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Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

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Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#281
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.

I agree that Reddit is borderline unusable in its mobile website, and the official app is ad-ridden, but 3rd party apps (the ones they're trying to kill) are fine.

I find HN a royal pain on mobile tbh. Everything clickable is so small.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Main instance (lemmy.ml) has quite heavy political censorship though. It’s not obvious or visible, and including under anti racism rules. Criticising non western countries leads to calls of orientalist and bans [0]. Also without a business model they will struggle to maintain the servers required for even a tiny fraction of Reddit [0] https://lemmy.ml/post/1167199

I think it's too early to complain about censorship. Moda are still probably adjusting to what is acceptable, and there are several instances where policies differ. Same as turning down whole of Reddit because one subreddit has strict moderation. Regarding the business model, there isn't any. At best it will be run by donations if the costs mount top high. I'm curious to see where it will go, but at least there are n…

> there are several instances where policies differ

For now, but if this is how the maintainers of the main instance feel, how long before they start defederating from instances without their strict policies? Isn't that already happening on Mastodon?

The fediverse ends up really confusing because it gets so balkanized. "One domain, one community" is easy to understand. "We're all seeing the same stuff no matter where you are" is easy to understand. But with defederation as an option, you have to navigate a complicated web of the meta social network—the network of networks, and who federates with who.

Email doesn't have this problem so much because ideology is not a concern for private messaging. You have spam and you have anticompetitive behavior, but you don't have "random guy who happens to maintain the instance had a falling out with the random guy maintaining this other instance."

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#283
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 you, and that's why I listed some missing things that would help it to be a Reddit replacement. Regarding mobile clients, there are at least a few third party mobile clients on both Android and iPhone that work quite well.

that's a good point, maybe I should try some of the mobile clients

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that many moderators are paid but by other companies and PR firms. Reddit doesn't see any of it. A lot of the content on Reddit is promotion and semi-hidden forms of advertising. Again Reddit doesn't see any of this spend. In both cases Reddit is paying other companies for using their platform for making money. Why would a corporation pay hundreds of thousands for ads when they could spend tens of th…

I started a sub with 100k users and nobody has ever contacted our mod team to try and pay for placement Maybe this is happening for subs over a million only?

Companies don't need to pay for mod placement.

Mods are given to most active and helpful users, those who are paid to be on Reddit for a living have an advantage.

Additionally, mods are not needed for influencing the content of a subreddit. Active users are.

It's worth saying that commercial moderators are against mod guidelines or TOS.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#285
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People should just go back to forums. It was better when I didn't know about the absolute nutcases and always felt like forum information was superior to the stuff I find on Reddit.

This is what I want to happen although I know it never will. Communities used to be spread out across the internet on individual sites that were maintained by enthusiasts as a hobby. I found the interactions among such communities to bar far more enjoyable. Once any community reaches a threshold of users it starts to get unpleasant.

I think the other thing that made forums a better place was the absence of a upvote/downvote system. It reduced the motivation of just chasing attention with little jokes and threads could stay on the front page so long as there was active conversation going on.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing is that many moderators are paid but by other companies and PR firms. Reddit doesn't see any of it. A lot of the content on Reddit is promotion and semi-hidden forms of advertising. Again Reddit doesn't see any of this spend. In both cases Reddit is paying other companies for using their platform for making money. Why would a corporation pay hundreds of thousands for ads when they could spend tens of th…

I started a sub with 100k users and nobody has ever contacted our mod team to try and pay for placement Maybe this is happening for subs over a million only?

[deleted]

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit can't force the moderators to return early. Letting it run with no moderation for 48 hours is far more damaging than a temporary interruption.

Reddit can solicit new mods and ban the old ones. It's probably the quickest way out for reddit and users will likely hardly notice except for those subreddits where the mods are very closely associated with the community itself. But that's definitely not the bulk of them and not the larger ones, though there are some exceptions.

Assembling new moderators for 3000+ subreddits on such short notice sounds a bit difficult.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has some pretty powerful tools at its disposal to re-enable those subreddits and then they can ask who wants to moderate them instead, I think there will be plenty of takers, if the community is in sync with the mods then the mods' play will succeed otherwise the mods are just putting themselves out of business. This whole thing is a nice illustration how when you use someone else's website for your community…

Reddit already lets you take over someone’s subreddit if they haven’t posted in N months which happened to me when my subreddit was humming along nicely with no need for me to log into my mod account. Just giving a subreddit away fits right into that ethos of temporary ownership.

We had a supermod (someone who mods hundreds of subreddits) try this on a small subreddit I was active in years ago. They must have had a watchlist of subreddits to claim because literally the day the only mod's N months was up they posted to try to take it over.

It was a small sub and we were all well behaved so there wasn't really any need for moderation, and we didn't want some random outsider coming in and taking it over as part of his supermod powertrip or whatever. We organized against it and the Reddit admins ultimately denied the request.

Re: Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark

#290
post #162
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when you take the time to write something out - something that benefits others and does nothing for you, like sharing your experience or knowledge Sharing your experience or knowledge is not a completely selfless act. Some enjoy the feeling of being an expert, others use this as an opportunity to push their point of view, some just like to help but even that is a benefit for them. https://xkcd.com/386/

Feeling good when you do good things is, in the main, what makes you a good person. I'm not sure it's sensible to describe such people as essentially selfish.

“Feeling good when you do good things” could be seen as a definition of hedonism ;)

I’d describe selflessness in this context as accepting that a community might have different rules and see someone’s actions as not helpful, despite their best intentions.

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