Tech Newsletter
June 11-17, 2023
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All of my opinions are italicized and sources are in blue.
Reddit Crashes for 3 hours due to over 8k subreddit black-out
Redditors around the world are protesting about Reddit charging for its API, which used to be free. Over 8,000 subreddits went dark from the 12th to the 14th, and some say that they would protest indefinitely. Some of the subreddits going dark have tens of millions of subscribers. But with the outage, the protests have already affected users who don't use a protesting subreddit. During the revolt, the Reddit app itself experienced some problems with loading subreddits, even those that were not revolting. The main feed showed "Something went wrong. Just don’t panic" and a pop-up saying, "Sorry, we couldn’t load posts for this page.” There were 45,887 reports of outages at the problem's peak. The reason that this revolt was so large was because the third party Reddit app, Apollo, is being shut down, due to it having to pay $20 million a year due to API costs. Apollo is the most popular third-party Reddit app and, from what I have heard since I don’t use Reddit that much, Apollo is better than the first-party Reddit app. Despite such a large blackout, Reddit is not changing their policies about API costs. While I find that Reddit charging for API usage is fine, charging $12,000 for 50 million requests is ridiculous. Apollo's developer, Christian Selig, only has to pay Imgur $166 for the same amount of requests. Reddit's API pricing would work out to about $2.50 per user per month. To put that into perspective, Reddit, the first-party app, makes 30 cents per user per YEAR! I suggest not using Reddit until they change their insane API costs.
Rockstar removes 189 vehicles from GTA Online
GTA Online was released 10 years ago and it is still being updated to this day. The latest update added many quality of life features, but it also removed over 25% of the game's vehicles. In a June 8 pre-update news post on the company’s official website, Rockstar technically did tell players it would be removing some cars. However, that warning was vague and didn’t specify how many cars would be removed, or which specific ones. Many assumed it might be a dozen or so really old cars that nobody cares about in 2023. Based on player reactions, some of the cut cars were fan favorites. This does not affect the people who already have the cars, just the people that don’t have them unlocked. The worst part about this is Rockstar is making the only way to get some of the cars back is through their $6 a month GTA+ subscription. In addition, GTA+ is currently only available for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S players and not PC or legacy console GTA Online players. These cars are also obtainable through the Lucky Wheel, which could only be spun every 24 real world hours. This would mean you would have to spend at least 189 days to get cars that you could have bought just a couple of weeks ago. Even though I have never played a GTA game, I still find this terrible. Removing features from a game that you bought is unacceptable, but locking them behind a subscription, that you need a modern console for, is worse. When you buy something, you should be able to unlock all of the content without paying more. DLCs are the only exception to this, since you are paying for extra content that the game developers put significant time into. The difference between a DLC and a game update is a DLC adds story, while an update would refine the game to make it more enticing for new or recurring players.
Intel officially rebranding consumer CPUs
As rumored over a month ago, Intel is dropping the ‘i’ in their processors in favor of ‘Ultra’ and ‘Core’. Starting with the new Meteor Lake generation of processors, the company is moving from its traditional "i3/i5/i7/i9" branding to "Core 3/5/7/9" concept. Even though no one asked for a rebrand, Intel says the rebranding “better aligns to customer requests”. Intel’s higher-end processors will include "Ultra" in their branding, which would look like “Intel Core Ultra 9." As I said last month, I find that this change would make Intel’s product line more confusing and a mouthful. Which would you rather have, “Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 1090K” or “Intel Core i9 14900K”. I will still refer to Meteor Lake as ‘14th gen’ instead of whatever jargon they will use when their next generation of processors are released later this year.
Twitch Partner Plus Program
Both Twitch and YouTube offer a 55-45 revenue split to creators when ads are played. This means the creator gets 55% of the ad money and YouTube/Twitch gets the rest. The threshold that you have to pass in order to receive monetization is lower than Twitch. One thing that YouTube does that Twitch does not, is offer a 70-30 split for gift subs. In order to match this, Twitch is introducing Partner Plus, a program boosting the cut that streamers earn to 70% of subscription revenue. Streamers in the Partner Plus program will receive the 70/30 revenue share on net subscription revenue (revenue from recurring monthly subscriptions and gift subscriptions), for 12 months up to $100,000. Once a streamer earns $100,000 through Partner Plus, the revenue share will return to the standard rate of 50% for most partners. YouTube on the other hand does not have a limit for their 70-30 split. This still makes YouTube the better platform for uploading and streaming videos.
OnlyTechFans.net won domain vote
Expect onlytechfans.net by the end of the month. I will continue to maintain this Google Site for as long as I can.
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