Live data from Hacker News

r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

reddit.com

131–140 of 340 posts

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#131
post #3

I decided to use this as a good excuse to delete Reddit. I find myself going to it too often, and scrolling for too long, and afterwards I feel worse about the direction of humanity and down about the world. I’m not getting anything positive from it so for my own mental heath I’m deleting the app.

Early this year, I added a blocklist for Reddit on my PC and deleted the app. I did it upon the realization that for me:

1. It was a time waste. It was entertaining, but more often than not, it wasn't useful or helpful at all. Classic short-term gratification.

2. Various issues with how it was run started to frustrate me. Advertising appearing as genuine posts, poor moderation / mod abuse. Also seemed to be a conflict algorithm, outrage and irrational ideas were disproportionately popular compared to real life.

The smaller communities on the site were good, I'd like to see them find another place to exist. But yeah, I used to think that self-control and discipline was all that was needed, but creating actual barriers like blocklists etc is actually pretty good.

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#132

Going back to decentralised individual forums seems like a better idea than centralising and giving control to a few individuals and corporations.

Some of those old phpBB and vBulletin forums never went away. They tend to be ones covering niche subjects, though.

We might start seeing more of these with the enshittification of all of today's social media landscape.

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#133

I’ll be honest, HN is the last place I’d expect to find people who underestimate the difficulty of creating a social network, but every single post about Reddit lately has had one or more comments about how the creators of Reddit clients should “just” make their own backend and take their users with them.

Is it hard? Yes. Is it harder than trying to influence Reddit by these "protests"? No, because the later has 0 chance of success.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea, and I’m sure there are people who want to do it and also understand the challenges they’ll face. But a lot of people in the comments seem to express a frustration that it should be so easy for people who have created a good client to draw the rest of the fucking owl, if you will.

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#134

Why are API calls less cost-efficient than getting the same information on a browser?

Users in a browser can see ads; the cost is subsidised.

Users in a browser, with no ad blocking - the five remaining ones...

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#135

I’ll be honest, HN is the last place I’d expect to find people who underestimate the difficulty of creating a social network, but every single post about Reddit lately has had one or more comments about how the creators of Reddit clients should “just” make their own backend and take their users with them.

I mean, it's 2023. Web-based simple threaded conversation platforms should be absolutely trivial to develop/clone/deploy.

I'm not convinced building a Reddit is hard, at all.

But getting a mass adoption of users to make it worth using is.

Which is why I'm continually surprised some startup+VC combo doesn't just build it and then pay the top 1000 broad-to-niche influencers out there to sign up and start relentlessly hawking it on their various social medias.

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#136

HN might as well just run the headline that Reddit is shutting down permanently. All the major subs are either temporarily or permanently shutting down in protest. Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet? Its the only way to ensure the community survives at this point; Reddit leadership has already proven they only wish to harm both shareholders and the community at large under the guise of…

"Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet?" Yes. It's called Lemmy. https://join-lemmy.org Just found out about it today.

Ah having issues signing into LemmyWorld. Would like to start building content but the sign-in / registration is a little slow...

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#137
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why the blackout needs to be permanent. If even 25% of the users have no clue what's happening and thinks Reddit is crapping out for a couple days they'll shrug their shoulders and use it 48 hours later when it's back up. I don't understand what they think they're protesting by timeboxing it .. Reddit can afford wait it out 48 hours and plan for that. I guarantee people are going to get an error they can't vie…

The mods only power in life is on Reddit. If they give that up they lose everything. Once in a while some crazy stats like 5 mods control 20% of the top 500 subreddits pop up, I’ve never tried to validate but there is definitely a small group with a lot of power among mods Their entire purpose in life is being a Reddit mod, they’re the ones people expect to kill Reddit?

People always say that Reddit depends on these mods for free labor, which is true, but there's a reason that the mods do this free labor. They enjoy the power/responsibility/community/whatever they get from it.

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#138

Guessing Reddit will give mod status to someone else and then boom! Resurrected. I don't know how much work the mods do but I do know a lot of people are willing to do it.

I'm sure they will have plenty of volunteers to be head mod for the day but how many of those people have so little to do that they are willing to continue after that?

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do we have a federated Mastodon-esque system to replace Reddit yet? Yes - it's all the sites that people link to on reddit :-P For the record, there's something happening to all the big Social Media sites over the last few years IRC/Freenode - dead, replaced by Libera, but not nearly as vibrant as its heyday Twitter - dying, replaced by Mastodon, Bluesky, and Instagram, none of them really capture the magic that was…

Why does everyone forget Discourse? It's quietly enabling all of the best topic/product/niche-specific commmunities out there. https://discourse.mcneel.com as an example is a thriving treasure trove for CAD/Nurbs/product modelers/architects/etc.

Ha! If people are forgetting it, is it really a competitor?

Truth is, for me, I just don't use it - it's as bad as Slack IMO, but I'm sure that a lot of people are finding it worthwhile

Re: r/ProgrammerHumor will be shutting down to protest Reddit's API changes

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Digg.com for whatever reason still exists. I wonder how these old websites that seemingly no one uses still churn out money?

The google trends graph is the worst I've ever seen https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=digg&hl=... EDIT: Note that it's a common slang word in Norwegian, hence why it still appears as a search term there

Did you try going there? Inexplicably it's worse than I could have imagined.

I found one thread with 9 comments. In the popular section. And it devolved into someone calling another an 'asshole'.

Post reply on HN