Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has given an enlightening interview with The Verge about the controversy surrounding its move to a paid API. In it he says that "we're not going to subsidize other people's businesses for free" and that the "API usage is about covering costs". When asked if apps like Apollo add value to Reddit and are worth supporting, "not as much as they take. No way". He went on to finish the interview arguing that "the blackouts are not representative of the greater Reddit community". In an interview with NBC he called the moderators of subreddits gone private, "landed gentry" that are "not democratic" and "plans to pursue changes to Reddit's moderator removal policy to allow ordinary users to vote moderators out more easily if their decisions aren't popular". Strap in, shit's gonna get messy.
I did not expect to be writing about Megaupload again, but here we are in the middle of 2023 and two executives/coders/large shareholders of Megaupload, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk, have been sentenced to 2.5 years in a New Zealand jail. The Megaupload story should be well known by now - they hosted a shitload of copyrighted material and did practically nothing to remove it when forced to by the copyright owners. In 2012 the FBI prodded New Zealand (where Megaupload's execs, including boss Kim Dotcom was based) to arrest and extradite them to the USA. Finn Batato was diagnosed with terminal cancer during the trial and died a year ago, Kim Dotcom is still appealing his extradition to the USA and these two guys gave and took the relatively sweet deal of just a few months in an NZ jail before they're out on parole.
Google is ditching their domain registration business and selling it to Squarespace. This impacts more people than I realised as many domains were sold alongside Google Workspace accounts. Starting in the third quarter of 2023, those domain names will have Squarespace as the registrar and that's where you go to manage them (i.e: setting your name servers and perhaps some DNS settings like A, CNAME and MX records too). Just another piece of evidence that demonstrates how Google is thoroughly uninterested in any business that doesn't directly relate to selling ads. I fear for Google Photos, one of my favourite Google products, as it doesn't appear to have any ads involved like say, Google Maps (the best Google product) which is full of ads.
Google Lens just got a new feature to detect skin conditions. According to the blog post, "take a picture or upload a photo through Lens, and you'll find visual matches to inform your search. This feature also works if you're not sure how to describe something else on your body, like a bump on your lip, a line on your nails or hair loss on your head". It's obviously available on Android phones, but also on iOS via the Google app. I just tried it out on a wart on my arm and it didn't do a damn thing, just dumped me in an image search of other weird looking skin conditions from the internet, many with links to pages not in English. Useless.
Here's five interesting discussions over on The Sizzle's paid subscriber forum for you to enjoy over the weekend. If you are not a paid subscriber but want to get involved, visit https://thesizzle.com.au/payme to get onboard.
Print, 'Connected Loneliness', wood engraving by Leonie Bradley, 2017. (Victoria and Albert Museum)
📻 How I Could Just Kill a Man - Cypress Hill
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