orcrist

Vodka. I had a bit too much of it a few times (100% my own fault, don't copy me) and now I can't stand the taste at all.

Oh I think pervert is an understatement. The courts have clearly ruled that he's far beyond that level.

There are more than two options. Obviously.

I hosted websites on my own hardware for 20 years and it worked out well Recently I've been using a VPS, and that has many benefits and drawbacks. Is it worth paying for the VPS? Maybe. That all depends on your situation.

I don't know the game, but definitely an Atari.

Depends on what the machine is for.

I'm as reliable as you pay me to be. Give me a 3-year contract with guaranteed raises and see what happens.

If you want to go way back, take a look at old BBSes or Usenet. The flame was commonly deployed. For many decades now people have used the internet to look at pictures of cats and also to talk trash or otherwise say horrible things. I don't think Reddit is different in any major way, except that on subs that were decently managed, many of the worst commenters were banned and the worst comments were often down voted into oblivion. It really did depend on the subreddit.

The fact that some people behave like assholes is not in itself anything indicative about a website working well or poorly. In real life some people behave like assholes some of the time too. Of course we have and should continue to take reasonable steps to deal with much of the badness, but we should never expect or aim for perfection on this front.

I remember when Google Chat added XMPP support. I already ran my own server but some of my friends we're happy enough to use Google. And that was good for a while, but at some point Google had enough people running its own chat that it could simply shut off external XMPP traffic. That was a sad time, because we could have had a federated decentralized chat protocol that dominated the internet, much like email does for its particular purpose, and instead we got fragmented chaos.

The same thing could happen with the fediverse in various ways. So hey, if some commercial entity wants to run their own server, that's cool, but we need to keep reminding our friends of the dangers of relying on that commercial entity.

Twitter's rate limiting has been reported as perhaps being a failure to pay bills or otherwise properly manage their servers, and not some specific policy change. So that particular example might not be what you were focusing on or what you meant to focus on. Obviously Twitter made many other decisions, and the recent big one is cutting off access to tweets for people who are not logged in.

As for Reddit, the price of the API is not the point. Rather, the price is so high that nobody's going to use the API, and that's the point. But they want to pretend that it's still possible to be used. And we know this is true because if the API really has such high value, then presumably some of the popular clients out there would have been worth it for Reddit to purchase, and the purchase price would presumably have some correlation to API usage.

On a more general level, though, I think what you're talking about is the process known as "enshittification". It's possible for social media companies to avoid this end result, but it requires great care especially in the early stages.