companies, but he was really just hoping no one would notice.

I quit pretty quickly and got a "real" real job.

A lot of coffee/donut/pastry shops offer “service discounts” to cops, firefighters, and paramedics. It really took off after 9/11.

A "tankie" is a pejorative word for a Stalinist. (Just in case any readers aren't familiar with the word?)

Basically lemmy (the project) was started by some Marxist-Leninists who have a soft spot for the CCP and authoritarian communism (really). Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml actually share the same IP address. And lemmy contributors seem to have lemmygrad accounts.

@feditips, who is a pretty well-respected Fediverse advocate, has recommended against lemmy here and here, with pretty good reasoning.

Having said that, the politics of the authors of the software do not necessarily dictate how you, me, or anyone else choose to run instances.

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”

Basically, they're buying the profiles corporations already have on you. It isn't just to sell you pasta sauce; your shoppers' card also helps build a government profile on you.

I would not be surprised if a lawyer jumped in and said that revealing even profitability vs not is something they should do through official channels.

I'm of mixed mind about this.

Obviously the course of justice must go forward, and if prosecutors have a strong case, the should pursue it.

On the other hand, given all that he's done to undermine democracy, subvert elections, destroy civility, erode democratic norms and traditions, and find common cause with hostile foreign powers, I'm not really keen on the idea that 30 years later, when people say Trump, they'll think "oh, the guy who mishandled classified documents?"

It would be like if Ted Bundy got caught writing bad checks and was locked up for that.

I’m a more recent Apollo user, having switched to iPhone last year. But I’m in the same boat. The third party apps are the only way to go on any platform.

I’ve also been a paying Reddit gold (now premium) user for, I dunno, maybe 10 years. It’s offensive that after all that, I can’t run the software I want to run to access the site. It’s a sign of enshittification.

And frankly, Apollo or not, Reddit isn’t what it used to be. It’s less friendly and welcoming than the narwhal days when /r/LucidDreaming was the hottest community. It’s more abrasive now, more childish. Like the rest of the internet, I suppose.

The Twitter exodus (which is still limited) was because all of the problems at Twitter were sudden. Huge staff cuts meant lower quality, way more bots, and of course, the owner's mercurial impulses.

Reddit is a bit different. It's more of a boiled frog situation. A little tweak here, a little change there, all definitely for the worse (and Reddit is going down hill) but so far nothing seismic. Even the number of users affected by the third party apps thing is pretty small because most users just looking at memes and sharing news just use the native app (my wife does).

I'm not sure whether that really results in an exodus.

Look at Amazon: it just gets worse and worse, but have people stopped buying from it en masse? Nope. It's getting worse, but ever so slowly.

That's fair, but it's less a matter of disagreeing (people disagree all the time) and more a matter of knowing what to expect. With lemmygrad, you know what to expect. It's very, very obvious what they're all about.

With lemmy.ml, you might not expect that moderation. The only way you could find out about it is by breaking an unwritten rule or by finding it in the modlogs. I'm not suggesting that violates some kind of contract, but I am suggesting (1) it's bad moderation, (2) it's worth knowing about.

That's a lot like the reasonable person standard, where the "reasonable person" is the lemmy.ml moderator, isn't it?

So what pineapple is pointing out, then, is that the lemmy.ml Overton window is (1) undocumented, (2) not an Overton window most people live and breath with.

Put another way, newcomers (and existing users who were blissfully unaware) would do well to be aware of that what they consider "safe" content will get you banned from lemmy.ml, but there's no indication of that in the rules.

Saying there's a catchall moderation policy to avoid having a wall of text doesn't address that. Not even a little bit.

"Our pricing is $0.24 per 1,000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app," the Reddit worker said.

This reminds me of the "average user" Comcast would talk about when they introduced ~~price discrimination~~ metered billing. Just include the long tail of lurkers and signups who almost never use the service, and you can claim that the Apollo users (who are power users) are just outliers who should pay more.

Ultimately for me this is a reminder that when there's a for-profit business ramping up to an IPO, it ultimately has to decide what the products are. Reddit tried to make itself the product with Reddit Gold, but clearly not enough people were paying for it, so it has to make users the product. It's hard to "monetize" users through someone else's app, so they've basically decided that for app users, if the developers figure out how to sell a very expensive service, more power to them, otherwise fuck 'em.