A piece in the i Paper today – “Reddit is ugly and utilitarian – but it’s the best space left on the internet” – sings the praises of Reddit. It does so through the lens of writer Zing Tsjeng enjoying a site that doesn’t demand you “market yourself as popular, attractive or palatable”. But in later admitting the site “isn’t perfect, of course”, the piece misses the chance to dig deeper and therefore overlooks key issues with Reddit that aren’t immediately apparent.

I do agree with the i about certain benefits. Reddit being largely text-based is increasingly rare in an internet obsessed with video and brevity. It allows for – and often encourages – depth and discussion, due to being essentially a bunch of specialist forums glued together. Its algorithm isn’t great. But create an account and Reddit will mostly stick to things you actually want to see, rather than ‘doing a YouTube’ and rapidly steering you towards extremism. It stands in stark contrast to the instant gratification of TikTok or the endless void of AI-generated slop that is a modern Facebook feed.

But. The piece calls Reddit “one of the few remaining platforms safe from capitalism’s onerous demands”. It then, crucially, qualifies that statement with, “to market yourself as popular, attractive or palatable for the online gaze”. I say crucially, because that caveat is vital. It aligns with the piece’s objective: to position Reddit as a place where you can be yourself. But by narrowing the definition, that dodges some uncomfortable truths, which are some of the places where Reddit starts to go bad.

The piece claims that in being “[f]reed from the need to appeal to the algorithm or establish a personal brand, people can actually be themselves” and this “fuels the brutal honesty behind notorious confessional subreddits”. In some cases, this is true. But Reddit has a karma system, which is often ‘farmed’ (gamed), a process that has been accelerated by the onset of AI. Long-time users have watched, glumly, as many of their favourite subreddits (Reddit’s jargon for ‘dedicated forum’) slowly descended into a game of spot the AI post.

For the most part, automated posts (regularly recycled) are confined to those huge subreddits, because they are the best places to farm karma. But AI has impacted the site in other ways. Users increasingly copy-and-paste from ChatGPT, just as they do everywhere else online. But on Reddit, this erodes the platform’s reputation for expertise. I recently witnessed a surreal argument about handheld console specs, with someone doubling down on their inaccurate, clearly AI-generated information. The result? People bought into it and said they’d ‘upgrade’ to a device that in reality didn’t offer the claimed benefits. Quite why they didn’t research outside of Reddit is beyond me, but for some people Reddit is the internet, in the same way older folks barely leave Facebook. Regardless, it shows Reddit isn’t immune from AI.

In fact, Reddit the company is in very much in favour of AI, largely because it long ago realised it could sell Reddit content as training data. This is, remember, user-generated content. Without that, Reddit is nothing. But the users won’t see any of the spoils. And if this alone makes you question whether Reddit is one of the good guys, the platform’s attitude was laid bare during what Wikipedia calls the Reddit API controversy. In short, Reddit brutally went after third-party apps, such as the popular Apollo, made unfounded accusations against Apollo’s creator, and sparked a wave of subreddit blackouts. When the Reddit leadership’s patience wore thin, the company simply threatened to replace moderators if they didn’t reopen their subreddits – and then followed through. That ended any pretence the platform is meaningfully democratic or, for that matter, meaningfully different from its rivals.

None of this necessarily contradicts the i paper’s subjective claim that Reddit is the “best space left on the internet”. But even if you agree (and, for the record, I don’t), the conclusion must be that it’s merely the best of a very bad bunch.

You might have seen reports about a heatwave in the UK. Then you might have looked at the temperatures and thought: what? What? Readings this week have been in the high 20s, and where I live are predicted to top out at 31°C on Saturday. (That’s high 70s to high 80s in old money.) Surely that’s just… lovely? Bit of sun. Bit of warmth. Get over yourselves, wimpy British people!

But no. Because various factors add up to make things pretty uncomfortable here. We don’t, as a rule, have air conditioning. It’s increasingly common in cars. Some offices and shops (mostly supermarkets) will have some kind of cooling units. Often ineffective ones, mind. Homes? Vanishingly rare. And those homes? They’re designed to keep heat in. Mostly brick-built. Heavily insulated. Smallish windows. No air flow. And speaking of air flow, there’s not much of that either right now. No breeze at all. Plus, it’s humid, due to the UK being a weirdly shaped island surrounded by sea.

There’s no time to prepare and build resilience either. If you live in a place that’s very regularly hot, you become acclimatised. The UK, though, frequently flips seasons at almost any time of year. A week and change ago, we were tempted to put the heating back on in our house. With wind chill, the ‘feels like’ factor outside was in single figures (mid 40s, in ye olde degrees). During evenings, we were wearing fleeces and wrapping up in blankets. Now I’m sitting in my office, just after 9am, with a fan blasting into my face, watching the temperature readings on our smart radiator gadgets tick ever upwards. The windows are open and that’s doing nothing. Fans are on, which is basically blowing hot air around. Even nights aren’t helping, with their lack of breeze and temperatures stubbornly only briefly bottoming out in the high teens (mid 60s). And sunrises before 5am mean if you do leave the windows and curtains open, you’re going to wake up at stupid o’ clock.

Despite all this, I personally would take heat over murk. We often have ‘summers’ in the UK that amount to six weeks of cool grey. I am solar powered. I love the sun. But the heat can be tricky to deal with. And because of the various factors outlined above, not least the fact that for many people there’s just no ‘escape’, it can feel an awful lot more uncomfortable, stifling and intense than you’d otherwise realise from the temperature numbers alone. In short, it’s hotter than you might think. So maybe think a bit before rattling off yet another “pfft – the Brits are just wimps” post when, here in the UK, we all feel like we’re melting.

To say iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 have been divisive is putting things mildly. Much of that is down to Liquid Glass, which at best needs a lot of optimisation before these operating systems ship later this year. But look beyond that and there’s a lot to like, the most notable revamped feature being vastly improved iPad windowing.

Often, though, it’s smaller changes that can make or break an operating system. And one change has me doing a happy dance: the Home indicator no longer scythes across the bottom of the screen, above the app you’re using. I’ve grumbled about the Home indicator for years. I wanted an off switch – the means to get rid of it for good. Because the last thing I need when playing a game, using a music app, or reading, is a distracting line lurking at the bottom of the screen.

In the ’26’ dev betas, Apple hasn’t provided an off switch in Settings, but it has introduced the next best thing. Actually, it’s arguably created something better. When you switch to an app, the Home indicator now elegantly fades. Further interaction with the app doesn’t make it reappear. Instead, you have to make a deliberate upwards swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring it back.

I’m no fan of hidden UI. Apple seems a bit obsessed with hiding settings, menus and tabs away, and that can make things difficult for people. But just this once, I’m going to make an exception, because the interface element I least liked on iPhone and iPad is no longer an irritant and a nuisance – it’s there when I need it and gone when I don’t.

Edit: As per a comment I received, I should note that the ability to switch between apps with a swipe at the very bottom of the display remains, regardless of whether the Home indicator is visible. So what Apple has removed is the visual distraction, not the functionality. When you swipe, the indicator immediately reappears.

What should new Apple leadership do? That’s the question posed in Apple Turnaround by John Siracusa, which explores a new deal for developers, better software reliability, and harder paths to growth. It’s a great post, and the developer side of things especially gets me. I remember being at an EA meet around 2010, with a slew of indies excited about iPhone. They didn’t care about Apple’s cut, because everything else was, for them, better than what existed on other platforms, including the (relative) freedom to do whatever they wanted. Amazingly, Apple was less prescriptive than others in the gaming space. Then things all went very wrong.

Apple prioritised IAP over traditional game models, training users to want games for nothing. App Store editorial led to iPhone game sites shuttering – but they’d given new titles far more visibility than Apple ever would. And competitors quickly learned and evolved to compete with – and then better – Apple’s offering to game creators. Whereas we once saw iPhone-first titles head to other platforms, the reverse quickly became more commonplace. Elsewhere, major mobile creators like Simogo quit, which should have set alarm bells ringing – but it didn’t. Because Apple just counted the cash.

More widely, across apps and games, Apple has also found itself in a space where it’s not just showing – as Siracusa suggests – disrespect for developers as much as outright disdain. Various emails, now very much in the public domain due to emerging in lawsuits, suggest too many senior figures at Apple believe their own press to the degree they think Apple is responsible for all developer success and the success of the platform as a whole. They argue developers should be grateful to Apple and not the other way around. I have two words to counter that: Windows Phone.

I hate doing a “what would Steve Jobs do?” and it’s naive in the extreme to think his Apple wasn’t out to make huge piles of cash. But there are questions today about where Apple’s priorities lie in a whole range of spaces. Perhaps, as one developer said to me, the Jobs version of Apple only appeared to be on the side of devs because it needed to be, and now it doesn’t. So was this disdain always there or not? Was it a culture ingrained in Apple when Jobs was CEO or is it a more recent thing? Because I’d say that if it’s the former, Apple has an even bigger problem than Siracusa suggests.

Rich white men feel they should have everything instantly. That now increasingly extends to skills. But also, they don’t know what good looks like. Hence the current mess we are seeing with GenAI. Worse, everyone – from managers to consumers – is now being taught the same thing.

I see an increasing number of people saying that they want to paint/write/make songs and that it’s unfair that they can’t, and GenAI is the solution. Or hear about organisations claiming they can automate such tasks to the level they no longer need creative people at all. But GenAI tools are rarely sufficient. At least, if you want good. Which requires you to be able to recognise good.

For people who want to be creative, GenAI generates a finished article for them, based on a vague idea. There’s none of ‘you’ in there. In corporate scenarios, the lack of precision, specificity and accuracy from GenAI ultimately leads to some level of slop. In either case, the result is further erosion of the creative industries to make a handful of rich white guys richer through enabling people to think they can be Picasso or Shakespeare from merely typing in a line of text. What you’re really getting is another anodyne ‘median’ remix of what’s already out there.

Just like any other type of skill, creativity is not innate. I’ve lost count of how many people in the past have inferred that people are just born artists or musicians or writers. You don’t get people saying someone was born an electrician or a scientist or a footballer. In my case, I certainly wasn’t born a writer or a musician. I got to the point I’m now at because I’ve been writing professionally for 25 years – and writing songs for even longer.

Whatever skills I do have in these fields are also the result of thousands of hours of experiments and failures and building on successes. There was no shortcut. Notably, I also, as a kid, was good at art. Today? I’m OK. I can draw quite well. Am I ‘entitled’ to more? No. I never kept at it. Increasingly, though, tech bros would argue there’s no need to keep at it because you don’t even need to start. You just need a GenAI service and a prompt and you’re good to go, ready to turn even the vaguest creative impulse into the finished article in an instant.

I’m not sure where this is leading us, but I’m certain it’s not anywhere good.

This post is based on a post originally published on Bluesky and Mastodon.