I wrote a frikkin’ essay. I wish I’d saved a copy because I was sure they were going to read it and file it under “whackadoodle: do not admit.”

I’m not sure they understand Reddit.

Did you know they also silently censor users?

Reddit has been shadowbanning users (making it so their accounts don’t publicly hold data or karma, but allowing them to continue making comments) without telling them they’re shadowbanned for many years now. The idea that Reddit is silently going and removing the content from some users is really not a surprise.

Due to being disabled I do most of my cooking in the microwave. I’d love to get an air fryer but I have no counter space for it where I currently live.

I often do actual cooking - you can cook almost anything in the microwave, except most baking and anything that needs to be browned like a hamburger or a pot sticker - but sometimes it’s just, feh, let’s just do this.

I’ll take a packet of the Knorr’s “fried rice” (which is rice, thin pasta, freeze dried peas & carrots, and spices) and extend it out. I always use plain olive oil for the fat, and slightly reduce the water it wants if I use frozen vegetables. Then, chop up whatever vegetables you need to get rid of and/or feel like throwing in with the mix, oil, and water into a bigass bowl. I tend to use broccoli, snap peas, string beans, and/or asparagus, but sometimes I’ll use a pre-mixed package of “mixed stir fry vegetables.” Whatever I’ve bought that’s on sale. If you want to add any kind of meat or tofu, add it in the last 5-6 minutes of cooking time, less if it’s pre-cooked. You can also stir in an egg or two at that point if you’d like. You’ll get thin threads of egg throughout. I set my microwave to cook the whole thing for about 15 minutes; all the additions makes it need more. Adjust as you need.

One thing I do that’s less lazy but more “lasts for a while” is a tuna pasta salad. Boil up half or a whole box of pasta - I use shells or bowties, but any pasta will do. Wrap a head of broccoli in moist paper towels and nuke briefly until it’s just starting to soften. Cool it down, then chop it up. Chop up some tomatoes (I usually use 2-4 Romas). Drain 1-2 cans of tuna fish [depending on how much pasta you have. Toss this all together. Pour over it a good vinaigrette. I make my own with red wine vinegar, olive oil, black pepper, garlic powder, and because I use a lot of vinegar, a pinch of sugar or a drop of sucralose, to offset the bitterness. Let it sit for at least an hour, toss again, then consume. The best thing about this recipe is what goes into it is up to you. You can completely change the vegetables. You could use shredded or chopped chicken instead of tuna. Or finely diced extra firm tofu and make it vegan.

The easiest snack of all is popcorn. Don’t buy the microwave packets. Buy the raw kernels. Get yourself a silicone popcorn popper for the microwave; they’re about $10 online. It’s a silicone tub/bowl with measuring markers at the bottom and a lid that goes way down at the start but rises as the kernels pop. Some people put butter in the bottom but I’m afraid it will burn and haven’t tried that; I melt and add butter afterwards. Some people claim you can do this with a paper bag, but I’ve also heard others say the bag can catch on fire. A couple of handfuls of kernels and 2-3 minutes in the microwave and you have a big bowl of fresh popcorn. Yum.

I was nearly 40 when RCT2 came out. :-)

My biggest wish for RCT3 has always been that you could store modified shops like you can store coasters. That’s the one thing about it that drives me further bonkers.

I really really really want to like Planet Coaster but dang, trying to put paths down and the like is a nightmare for me. I have bad arthritis in my hands and having to do minute and detailed movements can be incredibly difficult. So I wind up with things where they don’t belong and lose money and ARGH.

I’ve heard Parkitect is better but I’m gun shy after PC and afraid I’ll waste even more money on a game I can’t play.

I still play Dungeon Keeper (the original) sometimes, too. It’s such a classic, and every “new reboot” of the game seems to just fail in all the wrong ways for me.

Sorry. RollerCoaster Tycoon 3.

I know most people love 2 the most, but 3 is the one I like best. I like the 3D way you can move around and I like the whole way the mechanisms work.

Same thing I play every week. Coral Island and RCT3.

Coral Island is in Steam Early Access and is as yet unfinished, but is making steady progress and the devs are doing great at keeping everyone up to date on progress. Coral Island is frequently compared to Stardew Valley. Frankly, I don’t enjoy SDV. I’ve tried and tried and it just doesn’t do it for me. Coral Island is everything I was hoping SDV would be. It’s game play is similar, but I find the whole thing much more enjoyable.

I’ve been playing RCT3 off and on since I first bought it on CD a million years ago.

First: Good. Everyone deserves good and safe working conditions (and reasonable pay).

I have the same mixed feelings about Amazon as I do about Walmart. They underpay and overwork their employees, and treat them as replaceable cogs. They often gouge the companies that supply their stock. Their customer service ranges from “OK” to “forget it.”

But as someone living with a low income, I often don’t have a choice. Amazon’s “subscribe and save” program can save me significant money on bulk products, and sometimes Walmart’s prices are the best when I don’t have much money for the rest of what I need.

If you have the choice, I encourage you to choose to avoid these companies. But for those of us struggling to make ends meet, we’re stuck having to give business to companies that not only help create people like me, but depend on our need for them. Please remember that when there are calls that everyone has to stop using them.

Officially? Yes, it’s all against the rules. It’s against the rules to harass moderators. It’s against the rules to go attempt to rile up others to cause problems. It’s against the rules to have subreddits dedicated to trying to convince people to go to other subs and harass moderators.

In reality? It has to be very persistent for the admins to take real action. There have been cases where subreddits have been cautioned or (rarely) sanctioned for allowing or encouraging their users to go visit other subs to harass. There have been cases where harassers eventually get their accounts banned, but not before Reddit has smacked them on the hand and said, “No, no! Bad Redditor!” 3-4 times first. More likely, reporting this kind of crap gets you the response, “We don’t see a problem.”

Part of that problem is that a lot of report responses are automated, and you have to know how to appeal and get the attention of humans to even have a sliver of hope that one of them might take action.

It’s a case of too many problem children, not enough human staff to deal with it.

It’s against the rules to create account after account to follow and harass a moderator for over four years but 8? 9? of his alt accounts later, they still haven’t been able to stop this one nutbag from Australia who gets his jollies by following me around Reddit to disagree with everything I say.

I see it as Reddits obligation to educate the community about moderators and what they do on the daily.

Reddit thinks moderators are as disposable as napkins.

Oh, this sounds lovely.

I have heard people tell of using the seasoning packets that come with ramen noodles.

I’m a purest. I generally just use butter and salt, but sometimes sprinkle on that fake-ish grated parmesan & romano cheese that you shake out of a canister.

Two words: “race condition.”

One of my favorite server-crashing bugs was from the mid-'90s, before the web existed. Worked on a project to build, well, a mini-Web (though we didn’t really know that), a browser-like tool that ran on X-windows. It would let you search through an online library catalog. Everyone on the project sat down together to stress test the search engine. My student employee ran a search that began with a question mark, and it took out the search engine server.

You keep repeating that. Just how many times have you been banned on Reddit? I’m guessing a lot.

This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.

What moderating is really like, part 1

What moderating is really like, part 2

99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).

Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.

I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.

Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.

Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)

Voat became such a garbage site. It was (barely) tolerable in its early days but with the influx of the reddit refugees from the FPH and “Chimpire” subs, it started down the path to trash fire. My favorite (sarcasm) part was how the racists even attacked the Voat creator & original boss because he was Muslim. Yet the owner was such a tool that he shrugged it off with “Free Speech.”

By the time it failed – and yes, I know that there’s a version of Voat still around but it’s like 300 white supremacists all doing a giant circle jerk – there wasn’t a place on Voat that wasn’t a toxic cesspool.

I recently told this tale but I’ll tell it again: There was a short lived Reddit alternative that closed down for, as best as I can tell, mostly trying to run at just the wrong time. They sounded a lot like Beehaw: Open communication but no hate speech allowed.

They started growing around the time that Reddit was cracking down on the alt-reich subs that were doxxing people and making actual threats of violence, like the_dondon (You know what I mean) and its ilk, plus stomping out the incels. Both groups went crying to Voat. Voat, amusingly, called them all poseurs and downvoted them off the site. So they - especially the alt-reich kids - went to the new site.

The new site handled them with such grace it still boggles my mind. They told them all, basically, “Thanks for coming! It’s so nice you want to be here, but, sorry, you’re breaking our rules. Here’s your hat. So sorry you can’t stay with us! We wish you all the best. Bye bye, now!” and deleted all their accounts and the communities they created, and that was that.

It was a cute site and it could have been something nice, but it just didn’t fully get off the ground. I feel bad that I cannot remember the name of it.

Thank you.

Like I said previously, sometimes you have to shut the doors on bad actors. But doors can be reopened if things become better.

No one is ever ready for the Reddit Inqui-- er, Invasion.

The ADA only requires accessibility in websites if it’s a government site, or if it’s the site of a company providing a “public service,” such as a bank or a hotel.

Here’s the ada.gov page about it: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

I use NewsBlur. It’s sometimes clunky adding an RSS feed but the way you can organize things and do 101 settings is terrific. It’s for-pay though (around $30/year? I think) so that may not interest you. But I find it does far more than the free stuff that I tried.

Redditinc.com’s fact(oid)s about the API changes.

Includes such BS as

100,000+ active communities

Technically true. But it’s estimated that between 1/3 and 1/2 are NSFW. That is, the subs they don’t want shown at their (mythical) IPO.

Supporting these apps is not free for Reddit; they incur both infrastructure and significant opportunity costs.

Technically true. But so does the official app, and web browsers. API calls are not some sort of special magic that causes extra wear on the systems. If the users never had the third party apps they’d be using something else, causing the same traffic and usage - or using nothing at all.

Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use from our API.

Again, third party apps are no more of a drain on data use than anything else. It’s been proven, but Spez keeps pushing this lie.

Many other platforms have chosen to stop supporting apps like these altogether.

Objection! Facts not in evidence.

more than 98% of apps do not pay and will continue to access the Data API for free so long as apps are not monetized […].

Emphasis mine. This is the real story.

Our pricing is based on usage levels comparable to our own costs

Either this is an outright lie or Spez is admitting that the official Reddit app is an inefficient, data monching, piece of garbage.

We’re working to improve the mobile mod experience

Spez has been promising rainbows for years but all we ever get is poop. Or just the smell of poop. That the mobile apps were released without proper moderator tools tells you what he thinks of moderators.

We have a unique system of checks and balances, and we respect the communities right to protest.

Clearly a lie, given that Spez is going to change the rules to force out moderators who choose to follow their sub’s wishes to protest.

r/nottheonion is asking users to vote, including a fun option that encourages people to take Tuesdays off

The “fun option” is an official means of joining the protest. Can he stop lying for 10 seconds?

We conducted an accessibility audit with an external consultant and have been working on improving accessibility on the site and in our apps.

Yes, much smarter than actually TALKING TO YOUR OWN USERS AND SEEING WHAT THEY WANT. Oh, they want what you refuse to do? Gee, what a surprise!

Nothing says ableism more than telling people with disabilities that they have no agency in how or if they get accommodations. (Sadly, the ADA does not apply to Reddit as a website.)

In summary, Spez needs to be fired. Preferably out of a cannon, into the sun.

The audacity. The bullshit. The outright lies.

Spez is an embarrassment and I have no idea why the Reddit BoD hasn’t asked for his resignation.