I will never leave reddit. As the resident Nazi hunter, it’s a thankless task but a necessary one.

I’m not reading all that

How will the patriarchy ever recover?

I get accused of being a “Powermod” because I do a lot of grunt moderation work on a lot of large, active subreddits – and network with a lot of other moderators who are accused of being “powermods”. Most of what I do is “serious” about moderation, and I’m considered the “knurd” of the group.

The only way I can imagine that Apollo would be charged premium firehose api access is if Apollo was being a man-in-the-middle between Reddit’s servers and their user base — if Apollo was running a server, which server was authenticating as the users, and then the Apollo server was sending material back to the phone/tablet client app.

Which … should not be happening, for oh-so-many reasons.

For one, if Apollo is doing that to remove Reddit’s advertisements and/or insert their own advertisements … that would be shenanigans.

If Apollo is store-and-forwarding user data — are they complying with California user privacy & GDPR requirements?

etc etc etc

If I’m using a third party app to access Reddit, I do not expect that the API calls made by the app to go through the app publisher’s systems.

So I’m really not grokking how this state of affairs is a crisis for a third party app publisher, unless the third party app publisher architected their app in a completely upside down fashion, or is pulling some sort of MITM shenanigans, or the publisher completely misunderstands what the changes to the API will mean.

In short, “where’s the fettucine?”

The political right wing in the United States has been organised around a politics of scapegoating minorities for seventy years or more; there’s a point at which the two major parties switched their wing orientations in the 1960’s, but the same core principles have been the backbone of the right wing in the US for its entire existence:

• A “Natural” Hierarchy;

• A perpetual representation of their supposed victimhood;

• An appeal to Law and Order to redress the supposed grievance;

• An induction of sexual anxiety.

In years past, these were enacted on ethnic minorities; specially and primarily at African-Americans.

Today, a politics of Othering, scapegoating, and persecuting ethnic minorities is no longer politically viable, because society has moved its perception to the point that we now understand that persecution of individuals or groups based on ethnicity is not just hostile, rude, and immoral, but also criminal and outright wrong.

So to maintain their political power & influence, they’ve taken that playbook and turned it to the next page,

• A moral panic of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It should be noted that none of this is new; it’s been in development for decades, and was aimed at lesbians and gay men in the 1970’s and especially during the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s.

But the bigots feel they can get a wedge in to society and the law by aiming their bigoted behaviour and rhetoric at transgender people.

Full disclosure: I am transgender, and have spent the last five years documenting and fighting hatred on Reddit. I have an anti-hatred bias. If that disqualifies my answer as not being “unbiased”, then …

There are three main good faith issues with respect to the API changes.

1: Existing moderation tools were shut down (but later re-enabled)

2: existing third party apps with better moderation tools and better moderation experiences were cut off unless they paid a large amount of money.

3: Spez sneered at the moderators protesting.

The flipside to each of those is:

1: The API features that enabled the moderation tools also enabled stalking and abuse (like, kids viewing porn, as an example)

2: some of the third party apps were blocking Reddit’s advertisements and running their own adverts, while making Reddit bear the costs (fuskering Reddit)

3: some of the people who have been running subreddits are, uh, the kind of people who fondly remember when Reddit hosted racist groups , who are annoyed or angry that Reddit now has expectations that they not set up “roach motel” subreddits to corner unsuspecting visitors to exploit / hives of harassment & abuse, and who are no longer content to just “watch Reddit die” - the crab bucket phenomenon. They’re not sour over the changes - they were already beyond sour and they are using this as a pretext to harass others.

That is why Reddit was forced to close down the API, for the good of the community.

It is when one political party wants to genocide trans people and send gay people to reeducation camps.

Don’t be a pussy, just learn to drink liquor

We did it Lemmy!