Bonum Certa Men Certa

Reddit and the 'Modern' Web Are Spying and Profiling (Plus Censorship) Engines



Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

Reddit Implements a Social Credit Score Which Only Administrators Can See.



Reddit has implemented a new Social Credit Score.



It is being lampooned on Lemmy, a “federated” Reddit clone that is only truly improved in the sense that it is not a Chrome App that spies on the user.



When I was banned from most of Reddit, I had a “karma” of over 20,000 which means most users found me incredibly insightful.



The people doing the banning are toxic, and in the case of /r/Linux, they are puppets of Microsoft.



I wonder how long the Social Credit Score has actually been around before they admitted to it.



There’s almost no actual discussion on Reddit anymore because they’ve terrified people into this self policing or banned or driven off all the normal people with punishment for the moderators just not liking them.



Now all they have left are subreddits filled with pornography.



Apparently this is fine.



People spreading their bare ass cheeks in an entire subreddit is fine, but making a joke about Microsoft isn’t.



If you’re still using this thing, why?



I’ve been lurking on Lemmy and it strikes me that while it has many of the same problems, it does not appear quite as utterly toxic as Reddit. Although you’d have to try hard.



They’ve turned Reddit into something that’s not even the Web anymore.



It’s a Chrome App that pops up QR codes so you can “anonymously” browse pornography, you see, only with their official app that contacts dozens of ad companies and spyware servers.



Since Infinity, a Free Software program, stopped working due to the API changes, whenever I go to look at something on Reddit it’s in a Gopher proxy.



(gopher://gopherddit.com/)



If I want to view an image, it goes directly to a jpeg file instead of popping up this Chrome app garbage on Reddit’s site.



Chrome is being built to destroy the Web and force people into surveillance Capitalism.



It’s watching you.



Every single site you load. You’d have to be nuts to use Chrome.



Of course a lot of people are not capable of thinking about it in this sense because they’ve been taught to value convenience instead of Freedom and what’s best for them in the long run.



But Reddit’s app is the same thing. Most phone apps that are not from F-Droid are doing a lot of bad things to you.



According to Privacy Tests, the two worst desktop Web browsers to use are Chrome and Edge, which is just a version of Chrome from Microsoft.



The two best are Brave and LibreWolf.



While this only counts the level of protection from Web sites, Chrome and Edge have a lot of spyware at the application level, and so does Firefox.



Using adtech browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, is not a great idea.



When you go and look at Private Mode, Chrome and Edge don’t get much better than they are in the normal mode.



When you look at Android browsers, DuckDuckGo is actually much worse than Google Chrome for Android. 😛



DuckDuckGo is a “branding condom” for Microsoft Bing.



I was reading Jamie Zawinski’s blog because I was bored out of my mind today. One of his commenters was defending that DuckDuckGo used “hundreds and hundreds of sources”.



Curiously, if you do a search on DuckDuckGo and the same search on Bing, basically they’re 100% identical.



Hundreds and hundreds of Bing. 😉



But Social Credit Scores.



Yeah, that thing you’re always hearing about those “Nasty Red Chinese” having?



Yeah, the US has them and just outsourced this to Big Tech companies.



You have Social Credit Scores, and they just won’t tell YOU what it is, or how they’re using it to discriminate against you.



You have, probably as many of them as products that track you.



Reddit is just a very small turd in this punch bowl.



Google is a bigger one, so is Microsoft.



Every time you slide your credit card. Every time you transmit a fast food order with an app or save 10 cents a gallon on gas.



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