The API protests and Reddit’s heavy handed reaction to said protests are getting a lot of attention. And as far as I am concerned, Reddit is doomed as a result of that. I’ve been saying that for a while and I am sticking to that because from where I sit, this Reddit situation a case of is history repeating itself.
For those of a certain age who were using the Internet in the early 2000’s, one of the best places to go on the Internet was digg. Wikipedia describes Digg like this:
Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
It formerly had been a popular social news website, allowing people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. In 2012, Quantcast estimated Digg’s monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Digg’s popularity prompted the creation of similar sites such as Reddit.
In short, it digg was Reddit before Reddit even existed. But much like Reddit, management who figured that digg was immune to failure made a mistake that killed the site. Again, from Wikipedia:
Digg’s v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called “power users” who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another’s postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page. Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg’s.
In short, they took the ability for ordinary users of digg to upvote or downvote web content out of the users hands and put it into the hand of a few. On top of that, the site became buggy. That started the downward spiral that eventually led to the demise of digg. Yes digg did try to fix a lot of this stuff. But by the time they did, it was too little too late.
Now let’s compare that to Reddit, Steve Huffman who is Reddit’s CEO is trying to make money from Reddit at the expense of their user base. Specifically he’s ignoring its users, alienating the volunteers it depends on for literally everything, and killing third-party apps which work better than the first party Reddit app. Not to mention he’s ignoring the threat of subreddits moving to places other than Reddit such as Beehaw which will take traffic away from Reddit. In a way, Reddit is following down the same path as digg. And what is ironic about this situation is that Reddit was one of the sites who actively added to the factors that led to their demise:
Disgruntled users declared a “quit Digg day” on August 30, 2010, and used Digg’s own auto-submit feature to fill the front page with content from Reddit. Reddit also temporarily added the Digg shovel to their logo to welcome fleeing Digg users.
And now Reddit is on its way to becoming the next digg.
Can Reddit stop itself from becoming the next digg? Sure it can. All it needs to do is to have a CEO who will listen to users, respect them and change course accordingly. But Steve Huffman isn’t that CEO. So I’m not holding my breath in terms of seeing Reddit change course. And I expect that Reddit will join Digg, not to mention other sites like MySpace, and LiveJournal as being footnotes in Internet history as a result.
Petro Canada Gas Stations And More Are Offline Due To Unspecified Computer Problems…. Have They Been Pwned?
Posted in Commentary with tags Petro Canada on June 25, 2023 by itnerdLast night I went out to get gas at my local Petro Canada which is the closest gas station to my home. Upon arrival, I was greeted with this:
If you look at the top right corner, there’s a handwritten note that says “only cash”. But I wasn’t deterred as I opened the Petro Canada app and tried to do the pay at the pump method via the app. However I was met with this:
You can see that it says “Login is currently unavailable”. So that was a #Fail. Since I didn’t have any cash on me, I was forced to go to my nearest Esso station to fill up. Upon returning home, I decided to go to the Petro Canada website. I was met with this:
If you look at the top, it says “Login is temporarily unavailable”. Thus it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something is up with Petro Canada. I then checked the companies Twitter feed and it hasn’t been updated in over two days. That’s odd. And checking the local and national media, I I found two stories talking about this online. Twitter has people talking about this as well:
That last Tweet highlights what many are thinking. Which is that this is some sort of cyberattack. I don’t say that lightly. But this reminds me of the Sobeys situation as well as the Garmin situation. In both cases, normal business was disrupted for some period of time. Neither company commented in any significant way on their issues. Then it later came out that both companies were pwned by ransomware. This Petro Canada situation has that feel to it. And we’ll find out what the deal is soon enough because Petro Canada has a very high profile in Canada, which means the Federal Government will start to ask questions about this (if they haven’t already) as in many parts of Canada, gas stations are few and far between. Thus if your closest option for gas is Petro Canada, and the next option is miles of away, you might have a problem. The Federal Government knows that and will want answers. Hopefully Petro Canada will be able to answer them fully and transparently.
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