There are still some good communities on Reddit but the user experience of the web app on mobile and the iOS app are abysmal to say the least. I found myself using Reddit less and less when I couldn't access Reddit via my client of choice (Apollo) earlier this year and these days I hardly ever use Reddit anymore. If I ever need to revisit an old thread I do so on desktop via old.reddit.com.
I have a 15 year old reddit account, and when reddit was good, it was so good. Now, it's a rotting carcass. They blocked it at my work and I am sad to say I don't even really miss it.
apollo was the only way to possibly consume reddit without losing your mind: i had a filter list with words like 'dead, death, kill, killed, shot, murdered...'
this actually turned Reddit into a wonderful place where I learned a lot about my favorite tech and microcontroller platforms and still got a good dose of cool memes
i genuinely feel like i haven't been able to participate in a lot of things anymore because the generated noise from their current metric, 'if it bleeds, it leads', is too high
I watched a YT video about the apollo endgame last year and wondered "why didn't he steal that inertia and just launch his own social network?" It would have been so appropriate given reddit was started with a massive outflux from a previous link aggregator.
I wondered the same thing - I presume there’s just no money it a Reddit replacement unless there’s a subscription fee, but I think his users would’ve happily paid it. Plus it’d act as a cover charge to keep out bots and trolls.
yup, one of my favorite forums had a system that was open to view but had a five dollar invite fee to upgrade your account to post things, plus any penalties for infractions made by an invited member beyond a certain 'egregiousness' traversed up the invite tree
Sweden. I can count on one hand how many times I’ve used cash in the last 5 years. Cash is extremely rarely used. For paying in stores, contactless cards or Apple/Google/Samsung pay are the most common payment methods by far. For paying people (such as splitting the cost of a meal at a restaurant) we use a service called Swish which is connected to your bank account and works similarly to Venmo or Zelle in the US. Swish can also be used for paying businesses. Some businesses such as food trucks have a QR code that you can scan to pay them.
Paying businesses can also be done by using services called Bankgiro and Plusgiro. These are done directly via your bank account and if done after 10 AM are processed the next business day.
3,5% is actually the maximum ABV you can get in supermarkets in Sweden by law. For anything higher ABV than that you need to go to the government-owned chain called Systembolaget or go to a bar or restaurant that has a license to serve alcohol.
Because of the restrictions though, craft breweries have been making some great <3,5% beers that they sell at supermarkets.
> 3,5% is actually the maximum ABV you can get in supermarkets in Sweden by law. For anything higher ABV than that you need to go to the government-owned chain called Systembolaget
Jesus that sounds terrible. I get the good intent I suppose but the hell..
There are US states with monopolies on liquor sales too. It’s not that bad. The plus side is they are usually very clean and don’t let people hang around all day. It’s strictly business and that’s a good thing.
Systembolaget is a pretty good shop. They offer a wide range of products and in the case of wines they tell you what kind of food the product goes well with
It used to be the same in Colorado until recently. State law mandated only 3.2% alcohol by weight (~4.0% ABV) could be sold in grocery stores or consumed in state parks. It changed with a state-wide referendum.
There is a theory that this law is why craft beer boomed in Colorado. It is easier for small breweries to sell beer through a mom & pop liquor store than a national chain grocery store. Folks were more used to buying beer at liquor stores than other states.
The history of it goes back to the same era when the US implemented prohibition. Sweden had a referendum about having prohibition as well, but the prohibitionists lost by a small margin, so instead of banning alcohol sales, they just kept the pre-existing WW1 rationing of alcohol in place even after the war ended. Eventually the rationing was removed but the government monopoly was kept in place.
I didn’t expect to see a masters thesis from KTH on HN. I actually took a course with Roberto, one of the supervisors of this thesis, while I studied there. Small world.
Firefox with uBlock Origin most of the time, but I’ll sometimes use Chrome as well. I live in Sweden but I’m not a native Swedish speaker and Chrome’s webpage translation feature works quite well if I need to quickly translate some legalese or anything with language that is more advanced than the colloquial written language.
Sweden is a privacy-minded individual’s nightmare. There are a bunch of other sites like Hitta as well. For example on Ratsit you can pay a small amount of money and see anyone’s salary and full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US. If they live in an apartment you can see exactly where in the building they live. Just as an example, when I was visiting a friend for the first time I wasn’t sure where in the building he lived so I put his name into Ratsit and it said “second floor, third door from the left”. It also had his phone number and other information about him as well, including other individuals he lived with and the names of every person in his building.
Doesn't the EU lean towards privacy protection for individuals? I'm assuming Sweden being a member, means that EU laws would take precedence if someone wanted their information removed from websites like these?
As far as I can tell, the EU tends to lean towards privacy protection for individuals against businesses or other private entities, not against the government, and the focus doesn't always seem to be on governmental datasets being used for private purposes. A lot more governmental data collection is needed to handle things such as mandatory resident registrations in most EU countries, single-payer healthcare in some EU countries, relatively pre-filled tax declarations in some countries, etc.
Not Swedish, but the relevant one in the parent comment is probably mandatory residency registrations, and I'm surprised the data is so publicly accessible there. There are usually attempts at creating firewalls in many countries so the data that one agency collects isn't directly linked to that of other agencies, preventing broad files on individuals.
> full personnummer, which is similar to a social security number in the US
It's similar in the sense that it's a unique number assigned to each person, but the fact that it's publicly available means that it cannot be used as authentication.
And SSN shouldn't be used as authentication either. It's too easy to steal, too hard to change.
We have a similar issue with Finnish Personal Identity Codes, which are legally public, but there are restrictions related to their processing. Which leads to the common misunderstanding that they're secret, so they're used for authentication. It's a mess.
