Simon and Garfunkel: The Boxer

We’ll be telling our grandchildren that we remember the time /u/spez did an AMA…

I used to worry about us over here in the UK being judged badly over Brexit, but you guys have, er, trumped us. This is fun to watch from 5000 miles away, but I’d hate to be there.

What’s the betting he’ll back down in some way (which was the plan all along)? That way they’ll get what they originally wanted but will look as if they’ve “listened”.

I’m not sure I believe that will happen though, tbh.

Heardle. Like Wordle but for music.

The blackouts will make no difference to Reddit’s plans. The API charge will come in. The content creators and moderators will leave. The content will go stale. The smart shareholders will cash in early; the dumb ones will hang on for the prospect of a greater return which won’t materialise. Once the content is stale, the readers and lurkers will leave. Reddit will become a has-been, a memorable item of internet history like so many other sites.

A music playout system. I put on an internet radio-like show each week and I needed a way to play music. The only solutions I could find were for Windows but my desktops are all Linux so I wrote my own.

It differs a bit from the more usual “music player”. I need to know how long until the track ends and how long until it starts to fade out. I also want to add lots of comments so that I can talk about the tracks I’m playing.

Over time I’ve added other features - tabbed playlists, automatic lookup of titles on Wikipedia, estimated start/end times for tracks I’ve yet to play, ability to edit mp3 tags and - well, quite a lot more. It’s just grown over time as I’ve needed things.

I call it MusicMuster, but I haven’t actually open sourced it yet. I mean to, but imposter syndrome keeps popping up. I’ll just make the code a bit better, remove that hack, etc. Maybe you know how it is.

It’s inevitable and won’t be stopped. See Cory Doctorow’s article on the future (and current state of) TikTok, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Reddit is the same. Reddit as we knew it is gone: move on.

Reddit is determined to “go commercial”. It’ll be successful at first because there’s a wealth of good data in Reddit. However, those who contribute rather than just consume will drift away. The content becomes stale (who wants recommendations for great Bluetooth headsets from 2015?).

Cory Doctorow wrote an excellent article on how TikTok, Facebook, Amazon and more have become worse, and why. It was written in January before Reddit’s API announcement, but it applies to Reddit every bit as much as the others. It’s worth a read: Tiktok’s enshittification