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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2021

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  • Hmm, it’s truly not ideal, but while I certainly don’t want to defend them (just playing devil’s advocate a bit here lol), IMO application-based payments do make more sense than user-based. I assume way more people use more than 1 account than there are people who use more than 1 client. If that assumption is correct, the current system is very much in favor of the majority of users.
    But it’s indeed a bad solution for the 3rd party app devs to act as some kind of middleman for the payments. The only better alternative I can think of would’ve been to let users add their alts to their subscription, but that would need a system to detect and punish shared subscriptions.

    That the fees are too high might be true, I don’t have any insight on that - but Relay Pro has tiers from (in Germany) €1.09 to €5.49 (+ optional higher tiers for application support), the 5.49 tier being with unlimited API calls.
    This surely isn’t cheap, at least in the category of social media apps, which is 99% free (but usually ad-supported, which Relay isn’t), but not unfeasible. Generally speaking, i.e. regardless of category, ad-free usage (which is what API access is from reddits perspective) for €5.50 is actually cheap. Most apps and services charge around the same or more for that.

    That being said, I was obviously not in favor of that change either. And Reddit sucks at communicating what specifically they’re gonna do. But I also gotta say, the way it turned out in the end wasn’t too bad/unfair - at least not in my experience as a paying API user. Might be (and probably is) a different story for the developers, as the amount of shut-down 3rd party apps indicates. Reddit should’ve just worked out something together with these devs, then I’m sure the backlash and outrage wouldn’t have been half as large.

    Either way, I’m happy to be here now.





  • Germany, but limited to comedy (cause I don’t really watch any shows, but if I do then it’s comedy):

    • Stromberg - a German office show, focused on just one department with an absolute dickhead for a boss. But the worker characters are great too.
    • Pastewka - a series of the actor/comedian Bastian Pastewka where he basically plays himself in his private life. Often compared to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but while there are similarities it’s a totally different character IMO.
    • jerks - basically the title, two friends who are jerks. They’re often getting into awkward situations and try to resolve them with lies and brazenness.

    I love them all three, hard to pick one as the best. Probably Stromberg.


  • For me it’s API usage for the most part.
    When they locked the API, I was even fine with paying a bit, so I subscribed to Relay Pro. But now I got a degoogled phone, so I can’t use my play store subscription anymore, and don’t want to fiddle with cracked APKs or patching either.
    The original reddit app is a nightmare to use so… that’s why I’m here lol

    (Freedom, privacy and decentralization are awesome too, obviously. But I’m gonna be honest, I probably wouldn’t have switched - at least not fully - if it wasn’t for having an app that works well for me.)




  • Honestly, having to have the user type “I agree that I have verified the application i am trying to install is genuine and not a fraudulent app”

    Yeah, this would be the most promising approach IMO. Whenever I was forced to write something, I did pay more attention to what that said than if I ticked a box next to it.

    Maybe even have them write “I am not instructed to install this app by someone else. I am aware that following instructions to install an app this way often have fraudulent intentions”.

    (Also if the language was changed recently, it should ask to write it in all languages that were set within the last 14 days or so. Otherwise the scammer will have them switch the language so they don’t understand what they’re writing)




  • Yeah I get that but the way I experienced it is that ads can appear in a podcast in any of the following three instances:

    • Podcaster themselves record the podcast, may or may not add advertisement (self-spoken in their language)
    • Podcast network which the podcaster is a member of adds ad break time codes, in which later ads are inserted, dynamically based on the listener’s location (pre-spoken, usually in the local language of the listener’s location, sometimes personalized)
    • The podcast player/platform (Spotify, Pocket casts, antennapod etc) adds advertisements (also pre-spoken and in local or app language, more often personalized)

    The podcast player’s ads can not be distinguished from the podcast network’s ads, except that they have a higher tendency for personalized ads (given that personalization is enabled in the privacy settings) or if the player declares it as an advertisement in a place where the podcast can’t. Or if you know that a podcast is on an ad free network. Other than that, you don’t really know if it’s an ad by Spotify or the podcast’s network.

    My point is that, unless your player is explicitly declaring an ad as such, you cannot diatinguish a podcast network’s ad from a player ad. The only proof I have to know it’s a network’s ad in my case is that my player is open source and ad free. If I used a closed source commercial player, I wouldn’t know from who the ad is coming when it’s in my local language.
    I’m German too and got German ads on english podcasts, but I know that the player didn’t insert it, so you can never be too sure if it’s Spotify adding them either.



  • TLDR: I know it because the ads were German but the podcast is in English.

    That can still happen and happens to me too, despite using a no-ad FOSS player, so the ads are definitely from the podcast, not the player.
    Dynamic ad insertion is absolutely a thing in podcasts. If you access/download the MP3 file on the server from a German IP address, a German ad will be put in at the specified ad break before you/your player downloads the file.

    So a different language ad doesn’t mean it’s from Spotify.

    (PS: By the way, using a VPN connected to a country where not many companies make podcast ads works basically like a podcast ad blocker. I route my podcast player through an Albania VPN and have like 80% less ads than before. The remainder is “classic” podcast ads that are inserted as a static part of the MP3 file, no way to get rid of those.)



  • I’m probably quite biased being German myself, but I feel like that things like privacy and security tend to be more important to Germans than to other folks. And I don’t speak just about the tech bubble, it shows everywhere.

    To give a random example, when a license plate has been blurred in a photo posted anywhere, chances are high it’s been posted by a German. Despite the fact that there is no license plate lookup (like carfax for US, finnik.nl for Netherlands, car.info for Sweden etc) so a license plate wouldn’t even reveal anything to anyone, yet we treat it like a secret on instinct. If you ask such a German why he blurred it, he probably won’t have a reasonable response, he just does it because he feels like it.

    Getting back to topic, this might not be the only explanation, but I’m pretty sure it’s a noticable factor why Germans are especially present on platforms like this, i.e. platforms that tend to respect the user’s privacy more than the big tech corporations.