For the people rushing in to call this the beginning another great financial crisis: remember that back then the tower of cards that collapsed wasn’t the mortgage backed securities themselves but the spiderweb of derivatives and secondary securitizations built on them.
Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.
I apologize, and I'm embarrassed, I thoughtlessly repeated what my friend from Netflix said in a casual conversation. He specified that his larger org at netflix is hiring only engineers from Poland. That said, I believe the point I made stands.
Libertarianism is a two-part ideology that holds that first, despite all the clear signs around us, the world is simple. In a simple world, what is the point of regulation, policy, or any other collective action, for that matter? Why not abolish everything?
On its face, this isn't an insane point of view. It's natural to look at the scope and complexity of government and as yourself "is all this really necessary?" While it'll never achieve mainstream status, some tinges of libertarianism contribute meaningfully as a counterweight to the tendency of government to grow beyond the point of diminishing returns to society.
The problem is, the ideology has a second, usually unspoken tenet: anyone who suffers brought it upon themselves. Hacker stole your bitcoins? Should have used a hardware wallet. Hospital bills driving you to bankruptcy? This is what you get for not saving for a rainy day. Poisoned by shoddily produced medicine? Hey, you get what you pay for.
It's an ideology of arrogance. Both intellectual arrogance, as its dunning-kruger afflicted adherents look over the vast and complex world and say "how hard could it possibly be?" to every challenge they perceive, and also of moral arrogance, as those same people cast their eyes over the depth of human suffering and inexplicably think "I've got mine, you all are on your own."
The reason why libertarians always lose is because anyone who isn't a billionaire would spend their entire existence looking over their shoulder in terror at the infinite ways life can screw you. And even then they would probably fail. Any reasonable person would gladly hand over the right to sell medicine they mixed in their own basement in exchange for knowing they won't be poisoned when they need help themselves.
I think libertarianism is an ideology that says that people have the right to take responsibility for their own lives and make their own decisions for themselves without getting anyone's permission. That's what I see anyway. I could be hyperbolic and say something like "it's nice that you think human beings are stupid and need a mommy to make all their decisions for them" or "guard rails can be used to lead cattle to slaughter" but I think you just genuinely believe the second point you made. The world might not be simple, but I think humans are perfectly capable of navigating the complexity on their own. That's really the crux of this disagreement. It's an ideology that says human beings are very capable and good when left to their own faculties the vast majority of the time and that it is ineffective to take away their right to self actualize in a failed attempt to try to prevent the instances when that is not the case.
Side note, dunning Kruger has been discredited as statistical bias, I only know because I see a post about it on this site almost once a week.
So, "moderator bots and other tooling using our Data API" and concerns around that "[falling] into the free API tier" is definitely not the only issue cited in the link I provided.
Edit: Not only that, shifting mod tools to the free tier doesn't magically solve the fiscal issue third-party apps have and will still result in them shutting down. A huge part of the reason mods use those third-party apps is because Reddit's own app doesn't provide the tools they want/need. To the point of the other person who responded to you, Reddit has absolutely dangled a carrot that does nothing in an effort to seem like they're being helpful.
Non-concessions dangled (that were never demanded as dangled but which most observers think were) are far more effective than demanded concessions given. Your comment illustrates that nicely.
Honestly, good. Protest is fine and good, but what exactly are we protesting for here? The rights of a minority of users to freeride on a platform that gave them ten years of free API access? The right of third party app developers to make practically 100% margin on apps whose backend Reddit pays for?
The initial announcement and AMA were ham-fisted, to be sure, but at this point these protests are getting ridiculous. Tens of millions of people are prevented from enjoying their communities because a quixotic crusade of a literal handful of moderators? These people rule their little online fiefdoms with an iron fist, and the entire internet suffers. If I were in charge of Reddit I'd replace them, too.
Reddit is just where a community posted up. Reddit is free-riding off the efforts of the community, it is a lopsided arrangement. Reddit is not a challenging software platform to replicate, there are already platforms ready to be migrated to.
They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.
If the community decides to leave, it won't be because of API pricing, it'll be because the content and spaces they used to enjoy were taken offline because of a minority of moderators.
Moderators and content creators. The majority of Reddit users are lurkers. They never contribute anything, they don’t even comment.
The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.
All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.
I think you didn't see the amount of popular support these actions had. Many subreddits put it to a vote to go dark or not. The ones I am a part of were 90%+ in support.
If "the community" is upset at the moderators, they can take solace in the fact that the communities are almost certainly coming back - it's just a matter of if it's under new management or not.
The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.
I looked at one reddit: r/science. That is blockaded now. A 'private community'. This is (was) an aggregator of SCIENCE news and information. How does blocking the flow of potentially life-saving information help "the cause"?
I left precisely because of API pricing. I'm not using Reddit's shitty mobile app. I see the writing on the wall. old.reddit.com will be gone within a few years along with RES. I won't suffer that.
I mean if they follow your plan and replace the moderators of the subreddits I enjoy then I'm done with Reddit. Reddit can't expect to freeride off various communities and then kick out mods without a reasonable excuse, and this definitely does not classify.
And if they allow popular subreddits to remain private indefinitely then a lot more users will leave than just the ones who oppose the API changes. Better to force communities back open and let the most obstinate users leave than keep them private to satisfy the feelings of that obnoxious minority.
The most 'obstinate' users are the content creators and people actually driving those Reddits. I would hope you're familiar from the history of social media websites what happens when you drive out the users creating content.
People love a good bandwagon too, this will live or die by the PR it gets. People will leave if their favourite community gets messed with and the messaging falls flat, given how tone deaf they have been so far the odds of that are high.
I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.
Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.
Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.
Which happened because of API pricing? The moderators are why the community works at all at this scale. They're also how reddit makes the site palatable to advertisers. That's just the current controversy anyway, Reddit inc has been making numerous user hostile choices and their choice to push third party apps away is clearly not for the benefit of the community.
And if they didn't do anything you'd have said that these mods are too proud to move away from power for a few days and absolutely cannot listen to their community.
And that's their right. Many subs announced they would protest for 48 hours to prove a point, at which point they returned. But a moderator who continues to keep their sub private indefinitely is not protesting a decision, they are defacing their subreddits and harming their members. Removing such a moderator is the appropriate thing to do.
The damage here is what Huffman & board are pulling. They can have their website and free moderation back after they grow up and change their attitude.
Aren't all protests essentially extortion? We will sit here until you give into demands. We won't work until you give into our demands. We will crowd the streets until you give into our demands.
>It's saying "if I can't enjoy this subreddit the way I want to, no one can."
Who has said that users shouldn't be allowed to use the new app? I haven't seen even a single instance of that. The problem is that Reddit - the centralized entity with power - is forcing that to be the only option.
Reddit could be reasonable and continue to permit both. Until they decide to be reasonable the protests will continue. If Reddit gets butthurt and wants to call organized collective action "extortion" they can, but their childish whining isn't impressing anyone who has two brain cells to rub together.
You could make the argument that it's a reasonable API price compared to other social media sites. What I really wish is they made a distinction between people signing into Apollo to use the app and Apollo making API calls, although I suppose they're probably trying to push people onto their app to improve ad revenue
Looks like most of the layoffs are in marketing and sales, and that they're still hiring on engineering and product. Honestly, I'm surprised they had marketing and sales people to begin with. Those sorts of efforts pay off most with big-name, high-end artists who probably don't need monthly patrons to be successful. Focusing in improving the product seems like a smarter move, especially given how janky their product was until quite recently.
These "user generated content companies" spend a lot of time and money marketing to the content creators (Patreon is defending against the built-in platform monetization of things like Youtube and Twitch, et al) and getting big name content creators on their platform (see some of the leaks related to Onlyfans, etc al).
I’m about as far from a crypto defender as you can get, but I think this page misses the point. If El Salvador is planning to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, which by all accounts they are, their being “up” or “down” must be measured by the size of the economic activity that Bitcoin allowed them to facilitate. That figure is harder to get at.
Viewed this way, the additional purchases which seem foolish and laughable might even be signs of success: perhaps Bitcoin business is booming so hard they need to expand their reserves?
To be clear, I highly doubt that’s the case here, but if we’re going to assess success we should at least try to steelman their position. There’s plenty to mock about this change without taking cheap shots.
They're investing FX reserves in Bitcoin. Their imports are not priced in Bitcoin. Bitcoin going down relative to the currencies they import in hurts El Salvador's ability to finance them. Which raises borrowing costs [1]. Which leads to exporters demanding earlier payment [2].
San Salvador has less than three months' imports in reserves [3][4][5]. Their Bitcoin experiment has scared off crisis lenders [6]. There is no good ending for them right now.
Thanks for the sources to read further in the topic! I was always curious to know how their “experiment” was going to turn out and it seems like the results so far aren’t good
> was always curious to know how their “experiment” was going to turn out and it seems like the results so far aren’t good
They were in a bad position to start with. There was no happy ending even if they'd done everything right.
But had they spent the boom years borrowing cheaply where possible, renegotiating and paying off expensive debt where necessary, moderating fiscal expansion and fighting violence around their tourist centers, they would have had better options. Instead, they voted in a magician.
San Salvador is between a rock (currency crisis prompting food and fuel shortages) and a hard place (austerity and an IMF loan).
El Salvador is the country, "San Salvador" is standing in for "The Government of El Salvador". Or the leadership, executive, etc.
Like when news articles say, "U.S. trade deficits are widening. Washington appears to be pursuing domestic development efforts rather than the protectionist measures floated by many".
They're not trying to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
They're trying to funnel people into their own centralized crypto app, where people may (or may not) be allowed to send Bitcoin via the Lightning Netowrk.
Maybe the larger point is that bitcoin is too volatile a currency to be used as a medium of exchange? Surely they must be holding on to a decent amount of BTC and as such lost value, if not the government itself, then at least the country as a whole.
Currently, Bitcoin adds zero value, even if it was used for every single transaction in the country.
Currencies are not money because they don't store value. Bitcoin was a promise to be money in the full sense.
It's ability to store value is questionable, since it became a highly speculative and fraud facilitation asset. And the other aspects of being money are worse than currencies.
El Salvador has a trade deficit and can't print USDs; part of the point of adopting BTC was to allow Salvadorans abroad to send money into the country without paying wire fees.
I bet they could’ve put together an agreement with TransferWise or OFX to issue digital wallets to citizens and expats for facilitating more efficient remittance at scale for less money than what they’ve wasted on crypto losses.
the same argument can be said about literally every non-crypto currency. A US dollar doesn't have any "value" other than the small amount of heat you get if you burn your paper bills.
You pay taxes in USD, USD is legal tender for debts, you are incentivized to borrow in USD and finally because the dollar is widely accepted even beyond the borders of the US.
Money is really only meant to be a relationship between people which tracks how much they owe each other, the value isn't derived from money itself but from the network effects of many humans engaging in economic activity.
5% inflation obviously ruins the store of value aspect but it hasn't stopped anyone from sending or accepting inflating money. The idea that a merchant would refuse USD because it lost 95% of its value compared to eighty years ago or whatever is unheard of and doesn't seem to bother merchants as long as they can re-adjust prices quickly enough.
The last one is the most important. If everyone in El Salvador accepts Bitcoin then Bitcoin will act as money just like any other currency.
> same argument can be said about literally every non-crypto currency. A US dollar doesn't have any "value" other than the small amount of heat you get if you burn your paper bills.
Or the food and fuel one can import with it, which one can't with Bitcoin.
I find that something magical happens when you write things out by hand. Thinking slows down, you subconsciously explore the problem, and your expression becomes much more deliberate.
Also, you activate more of your capabilities as a thinking creature that way. Why just approach a problem with your fingertips on a keyboard when you can activate your visual, spatial, and temporal processing capabilities?
Personally, I’ve recently fallen in love with Leuchtturm notebooks. I bought the great big 83+ one, a nice Japanese mechanical pencil, and I’ve been going to town on problems ever since.
Obviously everyone who invested in MBS’s lost their shirt, but the general economy was hurt by the sheer level of exposure to MBS’s and the suddenness with which the realization of their corruption hit. I’m no expert, but I see no reason to believe a similar level of exposure and surprise is at play here.