Tech News: Reddit Goes Dark

This has necessitated the shutdown of several popular apps. So as a refresher, Reddit put in a new fee system, and the more an app needs to reference Reddit, so essentially, the more frequently the app makes requests from Reddit, the more the developer is going to have to pay a monthly fee, and it depends entirely on how many references

the app is making collectively to Reddit. Reddit representatives say that this is necessary because increased activity on the platform drives up hosting costs, and the money to pay those bills has to come from somewhere. Developers say the new fee schedule is prohibitively expensive and that it sure does seem like Reddit is pricing out competitors, which would leave only reddits own app standing in solidarity with these app developers.

The moderators of tons of popular subredits, including the technology Subreddit, have gone private for a couple of days. Also side note, I often use the technology subreddit to keep an eye on tech stories for these episodes because it's a very good aggregation site for that kind of thing. You see lots of people crawling the web and finding cool technology articles. It's incredibly helpful if you want to put together a

news episode. So what I'm saying is that this is also making me work harder, which we all know I hate. But more seriously, whether this is going to prompt Reddit to change its policy, I don't know. I would actually be really surprised if it did. I think it's going to bring a lot more attention to the issue, but I don't know that it's necessarily going to change things.

I think the only thing that would change reddits stance would be either if a lot of people just left the platform entirely, which means there would be fewer people to sell advertising for and that would be a huge drop in revenue, or if there was some sort of official investigation into whether or not Reddit is engaging in anti competitive practices that could also so force a change, But in the lack of either of those things happening, I just don't I don't imagine it will change, But

I could be wrong. Maybe there will be enough pressure on Reddit to at least have them tweak the policy. We'll have to wait and see. The various announcements that loosely speaking, make up the Summer Games Fest are wrapping up this week. Microsoft held its event over the weekend, but one thing the company didn't dive into was the

fate of the Activision Blizzard deal. Now. As I'm sure most of you know, Microsoft announced ages ago now that it planned to acquire Activision Blizzard, which at the time was weathering a pretty big storm with regard to the company's reputation for a toxic work environment and general tolerance toward harassment and that kind of thing. The plan was to have this deal finalized by this summer, been some notable hurdles. Regulators in the UK have refused to allow

the deal to proceed, at least in the UK. They say that it would give Microsoft an unfair market advantage in the sector, particularly with regard to cloud gaming services. Recently, Activision representatives requested that they be able to address this issue when it comes up for appeal with those UK regulators a little bit later this summer. Microsoft reps have argued that the UK is holding things up where regulators elsewhere have given the green light to the acquisition, like

the European Union or regulators in Japan. But that argument is going to be a lot harder to make because the US Federal Trade Commission or FTC, is now seeking an injunction and a temporary restraining order to block the deal. Okay, you might say, well, didn't the FTC already object to this, And the answer to that is yes, they actually challenged the acquisition late last year, back in December of twenty

twenty two. But justice moves slowly, like glacially slow, and so the FTC is looking for this injunction to temporarily stop the deal from closing while the challenge to the deal inches closer to actually making it into a courtroom. And it might seem a bit absurd that a major US government agency would have to get a restraining order to put a temporary block on a deal while the actual case to decide if the deal is even legal

or not meets court schedules. It does sound a little bit mad, as they say, but that's how it works. On Microsoft's side, the request for an injunction might not necessarily be a bad thing because if a court denies that injunction, that could give Microsoft a bit of a legal boost, as it were, and company reps both for Microsoft and Activision have said they're eager to get this matter to the court because in their opinion, it's an open and shutcase that there's no unfair market advantage or

any competitive element to the deal. So maybe we'll see the deal go through despite all these hurdles. Twitter's new CEO, Linda Yakarino, sent out her first official communication to Twitter's staff this week. The memo's title was building Twitter two

point zero Together. Now you might recall that Twitter's previous CEO, a guy named Elon Musk, revealed aspirations of evolving the Twitter service into a much more robust app capable of doing pretty much any basic app stuff, including handling financial transactions.

In the memo, she wrote, quote, it has become increasingly clear that the global town square needs transformation to drive civilization forward through the unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about things that matter most to us end quote. This seems to echo the message of free speech that Elon Musk frequently stated. But that's a message that's actually really muddled, because in the Elon era, it seemed like free speech mostly just applied to Elon and to the

people he liked, but not necessarily anybody else. And yes, I am editorializing, but what I'm saying is backed up by evidence. I mean, you just have to think back to the time when Twitter suddenly started to clamp down on any tweets that contain links to other platforms like Instagram or masted on. Apparently that speech was not allowed to be free. So like when I make these snarky comments,

it's not without reason. Anyway. While I have suspicions as to the sincerity of Twitter's mission, I have to say that our new CEO's communication style is more uplifting and humorous than Elon's typically were. If you read the memo,

it definitely feels a bit more supportive. On that side, it still says you're gonna have to work real hard, like it's repeating that little line, but it's more like a almost like a pep rally kind of we're all in this together and we can do it as opposed to you will do it or you will suffer, which, granted I'm paraphrasing, but a lot of Elon Musk's messages to employees kind of felt like that. But whether any of this translates into real improvement at Twitter, I don't know.

But sticking with Twitter, a user named Alessandro Paluzzi, who describes himself as a leaker, a mobile developer, and a reverse engineer, posted that he found something interesting. A limit to the number of direct messages or DMS you are allowed to send. When you hit that limit, you get a message from Twitter saying you've hit the maximum limit for direct messages in a single day. Sign up for

Twitter Blue to continue messaging. Baluzzi followed that up with quote, currently the limit is five hundred per day, but I bet this limit will be reduced when this will be rolled out end quote. Elon Musk, who still heads up product and development at Twitter even though he's no longer CEO, indicated that the deployment should happen later this week, So I guess we'll see what the limit is once we get there. Is that going to drive more people to

actually subscribe to Twitter Blue. Well, in my experience, folks get really irritated when they're asked to pay for something that previously they were able to access for free. So I have my doubts. And now to talk of Twitter past. Jack Dorsey, one of the co founders of Twitter and the former CEO of the company, alleged that in twenty twenty, the government of India threatened to shut Twitter down in

that country. Why well, according to Dorsey, it's because armers who were protesting the government in twenty twenty were using Twitter to share their thoughts and complaints and criticisms of India's government, and that government officials wanted to shut all that down. In addition, Dorsey says the government wanted Twitter to censor journalists who supported the protests, who or who called into question the government's positions. Government representatives deny these allegations.

They say there were no arrests, there were no raids, there were no shutdowns, but that Twitter had acted in violation of Indian law and that the platform was essentially ignoring India's sovereignty. The matter is a messy one. Twitter initially blocks more than two hundred accounts upon direction of India's government, but then reverse that decision after Twitter says it determined there was insufficient reasons to block those accounts

and cited India's own free speech laws. India's government allegedly then said failure to block the accounts would result in government raids on Twitter offices and a show down, and again the government reps in India deny those claims. Okay, we've got some more news to cover, but first let's take a quick break. We're back. So YouTube is making

it easier to qualify for the YouTube Partners program. This is where you can implement things like tipping and YouTube shopping, where you can sell your own merch and channel memberships and more. It's really a way of monetizing the videos that you put up on YouTube. So previously, in order to qualify, you need to have at least one thousand subscribers and either four thousand watch hours within the past year or ten million views of YouTube shorts within the

last ninety days. But now the requirements have been reduced to five hundred subscribers plus three public uploads over the last night days and at least three thousand watch hours over the last year or three million short views in the last ninety days. This seems to favor people who work in short form content because they're more likely to meet the requirement of having three uploads in ninety days.

But some of my favorite YouTube channels are producing long form content and they publish much less frequently, but their videos get tons and tons of views, like more than a million views. Their work is incredible. So I'm thinking about channels like Folding Ideas or Jenny Nicholson. So a startup channel like those might really make great content and might get lots and lots of views, but it wouldn't necessarily qualify because you wouldn't have the three public uploads

in ninety days. However, maybe YouTube also has a process to consider outliers like that, Like if you are garnering more than a million views per video, it's just that your videos take a longer time to publish because you're making long form content and you're putting a lot of work into them. I imagine YouTube would still consider those for the program, even if on the base of it it doesn't qualify. It just seems like it would be

short sighted not to. Now there is a disturbance in the force, and by force I mean the crypto community and by disturbance, I mean the US Securities Exchange Commission or SEC is taking aim at more than fifty different cryptocurrencies. Why. Well, the SEC argues that a whole bunch of alt coins, which essentially refer to smaller cryptocurrencies that aren't Bitcoin or ether, don't really count as currencies. There instead securities. But what

the heck is a security? Well this isn't a finance podcast, but it comes up all the time in tech news, and frankly, I felt the need to brush up on it myself. So I went to Investopedia, which has their own definition, and they define it as quote fungible negotiable financial instrument that holds some type of monetary value end quote. Thankfully, they also give some examples to clarify things. So stock

in a company is a kind of security. It's fungible, it's negotiable, and it holds monetary value as determined by the market. A bond, likewise, counts as a security, and so securities, Investipedia explains, typically fall into one of three categories. Equity, which means the security represents some percentage of ownership in

something like a company. A second type is debt, meaning you can actually purchase debt that other people owe, and then they have to pay you, so you get the debt payments plus whatever the interest rate is, so you get more than what you purchase the debt for. And then the third type is a hybrid between equity and debt. And here's the real kicker. The SEC has the authority to oversee public sales of securities. It has to be regulated, and crypto coins operate largely in crypto exchanges that are

operating outside the domain of the SEC. So if THEEC is successful in saying yes, these are securities, then they have the authority to oversee those exchanges. And as a result, a lot of crypto exchanges have started to remove the alt coins that the SEC has targeted in various lawsuits because these exchanges don't want to get dinged for allowing

unregulated securities deals. This is actually one of the big things that Binance is currently facing with US regulators, so this could have a very large negative impact on crypto coins, potentially preventing those specific coins from getting funding within the US market calendars. On July eleventh, the Nothing Company will release the second generation of the Nothing Phone aka the

Nothing Phone two. This is the smartphone that can display simple images on the back of the phone has some LEDs on the backside of the phone, which is a clear back like you can see the innards of the phone through the back, but the images that the LEDs show will create basic designs like a basic pattern, and Nothing calls these patterns glyphs, and those glyphs indicate incoming notifications and depending upon the style of the glyph, it can tell you what sort of notification it is, like

a text message versus an email, et cetera. Now, the original Nothing phone got decent reviews, but it wasn't widely available here in the United States. Apparently the phone two will have more of a reach here in the US, and one of the big selling points of the original Nothing phone was a lack of bloatwear, that is, apps that are pre installed on a device that can be difficult or impossible to remove. Nothing It only included a couple of apps on the device that were necessary in

order to operate things like the phone's camera. The underlying operating system of the Nothing phone is a version of Android that, according to reviewers, was pretty closed to stock Android. But we'll have to wait until July eleventh, to find out how the phone too stacks up against its predecessor and the competitors that are already on the market. And now to wrap up with some recommendations, I've got a pair of articles from Wired to recommend. As always, here's

my disclaimer. I have no relationship with Wired, nor do I know the folks who wrote these articles. They may also be behind a paywall. I'm not certain I have a subscription to Wired. In my opinion, it's worth subscribing to, but anyway, First up as an article titled the US is openly stockpiling dirt on all its citizens, written by

Dell Cameron. The article details a report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that shows how various agencies in the US federal govern are buying up enormous databasis of personal information that belonged to American citizens. And considering that's the same sort of shady stuff that folks are worried about with TikTok, I figure it pays to be informed about how the US is doing pretty much the same darn thing. I wouldn't say it's a happy read,

but it's an important one. The second Wired article is by Matt Laslow, and it's titled UFO Whistleblower, Meet a conspiracy loving Congress. Now you might recall from last week I reluctantly talked about a piece written in the Debrief about a former US intelligence employee who claims to have knowledge of the existence of aircraft that was built by some sort of non human intelligence. Now this person hasn't actually seen any of this alleged non human created stuff.

They haven't even seen photographs of it. Instead, they have to rely on second or third hand reports. Anyway, the Wired article talks about how, in our current environment here in the US, unsubstantiated claims can end up going a whole lot further than they used to. It's well worth a read. On a related note, I also recommend the episode of the Michael Shermer Show. It's a podcast, it's also available on YouTube, and it is called is the

Government Hiding Aliens? The too long didn't watch version of the answer is no, but Shermer goes into detail as to why people should be skeptical of these claims. Those are my recommendations. I hope you are all well. I'll be back again on Thursday with more news, assuming you know news happens so I'll talk to you again really soon.

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