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Alongside big subreddits like r/bestof, r/sports, r/music, r/pics and r/videos, a number of the most popular gaming subreddits have either confirmed they’re taking part, are polling members for their thoughts or will be taking more limited action as well.
That includes r/gaming with its 37 million members, r/PS5 and its 3.3 million members, r/minecraft’s 7 million members and r/wow’s 2.3 million members. Meanwhile mods at r/pcgaming (3.2 million members) are asking users for their input before making a decision, while r/nintendo are going into a “a read-only/restricted mode”, which is not quite as severe as locking the entire subreddit down. But if you’re like most people, you likely just lurk pages, so you may not be able to see anything but this right now:
Screenshot: Reddit / Kotaku
The entire thing has been planned for a while now, as a gathering of Reddit’s unpaid moderators banded together and penned an open letter to the site’s management, outlining not just the general popularity of the third-party apps, but also concerns over the potential loss of important moderation tools (which many third-party apps have but the official offering somehow lacks) and impact on NSFW content as well.
Reddit Goes Down
That letter has been backed by plans for much of the site to engage in a “blackout” on June 12, meaning today, which means individual subreddits will lock down into “private” mode, meaning anyone who isn’t already a follower/subscriber won’t be able to access them or see any of their content.
According to The Verge, over 6,000 subreddits have been affected on Monday as a part of the protest, which will last until the 14th. Some, it should be noted, are planning on staying private until things change. Other communities went dark as soon as the unpopular API changes were announced. Really, there are all sorts of approaches to the bad news. You might notice some communities are indeed available, but you can only post about the API changes. Others meanwhile will let you read the subreddit as it was, but won’t let you make new posts. In short, it’s a shitshow for Reddit.
Update 6/12/2023 11:10 a.m.:We’ve updated this post to reflect that Reddit is now in fact down and out.
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For anyone using the site on a desktop computer the Reddit experience is fine, I guess (“Old Reddit” is better), but on phones, that all changes. Reddit’s official app sucks, and is absolutely loaded with intrusive ads, meaning a lot of people rely on the work of third-party apps—like the incredibly popular Apollo on iOS and my own favourite, Infinity on Android—to browse and comment.
The creator of Apollo has done the math, and says:
I’ll cut to the chase: 50 million requests costs $12,000, a figure far more than I ever could have imagined.
Apollo made 7 billion requests last month, which would put it at about 1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year. Even if I only kept subscription users, the average Apollo user uses 344 requests per day, which would cost $2.50 per month, which is over double what the subscription currently costs, so I’d be in the red every month.
Meanwhile one of the developers of RIF, another popular Android app, say that not only are they also being priced out (if Apollo can’t afford it nobody can), but that Reddit is also implementing a change where third-party apps would lose access to NSFW subreddits, while the official site would not:
Removal of sexually explicit material from third-party apps while keeping said content in the official app. Some people have speculated that NSFW is going to leave Reddit entirely, but then why would Reddit Inc have recently expanded NSFW upload support on their desktop site?
It’s obvious that the steep pricing, which goes far beyond what these developers were expecting or could ever afford, is not there to make money. Not when it was clear nobody was ever going to be able to pay it. It’s being brought in to crush third-party alternatives, driving every mobile user to the official app where they’ll either have to watch ads or pay for Reddit Premium.
As the recent Reddit commercials have made clear, there’s a community for everything. Nihilist horror, Game of Thrones’ Hodor, avocado food porn (because why not)…you can always find your people. Case in point, there’s a subreddit dedicated to atrocious user interfaces, which is now seeing members attempting to best each other by creating the worst UI designs possible.
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The term is self-explanatory: A user interface is what allows you to interact with technology, from computers to McDonald’s kiosks to exercise equipment to, of course, video games. Some, like Elden Ring’s, are good. Most just get the job done. However, when you come across a bad UI, it’s like a painful hair in your eye and a sour taste in your mouth. Ubisoft games such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Bungie’s Destiny have been derided for their cluttered and clunky interfaces, respectively. But the nightmares being dreamt up on Reddit definitely, albeit intentionally, take the rotten UI cake.
Thanks, these UIs make me hate it here
As spotted by Twitter user Aleksandr Volodarsky, engineers on the badUIbattles subreddit are scraping the bottom of the barrel to build the most annoying user interfaces ever. A forum for folks “[creating] bad UIs just for the sake of them being bad,” redditors are designing UIs that, if they were ever implemented IRL, would make you never want to interact with technology again. Take this one designed by redditor Lamamour last April, in which you have to funnel digits into a moving row of blocks to enter your phone number.
This “enter your phone number” concept has been iterated, tweaked, and worsened since Lamamour uploaded their initial atrocity. The latest entry by user NotYourBoii confronts you with a disordered drop-down menu that makes entering a phone number (twice, I might add) pure pain.
But what if you wanted to unsubscribe from a newsletter, YouTube channel, or some other subscription service? Well, you wouldn’t be able to with redditor OrangePrototype’s unsubscribe button, as a fan blows your cursor away.
There are so many aggravating user interfaces on that subreddit, with Volodarsky tweeting out some of the worst he’s found. For your viewing frustration—I mean, pleasure—here’s a little roundup of Volodarsky’s incredibly annoying findings.
All of these were purposely designed to be as irritating as possible, and thankfully, I can’t imagine any game developers taking inspiration from user interfaces meant to get on your nerves (unless it was intended as part of the gameplay experience, as in Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy or QWOP). That said, it’s hilarious seeing redditors doing their best to make the worst UI ever.
Five years after stepping away from daily duties at the internet company he co-founded, Alexis Ohanian is pouring money and attention into 776, a funding mechanism that gives $100,000 grants to young climate-focused innovators. He says if he began his career over again, it would start with climate solutions. Ben Tracy reports.
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In March, an employee at a Massachusetts GameStop leaked on Reddit that Nintendo was probably about to reveal its long rumored special edition Zelda Switch at an upcoming mini-Direct for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Special editions such as these are highly coveted collector’s items, and news of one for the sequel to a best-selling game would be huge for fans looking to buy a new system. This week, GameStop fired the employee who leaked the news, and the employee claims he was told Nintendo helped make it happen.
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Back in March, Mike, who requested Kotaku only use his first name, posted a photo of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database had been updated with a secret new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit. It was the day before Nintendo’s big extended gameplay reveal for Tears of the Kingdom, and the employee speculated in the post that a special edition Zelda Switch which had already leaked back in December, would be announced during the stream. Mike says he got fired on April 11, about two weeks later.
In a phone interview with Kotaku, Mike said he made the leak because he was a big fan of the franchise and wanted to give others a heads up in case pre-orders went live that day. GameStop in particular has seen issues for buyers when it comes to preorders in the past, though this wasn’t a reason cited by Mike for the leak. On March 28, Nintendo did reveal a special edition Switch, and the following day pre-orders went live at GameStop and other retailers.
At the time, the Reddit post didn’t garner a ton of upvotes, and the now former employee said he didn’t think of it as a big deal since he didn’t technically leak any images or special details about the console itself, and the post itself was mostly speculative. Nintendo also tends to release special consoles such as this one for most of its major releases, such as Pokémon.
Collector’s Editions Are A Big Deal At GameStop
But on April 5, a week later, Mike said the company traced the leak back to them. Coming in for his afternoon shift after watching the new Super Mario Bros. Movie on release day, he said his district manager called him into the backroom for a meeting. Joined by another GameStop supervisor via video conference, the employee said he was asked if he made the post and whether he knew it violated company policy.
Mike said he immediately confessed, but maintained he wasn’t aware it went against the company’s social media policies. The district manager took their keys and placed them on suspension, saying the final punishment could vary between a first-offense write up and termination. It ended up being the latter. And the now former employee thinks Nintendo is to blame.
When their store manager called on April 11 to deliver the bad news, he said the supervisor told them “off the record” that Nintendo had forced the company’s hand, demanding the employee be terminated over the leak. Mike shared the allegation on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit shortly afterwards writing, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine.”
GameStop and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Image: Nintendo
Another employee at the store corroborated Mike’s account to Kotaku, and said they were told by the same store manager in a separate conversation that Nintendo was the catalyst. “He was an amazing worker,” they said of Mike, adding that he was one of the top performers in the area when it came to achieving GameStop’s aggressive sales goals.
Whoever ultimately made the decision to fire them, the leaker would have been easy to discover. Their social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch, were linked in various ways to their Reddit account, and included several references to their general geographic location, as well as selfies. “I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.
As a large-scale retailer staffed mostly by entry-level workers paid terrible hourly rates, GameStop has historically been a hotbed for big gaming leaks, from Assassin’s Creed to Call of Duty. But it’s rare to hear that someone was actually fired in connection with one of the leaks. It’s perhaps less surprising that this one happens to have been in connection with a big Nintendo reveal, however. The Mario maker has been on the warpath against leaks for years, most recently attempting to subpoena Discord for the private data of someone who shared images from the Tears of the Kingdom collector’s edition artbook.
When asked if the former GameStop employee ultimately managed to secure a Zelda Switch pre-order, Mike confirmed he had. “But sadly I won’t be able to afford it anymore due to lack of a job,” he said. Mike added that when his manager had to deliver the bad news over the phone they pointed out what a shame it was: “This is your favorite company and now they hate you.”
Reddit plans to shut down its live audio conference platform, called Reddit Talk, in June less than two years after launching the feature to compete with Clubhouse.
Reddit said in a blog post this week that employees have been working behind the scenes to update the website and make it simpler for users. The original plan was to keep Talk operating by using staff from an outside company, while in-house Reddit employees worked on the revamp.
“Unfortunately, the 3rd party audio vendor we use for Talk is shutting down its service,” Reddit said. “In other words, the resources required to keep Talk live during this transition increased substantially.”
Reddit said it eventually plans to relaunch Talk, but noted “there’s significant work we need to do — like making Reddit simpler and building better subreddit infrastructure — before incorporating audio.”
Reddit users who wants to download the audio file of their Talk session can start doing so March 21, Reddit said. Talk sessions launched before September 1, 2022, will not be available for download.
Reddit launched its audio function hoping to capture some of the stardust from the rise in popularity of Clubhouse. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Paul Davison and Rohan Seth launched the audio chat-housing platform in late 2019 with financial backing from prominent venture capital firms. The app caught fire during the pandemic as people stuck indoors searched for ways to connect with the outside world.
Clubhouse grew to more than 9.6 million global downloads by February 2021, according to TechCrunch. But Clubhouse’s popularity has waned and now has about 200,000 monthly active users, Business Insider reported in November.
Reddit Talk, which launched in April 2021, is a separate feature on the website that lets users host audio conversations within a designated community. Similar to Clubhouse, Reddit Talk gives a user “moderator” status who can mute and unmute live users. Daily use of Reddit Talk grew 250% between late 2021 and early 2022.
Khristopher J. Brooks is a reporter for CBS MoneyWatch covering business, consumer and financial stories that range from economic inequality and housing issues to bankruptcies and the business of sports.
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Washington — Kati Morton was a reluctant adopter of YouTube.
A therapist working toward her license in California, it was her then-boyfriend and now-husband who first suggested that Morton explore posting videos on the platform as a way to disseminate mental health information.
The year was 2011, and Morton, like many others, thought YouTube primarily consisted of videos of cats playing the piano and make-up tutorials. But after seeing other content posted on the site, Morton decided to give it a shot.
Her audience started small, with her videos garnering a handful of views. But in the more than a decade since then, Morton’s YouTube channel has grown to more than 1.2 million subscribers.
Crucial to the growth of Morton’s audience is YouTube’s system for recommending content to users, which the company began building in 2008. It relies on a highly complex algorithm to predict what videos will interest viewers and keep them watching. Today, half of Morton’s views come from recommendations, she said.
“If you could see the entire life of the channel, it was really, really slow and steady,” Morton told CBS News. “And then through recommendations, as well as collaborations, things have grown as you’re able to reach a broader audience and YouTube is better able to understand the content.”
YouTube’s recommendations algorithm, and those used by platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, are now at the heart of a legal dispute that will go before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in a case that involves the powerful legal shield that helped the internet grow.
“We’re talking about rewriting the legal rules that govern the fundamental architecture of the internet,” Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CBS News of what’s at stake in the case, known as Gonzalez v. Google.
“A backbone of online activity”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes internet companies from liability over content posted by third parties and allows platforms to remove content considered obscene or objectionable. The dispute before the Supreme Court marks the first time the court will consider the scope of the law, and the question before the justices is whether Section 230’s protections for platforms extend to targeted recommendations of information.
The court fight arose after terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, when 129 people were murdered by ISIS members. Among the victims was 23-year-old Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student studying abroad who was killed at a bistro in the city.
Gonzalez’s parents and other family members filed a civil lawsuit in 2016 against Google, which owns YouTube, alleging that the tech company aided and abetted ISIS in violation of a federal anti-terrorism statute by recommending videos posted by the terror group to users.
Google moved to dismiss the complaint, claiming that they were immune from the claims under Section 230. A federal district court in California agreed and, regarding YouTube’s recommendations, found that Google was protected under the law because the videos at issue were produced by ISIS.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, and Gonzalez’s family asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. The high court said in October it would take up the dispute.
The court fight has elicited input from a range of parties, many of which are backing Google in the case. Platforms like Twitter, Meta and Reddit — all of which rely on Section 230 and its protections — argue algorithmic recommendations allow them to organize the millions of pieces of third-party content that appear on their sites, enhancing the experience for users who would otherwise be forced to sift through a mammoth amount of posts, articles, photos and videos.
“Given the sheer volume of content on the internet, efforts to organize, rank, and display content in ways that are useful and attractive to users are indispensable,” lawyers for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, told the court.
Even the company that operates online dating services Match and Tinder pointed to Section 230 as “vital” to its efforts to connect singles, as the law allows “its dating platforms to provide recommendations to its users for potential matches without having to fear overwhelming litigation.”
But conservatives are using the case as a vehicle to rail against “Big Tech” firms and amplify claims that platforms censor content based on political ideology.
Citing lower court decisions they believe has led to a “broad grant of immunity,” a group of Republican senators and House members told the Supreme Court that platforms “have not been shy about restricting access and removing content based on the politics of the speaker, an issue that has persistently arisen as Big Tech companies censor and remove content espousing conservative political views, despite the lack of immunity for such actions in the text of” Section 230.
The case has presented the justices with a rare opportunity to hear directly from the co-authors of the legislation at issue. Ron Wyden, now a Democratic senator from Oregon, and Chris Cox, a former GOP congressman from California, crafted Section 230 in the House in 1996. The bipartisan pair filed a friend-of-the court brief explaining the plain meaning of their law and the policy balance they sought to strike.
“Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content curation and presentation,” they wrote. “Any other interpretation would subvert Section 230’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content moderation and presentation. The real-time transmission of user-generated content that Section 230 fosters has become a backbone of online activity, relied upon by innumerable internet users and platforms alike.”
Google, they argued, is entitled to liability protection under Section 230, since the platform’s recommendation algorithm is merely responding to user preferences by pairing them with the types of content they seek.
“The algorithm functions in a way that is not meaningfully different from the many curatorial decisions that platforms have always made in deciding how to present third-party content,” Wyden and Cox said.
The battle also highlights competing views about the internet today and how Section 230 has shaped it. For tech companies, the law has laid the groundwork for new platforms to come online, an industry of online creators to form and free expression to flourish. For Gonzalez’s family and others, the algorithmic recommendations have proven deadly and harmful.
Like the Gonzalezes, Tawainna Anderson, too, has fought to hold a social media platform responsible over content it recommends to users.
Last May, Anderson sued TikTok and its parent company, China-based ByteDance, after her 10-year-old daughter Nylah died in late 2021 after trying to perform the dangerous “Blackout Challenge,” in which users are pushed to strangle themselves until they pass out and then share videos of the experience.
The challenge, which went viral on TikTok, was recommended to Nylah through her account’s “For You” page, a curated feed of third-party content powered by TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation system.
“They are actually feeding it to our children. They are sending them videos that they never even searched before,” Anderson told CBS News chief legal correspondent Jan Crawford.
10-year-old Nylah died after attempting the so-called “Blackout Challenge,” which she had seen on TikTok.
Her mother has filed papers in a case now before the Supreme Court that could hold social media platforms accountable for some of the content recommend to users. pic.twitter.com/lzwF5fKAbh
Anderson’s lawsuit sought to hold TikTok accountable for deliberately funneling dangerous content to minors through the challenges and encouraging behavior that put their lives in danger. TikTok asked the federal district court in Pennsylvania to dismiss the suit, invoking Section 230.
U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond tossed out the case in October, writing that the law shielded TikTok from liability because it was promoting the work of others. But he acknowledged in a brief order that TikTok made the Blackout Challenge “readily available on their site” and said its algorithm “was a way to bring the challenge to the attention of those likely to be most interested in it.”
“The wisdom of conferring such immunity is something properly taken up with Congress, not the courts,” Diamond wrote.
Mackey, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that if peopledisagree with the reach of Section 230 as the courts have interpreted it, the right remedy is for Congress, not the Supreme Court, to rewrite the law.
“When they passed it, they set this balance and said not that they didn’t believe there wouldn’t be harmful content, but they believed on balance the creation of opportunities and forums for people to speak, for the growth of the internet and development of a tool that became central to our lives, commerce, political expression — that was what they valued more,” Mackey said. “Congress is free to rewrite that balance.”
A new creator economy
In the 27 years since Section 230 became law, the explosive growth of the internet has fueled a multi-billion-dollar industry of independent online creators who rely on large tech platforms to reach new audiences and monetize their content.
In Morton’s case, her YouTube channel has allowed her to expand beyond her office in Santa Monica, California, and reach patients around the country, including in areas where mental health resources may be scarce.
“The ability for me to get over a million views on YouTube means that I’m able to reach so many more people, and mental health information isn’t held behind a paywall,” she said.
Alex Su, a lawyer by training who runs the TikTok account LegalTechBro, first began sharing content on LinkedIn in 2016 as a way to drive awareness of his employer, a technology company. After building up a following of lawyers and others in the legal industry on LinkedIn, Su began experimenting with TikTok in 2020.
His TikTok videos, which touch on insider experiences of working at a law firm, resonated with other lawyers and people with ties to the profession. He said LinkedIn’s recommendation system has been instrumental in helping Su reach his target audience and market his company’s services.
“These algorithms let me go viral among people who can relate to my jokes,” he told CBS News. “If I put this type of content in front of a general audience, they probably wouldn’t find it as funny.”
Internet companies and supporters of Section 230 note the law has allowed for new and emerging companies to grow into industry leaders without incurring significant litigation costs fighting frivolous claims.
Su, an early adopter of LinkedIn and TikTok for those in the legal field, noted that creators are often quick to take advantage of new platforms, where they can reach new audiences.
“I think it’s no accident that there are these shifts where new entrants come in and you can take advantage of it as a content creator because then you can go viral on that platform with a new audience quickly,” he said. “Without those different platforms, I would not have been able to grow in the way that I did.”
Few clues from the court
The Supreme Court has given little indication of how it may approach Section 230. Only Justice Clarence Thomas has written about lower courts’ interpretations of the legal shield.
“Courts have long emphasized non-textual arguments when interpreting [Section] 230, leaving questionable precedent in their wake,” Thomas wrote in a 2020 statement urging the court to consider whether the law’s text “aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by internet platforms.”
The Supreme Court could issue a ruling that affirms how Section 230 has been interpreted by lower courts, or narrow the law’s immunity.
But internet companies warned the court that if it limits the scope of Section 230, it could drastically change how they approach content posted to their sites. With a greater risk of costly litigation with fewer protections, companies may be more cautious about letting content appear on their sites that may be problematic, and only allow content that has been vetted and poses little legal risk.
“If you’re concerned about censorship, the last thing you want is a legal regime that is going to punish platforms for keeping things online,” Mackey said. “It’s going to be increased censorship, more material will be taken down, a lot won’t make it alone in the first place.”
A decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the summer.
Washington — Kati Morton was a reluctant adopter of YouTube.
A therapist working toward her license in California, it was her then-boyfriend, now-husband, who first suggested that Morton explore posting videos on the platform as a way to disseminate mental health information.
The year was 2011, and Morton, like many others, thought YouTube primarily consisted of videos of cats playing the piano and make-up tutorials. But after seeing other content posted on the site, Morton decided to give it a shot.
Her audience started small, with her videos garnering a handful of views. But in the more than a decade since then, Morton’s YouTube channel has grown to more than 1.2 million subscribers.
Crucial to the growth of Morton’s audience is YouTube’s system for recommending content to users, which the company began building in 2008. It relies on a highly complex algorithm to predict what videos will interest viewers and keep them watching. Today, half of Morton’s views come from recommendations, she said.
“If you could see the entire life of the channel, it was really, really slow and steady,” Morton told CBS News. “And then through recommendations, as well as collaborations, things have grown as you’re able to reach a broader audience and YouTube is better able to understand the content.”
YouTube’s recommendations algorithm, and those used by platforms like TikTok, Facebook and Twitter, are now at the heart of a legal dispute that will go before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, in a case that involves the powerful legal shield that helped the internet grow.
“We’re talking about rewriting the legal rules that govern the fundamental architecture of the internet,” Aaron Mackey, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told CBS News of what’s at stake in the case, known as Google v. Gonzalez.
“A backbone of online activity”
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunizes internet companies from liability over content posted by third parties and allows platforms to remove content considered obscene or objectionable. The dispute before the Supreme Court marks the first time the court will consider the scope of the law, and the question before the justices is whether Section 230’s protections for platforms extend to targeted recommendations of information.
The court fight arose after terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, when 129 people were murdered by ISIS members. Among the victims was 23-year-old Nohemi Gonzalez, an American college student studying abroad who was killed at a bistro in the city.
Gonzalez’s parents and other family members filed a civil lawsuit in 2016 against Google, which owns YouTube, alleging that the tech company aided and abetted ISIS in violation of a federal anti-terrorism statute by recommending videos posted by the terror group to users.
Google moved to dismiss the complaint, claiming that they were immune from the claims under Section 230. A federal district court in California agreed and, regarding YouTube’s recommendations, found that Google was protected under the law because the videos at issue were produced by ISIS.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed the district court’s ruling, and Gonzalez’s family asked the Supreme Court to weigh in. The high court said in October it would take up the dispute.
The court fight has elicited input from a range of parties, many of which are backing Google in the case. Platforms like Twitter, Meta and Reddit — all of which rely on Section 230 and its protections — argue algorithmic recommendations allow them to organize the millions of pieces of third-party content that appear on their sites, enhancing the experience for users who would otherwise be forced to sift through a mammoth amount of posts, articles, photos and videos.
“Given the sheer volume of content on the internet, efforts to organize, rank, and display content in ways that are useful and attractive to users are indispensable,” lawyers for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, told the court.
Even the company that operates online dating services Match and Tinder pointed to Section 230 as “vital” to its efforts to connect singles, as the law allows “its dating platforms to provide recommendations to its users for potential matches without having to fear overwhelming litigation.”
But conservatives are using the case as a vehicle to rail against “Big Tech” firms and amplify claims that platforms censor content based on political ideology.
Citing lower court decisions they believe has led to a “broad grant of immunity,” a group of Republican senators and House members told the Supreme Court that platforms “have not been shy about restricting access and removing content based on the politics of the speaker, an issue that has persistently arisen as Big Tech companies censor and remove content espousing conservative political views, despite the lack of immunity for such actions in the text of” Section 230.
The case has presented the justices with a rare opportunity to hear directly from the co-authors of the legislation at issue. Ron Wyden, now a Democratic senator from Oregon, and Chris Cox, a former GOP congressman from California, crafted Section 230 in the House in 1996. The bipartisan pair filed a friend-of-the court brief explaining the plain meaning of their law and the policy balance they sought to strike.
“Section 230 protects targeted recommendations to the same extent that it protects other forms of content curation and presentation,” they wrote. “Any other interpretation would subvert Section 230’s purpose of encouraging innovation in content moderation and presentation. The real-time transmission of user-generated content that Section 230 fosters has become a backbone of online activity, relied upon by innumerable internet users and platforms alike.”
Google, they argued, is entitled to liability protection under Section 230, since the platform’s recommendation algorithm is merely responding to user preferences by pairing them with the types of content they seek.
“The algorithm functions in a way that is not meaningfully different from the many curatorial decisions that platforms have always made in deciding how to present third-party content,” Wyden and Cox said.
The battle also highlights competing views about the internet today and how Section 230 has shaped it. For tech companies, the law has laid the groundwork for new platforms to come online, an industry of online creators to form and free expression to flourish. For Gonzalez’s family and others, the algorithmic recommendations have proven deadly and harmful.
Like the Gonzalezes, Taiwanna Anderson, too, has fought to hold a social media platform responsible over content it recommends to users.
Last May, Anderson sued TikTok and its parent company, China-based ByteDance, after her 10-year-old daughter Nylah died in late 2021 after trying to perform the dangerous “Blackout Challenge,” in which users are pushed to strangle themselves until they pass out and then share videos of the experience.
The challenge, which went viral on TikTok, was recommended to Nylah through her account’s “For You” page, a curated feed of third-party content powered by TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation system.
Anderson’s lawsuit sought to hold TikTok accountable for deliberately funneling dangerous content to minors through the challenges and encouraging behavior that put their lives in danger. TikTok asked the federal district court in Pennsylvania to dismiss the suit, invoking Section 230.
U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond tossed out the case in October, writing that the law shielded TikTok from liability because it was promoting the work of others. But he acknowledged in a brief order that TikTok made the Blackout Challenge “readily available on their site” and said its algorithm “was a way to bring the challenge to the attention of those likely to be most interested in it.”
“The wisdom of conferring such immunity is something properly taken up with Congress, not the courts,” Diamond wrote.
Mackey, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that if peopledisagree with the reach of Section 230 as the courts have interpreted it, the right remedy is for Congress, not the Supreme Court, to rewrite the law.
“When they passed it, they set this balance and said not that they didn’t believe there wouldn’t be harmful content, but they believed on balance the creation of opportunities and forums for people to speak, for the growth of the internet and development of a tool that became central to our lives, commerce, political expression — that was what they valued more,” Mackey said. “Congress is free to rewrite that balance.”
A new creator economy
In the 27 years since Section 230 became law, the explosive growth of the internet has fueled a multi-billion-dollar industry of independent online creators who rely on large tech platforms to reach new audiences and monetize their content.
In Morton’s case, her YouTube channel has allowed her to expand beyond her office in Santa Monica, California, and reach patients around the country, including in areas where mental health resources may be scarce.
“The ability for me to get over a million views on YouTube means that I’m able to reach so many more people, and mental health information isn’t held behind a paywall,” she said.
Alex Su, a lawyer by training who runs the TikTok account LegalTechBro, first began sharing content on LinkedIn in 2016 as a way to drive awareness of his employer, a technology company. After building up a following of lawyers and others in the legal industry on LinkedIn, Su began experimenting with TikTok in 2020.
His TikTok videos, which touch on insider experiences of working at a law firm, resonated with other lawyers and people with ties to the profession. He said LinkedIn’s recommendation system has been instrumental in helping Su reach his target audience and market his company’s services.
“These algorithms let me go viral among people who can relate to my jokes,” he told CBS News. “If I put this type of content in front of a general audience, they probably wouldn’t find it as funny.”
Internet companies and supporters of Section 230 note the law has allowed for new and emerging companies to grow into industry leaders without incurring significant litigation costs fighting frivolous claims.
Su, an early adopter of LinkedIn and TikTok for those in the legal field, noted that creators are often quick to take advantage of new platforms, where they can reach new audiences.
“I think it’s no accident that there are these shifts where new entrants come in and you can take advantage of it as a content creator because then you can go viral on that platform with a new audience quickly,” he said. “Without those different platforms, I would not have been able to grow in the way that I did.”
Few clues from the court
The Supreme Court has given little indication of how it may approach Section 230. Only Justice Clarence Thomas has written about lower courts’ interpretations of the legal shield.
“Courts have long emphasized non-textual arguments when interpreting [Section] 230, leaving questionable precedent in their wake,” Thomas wrote in a 2020 statement urging the court to consider whether the law’s text “aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by internet platforms.”
The Supreme Court could issue a ruling that affirms how Section 230 has been interpreted by lower courts, or narrow the law’s immunity.
But internet companies warned the court that if it limits the scope of Section 230, it could drastically change how they approach content posted to their sites. With a greater risk of costly litigation with fewer protections, companies may be more cautious about letting content appear on their sites that may be problematic, and only allow content that has been vetted and poses little legal risk.
“If you’re concerned about censorship, the last thing you want is a legal regime that is going to punish platforms for keeping things online,” Mackey said. “It’s going to be increased censorship, more material will be taken down, a lot won’t make it alone in the first place.”
A decision from the Supreme Court is expected by the summer.
The founder of the popular Reddit forum WallStreetBets is suing the social media company, alleging he was unfairly banned as moderator of the group and blocked in his efforts to gain a trademark.
Jaime Rogozinski is asking that a court grant him ownership of the WallStreetBets trademark, according to a lawsuit filed February 15 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. He also is asking that Reddit be barred from using the WallStreetBets brand unless he is reinstated to the forum.
Rogozinski’s saga, as portrayed by the the lawsuit, paints the picture of a scrappy individual investor who sought to help others tap Wall Street advice following the Great Recession, only to be jilted by a large tech company. After WallStreetBets grew into a forum with more than 1 million subscribers, Rogozinski learned his account was suspended in April 2020 — shortly after he had filed an application to register WallStreetBets as a trademark, the lawsuit claims.
Reddit informed Rogozinski that his account was suspended for violating company policy by “attempting to monetize a community,” the lawsuit noted. The lawsuit alleges that “people use Reddit to market and sell everything from investment advice to bodily fluids.”
“Rogzinski’s true offense was trying to control the brand he created in the first place, a famous brand that helped Reddit ride to a $10 billion valuation,” the suit claims. It also added that “Reddit’s dreams … turned out to be Mr. Rogozinski’s nightmare as the company insists, ‘if you build it, we will take it from you’.”
Jaime Rogozinski, founder of Reddit forum WallStreetBets, speaks during the CoinDesk 2022 Consensus Festival in Austin, Texas, on June 11, 2022.
Bloomberg
In a statement to CBS MoneyWatch, Reddit described the lawsuit as “completely frivolous.”
“Jaime was removed as a moderator of r/WallStreetBets by Reddit and banned by the community moderators for attempting to enrich himself,” the company said.
The company added, “This lawsuit is another transparent attempt to enrich himself. It’s telling that he is filing this suit three years after he was banned by r/WallStreetBets and long after the community rose in mainstream popularity without his involvement.”
Although Reddit removed Rogzinski as a moderator, the company allowed him to continue using the social media platform, a spokesperson added.
Trademark fight
In March 2020, Rogozinski filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register WallStreetBets for use with online and print publications about trading and finance, for clothing items, and to provide an online forum for financial and trading information, according to his suit.
In May of that year, however, Reddit filed the first of four trademark applications to the U.S. Patent office to register WallStreetBets as a trademark. Reddit has also started legal action to block Rogozinski from asserting ownership of WallStreetBets, the suit said.
“This case is about putting a stop to Reddit’s systematic theft holding the company accountable for its misconduct,” the lawsuit alleges.
WallStreetBets emerged as a meeting place for small investors during the pandemic — after Rogozinski had been banned from the site — propelling the stocks of companies like AMC Entertainment, GameStop and others into the stratosphere for a time. But the subreddit’s brand is one of the better known sections of Reddit, which could prove to be a valuable asset for whomever controls the trademark.
Among his lawsuit’s goals — that the court will declare that “he, and not Reddit, is the owner of the WallStreetBets trademark.” He also wants the court to order Reddit to stop using the WallStreetBets name “unless and until the company reinstates Mr. Rogozinski as the senior-most moderator of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit.”
A wide range of businesses, internet users, academics and even human rights experts defended Big Tech’s liability shield Thursday in a pivotal Supreme Court case about YouTube algorithms, with some arguing that excluding AI-driven recommendation engines from federal legal protections would cause sweeping changes to the open internet.
The diverse group weighing in at the Court ranged from major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and Microsoft to some of Big Tech’s most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even Reddit and a collection of volunteer Reddit moderators got involved.
In friend-of-the-court filings, the companies, organizations and individuals said the federal law whose scope the Court could potentially narrow in the case — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — is vital to the basic function of the web. Section 230 has been used to shield all websites, not just social media platforms, from lawsuits over third-party content.
The question at the heart of the case, Gonzalez v. Google, is whether Google can be sued for recommending pro-ISIS content to users through its YouTube algorithm; the company has argued that Section 230 precludes such litigation. But the plaintiffs in the case, the family members of a person killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, have argued that YouTube’s recommendation algorithm can be held liable under a US antiterrorism law.
In their filing, Reddit and the Reddit moderators argued that a ruling enabling litigation against tech-industry algorithms could lead to future lawsuits against even non-algorithmic forms of recommendation, and potentially targeted lawsuits against individual internet users.
“The entire Reddit platform is built around users ‘recommending’ content for the benefit of others by taking actions like upvoting and pinning content,” their filing read. “There should be no mistaking the consequences of petitioners’ claim in this case: their theory would dramatically expand Internet users’ potential to be sued for their online interactions.”
Yelp, a longtime antagonist to Google, argued that its business depends on serving relevant and non-fraudulent reviews to its users, and that a ruling creating liability for recommendation algorithms could break Yelp’s core functions by effectively forcing it to stop curating all reviews, even those that may be manipulative or fake.
“If Yelp could not analyze and recommend reviews without facing liability, those costs of submitting fraudulent reviews would disappear,” Yelp wrote. “If Yelp had to display every submitted review … business owners could submit hundreds of positive reviews for their own business with little effort or risk of a penalty.”
Section 230 ensures platforms can moderate content in order to present the most relevant data to users out of the huge amounts of information that get added to the internet every day, Twitter argued.
“It would take an average user approximately 181 million years to download all data from the web today,” the company wrote.
If the Supreme Court were to advance a new interpretation of Section 230 that safeguarded platforms’ right to remove content, but excluded protections on their right to recommend content, it would open up broad new questions about what it means to recommend something online, Meta argued in its filing.
“If merely displaying third-party content in a user’s feed qualifies as ‘recommending’ it, then many services will face potential liability for virtually all the third-party content they host,” Meta wrote, “because nearly all decisions about how to sort, pick, organize, and display third-party content could be construed as ‘recommending’ that content.”
A ruling finding that tech platforms can be sued for their recommendation algorithms would jeopardize GitHub, the vast online code repository used by millions of programmers, said Microsoft.
“The feed uses algorithms to recommend software to users based on projects they have worked on or showed interest in previously,” Microsoft wrote. It added that for “a platform with 94 million developers, the consequences [of limiting Section 230] are potentially devastating for the world’s digital infrastructure.”
Microsoft’s search engine Bing and its social network, LinkedIn, also enjoy algorithmic protections under Section 230, the company said.
According to New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, it is virtually impossible to design a rule that singles out algorithmic recommendation as a meaningful category for liability, and could even “result in the loss or obscuring of a massive amount of valuable speech,” particularly speech belonging to marginalized or minority groups.
“Websites use ‘targeted recommendations’ because those recommendations make their platforms usable and useful,” the NYU filing said. “Without a liability shield for recommendations, platforms will remove large categories of third-party content, remove all third-party content, or abandon their efforts to make the vast amount of user content on their platforms accessible. In any of these situations, valuable free speech will disappear—either because it is removed or because it is hidden amidst a poorly managed information dump.”
For about $600, people could buy limited editions of Bob Dylan’s new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” with the promise of the book being hand-signed by the famed musician himself. Now, the book and its publisher are under fire as buyers revealed that the supposed hand signature was actually a replica.
Publisher Simon & Schuster offered a $599 version of Bob Dylan’s new book “guaranteed” to include his handwritten signature.
Simon & Schuster/Wayback Machine
A now-erased webpage for Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, offers an “exclusive edition” of the book “guaranteed to be personally hand-signed by Bob Dylan.” The listing price for the book was $599, final sale, with no returns accepted. Meanwhile, the unsigned copy of the book is listed by the publisher for $45.
Simon & Schuster is a division of Paramount Global, as is CBS News.
The book even came with a letter from the publisher’s president and CEO, Jonathan Karp, dated November 15, that further guarantees the signature’s authenticity.
“You hold in your hands something very special, one of just 900 copies available in the US of The Philosophy of Modern Song signed by Bob Dylan. This is Bob’s first book of new writing since Chronicles, Volume One, published in 2004, and since winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 2016,” the letter states, ending with a simple promise, “This letter is confirmation that the copy of the book you hold has been hand-signed by Bob Dylan.”
But when buyers of these limited editions got their copies, they were shocked to find that the signature was not hand-signed. It was a computer-printed replica.
The revelations of the replica signature emerged a month ago, before many people received their books. One YouTuber popular for promoting fan mail and autograph collecting posted a video on October 21 that showed a signed copy of the book that someone had acquired through Canadian bookseller Indigo.
“It was painfully clear that it was never signed by Bob,” the YouTuber says, saying it was clearly made by a machine for a number of reasons. “…It just doesn’t look like Bob’s signature. Secondly, the lines are 100% uniform and have distinctive starting and stopping points.”
And finally, he said, “at 81 years old, you would expect to see some shake in his signature.”
“If you ordered a copy, now’s your time to cancel,” he warned.
One person who purchased the book said on Reddit that it looks like it had been signed with an “auto-pen,” a machine that reproduces someone’s signature.
“Definitely NOT a real signature,” another person tweeted this week after getting their copy of the book. “I have 3 actual Bob autos that look nothing like this. Anyway, glad I’m getting my money back. The letter is a complete joke.”
@DefDylan@skennedy88 I got mine. Definitely NOT a real signature. I have 3 actual Bob autos that look nothing like this. Anyway, glad I’m getting my money back. The letter is a complete joke. pic.twitter.com/RBFk1nvabm
Simon & Schuster publicly addressed the situation on Sunday, issuing an apology to those who purchased the supposedly hand-signed book.
“As it turns out, the limited edition books do contain Bob’s original signature, but in penned replica form,” the statement says. “We are addressing this immediately by providing each purchaser with an immediate refund.”
Dylan has not publicly commented on the signature snafu.
The book was originally announced in March for a November 8 publication. It’s the legendary singer and songwriter’s first book of new writing since his 2004 book “Chronicles, Volume One.” In it are more than 60 of Dylan’s essays about music and songs, in which he breaks down their rhymes and syllables and shows how genres are intertwined – even bluegrass and heavy metal.
Drake’s newest album includes jabs at multiple other artists and public figures – and some have their own choice words for the Canadian rapper.
Drake released “Her Loss,” a 16-track collaboration with 21 Savage, on Friday. On one song, “Circo Loco,” he seems to imply that Megan Thee Stallion’s allegations that she was shot by Tory Lanez were false. In 2020, Megan stated that she was shot in the foot by Lanez, who has been charged with felony assault with a firearm and pleaded not guilty.
“This b—- lie ‘bout getting shots but she still a stallion,” Drake raps on the cut.
On Twitter, Megan asked other artists to “stop using my shooting for clout” shortly after the album was released. She asked why it was acceptable to joke about women being shot and seemed to compare the reaction to her shooting to the ongoing outcry over Kanye West’s antisemitic comments.
“Ready to boycott bout shoes and clothes but dog pile on a black woman when she say one of y’all homeboys abused her,” she wrote.
Megan Thee Stallion has been vocal about critiquing the societal acceptance of violence against Black women, penning a New York Times op-ed in 2020 that reflected on her shooting and the intersection of sexism and racism.
And Megan isn’t the only public figure speaking out against Drake’s newest disses.
On “Middle of the Ocean,” the album’s 12th track, the rapper throws a barb at Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who married tennis superstar Serena Williams in 2017.
“Sidebar, Serena, your husband a groupie,” the artist raps.
But in a Twitter thread about his new investments and business success, Ohanian said that being a groupie isn’t such a bad thing.
“The reason I stay winning is because I’m relentless about being the absolute best at whatever I do — including being the best groupie for my wife & daughter,” he wrote.
Given that Cyberpunk 2077 came out nearly two years ago, you might think there’s little left to discover and document ahead of the game’s first and only planned DLC, Phantom Liberty. But right in the heart of Night City lies the beginning of a riddle that has left fans scrambling to unravel the mystery since the hunt began in 2020. It all starts with a single statue and a six-digit alphanumeric sequence: FF:06:B5.
Cyberpunk 2077 players caught on to the FF:06:B5 mystery early on in the game’s life, but the answer has remained frustratingly out of reach despite many elaborate theories. The mysterious six-character sequence is found on a statue where monks can often be seen praying or meditating. The search has involved rigorous number-crunching based on the initial hint, maps that chart the location of repeat instances of the same statue, and deep dives into spiritual concepts and real world history, among other attempts to find the solution. Following the trail is dizzying to say the least. But every step of it is intriguing, even if you’re not sure you’re on a trail to begin with.
Few concrete, undeniable facts and trails have surfaced outside of initial observations, a good chunk of which are documented on r/FF06B5, a subreddit dedicated to cracking the titular mystery (as well as other secrets found in Cyberpunk 2077). Theories and speculation go over the deep end real fast with this mystery, so if you find yourself struggling to keep your head on straight, you’re not alone. As is said in the “Newcomer Sticky” of FF:06:B5’s subreddit, “Without concrete proof that one [theory] is more viable than another, it’s difficult to give this community and newcomers a direction to look.”
No one is certain what the solution is, or if any of the proposed theories and documentation are even on the right track. If you want to get a look at the origin of the mystery for yourself, you can find the first and only truly confirmed “hint” right in Corpo Plaza. Located northwest of the massive roundabout and near the Corpo Plaza apartment, is a statue known to FF:06:B5 mystery hunters as FF:06:B5 Prime “D3.” A multi-armed statue holding a giant sword with two hands, and a sphere in one of its left hands, it has the six-character sequence in bold across the front. It also has a strange forking symbol that many suspect either relates to V’s lifepaths, the branching nature of the game’s story, or even ancient numbering systems. This statue can be found in multiple locations in the city, though not all have the alphanumerical sequence. Miniature versions of the statue, complete with the sequence, also appear in the game’s recently-added apartments that are up for sale.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
G/O Media may get a commission
Despite the mystery, a few reliable observations and likely starting points have been established by the community:
FF:06:B5, when used as an HTML hex color code, translates to “shocking pink,” or as the community refers to it (and often the mystery itself) “magenta.”
The sequence looks like a portion of a MAC address and/or matches other kinds of code sequences found elsewhere in the game.
NPC monks gather in front of the D3 “Prime” statue. They can be heard chanting as well as repeating one particularly intriguing line of dialog: “My apprentice! Your throat chakra is blocked! Activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.”
Paweł Sasko, Cyberpunk’s lead quest designer, confirmed that this isn’t a case of smoke where there’s no fire. He acknowledges that it is indeed a mystery worth looking into, likely with a specific meaning and solution—and one he has turned down every opportunity to shed light on, even when asked directly.
There’s also somewhat of a sixth fact to consider: After update 1.5, the text on D3 “Prime” changed from red to yellow. What that could possibly mean is anyone’s guess.
All theories more or less sprout from these confirmable observations. What follows depends which avenue you choose to pursue and how lost in the weeds you’re willing to get. You can check out some of the connected threads in the community’s mind map, which traces not only connections within the game but also connections to works of pop culture and spiritual concepts that exist outside of the game. Anything that can have a number, color, or thematic concept attached to it seems to be up for exploration. Trips through Reddit threads and Discord conversations point to any number of possibilities. Everything from complex readings into spiritually to matching the code to Windings fonts, of all things.
One example of the rabbit hole that can ensue from following a potential lead includes attempting to connect the mysterious “Zen Master” side jobs to FF:06:B5. Given the presence of monks at the D3 prime statue, the monk’s meditation quests seem like a natural place to look. These side jobs involve meeting a lone monk who takes you through a meditative brain dance. When pulled apart for clues, things get a little interesting.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
As charted out in the mind map, players have figured out that the amount you can choose to donate to the monk after each meditation session increases in order of the Fibonnaci sequence starting at the 12th position. Not only that, but each quest is named after specific works of art such as John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Rūmī’s “Poem of the Atoms,” and “Meetings Along the Edge,” the title of a piece that appears on the collaborative recording project between composers Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar. These have their own numbers to contribute with release dates, song length, and more. Trailing sets of numbers and thematic relationships seem to be a common end result of many theories and the game is more than happy to provide such speculative fodder.
Occurrences like the Zen Master and the weird math hidden in the details have become the meat and potatoes of intense speculation that blends number crunching with concepts of spirituality with the game’s own lore and references to pop culture. It’s hard to keep track of it all. Does it directly relate to the main FF:06:B5 mystery? Another mystery altogether? Or none at all? While some trains of thought seem more convincing than others, the game is filled with dozens of opportunities to trace lines where there might not have been any in the first place. Yet, it always seems like certain clues are too hard to ignore. Why does one striking in-game ad in particular seem to not sell a specific product (or contain other versions of it as all other ads do, confirmed via datamining)? I found myself wondering why said ad seems to bear some resemblance to the mysterious symbol on the D3 Prime statue and on the jewelry worn by the monks who meet in front of D3 at the same time of day, every day. Am I seeing things or am I on to something?
The scope of the city, the frequent themes of identity and reality woven throughout the game, it all creates a spiral of possible solutions to a weird statute that has been resistant to the most audacious efforts to crack it.
Given the clear esoteric nature of the mystery, others have turned to investigating Misty, her shop, the game’s tarot cards, and all other appearances of religious and spiritual concepts and iconography. The glyph found in Misty’s shop contains strings of numbers and letters that can be connected to form a larger sequence, broken up into pairs similar to FF:06:B5. It also bears resemblance to graffiti found near the final Zen Master quest.
Screenshot: CD Projekt Red / Kotaku
The NPC monk line concerning the “throat chakra” seems to also be somewhat promising, as some speculate that the answer to the mystery lies in following the request to “activate the meridians on the roof of your mouth.” A couple of recent posts to the mystery’s subreddit are following patterns of blue, based on the traditional color of the throat chakra and how that matches the giant blue circular glass “roof” that covers a portion of the road in Corpo Plaza.
Despite the impressiveness of the documentation that’s been gathered in pursuit of this mystery, it’s hard not to get discouraged by how many lead to dead ends. And when every little thing in the game can seemingly be related by some extension, it’s easy to start getting paranoid.
Every time I felt like I was ready to give up on one of the possible theories or speculations, there’d be a small connection I’d struggle to dismiss, or documentation of alleged clues that drew lines to other oddities in the game, such as the constant repetition of the “no future” graffiti. But after sifting through so many long strings of speculation and theory, it’s hard not to deny the fun in finding something tucked away in Cyberpunk 2077 that no one’s pieced together yet.
Cryptocurrency haters have found a home—and common cause—trashing the volatile asset class and wishing for its demise.
David Gerard has not a kind word to spare for any part of the $1.4 trillion cryptocurrency market. “It’s dumb nerd money that nerds use to try to rip each other off,” he says. Bitcoin in particular earns his ire. “Its history is a series of get-rich-quick schemes,” says Gerard, a 54-year-old IT administrator in London. He does not even have anything nice to say about the widely applauded technology underlying crypto, the digital ledger system known as the blockchain. “A pile of nonsense,” he concludes.
He has amassed a modest Twitter following spouting off like this (13,300 followers) and has self-published several books on the subject (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried To Take Over the Money). When Gerard wants to commune with other crypto haters, he heads over to a burgeoning corner of the web: a Reddit forum called Buttcoin, the name a suggestion that cryptocurrencies are, well, a waste of time. He often posts there several times a day and spends more time commenting on what the group’s other 63,000 members publish. “Every other Reddit about cryptocurrency is full of cultists! Or marketing shills. Or both,” he says.
Cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin have made millions for investors large and small and become popularized by such mainstream figures as Jack Dorsey, who has said he’d be working in cryptocurrency if he wasn’t running Twitter and Square—and, of course, Elon Musk. The Tesla CEO made a $1.5 billion Bitcoin investment earlier this year that prompted a spike in the currency’s value and later sold some of his holdings to help his electric-vehicle company report a first-quarter profit. Crypto has legions of devoted fans but also an army of critics. And sometimes those lines blur: Musk turned on Bitcoin last month and triggered a plunge in its price by saying Tesla would no longer accept the currency as payment for its vehicles, citing “the rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels” by miners who create the currency with banks of computers that create blocks of verified transactions which are then added to the blockchain.
Crypto foes on Reddit cheered Musk’s retreat and trumpet any such negative news to fuel their own strident criticism of Bitcoin and other currencies, pointing out that they are underpinned by little other than hype of the kind initially inspired by Musk. Like those true believers, the denizens of Buttcoin tend to be men interested in technology who are constantly online and enjoy communicating through things like memes. (The group motto: “Buttcoin: backed by gold, comedy gold!”) But rather than devote themselves to talking up an asset, Buttcoin does the opposite, schadenfreude firmly established as the group’s lingua franca.
Some of the most popular posts over the past week: a screenshot from a pro-crypto Reddit of someone losing $35,000 on DogeCoin; a photo of red and green chiles tracing out Bitcoin’s trading chart; and one simply headlined “30k finally broken 😊,” a reference to Bitcoin’s recent descent from all-time highs earlier this year. This type of thing is what Amy Castor, a Buttcoin fan and online crypto pundit, calls “shitposting.” Within the crypto world, “there are a lot of ridiculous things that happen, so ButtCoin is a place where you go to poke fun at all that,” she says. As you can tell, Buttcoiners aren’t any more buttoned-up online than their idealist counterparts, and much of the thinking on both sides tends to be pretty simplistic, accepting little nuance. But Buttcoin’s antics at least aren’t gyrating financial markets.
Despite two decades of steadily increasing mainstream acceptance, crypto remains an undeniable easy target—something that some people love to hate, like say, the tax man and the New York Yankees. Owning it requires a remarkable leap of faith many cannot justify: There’s nothing backing it. It has no value tied to a physical object. Plus, the stuff’s super volatile, its value seeming to ping-pong madly on a consistent basis. (Bitcoin, for instance, was worth over $60,000 at one point this year. Today it fetches around half that.) The combination of these elements makes crypto even easier to ridicule than an aging retail chain or an ailing movie-theater business.
McCormick’s actions get at the real weightiness of these social media-led financial manias. He didn’t believe what he was saying at all. But other people did.
“It’s not real, actual finance,” declares Stephen Brown, 40, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, one of the moderators of the Buttcoin Reddit group. No one is sure who created Buttcoin almost 10 years ago; Brown and the seven other moderators represent as much authority as it has known since. “They’re just trying to build this other system and replace it with something that’s either a joke or a huge bubble.”
Brown can seem like something of an anomaly within his own group. He admits to having dabbled in short term trades of crypto over the years, though insists he would never buy and hold for the long haul. Most Buttcoiners are more like another group moderator who would only identify himself by his handle, AmericanScream, or by his preferred pseudonym, Adam Smith. (Since the latter seems rather like unearned aggrandizement, let’s refer to him by the former.) AmericanScream attests to never owning any cryptocurrency, and his complaint about the asset class is a familiar one: That it lacks fundamental value, and it can only increase in price if enough people successfully convince more people into buying: “Once you hold Bitcoin, PR is all you’ve got.”
AmericanScream, who says he is a 50something semi-retired software engineer, is a near-constant presence on ButtCoin, talking about upcoming changes to Ether, the death of crypto proponent John McAfee and the recent vanishing of two South African crypto-preneurs, whose disappearance could represent the largest scam in the industry’s history. “You’ll see me post at 8 in the morning, sometimes 11 at night, sometimes at 3 a.m.,” he says, proudly. His prolific publishing has had consequences, he says, and it’s why he studiously refuses to give his name. He claims to fear that if he did, pro-crypto Redditors would read this, track him down and punish him for his many contrary comments, perhaps by doxing him. “We’re the little guys saying the emperor has no clothes,” he says. “People want to shut us up.”
Buttcoiners by nature aren’t afraid to go poke the bear. And Jim McCormick, a 28-year-old from Houston, is another of those types. McCormick discovered Buttcoin only recently, but in one of his first actions to amuse the group, he pulled a prank on a rival crypto-supporting Reddit, publishing several wildly ludicrous posts on the pro-crypto page going bullish on Bitcoin. (In one, McCormick purported to have found a rare “Iron Gremlin” movement on Bitcoin’s stock chart, a surefire sign to buy; to be clear, such a thing does not exist.) “Not exactly to my surprise but still to my dismay, a lot of people believed it and supported it without a hint of irony or skepticism,” he says. Afterward, he posted screenshots of their enthusiastic responses to Buttcoin.
McCormick’s actions get at the real weightiness of these social media-led financial manias. He didn’t believe what he was saying at all. But other people did, and possibly after reading his faux posts and taking them at face value, they went out and bought more crypto. Now imagine what else has been said across the web over the past year—and who’s said it and who has chosen to believe it—to get the markets behaving as schizophrenically as they have recently. “It was kind of a brief experiment to see if people would be able to distinguish mockery of what they believe in from the actual thing,” McCormick says. “And to their demerits, I guess they couldn’t.”
Twitter has been widely criticized for trying to charge transit agencies, third-party app developers and academics for data access to its platform, a move opponents say has forced independent apps to shut down and threatened research on misinformation and hate speech.
Now, a similar revolt against Reddit may be gaining steam after a popular app developer said Wednesday the social media company wants to charge him $20 million a year to continue offering software that lets Reddit users view and interact with the platform.
The newly unveiled pricing of Reddit’s paywall “is close to Twitter pricing” and is not “anything based in reality or remotely reasonable,” said Christian Selig, developer of the Apollo app, in a Reddit post on Wednesday. “It goes without saying that I don’t have that kind of money or would even know how to charge it to a credit card.”
Selig’s post highlights a plan Reddit announced in April to enact a Twitter-like pricing structure for its application programming interface (API) — the software that allows other programs to tap into the company’s data, including posts and comments. Reddit’s API is what allows Reddit content to be displayed to the Apollo app’s 900,000 daily active users.
Reddit’s initial announcement had been light on pricing details, leaving many to speculate about the future of third-party access to Reddit. As details of its pricing plan trickled out on Wednesday, Reddit did not dispute Selig’s account of his conversations with the company, but said Reddit remains “committed to fostering a safe and responsible developer ecosystem.”
“Expansive access to data has impact and costs involved, and in terms of safety and privacy we have an obligation to our communities to be responsible stewards of data,” said Tim Rathschmidt, a company spokesperson, in an email.
Selig’s tweet on the issue has been viewed more than one million times and has led to an outpouring of criticism for Reddit. “Apollo is the only reason I use Reddit,” one fan of the app tweeted. Another said: “Reddit is going full Twitter and it’s a big mistake.” .
Selig had initially expressed cautious optimism about the company’s plan, saying on the day of the announcement that he had spoken to the company and that if the new moves were implemented reasonably, “this could be a positive change.”
But now, a month later, Selig’s optimism has deflated. According to Selig’s post Wednesday, Reddit intends to charge $12,000 for every 50 million attempts to access the company’s data.
“Apollo made 7 billion requests last month,” Selig wrote Wednesdsay, meaning his additional costs simply for running his business as usual would add up to “1.7 million dollars per month, or 20 million US dollars per year.”
“I’d be in the red every month,” he added. Selig didn’t immediately respond to questions from CNN about whether he expects to have to shut down the app.
Selig isn’t the only app developer crying foul. Some developers have said Reddit’s API changes would also block ads in third-party apps, potentially depriving apps of ad revenue and forcing them to try to convert users to subscription business models.
Part of the motivation for Reddit’s plan involves the surging popularity of artificial intelligence.
Large language models such as ChatGPT are developed using training data, which in many cases is sourced from content found across the internet. Reddit should not be expected to provide that data to “some of the largest companies in the world for free,” CEO Steve Huffman told the New York Times in a recent interview.
Meanwhile, Reddit is also widely expected to go public, potentially as soon as this year. The stock offering could add to pressure for Reddit to show revenue growth. Its paid API could help on that front.
But that could come at the expense of independent apps and, as some pointed out, Reddit users who may experience a loss of choices in ways to access the platform. Some predicted that they might soon have to rely on Reddit’s proprietary app, which has been widely panned by users, if they wish to access the site at all.
A widespread Reddit blackout affecting some of the site’s largest communities has continued into its third day with no signs of stopping, as a number of groups on the site vowed to remain closed off indefinitely to protest changes to the platform’s data policies.
As of Wednesday morning, more than 6,000 subreddits remained inaccessible and in private mode after what began as a two-day voluntary shutdown. The blackout includes popular forums such as r/aww, r/videos and r/music, each of which claims more than 25 million subscribers on the platform.
The extended protest highlights the commitment of some users, moderators and developers to a long-term standoff with Reddit’s management over a decision to begin charging steep fees for third-party data access to its platform.
Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The coming fees have provoked broad outrage because of their expected impact on independent apps and moderator tools that have grown up around Reddit and that many users view as a critical resource. Some of the largest third-party apps, such as Apollo and RIF, have said they cannot afford the fees and must shut down, effectively driving users to Reddit’s native app that has been widely panned as slow, buggy and inferior, particularly for users with disabilities.
In recent days, Reddit has said it would exempt some accessibility apps from the price changes and allow some third-party tools to continue operating through its application programming interface (API). But many moderators have called the announcements little more than a “microscopic” concession.
In response to allegations that Reddit is imposing the fees and forcing developers to shut down in a “profit-driven” move, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said in a recent Q&A with users that Reddit will “continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive.”
“Unlike some of the [third-party] apps, we are not profitable,” Huffman said.
The tensions echo how Twitter, under its new owner Elon Musk, has prompted criticism with plans for its own paywall for data in a bid to develop new revenue sources and to shore up the company’s struggling finances. For Reddit, the stakes are also high to grow revenue, as the company reportedly looks to go public later this year.
Huffman reportedly dismissed the blackout in a leaked internal memo obtained by The Verge. According to the memo, Huffman described the protest as “among the noisiest we’ve seen” but insisted that “like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.”
“We absolutely must ship what we said we would,” Huffman reportedly wrote in the memo, in an apparent reference to the API changes. Huffman also reportedly predicted that some subreddits would end their protest after the initially scheduled two days.
As of Wednesday morning, many groups participating in the blackout had lifted their self-imposed restrictions. But even as some groups went public once more, others joined the protest.
Hackers from the BlackCat ransomware gang, also known as ALPHV, are threatening to leak 80 gigabytes of confidential data from Reddit that they claim to have stolen during a February breach, according to a post from the group on the dark web, which was reviewed by CNN and an independent cybersecurity expert.
In their post, the hackers claim they first demanded a $4.5 million payout “for the deletion of the data and our silence” in April. After receiving no response, the group said it followed up on Friday with an additional demand: Reddit should withdraw a controversial new pricing policy that has sparked a protest from some of the platform’s most influential users.
Reddit CTO Chris Slowe previously posted about a security incident that took place in early February. In the post, Slowe said the company’s “systems were hacked as a result of a sophisticated and highly-targeted phishing attack,” with hackers accessing “some internal documents, code, and some internal business systems.” Only employee data was accessed, according to the post.
A Reddit spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Monday that BlackCat’s post relates to the February incident. The spokesperson reiterated that no user data was accessed, but declined to comment beyond that.
More than 6,000 Reddit forums went dark last Monday in what was supposed to be a two-day protest over the company’s plan to begin charging steep fees for some third party apps to access its platform. A week later, more than 3,500 Reddit forums remain dark.
While the ransom note appears to support the protestors’ cause, some experts are skeptical of BlackCat’s actual motives.
“I suspect that ALPHV doesn’t actually care about the API pricing. They simply want future victims to see how much ongoing harm they can cause to increase the likelihood of them deciding that payment is the least painful option,” said Brett Callow, threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, who reviewed the post on the dark web.
BlackCat, for its part, said it does not expect Reddit to meet its demands.
“We are very confident that Reddit will not pay for its data,” the group wrote in the post on the dark web. “We expect to leak the data.”
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