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Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

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Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#201
post #187

48 hours will not even ding reddit. Do it for a month and it will count, assuming reddit doesn't simply re-enable the subreddits. But obviously the mods here are walking a fine line between pissing off their users and getting reddit to bend over. With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut everything down for a week (I don't blame them, but tha…

Twitter has proven that not even that would matter. Network effects are too powerful. People use Reddit therefore people will use Reddit. Once a company has a large enough network effect they can do almost anything and people won’t leave. I’ve come to believe that it’s the most powerful form of lock in.

Thanks to LLMs traffic can be artificially boosted to the point where ghost towns feel like they have momentum. That problem just won't be getting any better.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.

Digg users went to Reddit, a viable alternative. There's nowhere for Reddit users to exodus to.

Redditors have many alternatives, which is the real problem: the communities will fracture as they find new homes.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#203
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is a lot of commercial use of reddit that reddit fails to monetize. I have no idea how much of that is moderation, but it doesn't really matter: restricting API usage is the wrong way to solve this problem Instead, the easy fix is to update the standard ToS to be non-commercial use only and introduce paid plans for commercial use. I'm pretty confident that would be way more lucrative than advertisi…

This is pretty much what Reddit is doing. All the major 3rd party apps fall under commercial usage. The main issue is the price is insanely high for commercial apps. https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...

Those third party apps aren't commercial use of Reddit. I am the user, not the app. That's like saying you can't use Chrome to view some website that prohibits commercial usage. That argument makes no sense.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#204

48 hours will not even ding reddit. Do it for a month and it will count, assuming reddit doesn't simply re-enable the subreddits. But obviously the mods here are walking a fine line between pissing off their users and getting reddit to bend over. With camarades.com we had a week long outage because of a fire in EV1's DC which then caused the fire marshal to shut everything down for a week (I don't blame them, but tha…

Reddit admin are bricking themselves to be resorting to telling moderators that they will only make better moderation tools if their subs don't participate, so they clearly don't agree 48 hours is an idle threat.

Writing two sentences to scare a handful of people isn't exactly showing their hand...

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#205
If someone got so confused like me, even following the links of the OP page,

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/142kct8/...

(PD: The archive.org waiting queue for to submit old.reddit looks collapsed. Was this organization warned before promoting a massive submit? )

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very true, but digg never had the kind of stickyness that reddit had from early on. I think reddit has a stronger sense of community and I think that users may well be more attached to their communities than they are to their mods.

Digg users went to Reddit, a viable alternative. There's nowhere for Reddit users to exodus to.

[deleted]

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#207
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pre-IPO process often involves all kinds of fun short-term profit maximizing activities.

Honest question, does this include artificial inflation of costs? I have seen figures that Reddit used to run with 20 people, and inflated to 2000 in 10 years. Old reddit is also superlight in bandwidth. New reddit is not.

Yeah, they're probably somewhat bloated like Twitter was, just like Twitter they don't deliver nearly as many new features to justify the large employee count, they don't do much of their own moderation either.

A large portion of those might be for checking reports etc, since reddit at least does seem to do a slightly better job trying to keep humans in the loop there.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what puzzles me the most is that reddit's reasoning for charging money for their API is that "it's bad that other people are profiting from our work and it's too expensive to maintain without someone paying it". hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators. if you wanna charge for API access, you should also pay your moderators since you are profiting from their work.

> hey, guess what? reddit "profits" a LOT from unpaid work from their moderators. That work is not forced, they all choose to "work" for free and can quit any time they want. And that work may be unpaid in monetary terms, but many of those moderators enjoy their share of internet fame or a sense of power over "commoners" or their feeling they are doing something for a common good, that they are happy to continue work…

I didn't realize Reddit API development was "forced".

Whether they enjoy it or not is beside the point.

Moderators are providing value to Reddit. If all mods quit, and no one stepped up to take their place, what would happen? Now who deserves to take profit monetarily for that value?

As far as Reddit "development" they should have stopped a long time ago, the site is horrible to use and has been for a long time.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#209
post #102
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reasons why HN doesn't work as a reddit replacement: - It has no subforums - Almost everyone here is in IT, other topics only get discussed when they are interesting to IT people. On reddit, you can talk to historians, mathematicians, language enthusiasts, fans of your favourite series, etc. - HN usability on mobile is... yeah - HN is text only, that's already difficult for programming, but would make talking about e…

I agree with everything except the mobile usability. Hacker News has some of the best mobile usability of the websites I am using. It is not perfect but it is way better than Reddit. Hacker News is very comfortable to read on mobile and the only thing which could be improved is the too small voting buttons.

Reddit are intentionally sabotaging the mobile Web experience to drive people to the app.

Of course, that often backfires.

HN hasn't actively sabotaged mobile. But it hasn't gone out of its way to make the experience better either.

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