I’m posting this from Mars colony. Amazing isn’t it.

Where did this come from? Is this a precursor to pushing some blockchain shit or something?

It did happen before the IPO. It’s been happening for several years. They have not been doing mass bans all at once. They’ve been surreptitiously taking down subreddits over the years. Mostly smaller ones that nobody cared about. Looks like they went for the bigger targets now.

This isn’t a sudden change to ideologically align with the current US administration either. They have been at this for a long time.

Well bluetooth doesn’t carry enough bitrate to accomplish this. Besides. Apple won’t and doesn’t need to because their AAC encoder is superior. There is no other bluetooth codec that comes even close. Every codec that claims to be the best one yet is more marketing than anything.

Vendors reframed the narrative for SBC to be dog shit so they can push their own as cutting edge new tech. In reality SBC isn’t that bad. The vendor codecs aren’t that good. And Apple has some kind of secret sauce in their AAC encoder that results in really good quality reproduction of audio.

As far as I’ve seen most of the gimmicky codecs are spins of existing old technology. AAC itself is old too but at least one vendor Apple has focused on making their implementation good. We don’t need another standard+1. We just need a common standard done well. If only Apple would open theirs.

This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.