For the U.N. and international prosecution of genocide, intent is important—there has to be evidence that a government set out deliberately to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. …

there is some evidence to suggest that the Trump administration did in fact intend to use COVID-19 to target certain political and racial groups. According to reporting from Vanity Fair, Trump’s son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner shelved a federal COVID-19 testing plan because he believed that the virus would mostly affect Democratic states, and the administration could then blame Democratic governors for deaths. Blue Democratic cities are disproportionately home to Black people and other minority populations. A federal plan to allow deaths in blue states inevitably and predictably disproportionately facilitated the deaths of Black people and other people of color.

Black death rates and Hispanic death rates from COVID-19 were 2.3-2.5 times those of white people, according to the CDC. Indigenous death rates were 2.2 times those of white people.

Wow, that is pretty damning. The only reason it might technically not be genocide is that he targeted a political group, (which just happens to have the most minority members,) as a proxy for specifically targeting minorities themselves.

Ironically, their denial of pandemic reality seems to have ultimately led to more Republican deaths than Democratic:

Average excess death rates in Florida and Ohio were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats from March 2020 to December 2021

So you’re saying we need an ad-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker-blocker.

I thought links between domains helped pagerank score? Mind you, it’s been a while since I learned SEO. A lot of the content, especially the federated stuff, seems to be loaded via javascript. I wonder if that affects what can be indexed.

Ever tried looking at youtube while in incognito mode? What’s popular is a hellscape of lowbrow garbage that makes reality tv look downright erudite. I still like the site when it shows me all the channels I’ve curated, but otherwise, goddamn…

This will lead to an increase of ad-blocker-blocker-blocker development.

I read somewhere that a lot of the API pricing has to do with people training LLM’s on reddit comments for free; reddit wants to get paid for it. I guess they’ll just have to scrape instead. /shrug

There’s still a lot of tracking that can be done via api calls but you’re right that they lose ad revenue and UI/click info.

I don’t know how to feel about this, that’s the app I use and was mad about losing… I already bought the paid version a long time ago but now it’s moving to a subscription model so I guess that doesn’t count anymore…

The base subscription could cost $2 per month, with an extra $1 for message notifications to account for the additional API calls that such polling incurs.

I’m getting used to the slight UI differences but it has a similar vibe. The biggest difference to me is the server/global federated dynamic. I like that it’s owned by individuals running communities rather than a megacorp mining data and engagement for profit. I’m also on mastodon, but I never used twitter so I feel like there’s fewer expectations to unlearn.

I’ll be darned, looks like voat shut down a few years ago.

Digg was a site that was a lot like reddit, it was incredibly popular until they did a site redesign that many users hated and they were unable to roll back, engagement went way down, users looked for alternatives, and reddit got most of the refugees. I haven’t been back on digg for many years.

I thought reddit learned its lesson from digg given they kept legacy old.reddit.com running even after their own redesign, but they failed to remember that 3rd party interfaces to their API is almost the same thing; users like interfacing with their social media using the UI/UX design they chose and grew accustomed to. If they take that away, it risks alienating users and driving them to alternatives.

If reddit was smart they’d make it so that people with reddit gold can keep using API access instead of locking them out entirely.

Cool, well the reason I’m here instead of on reddit is because of this. Last time I did this was when I found reddit after digg.