To everyone in this thread thinking ooh, how horrible for those poor women, where can I get some, may all your deepfake nudes end up looking like Donald Trump mushroom hunting with sixteen misshapen fingers through Jabba the Hutt folds of his own curdled fat.

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The only thing I really want to know about Google’s Protected Audience “alternative information dimension” container is how I can stuff it full of noisy bullshit, fuck around with it, poison it as thoroughly as I can, and then cheerfully send it away back to Google as a trojan horse as often as possible – all while maintaining the appearance of operating organically within the parameters of normal function as expected by the Google mothership, so they will gladly hoover up my toxic shit and not stop me from seeing what I want to see outside the interference of their New and Improved intrusive hellscape of data collection and ad serving.

And all this preferably as an automated function via uBlock Origin. Thanks!

https://www.reddit.com/u/PhillyCanada/s/O52X2oGf5V

It’s gone now, on www. and old. via browser. “Page not found” with a pic of that snoo crying under a hot sun because he bought the pre-IPO shares, lol.

Yeah. In a nutshell. The number of commentaries, old and new, formal and informal, asking the exact same questions from every possible angle, are countless. And every single one of them is pointed at trying to make it make some kind of sense, lol.

Funny you should mention that.

In the mythology of the bible, 2 Samuel 24 talks about how King David took a census of Israel, and it pissed god off so much that he killed 70,000 completely uninvolved Israelis over it, and would have killed more but he stopped when he got to Jerusalem.

And these modern day chuckleheads are doing it on purpose, lol. If only they believed a fraction of their own holy book, I would have the best time gladly explaining to them via scholarly biblical exegesis how and why they’re gonna DIE a nasty death if they do this.

If only. -sigh-

I haven’t signed into YouTube in maybe 5 or 6 months, I turned off history two or three years ago, cookies get deleted every time I shut down the browser, and I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube. But some things, like foreign language videos that need automatic caption translation, I still watch in YouTube.

Even so, I’ve only encountered a blank page like this maybe three times in all those months. And the beautiful blankness doesn’t last: as soon as I open a specific video URL – any video URL – it fills right back up again with the same old shit, except now it’s ALL related to that one single video I open.

This is no big deal. Open up any video and you still get sidebar recommendations. I use Blocktube to ensure I don’t see channels I don’t want, so it doesn’t just fill back up with Mr. Beast and Fox News, I continue to use FreeTube for everything else, and all is well.

Awesome. Joined. Thank you.

To short a stock is kind of difficult to do on an IPO because you have to borrow a stock to short it, and pre-IPO only the underwriters have that stock, and are not usually lending it out. Naked shorting – where you don’t actually have a stock but you sell it anyway, lol – is illegal. I know there are a lot of folks talking about shorting RDDT here but you have to actually borrow a stock to short it.

More likely is that Reddit’s trying to get people to buy at a fixed price before it tanks, because any shares purchased pre-IPO are guaranteed cash at a set rate for them, not subject to the trading volatility that will come with the IPO. I think that’s why WSJ is calling Reddit’s strategy an “unusual IPO wager.”

So far this year it’s been a rocky start for IPOs anyway, many are trading below IPO value, even companies that have more in the way of tangible assets than Reddit. But the clock is against them, the Reddit board pretty much has to do it as soon as possible or fight the added market volatility that comes with an election year, among other reasons.

I’ve linked a couple of articles; the second one especially is very helpful. It talks about a similar situation, a healthcare company called BrightSpring with a heavy debt load looking for capitalization that went for an IPO in January 2024, and how they spent their pre-IPO time trying to talk investors into buying at a set price beforehand because that’s how they could still get some cash out of an otherwise shitty IPO showing. Personally, I think this is exactly what Reddit is trying to do, and what this car-dealership style hawking of pre-IPO shares via email is trying to accomplish for the Reddit board.

Archive links:
WSJ: Reddit Plans to Sell Stock to Loyal Users in Unusual IPO Wager
WSJ: Will the IPO Market Spring Back in 2024? The First Big Debut Offers Clues

This pre-IPO invitation to buy is the “pump” part of pump and dump, of course everyone hates it, lol.

“I think it’s pretty cool that Reddit is doing this IPO offer to their mods and users,” a Reddit user who asked me to identify him as Kevon tells me. “It’s a nice little thank you that actually may have some monetary value.”

Kevon’s considering buying shares in the Reddit program, and may buy more once it goes public, if he feels the stock is undervalued.

Kevon sounds like a nice guy, but someone should explain to him the difference between being given options and buying shares at the IPO price. Reddit’s not doing him any favors.

The REAL value of Reddit that tends to get overlooked in these conversations about Reddit’s measurable value in the IPO has nothing to do with its use or its users, but (1) in its ability to influence public opinion and (2) its possession of users and data to sell on, including being a platform for ad delivery to millions of eyes.

Now look at its majority owners: Conde Nast, Tencent (China), and Sam Altman (AI). There are some who believe this is coincidence. But I believe where there is money, there is no such thing as coincidence.

Reddit has already proven that it has never made and will never make a profit in and of itself, yet the cash continues to flow. That’s because Reddit management is structured around churning Reddit’s secondary benefits into wealth for itself, and nothing else.

Look at their actions, both in the short term and in the long term. Regardless of their words, the owners have proven incontrovertibly that neither the users nor even the usability of the site means jack shit to them.

It’s ALL about advertising money, being able to steer public discourse, and scraping data wherever they can find it. That’s the real product.

Thus it’s a pretty certain guarantee, IMO, that anyone who isn’t already on the Reddit board or an owner of Reddit will lose whatever they invest in the IPO, because Reddit is NOT about social media, or providing/creating value for its users. Reddit is solely about scraping the secondary benefits that the users provide and selling them off for the benefit of the few.

Even the selling off of pre-IPO shares – normally reserved for those already involved in the ownership or financing of a company about to go public, because pre-IPO shares can offer massive gains if the IPO is successful – should tell you that they expect RDDT to instantly sink. Why on earth would they give those sweet pre-IPO shares up to the unwashed masses if they thought there was even a remote chance the IPO would at least break even?

This IPO is complete shit, lol. And what’s even funnier is that the C-suite of Reddit is SO used to pulling fast ones over on their users that they aren’t even trying to hide it. I feel sorry for anyone buying these shares, because they are going to tank on day one. There’s literally no value there, other than for the rich boys already skimming it off the top, and this IPO is their final skim.

Then I hop to another instance or create one of my own (running 19 or later so I can block his) and problem solved, lol.

Federation means Musk can buy a single instance, or even a hundred instances, but cannot prevent anyone else from simply opening another somewhere else and making their own portal to the same content he wants to collect behind a paywall (if he even could).

I feel like AI companies have been scraping Reddit for their datasets already since the beginning and without permission.

Well yeah, Sam Altman (Open AI) was even on the board of Reddit for a while. It’s a safe bet that they’ve been doing it for years.

This is not surprising, given as much nuclear saber-rattling as Putin has done in the last two years. He is absolutely desperate to be feared and for the West to back down, and I don’t think that’s an overstatement. Every day that goes by is a day his own empire slides back a bit, and his home control weakens as more and more Russians personally feel the bite of war coming back to them in myriad little ways.

And meanwhile, as Putin grows weaker both at home and abroad, Europe and especially his bordering countries are strengthening both alliances and arsenals, choosing NATO over Russian lies and Ukrainian freedom over the easy path of just letting him have yet another country without a fight, like Georgia and Crimea.

This war was only supposed to last three days, and we’re almost at the two-year point. If Putin could already have used nukes, even in the tiniest of “accidents,” he would have.

Yet Putin is even more aware than anyone else that nuclear saber-rattling is ALL he can do without triggering MAD and/or putting the “blast” back into “oblast” when his shit blows up without leaving the pad for want of maintenance over the last few decades.

Putting nukes into space is a great way of reinvigorating the threat behind his nuclear arsenal for the rest of the world and giving us all a bit of shock-and-awe – but without actually having to turn the key on anything he’s had laying around for the last forty years.

“Less filling, tastes great.”

But it’s still all theater. What Western satellites or resources can he actually nuke, anywhere, without triggering Article 5?

A few seconds in the breakroom microwave ought to take care of any problems in that regard, if there’s no other obvious metal in them like grommets for laces. Bzzzzt ding! and problem solved, lol.

Nah, you’re good. For some of us it’s the first time seeing it, and I really liked reading what people far more familiar with this tech have to say about it here, including that it’s old news for them. So thank you, seriously, for posting it.

There is something not right with that guy. Apologies to all the Mr. Beast fans, but there it is.

The first time I ever even heard about him was from a news article about a year ago. Some disadvantaged little kid got pranked by people claiming to be on Mr. Beast’s staff promising him [something] that made him light up with joy, but was then deliberately stiffed on whatever the promise was, and of course it broke his little heart. It was clearly not a scam and the kid was just destroyed by it, so much so that it upset his community and finally hit the local media.

When contacted, Mr. Beast and his staff denied they had anything to do with it, which is entirely possible – but what really got my attention was just the callous kind of half-assed apology and oh well response the kid got from them. They could so easily have tossed the little guy some kind of bone; instead it was more of a shut-up-and-go-away response.

I have my YouTube subscriptions tightly curated so I rarely see any of the really popular stuff, but at some point after all this a Mr. Beast video was offered, and I remembered it was that guy. So I went and looked at his channel and ALL of it just seemed to have a very strong ick factor. Okay, maybe it’s just my poor taste, lol.

But now he’s on my radar, and I’ve noticed something else: I have never actually heard a completely positive word about him. There’s always some kind of controversy involved. Contrast that with other celebrities: there are many who never have a bad word spoken about them. Not this guy.

And now Elon Musk wants him on X. Keep in mind that Elon Musk is openly repelled by those he cannot manipulate, including anyone with working conscience who is disgusted by the kind of propagandistic hatred X serves up on the regular, and Musk tirades against that kind of ethical “wokeness” regularly. Yet he loves Mr. Beast enough to run Beast content (for free? as an ad?) to get Mr. Beast onto his platform. That’s not the kind of recommendation decent people get from Musk.

Yeah. @[email protected] is right. There’s something just NOT right about that guy.

EDITED TO ADD: I have also noted that several of the people who replied with disagreement also felt the need to obviously misquote me. Normally I don’t bother messing with that shit – if you won’t read well enough to quote correctly the first time, you won’t if I reply – but just because misquotes are now An Actual Theme in the replies, I’d like to point out you’re not helping your cause, no matter how good it sounds on comeback. To deliberately misquote someone in order to slay a strawman just means you never had a valid point to start with: you literally had to make one up to be able to cut it down. And in defense of this guy, too. Birds of a feather, lol.

I haven’t experienced this because I don’t log in, and haven’t since all this fuckery started a couple months ago. I have to double-click play, but that’s it. Fully loaded uBlock Origin and AdBlockPlus, no problems in browser at all.

I keep FreeTube loaded with my subscriptions, so if I want to see what’s new I can open FreeTube and either watch there or copy the YouTube link and watch on YouTube.

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