Reddit’s CEO said he expects this blowup will pass eventually.
This was precisely the wrong thing for him to say if he wanted that to happen
Seriously. Talk about poking the bear, he got me pissed all over again. Never going back to reddit now.
That’s because spazzy spez didn’t think his internal memo would leak.
Nah I think it’s clear he wanted it to leak. He’s just an egomaniac who thinks he’s actually a good leader. That section of the memo was for investor confidence. (It’ll pass, no revenue effect so far, etc.) The other part about warning employees not to wear Reddit gear in public for fear of violence was meant for the press and for the uninformed, to try to garner sympathy and paint the protestors as bad actors.
Obvious tactic, paint the other side as violent and you’ll get sympathy. Won’t someone please think of the corporation.
Make no mistake, spez would love to see someone in a reddit tshirt beat up on the street. He’d be able to plaster that everywhere he could showing how sad his side is
A false flag is a typical right wing move. I can picture spez doing it. He should pick some kid name Aaron just to make it that much more spiteful.
I dislike u/spez as much as the next guy, but man, that’s dark.
I mean there is a lot of money riding on this. I’ve seen people getting killed for 3 grand.
It’s working, too. The Forbes article which I saw posted either here or on Kbin didn’t even push back on Huffman’s claim that traffic from LLMs was the reason for the price hike, and I haven’t seen any big publication use the audio or transcripts showing a slam-dunk case of slander (or libel, whichever one applies to text) against the Apollo developer.
The problem with the libel/slander is unless it falls into a few categories of what’s called per se defamation, you’re required to prove damages. (From the libel’s/slander’s damage to your reputation, not from something like Reddit’s API change destroying his business.)
LLMs were just the catalyst for sure. They saw that as the opportunity to start milking all API users. They could have classified the users into groups and charged those groups differently, but they didn’t, and here we are
slander (or libel, whichever one applies to text)
Easy way to remember: Slander is Spoken. (They both start with S)
The other part about warning employees not to wear Reddit gear in public for fear of violence was meant for the press and for the uninformed, to try to garner sympathy and paint the protestors as bad actors.
Glad people aren’t blind to this obvious ploy. When LGBT violence is at an all time high I don’t think you need to be worried about wearing a reddit shirt.
He expects so because he’s going to have his admin staff de-mod all the rebels, open the subs back up, and ruthlessly ban anyone who says a word about the controversy. The user population that remains will eventually go back to sleep, and all will be well in Reddit-land.
Lol good luck finding new mods that will be any good after pulling a stunt like that. They certainly aren’t going to pay for any either.
The News and Worldnews subreddits prove there are people still willing to lick Spez’s boots.
This. There will always be people attracted to power, even power as ultimately meaningless as being a reddit mod. Spez will enlist a new squad of wanna-be petty tyrants.
They never shut down, along with a few other biggies. TiL just reopened.
That’s why I’m not sure that letter was intentionally leaked. He said all the wrong things for de-escalating this situation, he just added more fuel to the fire.
After reading his message I blocked Reddit at DNS level. I wasn’t planning to leave it completely before, but now I’m not planning to unblock it till when u/spez will be there.
I mean, the charitable read is the CEO of the company reassuring the entire company that they’ll be OK. That’s his entire job. Yes, it’s a pretty crappy thing to say but we all weren’t the intended audience. He’s there to rally the troops and keep morale up.
That said, fuck u/spez and I’m way happier over here than there.
Every person counts
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The major Star Trek subs all have. Started their own Lemmy instance (startrek.website) and have their private message directing folks over.
Well they uave been familiar with the Federation for very long time.
Take your upvote and go.
You know, I wonder if that was in all seriousness actually part of it, because they do have positive associations with the word federation, and that’s the same effect marketing mainly tries to achieve. Might make people just that little bit more interested in it and more willing to work through any troubles getting used to a new system.
I’m sure that subconsciously influenced the decision at least a bit. Plus the whole socialist and “fuck money” attitude in Trek.
Damn it… yeah take your upvote…
I see what you did there. Keep doing this here an you will prosper. 🖖
that would explain why Im suddenly seeing a ton of star trek posts on my federated feed, I mean Id expect some but Ive seen a lot more all of a sudden
LOL That would be me bringing them into the federation LMAO
More star trek fans in the fediverse = awesome, imo. Welcome aboard, and thanks.
As somebody who isn’t even a Star Trek fan, I still think a flood of trekkies is infinitely cooler than a flood of white supremacists which have killed similar platforms.
That’s awesome. Starting a community is cool but starting their own instance is next level.
Hey Trekkies are top nerd, would you expect any less? Godspeed brothers.
I grew up with TNG and it warms my heart that it’s still going strong, we definitely need some of that optimism for the future.
Oh nice I was looking for a good Trek community. Did
/r/tuvixinstitute/r/daystrominstitute move over?They did! [email protected] is Daystrom. [email protected] is the mainsub, and [email protected] is the meme/shitpost sub!
How do I get to those from your comment? I clicked them and it just opened Gmail and decided the links were the addresses lol.
in the search tool of your instance enter [email protected] and it will find it and start federating it.
Try this, I’m still learning how to link other communities. StarTrek - Mainsub Discussion Daystrom Institute - In Depth/In Universe Discussion Risa - Memes&Shitposting
Frustratingly, your first link there works for me, but the other two return 404s…
It’s possible your space isn’t federated with those communities yet? You might need to start the link with searching for them using the [email protected] command to force your instance to download their pages first.
Bless you, kind stranger
I can’t find startrekmemes did they move over?
Looks like they’re called /c/risa now.
That is awesome! how soon until Beehaw is federated with them?
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This only proves that you can’t unilaterally migrate a subreddit. That instance currently has ~250 users. I don’t know how active the subs it represents were, but surely they had at least an order of magnitude more active users than that?
Since it’s based around a show, Trek as a whole is in a show lull until Thursday. The folks who normally run the weekly content posts have already migrated over. There has been half a dozen attempts at replacing r/startrek with versions of it not run by that mod team and all have failed to gain traction, so good luck to anyone trying to do that. They run a tight ship and make it one of the more enjoyable subs on the site.
Trekkies have existed in groups in one form or another since Usenet and BBS. Moving to a new technology is nothing new to us.
That being said, 250 users in 1 day (they didnt get it set up and actually open until last night) is nothing to scoff at.
Edit: As of now (2am ET on Wednesday) they’re at 800+ subscribers to the mainsub. That’s-- not bad at all.
Is it the same mods as /r/startrek?
Yes. It is the same mod team.
Well, shit.
250 users in one day is excellent!
Oh nice! I’m gonna have to follow them on here too- now I just need other subs for my interests (cars, aquariums, etc) and shitposting sites (dccirclejerk, batman arkham) to make their way here
And they have made a lemmy based icon already!
Does anybody know yet if you are allowed to criticize startrek on those communities? I had a major problem with /r/startrek in that you couldn’t say anything less than glowingly positive or you were banned. Like, not even about the whole woke bullshit, you couldn’t even say the writing was below par - banned.
I just wanna talk about startrek, both the good and the glaringly bad lol.
You could always criticize them, you just couldn’t be lazy about your criticism.
I’ve many times talked about the inconsistency in character development, the trend to “give backstory and then kill a character,” and the absolutely nauseating camera movement (especially in the early seasons) of Discovery, for example. Never even got a warning, nor my posts removed.
There was a major thread like a year back talking about how in Disco, the actors don’t actually move about a scene when they do things. The movement is from room to room, and then they are stuck in place as they talk and it really throws you out of it.
Edit: In fact, there’s literally a post critiquing season 4 of Discovery right now on their front page with healthy discussion in the comments.
All of these were allowed before and still.
Disagree. I was banned from there when they signed on with the brigade to get /r/nonewnormal banned. My offending post? “Et tu, /r/startrek?” (Off topic - so much for Reddits rules against “brigading.”)
That was it. And it was in that thread (so it was on topic.) And I watched others get banned in the same thread for literally quoting from the TNG episode “The Drumhead.” So I found alternate startrek subs and saw the influx of other users who were banned from the main sub for mild criticism (with receipts). Then watched those subs get banned as well for not towing the Paramount line.
I firmly believe that the main ST sub was monitored, if not infiltrated by, Paramount (or a PR/marketing firm hired by them) to halt any negative discussion of the new shows. I watched similar things happen all across Reddit, especially in the larger subs. After being on Reddit for nearly 15 years (since just prior to the Digg migration), that place has changed.
“Et tu, /r/startrek?”
I feel your pain. I "and my ax"ed a comment thread on /r/pics and got a ban.
When I went back to it, the entire thread was just deleted comments. Shadow-banned?
When someone finally responded to a plea for an explanation and we tried to discuss the error and a path toward a fix
- no context was available
- no one could explain the ban
- no one could confirm the ban was justified
- no one had an idea why “and my ax” was somehow bad in any context
- no one could offer anything I could do - apologies, I was thinking - to reinstate access
They just said “I don’t know why but you’re still banned” or so and that was it.
Power-tripping mod shadow-banned everyone in a thread? Some mod whose spelling I corrected, somewhere, projected guilt as wrath? We’ll never know.
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Considering you used “woke” as a pejorative earlier and now you’re ranting about conspiracies involving Paramount (why would Paramount sanction a move to the fediverse where they can’t show ads?) and supporting a sub that was about supporting anti-mask/anti-vaxx nonsense during the beginning of a global pandemic that’s killed ~7 million people since 2020, I really am not even interested in furthering this discussion with you. LLAP 🖖
I really am not even interested in furthering this discussion with you.
Aww, and we were having such a pleasant conversation. That’s ok, I’m going to respond to you anyways, for the benefit of anybody else who comes across this.
Ahem.
Considering you used “woke” as a pejorative
I believe what I said was “woke bullshit.” And I used it as an adjective to describe, specifically, one aspect of a show that you were not allowed to criticize on /r/startrek. Like it or not, you cannot deny that Disco is woke AF. I would personally argue that ST has always been progressive, and in the modern era going woke was the obvious and logical next step for the franchise. Furthermore, it has been criticized for this, rightly or wrongly. But that’s the literal point of a discussion board, to have a discussion. And people are allowed to like different things - that’s ok. They’re even allowed to * gasp * like things that are different than you like, or like things that you don’t like - that’s also ok. What is not ok, IMO, is censoring the conversation because you don’t like it (to a point, please don’t use this as a straw man or slippery slope, let’s keep this on topic). And that’s what was happening on /r/startrek with all the bans.
ranting about conspiracies involving Paramount
“Oh no, he’s ranting! Watch out, he’ll start raving next!” 🙄 Because it makes zero sense that Paramount would keep an eye on the largest message board on the internet dedicated to discussing their flagship product. No sense whatsoever. Crazy talk. And it further makes even less sense that they would want to advertise on the platform hosting that message board, to try and drive traffic towards their subscription service, being buoyed by their flagship product. Complete lunacy. And then to even suggest (gasp!) that they would use those advertising dollars to apply pressure to the platform to quell any sort of negative discussion about their flagship product, well that just crosses a line. I mean, that would never happen, and to suggest otherwise is clearly insane.
why would Paramount sanction a move to the fediverse where they can’t show ads?
Never said they did. I said that my belief is that they were involved to an extent over on /r/startrek. I don’t think they would follow over here, for the reasons you’ve stated. But knowing that the same mods that ran /r/startrek are also running startrek.website is enough to give me pause about what sort of criticism of the brand will be allowed.
Edit: If Reddit dies a miserable death, and startrek.website becomes the de facto startrek message board on the internet, it would be extremely naive to think that Paramount (or their PR/marketing firm) wouldn’t follow the Fediverse. They wouldn’t be able to apply pressure directly like they can/could on Reddit with their advertising dollars, but if I worked for that department I’d get very creative to see how I could exercise control over the content of the community. Just off the top of my head, first thing I’d do is to offer a job to one of (if not all of) the moderators - “We’ll pay you $ to make your community look like this. Welcome aboard!” Hell, maybe that’s simply all they did on Reddit in the first place - no need to pressure the platform when you can simply buy the mods. (I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m simply thinking out loud. 🤷♂️)
and supporting a sub that was about supporting anti-mask/anti-vaxx nonsense
It was a sub dedicated to vaccine hesitancy, vaccine-induced injuries, and vaccine mania (“take the vax or lose your job!”). And Covid vaccine injuries are very fucking real. I’m old enough to remember the last time a vaccine was rushed to market, and allllll the problems that caused - there is very good reason to be hesitant this time around. Personally, I believe “you do you” - but the hive-mind hysteria would have none of that. (“Brought to you by Pfizer!” ?)
So that’s ok. I think we’ve both gotten what we needed out of this conversation. You have yourself a wonderful day, I wish you nothing but health and happiness.
Edit: almost forget this gem!
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
To quote Nero: “Don’t tell me that didn’t happen! I watched it happen! It did happen!” Lololol
Whilst we’ve defederated with some of the parties in this chat thread and won’t see this comment, please remember our rule of “Be(e) kind to each other”. It’s okay to have differing opinions and to get heated, but don’t overdo it like what’s happened here.
I would be cautious too if I were a sub owner and guiding people to an alternative honestly. Lemmy and Kbin both are relatively unstable right now, even if they are pretty good. Waiting a little to see which instances are more stable and likely to last is a good move before planting people somewhere and making an official replacement sub.
This is the main issue I see right now as well. I created my own instance for my account to live on, just so I know it will be there as long as I want it to. But that doesn’t do anything for communities I’m subscribed to that could, potentially, be on an instance that later goes down.
I think communities of similar topics are going to need to coordinate in the long run, and perhaps run their own instance to house their communities. This way the folks running the community and the folks hosting it are one in the same. You’d have instances that mainly house users, and perhaps a community or two. That’s where most folks would have their main account. Then you’d have instances that mainly house content, with few users besides the moderation/admin team(s).
I am gonna be honest but instances going down and losing communities could have the same probability as Reddit shutting down Subreddits just because they feel like it.
I understand your concern, but I think it would first be wise to let some communities flourish and look how it holds up in the grand scheme of things.
I think what would help is the introduction of multisubreddit equivalent for lemmy and then allowing similar duplicate communities to have the option of linking up with each other so people can subscribe to public multisubreddit. So regardless of what instance a community is on if it’s like a technology community it’ll display all the technology community duplicates.
Dude what a great idea I hope that’s on a roadmap
That is brilliant. A sort of sub-federation within the grander federated instances. Subfeds (you heard it here first!) could feed off of and into each other, so if one instance goes dark it’s community and content are not lost as they’ve been replicated across the Fediverse. Sort of a cross between multisubs and RAID.
How about extending the software so that communities replicate between sets of servers over time? That way, things are more robust even if one server goes down.
This will be like the YT changes in 2017 only much sharper. The utility of reddit is already dead. The whole point in all of this is to be another mindless zombie platform. The native app and nu(ked) reddit were already like this. Now you won’t be able to search and find anything anywhere on the internet unless you are escorted there by an algorithm.
Eh, this was already the case on Reddit to an extent, but the point is moderators really carried the platform on their backs and if many of them really do leave then Reddit will collapse as a useful platform with actual discussion.
Reddit without niche subs would probably become a aggregate for tiktok, Instagram, and Twitter videos. Which it has been trending towards when it comes to what reddit displays to users as default.
Speaking of: Remember when YouTube was good? When your feed showed you your actual subscriptions, the earlier algorithm was showing you stuff you actually want to see and not 6 late night shows, an ad for YouTube TV, and maybe a decent video essay or two?
That and there is some rapid development for the apps going on right now. Lemmy definitely still needs some UI improvements and has a bunch of little problems which could turn away new users prematurely. So it would be good if there was some advertisement in July when the reddit apps shut down.
Fittingly I had two rewrite this comment and another comment 10 minutes ago because I got errors when trying to send them…
I mean…Reddit was taken offline by subs going private, and they had forewarning this was going to happen. Lemmy is handling a veritable monsoon of new users
they are playing the long game so should we
that’s why we should be spreading the word about the fediverse
There are enough people posting to see a fresh dozen or so posts an hour my Subscribed > New feed and I don’t have a ton of subs, mostly STEM. Honestly a few days ago that was a crazy pipe dream. With this kind of mass threshold passed, we only need to expand the scope/quality of posts and this can be a permanent home that organically draws people to the platform. I think we need a page on the major instances that show the plans and limitations of those hosting the instance and where they need support. Like learning Ruud has a bunch of other federated .world servers and seeing his remarkable ability to handle scale makes me much more confident to be here.
people will have to stick around for this to work though, if the honeymoon period is over and perhaps spez stops being such a knob, people could disappear just as quickly as they appeared
No doubt it will cool off some here, but I like this more and it seems like some others feel the same. I don’t think there will be any going back because it won’t be the same reddit ever again.
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I think the big Mastodon push last year has made things a little bit easier for Lemmy. Basic awareness of the fediverse has broken into the mainstream of social media, rather than being a niche interest of Free Software enthusiasts.
Now that Lemmy’s gotten this initial nudge of mainstream support, I’ll be far more engaged here than I ever was on Reddit.
This may seem a tad ironic since I’m posting here in the fediverse, but I think we should also be encouraging a variety of alternative, self-hostable options, e.g. Postmill (similar to reddit but not federated), Discourse (more of a classic forum structure but with some modernizations), etc.
Not everyone will want to try to figure out federation/ActivityPub, and that’s okay, because there are more options that folks can spin up. The fediverse, imo, benefits as much from other self-hosted sites as it does from those that connect with it.
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undefined> doing my best :) PS how did you quote me?
well if you select text in a comment and then click reply, it comes out like that. I don’t know why it says “undefined” here, must be a javascript bug. Simply copy pasting and prefacing it with a > works fine
> like this
which looks
like this
Can the various servers take it? The one I’m on (BeeHaw) has held up admirably but I’ve heard of others going down with an influx of users.
The answer is prompting users to spread out to different instances, at least in the short term
Apparently the head mod of /r/Tumblr has already been forcibly demodded. A bit weird that Tumblr of all places has been the starting point.
The real question I think is will Reddit retaliate back and forcibly recover communities and install new mods?
It’s already started.
It makes sense from their perspective but still kinda shitty.
And I’m sure the new mods being installed will have an even stronger alignment with Reddit’s philosophy and direction which will only make life in that place more hellish.
I’m glad I jumped ship when I did.
If they tried to hire enough mods to do a quality job of it they’d be bankrupt by the end of the year. I don’t know if they’ll have enough capable volunteers for a significant fraction of the subreddits.
True, although the way things are going, some instances don’t have the mod capacity right now. Lemmy needs more moderators and moderation tools as people move to the service. https://beehaw.org/post/567170
Also /r/adviceanimals, we’ll see which others
Do you have any source or details? Would love to read about it.
Removed by an admin or another mod? There aren’t really enough details in that story to know exactly what happened. It also seems strange that it says the sub went public briefly and then back to private. That doesn’t really sound like an admin forcibly stopping the blackout.
I feel like subs being forced public is a real possibility as things continue on, but I’m not sure this is a good example of that.
I predicted this but kind of surprised that it happened so fast. I’m guessing this mod won’t allow anything critical of spez.
I predicted forcible demods…
But like, I feel like the one thing that would work is the one thing no one has been talking about.
A mod strike!
Maybe it has been suppressed because it would seem too radical but like, if the communities are going to die anyways might as well go out with a bang. Mods should all go on strike and spammers can run free and burn the site to the ground. That’s basically what happened with Twitter, right? Has Spez seen what has happened to the valuation of Twitter this past year or what?
I went on Reddit during the blackout and on the front page there were shitty tattoos of bdsm furries with their dick and balls out… If the front page could all turn into that and the enforcement of NSFW tags was lost due to lack of mods, I can’t imagine that the shareholders would be happy about what the site has become.
Mod + user direct action - everyone should post spacedicks/porn and mods should refuse to enforce the rules. Reddit wants to destroy the mods? Then reddit should see what a world without mods on the internet actually looks like… Especially before the IPO. Plus, the internet can get VERY active when it comes to participating in mischief instead of watching things slowly fall apart. I’d upvote spacedicks for the cause.
I have no idea why no one is talking about this unless posts/comments like that are being suppressed. Since it seems like most 3rd party apps have the best mod tools and most mods won’t keep up their work if they don’t have the right tools, the end result will be the same anyways.
Edit: they can’t afford to pay people to replace enough mods. Spez deserves a look at what reddit will become BEFORE the IPO in my opinion.
Mods are basically the slave labour that make Reddit profitable and allows for its existence.
The exploit is taking superuser’s hobby or specialty and getting them to work 24/7 in an permanent unpaid internship position that doesn’t run counter to labour laws.
No one wants to upset that tenuous (and likely quasi-illegal) system of exploitation by empowering the mods to know that they can make changes by organising or going on strike.
Neither Reddit executives nor the protesting app developers and other API data users have the actual interests of reddit superusers at heart.
Reddit wants to destroy the mods? Then reddit should see what a world without mods on the internet actually looks like… Especially before the IPO
To be fair… reddit was originally designed to be self-moderated by the users… and it use to work really well. It would be a miracle if they moved back to that model and I would no doubt switch back to them from lemmy if they did. Those were the hey days of reddit and the internet as a whole.
Reddit declined to comment
I am guessing their comment would be something like, “FUCK!!!”
Well now they have to take over the subs and get new moderators. They won’t just sit there and watch Reddit burn further.
For the 2 days private protest, their comment that it will be over soon was appropriate. As giving an exact time frame allows to know the exact end of it. They could just sit there and wait it out.
Now with the indefinite protest, they have to act. And to get to content onto Reddit again, they will probably be looking for new unpaid
strike breakersmods for those subs, so they don’t have to actually hire and pay people to moderate content on their soon publicly traded company website.Have subs continued to stay blacked out? I have not checked it out since the first day of it.
Yes. For instance, at this time, /r/nba is still blacked out even though the NBA season ended recently.
Good for them!! Did they make a lemmy instance?
No, it would’ve been something along the lines of “A: We are evaluating it at this time for the best approach moving forward”
Lemmy is growing but we need to work to make easy to allow reddit mods to setup instances and fund them
I am a Reddit mod. Gimme the step-by-step tutorial! There are certain subs that I want to see reproduced ASAP, like /r/LifeProTips and more!
Be mildly competent at computers… or know someone who is and willing to help you.
Either setup your own instance, or find an instance that’s already setup that you like and the owner will let you add stuff to the database…
Start a community…
Read here… https://github.com/rileynull/RedditLemmyImporter
Success! now you’ve migrated your subreddit to lemmy!
(This is a little sarcastic. I’m not good at legit guides. But it is possible!)
Edit: tweaked phrasing… doing this to general public servers would be unlikely.
Just wanted to add that not all instances are allowing new community creation, including Beehaw.
Yeah, there’s an edit. Seems not to have propagated back to beehaw. yay for beta!
Well, that is an interesting script. I wonder how many will come across? Maybe they will pull the top 20% or something.
Maybe pick an existing one and help it get off the ground:
- [email protected] (direct link) this one seems like it’s newly set up by a community squatter, but you might have luck approaching them
- [email protected] (direct link) - this one is older but was inactive for a long time before the recent migration so idk if the mod is active
If you’re interested, I’d recommend posting in the older one, then requesting it on [email protected]
Well, on Beehaw you cannot create new communities, but you certainly can be made a mod of one even from another instance. Find the ones you want and ask the current mods of it.
Why can’t we create communities on here? Do the Beehaw admins specifically restrict this? Thanks, by the way.
We’ve outlined the rationale in this thread: https://beehaw.org/post/140733
The tl;dr is that having many communities make it difficult to govern and ensure a safe space exists for the overall community and having too many can result in highly fragmented discussions that would be a challenge to grow and nurture organically like we do in the physical world.
It’s not that we don’t permit new communities, but more towards we moderate their creation based off the communities interests.
I haven’t found many moderator features on Lemmy so far. The community that I created does not seem to have any way of blocking posts.
You should be able to, here’s the mod docs
Thanks!
It was truly unexpected to see how large social networks find new and innovative ways to ride and accelerate their downfall.
From my perspective:
-
Facebook --> Cambridge Analytica fiasco
-
Twitter --> Elon was bluffing but Twitters Legal team forced him to proceed otherwise the SEC was already looking for blood and an excuse to make his life very difficult for all his previous shenanigans
-
Reddit --> already downhill since just before Ellen Pao nonetheless may I speculate that perhaps one or more of the larger shareholders/investors forced the current situation but Huffman underestimated and did not realize that the power users and pro bono moderators were entirely dependent on third-party apps.
Moreover, I exclusively used reddit through old.reddit.com I have no idea how current Reddit actually looks like nor do I care as it was unusable.
Sad to see great things go but life continues onward.
I have no idea how current Reddit actually looks like nor do I care as it was unusable.
Just for fun, I opened reddit in a fresh browser, without my settings and extensions etc. It was… shit. No other way to put it. 1/3 of the screen was used for content, the rest was some form of trying to feed you crypto stuff, advertisement or “hey you should rather watch this video than read text, you loser!”.
For now, I can, thanks to some plugins, bring new reddit to something that is close enough to old reddit to be usable. But if this is the way reddit is heading, I’m out, alternative site or not.
Always felt that the way redditors treated Ellen Pao was horrendous. That place is a cesspit
https://nextshark.com/ellen-pao-reddit-dacvak-ama You sure about that?
It’s inevitable, honestly. All things end.
At least we got to see a REMARKABLE flame-out of a once incredibly popular website. I thought Digg was wild, this is something else entirely.
-
Imagine how differently this would have played out if Reddit CEO Steve Huffman had taken a collaborative approach with app developers and stake holders. A few months ago, he could have called them up and humbly asked them for ideas and assistance in making Reddit profitable. Reddit would be on path to financial success by now.
It’s a corporate us vs them mentality. I don’t think Steve would even ask his own employees for help - the people who are on the ground running the company. The internal memo strongly indicates that Reddit doesn’t have a two-way communication channel.
I don’t think it’s wrong for Spez to charge for API access, but the rates he’s vowing to charge are excessive and clearly designed to nuke third-party apps from their ecosystem.
As for how I’d make money from Reddit in his shoes, I’d:
- Add more features for Reddit Premium, like being able to view more than 1,000 items on the front page, video uploads in comments, or enhanced search functionality.
- Add OnlyFans-style subscriptions or revenue sharing for partnered subreddits/users, with a 90% to 10% cut between content creators and Reddit.
- Bring back RPAN as a full time streaming platform to compete with the likes of Twitch/Kick.
Twitch is hardly a profit center, streaming isn’t where you’d go to boost profits.
Good. I really hope this causes a snowball effect. After spez (fuck spez) basically told all the moderators “fuck you” today, I’d say there is enough momentum to get at least a good half of the participating subs on board with an indefinite blackout. And with more moderators checking their inboxes and feeds tomorrow, “after the blackout,” I anticipate seeing a second wave starting tomorrow and throughout the next week, as these mods return to reddit temporarily to coordinate.
KEEP IT GOING!!!
Stuff’s already starting to go back to public, I expect nothing to change.
I mean it seems like only a couple thousand went public, the site is still very much noticeably short on content.
And reddit still don’t give a shit. Just shows how much they care about the community.
I honestly don’t care whether or not reddit (the company) gives a shit. I just want users to realize that reddit deserves to be replaced by something more open and user focused.
Im surprised they havent just performed takovers of the private subreddits and installed new mods.
Maybe they have but are doing it at a slow pacing, either because its manual or because it may attract less attention.
They have. I assume you haven’t seen the r/adviceanimals post yet?
I’m skeptical about these claims. If they wanted to do that, why start with AdviceAnimals? Why not funny or pics?
I haven’t. But now I’ve seen a couple. I believe they did /r/tumbler or something dirty too.
It’s a shame. Totally antithetical to their culture they (Reddit) started and grew with as a freedom of speech platform.
They’ve been running away from their culture of free speech since 2008. The only direction they have ever moved has been in the opposite direction.
I expect most of the “popular” subs (like the one you mentioned) aren’t ones I have ever been aware of or cared to be aware of.
I wasn’t aware either, but it was mentioned on Lemmy somewhere
As much as I do hope this helps, I’m afraid it won’t change a thing: Like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well." -Spez. Seem they will ride out this storm. This have to be permeate to make any changes at Reddit.
Maybe Spez is right (obligatory fuck /u/spez comment), but this blowout also brought Lemmy and other similar sites to the limelight. We’re on the stage where we early adopters are testing the waters, it’s just a matter of time until a new competitor stands above the others and Spez’s Reddit irónico s going to have to eat those words.
But not for me. I’m forever gone.
And if there are enough power users (lots of comments, posts) like me who feel the same, it will have an impact.
There’s a HUGE middle ground between “nothing changes” and “reddit goes out of business.” As we see with Twitter, you can have a zombie platform that persists but slowly loses inertia month after month.
It’s not that Reddit dies abruptly. It’s that the platform is wounded now and, without attention, will bleed out slowly over many years.
At a communications conference last week, a Bloomberg reporter told the attendees that most tier 1 journalists are looking for stories on LinkedIn now instead of Twitter. It’s gone from vital to junk in just a few months. Without its moderators, Reddit faces the same fate: lots of activity, but most of it junk.
Its not the loss of moderators, its the loss of content. If reddit hadn’t changed their original self moderation model this couldn’t happen. Or at least, not like this.
Moderators are not responsible for making content, they just moderate a sub where others create content. Originally users moderated content on their own.
Pretty funny how reddit’s move to authoritarianism has worked against them this time.
My goal is to hurt Reddit’s IPO to prevent a capitalisation on the platforms recent string of real world impacts, such as the Game Stop short squeeze and the intelligence leak that happened on a Discord server.
I don’t care if Reddit’s CEO caves in, just so long as Reddit doesn’t get the large influx of capital to prevent the corporation from achieving any larger impact like Twitter and Facebook did in their respective times.
The secondary marketplace to sell your Reddit accounts to bot farmers is very active, accounts are being bought at upwards of $200.
The social bots work just fine inside reddit’s Infrastructure without 3rd party apps and/or API data.
Reddit is going to be just another Twitter for the 2024 US election, where the conversation is managed and directed by bots, but pro-democracy based. When that becomes known Wall Street will act accordingly and Reddit won’t be worth much…
a lot of people back on Reddit could not give less of a shit about the issues and just want their content; they even see this as just mods powertripping again
it’s kind of annoying to see that, tbh, even if I sort of get it
A look at those people’s comment histories might be interesting, to see if they’re the ones contributing content worth reading.
I suspect I can guess the answer.
it’s kind of annoying to see that
Why would that be annoying? It means the strike is working, it does exactly what it is meant to do. If the consumers don’t find content, they will ultimately move elsewhere
they could easily have their cake and eat it too by signing up to lemmy. There are a lot of instances out there and they could make their own if none fit.
but that’s not immediate and requires some work and effort (to figure out how federation works, to figure out how Lemmy works, to learn how to create an instance and to make one, to start over with an entirely new community); many on Reddit want the easiest path to get their content
which again, understandable, but still annoying to see
Damn, the apathy is strong but I do get it. After all, Reddit was mostly a place for me to deflate and relax or just read things during downtime.
I haven’t seen that. Everyone seems to be rather upset about Apollo, RIF, Relay, etc. The only person I’ve seen suggesting power tripping mods is u/spez.
Problem is it will work lul. Just read some comments in some subs that are restricted like the Star Wars one. Kinda sad to see people bend over so easily only because they cannot post in their sub for a few days. Like, geez doesn’t matter at all what % of people use 3rd party apps. A little bit of inconvenience doesn’t kill anyone and it’s good to stand up for stuff like this as well.
Keep in mind that Reddit is running a propaganda campaign to try to squash the blackout. Notice most of the comments are almost exactly the same. As we saw with Trump, all it takes is a few well placed comments to stir up dissent and get people to parrot dumb talking points. Reddit can easily manipulate votes and comments to make it look like most people don’t care, but obviously they do, because there was the biggest blackout I’ve seen on a social media platform ever.
I’m sure they do but I have no doubt a ton of people also simply are in the typical “I don’t care, it doesn’t affect me directly but the subs going dark does so it’s bad” mode as many are with lots of things these days sadly.
Also there alot of bots going around Reddit saying the protest is not working and all the subreddit mods are going to be easily replaced, with who I don’t know.
Well if only bots are talking, mods can be bots too. /r/SubredditSimulator will just take over the whole Reddit
Pretty much already there on some subs.
Cool, well the reason I’m here instead of on reddit is because of this. Last time I did this was when I found reddit after digg.
Can I get an eli5 on digg? It seems to have happened years and years before I joined reddit
Same but different. The site sold out and made some changes that were good for investors, but bad for users. It also happened to slashdot. When that went bad, we all went to digg.
Looking back, I’m surprised reddit lasted as long as it did. Digg and slashdot still exist, but aren’t what they were in their heyday. I’m sure reddit will continue in some form.
Tbf, reddit is infinitely more mainstream than digg and Slashdot ever were. Reddit has well over 500 million monthly active users. We are just reaching 100,000 here.
I’m all in, I’m committed here and never going back to reddit. But I want to manage expectations about what we should expect in the coming months and years. People need to understand that this isn’t going to be a seamless transition like that one. Part of the reason that was even possible was because reddit got hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital funding as they rapidly grew. We don’t have that option here.
It will take years for this platform to come anywhere near the current size of reddit, if ever. Now, many of us would argue that reddit was better back when it only had say 50 million MAUs (which was about 10 years ago). That still leaves us 49.9 million users short.
If we want to build a truly free, independent, decentralized space, it’s going to take a lot more commitment and time than switching from digg to reddit did. And I think it will be a rewarding journey for those that stick around.
But don’t count your chickens yet people, we are still in the first round and it’s going to take more than this to bring down the big bad reddit. I’m just glad I finally have some way to fight back.
Yeah, I’m committed as well, and you’re right about your input.
A few notes in my mind, tho:
1 - Reddit became really mainstream, yeah, but I figure a huge part of the user base were tech people. Probably work in tech somehow.
2 - those who came to Lemmy/kbin already are also tech people, I figure. Right now, I think it is just normal that the first to pull the trigger are in tech. It’s not too friendly to the average user (despite the forum format really not being what the average user goes after today)
3 - these people will start to contribute to the development, even if not providing actual code and developing apps or creating their instances, most will post issues about their user experience and will have valuable input about the platform.
4 - I think the true take off of the Fediverse will come once content creators start to post their content in here. And I expect the first of them, at least, to also be tech content creators.
I’ll try to encourage some of the guys I follow, mainly course creators, to invest a bit in the Fediverse. Some of them already do. I know that Twitter puts food on their table, but it should be easy to automate and crosspost to Mastodon, for example.
I hate social media overall. It’s not really hatred, I just don’t use most of them, don’t find the motivation and don’t really value what they have to offer me. I think Instagram sucks for searching anything (who would say searching pictures would be hard, huh?).
I, for one, started lurking on Reddit because of fantasy football. Reddit was really good as a link and content aggregator, and I got most of my news from there. But it depends on Twitter as well, since the reports mainly come from there. And you see where the problem is at? Most of the people who advocate for the Fediverse don’t really use Twitter as well.
So I can only dream of the day Ian Rapopport will post some breaking news to Mastodon and a bot will auto-crosspost it to /c/fantasyfootball.
A man can hope about this ideal future.
In this utopian vision, I hope only that we leave Schefter behind.
Mastodon/Akkoma/Calckey/Misskey/Pleroma side of the fediverse is somewhere over 10 million users right now and it’s already starting to be quite active and having lots of quality content. It went from less than a million users to the current numbers in about six months. We’ll see where Lemmy is in December…
Wild time. Remember that brief offshoot to voat?
I’ll be darned, looks like voat shut down a few years ago.
Honestly, good riddance. That place was a cestering fesspool.
It was quite toxic, indeed. I think that’s what sent people who tried it back to reddit.
I see, thanks for the backstory.
Digg was a site that was a lot like reddit, it was incredibly popular until they did a site redesign that many users hated and they were unable to roll back, engagement went way down, users looked for alternatives, and reddit got most of the refugees. I haven’t been back on digg for many years.
I thought reddit learned its lesson from digg given they kept legacy old.reddit.com running even after their own redesign, but they failed to remember that 3rd party interfaces to their API is almost the same thing; users like interfacing with their social media using the UI/UX design they chose and grew accustomed to. If they take that away, it risks alienating users and driving them to alternatives.
If reddit was smart they’d make it so that people with reddit gold can keep using API access instead of locking them out entirely.
What reddit doesn’t seem to get that for many people old.reddit (or a 3rd party app) is reddit for them. If they take that away they’re forcing them to learn a new UI or to get a new app. It’s naive to think that everyone is just going to switch to the official ones. Might aswell find an alternative to reddit and learn to use that.
It’s not just about learning the new interfaces…I’ve used the new site design and have heard the official app is just as bad about shoving ads down our throats. Baconreader made ads at least fairly unobtrusive, but with all the drama I’ve decided: fuck it. I appreciate Lemmy and other decentralized options for being user-funded rather than reliant on corporations
But that would be contrary to Reddit’s actual goals, which is to monetize their user’s data as much as possible. They can’t do that if third party apps are providing a better experience, so they are trying to force everyone to use only the website and apps that are directly controlled by Reddit. So they can track our behavior and sell more ads.
Thanks for the explanation
Hey folks. Looks like I let this one get by so I’ll leave it since there’s already some discussion happening, but for the next few days please try to keep discussion of the Reddit situation in the megathread.
How do we get to the ‘megathread’ ? I never knew one existed.
WTheRtRevKaiser - you didn’t post a link to the ‘megathread’ - I’m not sure I know where that is. Sorry… I need a tutorial for every suggested action ;)
Here ya go!
Sorry about that, I’ve been away from the computer for a bit. For future reference if we have a megathread about a big event like this, it will most likely be pinned at the top of the relevant community. This one is pinned at the top of !Technology here: https://beehaw.org/c/technology
Cool that sites are reporting on it. Maybe that’ll add pressure.
