401–410 of 478 posts
As a casual but persistent user, it pains me to say it - because ethically I support the grassroots side of the equation - but as a path of least resistance to casual, anonymous public engagement on a wide range of topics, there seems no viable alternative. [For a given subjective value of 'viable', naturally!]. So after a period of abstention, I gradually ended up back there, simply because I know of no other sizeab…
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Reddit mods have some of the worst reputations for power abuse on the entire internet. People in the comments are saying that many of these people quit with the implication that this is bad. But what if it's not? There are quite a few stories of these people being horrible gate keepers that pushed certain pet agendas. It's possible with these people out that new ideas can flourish and more people will be able to part…
My constant answer to this is to volunteer oneself. Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues. If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs. Spez recently joined a mod team. It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences. Reddit modding in particular is not just modding,…
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I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.
Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit? Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.
Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at.
The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts.
It also helps that comment sections here are smaller and that HN doesn't have pictures or other easily-bingeable content.
HN is also less likely to get me worked up over nothing. Partially because the comment section is more mature, partially because the community doesn't regularly discuss topics that get me worked up.
Edit: Another thing that came to mind: If I do accidentally visit HN too often, seeing nothing new on the front page make me realize I'm checking it too often and helps me realize I need to focus better or seek out something more productive to do.
Some Reddit communities fled to other platforms such as Lemmy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network) Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced. Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam. Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?
Speaking of "other platforms", I know of a 3D printing sub that went over to Discord and they have no plans to ever go back. I wonder how many other subs headed over to Discord as well.
It's an entirely different medium that serves an entirely different purpose. Reddit is a message board. Discord is chat. A highly-active Discord is impossible to keep up with, whereas a highly active subreddit is still very useable. You can post a question on reddit, go to work, come home many hours later, and read the answers, and it's easy no matter how much traffic the sub gets. On Discord, if it's very active, you could find yourself scouring through hundreds of messages to see if someone replied to you and didn't use the Reply feature.
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I still have mod status on a large-ish (70k+) subreddit so I can view reddit's internal traffic statistics for it, and these estimates are definitely wrong. These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops. In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in ev…
Did you participate in the blackout? What was your impression of it? Were any of the tools you used impacted by the API ban? I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign. Package up a lightweight, easy to use LLM for Windows users and let them turn their accounts into noise. Purposely generate overly-argumentative, blatantly wrong prose on every subject and in every subreddit. Re…
Also hugely immoral.
If you don't like Reddit and decide to not use it: fine, your choice, obviously.
But completely fucking over a platform because you don't like it? That's an entirely different thing. Who are you exactly to decide how Reddit runs it site?
This is just a DDoS attack, but in a slightly different form.
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IIRC there was just one comment when I posted that (but others may have been posted in the 10 or 15 minutes it took me to write that), and I still feel my comment adds value, because "likely to be wrong" in the warning seems like a rather weak phrasing (can also mean it's correct!), as are some of the other "I think this may be wrong" comments I see here. I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure tha…
So, I don't think it's wrong in a way that matters for this discussion. The data is useless as an absolute measure of activity, sure, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425501 . The message at the top of the main subredditstats page says, "...the data collector is not robust, and so the numbers should only be used as a general guide." You can read that. Let's assume I can read that, too. But it do…
The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…
My preferred way of viewing reddit content when I am not using the old reddit desktop version with RES is usually on "redditp.com". Reddit is not great mind you, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's a welcome break from the ultra-repetitive and deeply psychologically manipulative ad laced feeds that TikTok and Instagram have. Redditp.com is a video and picture scroller that is also customizable by modifying the site URL, so content from specific subreddits can be viewed on it by scrolling rather than by expanding each individual post.
They really need a UI that allows subreddit titles to be selectable on it. They also need to reign in moderators that strictly control subreddits to enrich themselves and shut out others mind you...
The desktop experience on Reddit needs to be protected at all costs, everybody is trying to turn Social Media into dictatorial Cable TV with Commercials (where you have no control over what you see) everywhere now.
Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic. ------ Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world.…
Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is…
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Are you innovating? Are you top of mind for people? Is your tech transforming people's lives? I use electricity every day. Is electricity relevant in most contexts for me? Nope. I drive a car every day. Is the type of car I drive relevant in any way? Nope.
Your life as you know it would disappear if electricity stopped flowing tomorrow. Facebook is no longer the trendsetter but it still influences the daily lives of millions of people and will probably, once again, have a major impact on who the United States next president is. Facebook is highly relevant.
Facebook is a cancer to our society. Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.
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Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is…
Do you see the main issues inherent to Lemmy as likely to be remediable?
Mastodon has proven that these moderation issues can be solved. The question is if the Lemmy devs (and community) can politically agree that Mastodon-like moderation tools are a good idea to prioritize. That's where I'm worried.
I guess its not a big deal because there's bigger fish to fry right now, so to speak. (Plenty of simpler bugs that everyone agrees upon). But eventually, the fundamental user-tracking / karma-system / vs defederation / design of anti-trolling tools becomes political and ideologically based. What happens to the community then?
Hard for me to say. I hope that the overall community accepts the problem and agrees its a problem worth fixing (even at a slight tracking / anti-anonymity features getting pushed to Lemmy-core). If not, maybe the problem can be solved with bots (aka: IRC) that helps track Karma-like scores and whatnot across servers and helps auto-moderate content that enters a particular server or even community/sublemmy.
I think I can "imagine" solutions to these problems. But what I can't foresee is what the community will deem an acceptable solution or not.
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Mastodon is a very good model though and has led the way by showing what kind of tools are needed to curate a community. I see that Lemmy kinda-sorta wants go to about things a different way though.