In that vein, it's very much worthwhile to take the time to write a review explaining why the app sucks. It legitimately does, and I'd have been far less annoyed about the initial API change if the app they're trying to force folks to use wasn't so goddamned awful.
Then ... leave out the API stuff, the Reddit corporate bullshit, Apollo or RIF - Apple will scrub review-bombing from Apps' pages, and mentions of drama or competitors makes it easy to target those reviews.
There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the "display name" selected later would appear to other users on the site.
Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as "display names" don't seem to have ever been served via the API.
To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was "extravagant_mustard_924" and not "Cool Dude Brian" or whatever they'd put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.
My understanding was that the traditional chilis used were Thai or birds-eye chilis, and ripe red jalapenos were used by immigrants to North America when thai chilis weren't available. The "sriracha pepper" is a modern invention to capitalize on the popularity of the sauce, rather than the source of it - and it is still just a close relative of the jalapeno.
Reddit removed the mod team for 'making the community inaccessible' - and then have left the community inaccessible due to no moderation for longer than the original mod team had it closed.
I know the irony there is damn near horse pate at this point, but that shit's still funny every time it comes up.
Aw lawd hold me back; I've been battling that temptation for months now while it was at normal retail pricing - a discount is added temptation I absolutely did not need.
Indirectly, that was some of my point.
It looks strongly like one of two things has happened - either Narwhal took the knee and has accepted absolutely abysmal terms in order to remain in existence, or Reddit has offered them a better deal in private to keep them afloat - solely to use them as a PR example case.
The only thing that seems unlikely is that they're working under strict terms of the published agreement, otherwise IMO costs to users are functionally unfeasible.
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
So a bit of a deep cut here, but there was a game from almost ten years ago that - as far as I can tell - flopped abysmally. I've never seen anyone else talk about it online, since I heard about it from a random Reddit comment buried deep at the bottom of an unrelated post.
Lichdom: Battlemage
It's jank. It's not a great game. But the magic system and the depth there made the repetitive enemies and dull environments completely worth it - at least in brief sprints.
Magic is 'runes' - or items. They drop in the world with various properties, and you can pick them up and assemble them into spells - you get, like, four bound on the UI. Base type is runes that classify the element of the spell, each having very unique mechanics. Fire does either big swingy crits or DOTs, ice is consistent damage or stored combo damage, electric is fast casting and AOE, etc. Then you get the physical shape of the spell, sometimes it's a beam, or a bolt, or a mortar, or a pool on the ground, etc. Then last up you get some added runes that will manipulate the mechanics of the element and shape you've chosen.
From there, though, all of your spells can interact with each other.
So for example, ice will freeze on enemies and only do a small amount of base damage directly, but then will "store" damage. Hitting with another ice spell pops the stored damage and stores another charge. Hitting with a different element magnifies that hit relative to the stored damage - so hitting with ice, then popping it with fire, does far more damage than just hitting with a second ice because the fire has a larger base hit. But you can also modify fire to also store a damage multiplier on the enemy - so if you set up a pool of fire that stores multiplier, then hit them with cold to add more stored damage and lock them on top of the pool where multiplier continues accumulating, then finally follow up with a different very high-damage fire spell ... the stored damage and multi kick in and Big Numbers Go Boom.
That is probably the simplest elemental interaction in the game, that's the basic gameplay loop combo. There's like a time element that will put the enemies in timed stasis, and you can shoot them while in stasis but it won't do anything - then when stasis pops it'll repeat every instance of damage applied X times per second for Y seconds, based on the numbers on the skill, and if you also use another skill it'll do the same damage to every other enemy within a radius ...
The shit you could do was wild.
It's a pity that the level design and enemies weren't really on the same level, so there wasn't a ton of motivation to fully explore the depths of the magic system - and then separately, the game also gave you tons of reasons to go play a different game.
but the answer they were looking for is just France.
Leif Erikson did not establish Vinland in 1000 AD to suffer this kind of disrespect.
Seriously - the far northern tip of Newfoundland island has archeological remains of a viking settlment that carbon-dates to somewhere around 990–1050 CE.
It lasted for anywhere between twenty and sixty years, and while it appears that Vinland was still heavily dependent on supplies from Greenland and Iceland, it was definitely a settlement and the Norse are well-established as definitely European. It had permanent dwellings, and permanent communal work buildings, including a smithy, a carpentry shop, and boat-repair facilities.
There is arguable case, but intangible intent, that it may not have been a long-term attempt at colonizing North America, but the question on the test wasn't asking about colonizing Canada - just who gets to claim the "first European settlement."
I'm writing these comments from the perspective of a mod over there who is looking at trying to prompt community migration and who has a reasonable mandate from community voting around pursuing that - just that I'm super conscious at the same time that what they're asking for requires me or the rest of the team accomplishing a bunch of things that we can't directly influence.
I don't think a lot of the votes we're getting are also volunteers to come over here and be pioneers, they're indicating that they support moving everyone over. They want the community and population from over there, but located somewhere else, and practically speaking we can't make it happen that fast. They all have free will and it'll take time for them to contribute it. They're not driven to build a community or develop content - they want to join something already-existing and already meeting a need.
I think no matter where we end up, we're still facing a tipping-point problem as far as getting that momentum happening - while I'm also needing to weigh responsibility to the people remaining behind, the people showing up late, and balance being a good steward to both of those responsibilities without sabotaging the new community. That's further complicated by the fact that if we try to migrate and we "dismantle" our old community, Reddit just turns up, gives the subreddit to someone else, and the newcomers have every incentive to keep as many people on-platform as possible. In that specific case, everything gets worse, and community migration fails.
Equally, it's something I think needs to be a "carrot" solution, not a "stick" - they need to want to move to a new location, and we have to offer them something that they want in that location, it's neither appropriate nor productive to make the old community suck until they move to the new one. Doing that just winds up where they're going to resent us and they're going to actively seek out a community run by other people who haven't, to their perception, "pushed" them out of the old space.
I think that outcome has strong up- and down-sides.
In one sense, it allows someone to consume a collection of different-focused communities grouped around a topic, and allows each community to specialize better within it's "own" scope.
The flip side of that though is if that is excessive frontloaded as a default experience, or a recommended one, you wind up in a situation where none of those sub-communities matter as something unique to themselves. They're all just relatively interchangeable sources of content for the multi-magazine clustered around a topic.
When multireddits first launched and there was big enthusiasm for them on Reddit, there was a specific user who was forever trying to put together collections of spinoff "high quality" subs and package them as this sort of "true old-school reddit experience" - but what that resulted in was huge numbers of discussion subs becoming generically similar, because that one user was pushing the entire collective as this big homogenous "better reddit" experience and users entering the space via the multireddit engaged with the listing in that exact fashion. Then when those subs' own communities got fed up with the newcomers and went and created their own space, Our Helpful Friend would add the new community to their list.
Moderating in that space was incredibly frustrating, because both newcomers and the user spearheading this were diametrically opposed to the need for moderation - despite wanting an experience IMO is only available in highly moderated spaces, they all firmly believed that the community style they wanted was possible without moderation, if everyone just worked together and played nice. So you tell someone that their post doesn't meet standards, and they get upset that standards apply to them, cite the rules in some other community, or from Our Helpful Friend's values statement, or whatever they were using - not understanding that we had not signed on to their project and unwilling to respect that we have our own rules and would not be changing them.
So yeah. Both great feature and annoying feature, and I do vaguely worry that the prevalence of parallel and overlap communities across the Fediverse does risk that multi-mag function doing a little community erasure if it's not implemented carefully and gracefully.
Admin realized that despite all the applications, there were:
From what I could see, there no actual good-faith requests from people who genuinely cared about /TIHI and wanted to moderate it well and diligently. And like, who's surprised? It's a huge subreddit without a concrete community core, it's more of a content category. I don't think anyone except the mods cared about the community itself, because there barely was one.
That's the same issue they're running into with the other large subs. They're too huge and too general and everyone is just another face in the crowd, so there are very few people who care about that specific space in the way that makes for good volunteer moderators - in most cases, when those people existed for those communities, they were already recruited into the old mod team.
And all the people who want to mod are either activists for the protest, the sort of power-hungry weirdos that end up as powermods, but who showed up to Reddit too late, or somebody with an axe to grind about moderation in general seeing an opportunity in the massive unmoderated subreddit.