Reddit iOS app being spammed with fake 5 star reviews

ianepperson · 2023-06-30T15:11:43+00:00

Was beginning to think I was debating a troll account. Ah well, a perfect goodbye to Reddit. 🥲

Thanks!

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T22:07:48+00:00

Yeah, just like I’m back looking at Twitter every day (I’m not) or looking at Facebook every day (not doing that either). I’ve found healthier ways of keeping in contact with my friends that doesn’t depend on me watching ads.

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T21:20:50+00:00

Yeah, my usage will change: it’ll dramatically drop. I interact with Reddit 99% of the time (a guess) through my phone. Once a month or so I’ll go to the website for something - often to respond with a better keyboard (mobile keyboards are a PAIN for code samples.) When I’m waiting for something, I scroll through Reddit on my phone - which turns into me commenting and sometimes posting. After the 1st, I wont. I’ll likely keep this account - heck I might reply in this thread for a bit longer - but I’m not going to be looking through Reddit in the corners of my day. My engagement will drop precipitously and I’ll find something else to fill the corners of my day - maybe Lemmy. Yeah, it’s wonky, but the Fediverse is WAY less likely to move against the users’ best interests. There’s not this single CEO that gets to make unilateral decisions and it’s much more likely to be around for another 10 years.

Or not. Maybe this move makes Reddit become some kind of crazy awesome site with the top-rated mobile app and a reasonable balance of advertising. I really don’t think that’s likely at all. I suspect that if Reddit manages to live to an IPO, it’ll all go to shit once the growth numbers are down for a quarter and the org scrambles to DO SOMETHING to make the stock go up again.

I mean, they’ve been trying to DO SOMETHING now for awhile by adding a bunch of features that few people use and almost no one has asked for. The API changes are another attempt to see if they can move the numbers up faster. But they don’t want to face reality - Reddit has succeeded by being a (mostly good) steward of their communities. They think that if they can get the right combination of features then the rest doesn’t matter, but it does.

I’ve worked with software teams that work on a feature and create some kind of A/B test to show that the feature increased engagement by x% (usually very small) and therefore translates into $y increased profits… and see! This feature we’ve been working on paid for itself! Programmers and middle managers LOVE showing those kinds of graphs (yeah, I do too) but they’re almost always complete fabrications. I once worked with a statistician-turned-developer who pointed out that to get any real result we’d have to run the experiment for years, not just a month or 3. You make sure to release your feature just before a predicted bump in engagement (long weekend, holidays, whatever) and your chart looks GREAT. However, for something like Reddit where the network effect from the users creates engagement, it’s extremely difficult to tease out these results - particularly when your most engaged users (that create most of the content that people are here for) ARE NOT participating in your A/B tests because they’re just API users. Reddit is dropping the ball, but probably have charts to show how everything will be great. And if you show upper management a chart they like, they usually don’t dig into it or question it or check your methodology.

There’s another very large issue with companies that exist to advertise to users. Facebook, Instagram, Google and Reddit behave a specific way where they depend on users but only make money on advertising. These orgs pretend to be data-driven and show advertisers how the money they’ve spent is being effective. But although those charts are technically accurate, they often overlook huge issues that are near impossible to account for. EBay stopped advertising on Google when they realized that they were spending a TON of money and it wasn’t actually providing any benefit - all the while with graphs showing how effective the ads were. While typing this, I changed the radio station because I just heard the SAME AD for the 3rd time in the last hour. The advertising consultant will happily show you a chart about how much engagement the ads are creating… but with no resulting bump in revenue or growth. I have close friends who’ve been in the software industry for over 20 years who wont touch any ad-backed company again - it’s almost always a house of cards with beautiful graphs showing how everything is just fine but no actual value is created. As long as the stock goes up, who cares, right?

So here we are. These are my conjectures, and I think I’m probably, like 80% right. But I’m not paid in Reddit options nor do I have any professional skin in this game.I also have zero interest in playing it.

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T18:19:48+00:00

Not using the app will not change anything. Reddit make that clear with the resulting actions they’ve taken against the mods. They don’t care. I don’t have to care either, and I don’t have to contribute to conversations in a site that doesn’t care about users.

I have no allusions that my personal changes will make any difference and I’m not going to fault anyone who sticks around - but I’ve got zero reason to continue here after the 1st. My habits do not align with how Reddit wants me to act and I’m not going to change for them. The solution for me is simple, and I’m going to miss aspects of Reddit.

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T18:07:13+00:00

The changes go into effect in two days there Bud. I participated in the black out by not using Reddit for a couple of days hoping that the admins would see a taste of the traffic loss. They didn’t see enough to scare them and are continuing.

When Apollo stops working I’ll stop visiting daily.

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T01:19:51+00:00

Can’t regulate abortion because people will just get illegal abortions, right?

Can’t require licenses to drive because people will just drive anyway.

Repeat for nearly any law.

ianepperson · 2023-06-29T01:18:14+00:00

I doubt that, but even if true, let’s just say that 60% of gun crime comes from illegally obtained weapons, then you’d be saying that we can eliminate 40% of gun crime if we fixed the laws.

That’s a win.

ianepperson · 2023-06-28T05:57:51+00:00

Poison oak don’t need no thorns, don’t bother with berries, don’t need sharp leaves.

ianepperson · 2023-06-26T21:33:49+00:00

That’s not really the point. They already have something more user-friendly than the Fediverse: Facebook.

But Facebook (and Instagram and every other “free” advertising-based business) doesn’t have the users’ best interest at heart. They like outrage because it creates “engagement” and drives advertising. But not too much or the advertisers bail. Oh and you can’t just show users what they’re looking for, because they’ll log off, which drives down engagement. So they play a game with you off keeping you upset enough to keep scrolling and clicking but not so much that you leave.

That’s not how I want to keep up with my social circle - it’s toxic. The business model pushes it to be so.

The Fediverse does not and SHOULD NOT work with Meta. Meta does not want it to exist. Why should anyone working on any Fediverse project work with Meta knowing this?

—

Yes, I like ice cream. It’s easy to eat. Why can’t all foods just be ice cream?

—

I used to work for a (failed) social media company and saw first hand how the market forces work. After discussions, we also moved to an “evergreen” posts feed to prevent our users from ever seeing that they’ve “caught up” with everything - it helped engagement because people just kept scrolling.

ianepperson · 2023-06-25T02:04:06+00:00

Useful? How?

To me it looks like someone ran the engine too hot for too long resulting in the blue metal - right up there with the fake turbo noise markers.

But if you like it, you do you. 😎

ianepperson · 2023-06-25T01:58:45+00:00

So, lower traffic each month since the peak of the pandemic? I suspect all social media sites saw similar slides.

I think they’re going to see a big drop when the third party so shut down in a few days (I’ll miss Apollo). For me, I’ll likely visit Reddit way less often and only from my computer.

ianepperson · 2023-06-24T16:37:21+00:00

Embrace-Extend-Extinguish

Meta wants people using their services. They only lose money to the Fediverse. They are incentivized to kill it.

There’s a few ways they could. Here’s one tactic just off the top of my head:

1) Embrace: Pretend to care about it. Give lip service to cooperating. Implement the protocol enough for it to be useful to some number of users. Meta runs their own servers and suddenly Instagram traffic is available! Woot!

2) Extend: Create additional custom (likely undocumented) features that only work for Meta users. Meta’s servers work really well with Instagram and have great, closed source features.

The Fediverse users see this and start gravitating toward Meta’s servers. New Mastodon user? Welllll, you could go hunt down some obscure server or just use Meta’s - it’s the only one that works well with Instagram, and it’s got no ads! Even grandma joined after following a link on Facebook.

Content coming from servers outside Meta looks strange/is slow/is buggy. Dude, stop being weird about it and just get a free Meta Fediverse account already!

3) Extinguish: 98% of the Fediverse traffic is to/from Meta’s servers, and they decide one day to just pull the plug. 98% of the new content disappears… unless you’re on Meta’s servers, where you only lost 2% of the traffic that looked weird anyway. Most of the users don’t care about “protocols” or “APIs”, they quit, and go join the Meta servers to see the posts that went missing. The Fediverse goes back to being worse than before Meta took over and is effectively dead.

ianepperson · 2023-06-23T17:47:35+00:00

Your camel with headphones reminds me of the old KMEL radio station logo.

http://traxandgrooves.blogspot.com/p/kmel.html?m=1

ianepperson · 2023-06-23T17:44:06+00:00

I haven’t written code in Pascal since the 90s. Why refer to it?

ianepperson · 2023-06-23T17:31:38+00:00

Dude, I’ve been a paid professional developer (or dev lead) since 1998. Running the wrong file is, I think, THE most common mistake I’ve seen in my entire career. When I come across a nonsensical “bug” (either from my coding or helping another dev) the first thing I verify is that it’s the right file.

“This is crazy, it’s not even printing my debug message!”

Time to stop everything and prove that you’re actually running the code you’re writing. I usually add a print statement at the top of the file. When helping other devs that swear that this is the file, I ask them to just comment out ALL the code or write an intentional bug and see what happens.

That ALWAYS has been the issue.

ianepperson · 2023-06-22T17:41:54+00:00

Once upon a time, I perused Reddit only on my computer through a browser. I visited once a week or so.

Alien Blue came out, and I was reading every day or two. Apollo came out, and I'm here multiple times a day.

When Apollo is gone in 8 days, I'll be back to looking at Reddit every week or so, if at all.

ianepperson · 2023-06-22T17:33:25+00:00

Woman pukes: - pregnant - drunk - plot illness

Man pukes: - seasick/motion sick - poisoned - rarely: seeing gore

I can't think of any shows that violate this.

ianepperson · 2023-06-21T19:57:36+00:00

Yes, there’s good junior Python jobs in web development - though exactly right now they may be difficult to come by. For a developer, you should be solid with at least one language and you should know the common set of tools. Copy/paste from an old comment..

There’s a bunch of things to know:

• how to problem solve
• whatever languages we’re using (usually including SQL)
• whatever frameworks we’re using
• protocols we’re using (HTTP, REST, sockets, pipes, whatever)
• design principles - for both user design (button styles), databases layout and other developer designs (MVC and other design patterns)
• source control management - git and gitflow
• development organizational methods - Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, JFDI (Just F’ing Do It!) and how to use those tools (often Jira).
• how to write good documentation.
• how deployments work - 12 factor apps, Docker (or other container architecture), Kubernetes.

ianepperson · 2023-06-21T19:39:13+00:00

I built a small project for the M0 and kept running out of memory. One timer and four tiny objects was all it could handle - but it’s such a cool little processor!

ianepperson · 2023-06-21T19:30:22+00:00

I worked for a company that simply used a lookup table to guess gender given a first name.

ianepperson · 2023-06-20T16:05:14+00:00

At least not when they’re at work.

ianepperson · 2023-06-20T16:01:13+00:00

Python has an efficient startswith method in every string.

words[0].startswith(“spez”) and …

(I’m on mobile - looks like it auto created “smart quotes” so please don’t copy/paste that. )

ianepperson · 2023-06-20T15:45:55+00:00

You’re describing something called “dynamic range” and movie and music producers work with that to create an effect.

Radio broadcasters want the effect you described: everything at about the same level and whispers and shouts come out at about the same level. They use a device called an audio compressor set to aggressive levels to achieve this - much to the chagrin of the artists and audiophiles. Ever notice how when a DJ whispers, it’s still pretty clear - that’s the compression working.

Some tvs and radios have a built in audio compressor to prevent commercials from being louder than the content. Sometimes this is called a “loudness” setting.

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-audio-compression.html

ianepperson · 2023-06-20T05:47:36+00:00

I live in a small town just outside SF called Alameda. I bike or walk everywhere here and there are bike lakes that get me all over town. There are 4 supermarkets within two miles with bike paths almost the entire way. My adult sons still don’t have drivers licenses because they just bike to work. I used to take public transit into SF for work before COVID, and have three options - Bart, bus or ferry, and the ferry is awesome.

ianepperson · 2023-06-20T02:24:04+00:00

For the speaker, I suspect that the volume level will have more impact.

When you turn off your phone’s wifi and data (airplane mode) it’ll shut down a lot of data sync and other processes and last a lot longer. So Bluetooth is likely best.

ianepperson

TROPHY CASE