As an idiot, I am too!

Also, in my experience people who dislike AI features are often more tech-savvy in my experience. And tech-savvy people tend to know “hidden” subdomains such as “noai.” and how to change the default engine’s URL string whereas non-savvy tend to not know that.

So even if the majority would be against these AI features it might make more sense to make AI the default and noai opt-in. Because you’d lose more non-savvy people having no-AI as default than you lose tech-savvy people with having AI as default (I assume).

I don’t understand either. What benefit do they have from blocking it (or what disadvantage do they have from not blocking)? There has to be some reason, no?

Just the other day I was pissed off. My dad missed some deadline to request money from the government. I told him to call them, they might be able to do something anyways. He was like “nah, they’ll never do that, why would they have a deadline if they do it after the deadline yadayada”
Then a few days later he told me “oh that gpt thing told me to just try, I might be lucky and they pay out even after the deadline, he was very reassuring, so I’ll try calling them!”

Man chatgpt would fucking tell you to try your luck if you’re 12 years over the deadline, but god forbid your son tells you the exact same thing and you even consider calling them lol

Yes. And airlines are active participants in the piracy chain. I mean, they openly advertise their services with the ability to switch the country you’re in! BAN THEM!

Hmm, it’s truly not ideal, but while I certainly don’t want to defend them (just playing devil’s advocate a bit here lol), IMO application-based payments do make more sense than user-based. I assume way more people use more than 1 account than there are people who use more than 1 client. If that assumption is correct, the current system is very much in favor of the majority of users.
But it’s indeed a bad solution for the 3rd party app devs to act as some kind of middleman for the payments. The only better alternative I can think of would’ve been to let users add their alts to their subscription, but that would need a system to detect and punish shared subscriptions.

That the fees are too high might be true, I don’t have any insight on that - but Relay Pro has tiers from (in Germany) €1.09 to €5.49 (+ optional higher tiers for application support), the 5.49 tier being with unlimited API calls.
This surely isn’t cheap, at least in the category of social media apps, which is 99% free (but usually ad-supported, which Relay isn’t), but not unfeasible. Generally speaking, i.e. regardless of category, ad-free usage (which is what API access is from reddits perspective) for €5.50 is actually cheap. Most apps and services charge around the same or more for that.

That being said, I was obviously not in favor of that change either. And Reddit sucks at communicating what specifically they’re gonna do. But I also gotta say, the way it turned out in the end wasn’t too bad/unfair - at least not in my experience as a paying API user. Might be (and probably is) a different story for the developers, as the amount of shut-down 3rd party apps indicates. Reddit should’ve just worked out something together with these devs, then I’m sure the backlash and outrage wouldn’t have been half as large.

Either way, I’m happy to be here now.

or making it so you have to be a paid Reddit subscriber to have expanded API access.

Isn’t that what they’re doing? I’ve used Relay Pro via API until recently by paying for it.

The only reason I don’t use that anymore is cause I went de-googled, so no play store subscription and thus no API access anymore, and since I can’t stand the original app I came here.

That sounds tempting, but still won’t make me rejoin reddit.

Germany, but limited to comedy (cause I don’t really watch any shows, but if I do then it’s comedy):

• Stromberg - a German office show, focused on just one department with an absolute dickhead for a boss. But the worker characters are great too.
• Pastewka - a series of the actor/comedian Bastian Pastewka where he basically plays himself in his private life. Often compared to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but while there are similarities it’s a totally different character IMO.
• jerks - basically the title, two friends who are jerks. They’re often getting into awkward situations and try to resolve them with lies and brazenness.

I love them all three, hard to pick one as the best. Probably Stromberg.

Honestly, having to have the user type “I agree that I have verified the application i am trying to install is genuine and not a fraudulent app”

Yeah, this would be the most promising approach IMO. Whenever I was forced to write something, I did pay more attention to what that said than if I ticked a box next to it.

Maybe even have them write “I am not instructed to install this app by someone else. I am aware that following instructions to install an app this way often have fraudulent intentions”.

(Also if the language was changed recently, it should ask to write it in all languages that were set within the last 14 days or so. Otherwise the scammer will have them switch the language so they don’t understand what they’re writing)

Must’ve been the wind.

Yeah I get that but the way I experienced it is that ads can appear in a podcast in any of the following three instances:

• Podcaster themselves record the podcast, may or may not add advertisement (self-spoken in their language)
• Podcast network which the podcaster is a member of adds ad break time codes, in which later ads are inserted, dynamically based on the listener’s location (pre-spoken, usually in the local language of the listener’s location, sometimes personalized)
• The podcast player/platform (Spotify, Pocket casts, antennapod etc) adds advertisements (also pre-spoken and in local or app language, more often personalized)

The podcast player’s ads can not be distinguished from the podcast network’s ads, except that they have a higher tendency for personalized ads (given that personalization is enabled in the privacy settings) or if the player declares it as an advertisement in a place where the podcast can’t. Or if you know that a podcast is on an ad free network. Other than that, you don’t really know if it’s an ad by Spotify or the podcast’s network.

My point is that, unless your player is explicitly declaring an ad as such, you cannot diatinguish a podcast network’s ad from a player ad. The only proof I have to know it’s a network’s ad in my case is that my player is open source and ad free. If I used a closed source commercial player, I wouldn’t know from who the ad is coming when it’s in my local language.
I’m German too and got German ads on english podcasts, but I know that the player didn’t insert it, so you can never be too sure if it’s Spotify adding them either.

TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.

That can still happen and happens to me too, despite using a no-ad FOSS player, so the ads are definitely from the podcast, not the player.
Dynamic ad insertion is absolutely a thing in podcasts. If you access/download the MP3 file on the server from a German IP address, a German ad will be put in at the specified ad break before you/your player downloads the file.

So a different language ad doesn’t mean it’s from Spotify.

(PS: By the way, using a VPN connected to a country where not many companies make podcast ads works basically like a podcast ad blocker. I route my podcast player through an Albania VPN and have like 80% less ads than before. The remainder is “classic” podcast ads that are inserted as a static part of the MP3 file, no way to get rid of those.)

I learned that Germany doesn’t have a state owned mail service anymore

It’s so dumb. We privatized all kinds of important infrastructure, then it became enshittified for revenue maximization and now it’s broken, shitty and expensive.

Some postal service, trains, telecommunication service, banks, airports & airlines etc have been government owned a few decades ago and worked so so much better.

Me neither. It’s the same as the /TikTokCringe subreddit which Ive had subscribed to to see some curated TT content (other than the name suggests they don’t post only cringe content but anything interesting).

Just because I don’t like a platform and decide to not use it that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the content from there.

“Send this to 3 people that love you or I will die”

Even if they decide to send it, that will have them wondering forever who of the 3 doesn’t love them lol

Wenn man ganz still ist, kann man leise Linus Neumann weinen hören.

I live near the A7, a North/South directed highway in Germany going all the way from DK to AT and I also live near a motorcycle hotspot/meetup point.
In the summer, there are so many Scandinavians doing just that, making long distance travels with motorcycles, sometimes even with these small motorcycle trailers attached. They go camping in my town and continue the next day further south (or back up north respectively).

I don’t have a bike nor do I like camping, but I love seeing these guys every time :D

It was always the same. They came in saying they’re looking for a small device. I showed them the small devices. They played around with them a bit, then slowly moved on to the bigger devices. No reason given, they just said they liked the smaller ones more and yet still bought the bigger ones.

Around 10 years ago I worked in an electronics store. You know, when actual small smartphones were still a thing (think S4 Mini and stuff like that).
Every day people came looking for a small phone. Always were very interested in the smaller devices. And yet most never bought one, they eventually decided for a larger one. For each new Samsung series during that time, I’d guess it was about ~50% of people interested in the Mini series, but only ~5% of our actual sales were the Minis.

It’s crazy and I learned a lot about people and their purchasing behavior back then. People often think they want something and never buy it and vice versa. It’s interesting, from a psychological view. In my current business it’s the same - people keep asking for stuff, and once you offer it, nobody cares about it.

That’s probably why Samsung kept on making these Minis until the S5 despite them not seeling. Customers kept just giving them feedback that didn’t reflect their behavior.