1. Clicking on a link now takes you to the comments page, instead of the destination. To get to the destination, you need to hunt down the "direct" link. This is a shitty pattern.
2. The spacing is all weird. I just don't like the design aestheticially. But it might just be "it's different and therefore bad".
3. A lot of features aren't yet implemented on the new platform. (Crossposting, at least.)
4. Some content that I want available immediately (my multis) are loaded asynchronously, forcing me to wait before I can actually go to where I want.
5. Infinite scroll can fuck off and die in a fire. It's less of an issue on reddit, where bookmarking a given page doesn't really make sense anyway, but in principle I want my content paginated so I can have a sense of how much I've seen so far.
6. Collapsing threads is now slightly more annoying than it was, although it might be another case of "new and different therefore bad".
Some of these aren't really relevant to a link to a specific thread from outside reddit.
It's a lightbox-infested mess that badly reimplements browser features like "tabs" and "back button" with so much needless JS that my laptop's fan goes to 100% of rated RPM.
Also the design takes up lots of screen real-estate with cutesy useless features.
Personally I feel it is optimized for constant dopamine and advertisement, at the cost of content density.
Previously, I could navigate to a subreddit, relatively quickly glance at whether anything was new, without being distracted by autoloading images and videos. Now reddit looks more like ebaumsworld 10 years ago.
If you’re not on mobile, it takes for me like 4 times as long to load a page. And there’s all kinds of dark UI patterns to prevent things like linking away from the site or even searching the site.
How it looks, how it behaves, how it performs. If they implement it, I will finally be able to break the addiction, and will probably sell off my 11 year old account.
It breaks keyboard navigation in some cases that I've been unable to identify why. I think that the new style of loading pages in a div on top of the underlying page sets the focus wrong or something but often pgup/pgdown will not work.
When I went to start streaming the world cup, AT&T took the initiative to "sign me in" to a third party (Fox) without asking for credentials or permission.
They know who you are. They know everywhere you go. And they are happy to spread what they know about you around.
When I used AT&T TV+internet a few months ago, this was still the old-style "click here to auth with your cable provider" -> [click the AT&T Uverse button] -> "thanks!" (they recognized I was on a hardwired AT&T connection so didn't require auth).
Is this something new? What was the flow? Do you have both AT&T internet + TV as well?
Have you used your login for any other TV service? The OTT industry has settled on a pretty broad single sign-on ecosystem. If you've logged into any OTT service with your crendentials, you likely don't need to do it again for any other service.
No. I've got Firefox configured to nuke almost everything on restart, plus I run PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin. This is not me overlooking an existing login.
(I also run a site-specific browsers via Chrome to isolate my Gmail login and keep Google from knowing who I am, I have no Facebook login, etc. I'm not serious enough to run a VPN or Tor, and my setup isn't enough to guard against browser fingerprinting, but I'm reasonably paranoid.)
Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID.
But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but no impediment to other.
Why is this bad? I’m on thier network, they know I’m a customer, why not sign me in.
I bought my dad a Roku TV for his birthday and the idea of having to go to website, login with his cable companies userid and password and then use the one time code displayed on his TV,confuses him to no end.
It would be "convenient" if AT&T's CEO were to appear in my boudoir tomorrow morning to give me a pedicure, comb my beard, spritz me with Axe Body Spray, and tie my bow tie. But before they decide to do that, I'd like a say in the matter.
Honestly, at this point I'm just waiting for the internet to implode so we can start something better. No more signing 'petitions' for me, which go straight to whatever senator's trash.
Or we could work to make sure that traffic is always encrypted. Solving the ISP knowing who your packets are going to is more difficult, but no longer having clear data passing back and forth should have been a solved problem by now.
On one side: Net neutrality is dead, so you can see where AT&T might see a future for expanding their advertising business. But on the other side: Between GDPR and the constant calls for the US to adopt something similar, the default integration of ad blockers into more browsers, and the fact that targeted advertising just... isn't all that effective, it seems like a poor business to start investing in now.
>default integration of ad blockers into more browsers
Good idea! The only way this could fail is if some huge advertising company had created their own browser and became dominant on the market. We would be so screwed! XD
>it seems like a poor business to start investing in now.
Allegedly they're buying it to integrate into their TV offerings. There's a huge market there that's relatively untapped at the moment compared to Display so it makes some sense.
Part of me is terrified that someone who has all my details just bought a firm that can trad on them. (It’s economic magic though - as if the Federal Reserve bought a hedge fund)
But part of me says that when one dinosaur buys another, the end result is rarely Excellence. I suspect that this will wind up a disaster and write-off.
Been blocking ads for years pretty thoroughly. Its a trillion $ industry that might as well not exist really.
My advice: buy an unlocked Android phone. Throw DNS66 on it to block in app ads. Use browsers that support ublock origin, I advise Fennec which is Firefox for Android stripped of the Mozilla crap.
How is Fennec on the battery life? I tried firefox on android several years ago and uninstalled immediately due to battery consumption. Has that story changed?
There ought to be some sort of regulation preventing this sort of thing - like the Glass-Steagall Act in banking that mandated separation of investment banking and commercial banking operations.
GS was created so an implosion on the banking side didn’t kill our savings accounts.
In general antitrust is more about preventing Coke from buying Pepsi than Coke buying It’s bottlers or Kroger. The idea was vertical integration isn’t as harmful on consumer prices as horizontal.
I think in this case it’s more about something like GDPR.
My analogy was based on means, not ends. GS split investment banking ops from consumer banking. Similarly something could separate the consumer data business from the telco/infrastructure business.
But sure, GDPR works just as well; even better perhaps. Although GOOD LUCK getting something like that to pass through US legislature. Especially when the legislative has already allowed ISPs to freely trade in consumer traffic (meta)data. You can find a preliminary coverage here https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/28/house-vote-sj-34-isp-regul...
But indeed, I do agree that a GDPR-clone is overdue in the US. While I hope it comes to fruition, I also hope it isn’t hopelessly bastardized and rendered toothless by the lobbyist lot.
Well, since ISPs are now free to sell / monetize consumer traffic data [0], this makes some sense. They are pretty desperate for ways to be something more than a dumb pipe for other's content.
Absence (with the threat of regulation) is a very different state than an explicit ban on regulation (via the CRA) and what amounts to a governmental endorsement of their move into ad tech.
You're correct that the rules never went into effect, but they also had no reason to invest in ad tech with the (increasingly probable) regulation looming in the future.
And, with the current FCC, I expect more forced "channeling" of customers/users into said integration.
I wrote Congress regarding net neutrality. I got one response -- and that not from my own representatives. And, despite my pointing this behavior out in my original letter, it just continued to shill the ATT, Comcast, Verizon, et al. talking points.
Right now, at home, on the connection Comcast just raised the monthly cost of by circa 30% since the beginning of this year, I'm using a VPN to keep their nose (and JS injection) out of my business.
I reiterate: We need a competing physical layer. One that we keep from getting likewise co-opted.
Interesting answer to Verizon's acquisition of AOL + Yahoo, until all the recent acquisitions I (naively) just assumed ISP's revenue was primary from selling services (cable, internet, tv, data, etc) and reselling the data somehow, but did not connect that they're all very much in adtech...
I am more surprised to see Oracle in adtech. I assumed ATT would want a piece of the pie when I read about Verizon's supercookies. I think I still fail to grasp the size of the ad tech/marketing industry. I know it is big but I think it is bigger than I can comprehend.
Make your own with a box in AWS or any other cloud provider running something like Strongswan on Linux or iked on OpenBSD.
All the out of the box VPNs I've found have some shortcomings, either being horribly insecure (PPTP, seriously?), overpriced, often abused (which means their entire subnet is banned by pretty much everything) and the providers sometimes seem shady (I want a VPN to escape cancer aka ads, not the government - in this case I'd actually prefer something akin to an ISP complying with local laws versus a "bulletproof" one who could very well be a fly-by-night operation up to no good).
Lots of gaming traffic is also banned. People use AWS for malicious purposes (usually free tier) and then the IP gets recycled, eventually, to a legitimate user.
Popular cloud hosts with a freemium option are a bad idea for personal vpn.
Getting a VPN just means some other company knows your browsing history. Also, I doubt any VPN service can reliably deliver the native speed of my gigabit internet.
With IPO rumors existing for at least 4 years and a price under $2B, is this a good exit for the company’s leadership and employees? (Understanding that an exit is better than nothing at all!)
I wonder if they are getting their definition of privacy from the same place they get their definition of unlimited?