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Reddit Strike Has Started

reddark.untone.uk

271–280 of 1001 posts

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#271
post #34
post #11

Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.

Reddit is basically successful despite itself. It's wild.

It’s popular despite itself… but It’s not successful.

One of the things Spez is whining about is that they’re not profitable.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#272
post #21

Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.

> I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... People have been saying this for 10+ years. No reddit alternative has proven to be viable. So the people at reddit know that "mass migration" is an empty threat. Where will you go instead? That's right. No where. Rather than quickly bleeding out like digg, reddit has simply achieved a stable stagnant equilibrium. It doesn't grow, it d…

Necessity is the mother of invention.

A CRUD app with a UX so bad people feel the need to use third-party clients isn’t exactly a moat. Half the people here could scaffold a Reddit clone in a week or less.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What power? Reddit can just takeover the subs and turn them back on.

Yes but unless they’re well moderated they’ll turn to crap. There’s a lot of moderators out there moderating by hand and using bots to run some of the bigger subreddits, much like IRC. Without those bots having access to the APIs, that job gets harder and it’s less likely to be done well. Personally I think Steve Huffman is the fall guy here and this is coming from the money people who have zero interest in where Red…

I also think the CEO is a scapegoat. I’d argue that Huffman showed more courage than Elon did, though.

That said, Huffman’s handling of this was bumbling at best.

It demonstrated a failure to understand his own users or the culture of the site.

For that alone, he should go.

But there are plenty of other reasons company leadership has failed its community, particularly it’s unpaid workers moderating content.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#274
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the new Reddit though?

I don’t think Reddit being replaced is as much of a given as everyone seems to think. People might simply get tired of the concept altogether. Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives, and there is no shortage of social media in sight.

>Nobody needs a vote based link aggregator thingy in their lives

A link based aggregator, you are correct. There's more of them out there than TODO app tutorials. What I do find hard to separate from is the communities that have constant ongoing daily conversations. Cooking, AskCulinary, all the science subreddits, some indie video game ones. Having one non-discord like hub for a community is great, and I do miss checking in on my daily AskCulinary questions and helping newbies out.

Really all I want from it is just a forum with the ability to upvote threads (rather than replies bumping them up) and the ability for anyone to be able to create their own sub-forum, but to heck if I can find something in that category that replaces reddit.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#275
post #11

Great! There's a picket line I won't be crossing. Not just for those subs, of course, but for all of Reddit. The reason Reddit is valuable is not the few execs making these (IMHO terrible) decisions. It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back.

>It's the thousands of mods and the millions of people creating and organizing the content that I go there to read. Until those people are happy with things, I'm not going back. You go there for the user content, not the mods. You can say mods cultivate communities, but to say that they deserve credit but not the admins or platform itself seems untenable. Furthermore, insinuations that the API changes will lead to a…

Oh? Thanks so much for telling me what goes on in my head, bub.

The average bit of user-generated content is of very low quality. Which is why pretty much any successful platform, this one included, uses user-generated signals to filter the good stuff to the top. And any social context is prone to vicious circles where dark triad find somewhere successful and ruin it. Preventing that requires active weeding. All of that is labor I value.

The platform deserves some credit. But as all the developers here know, Reddit is not succeeding on the strength of its software. Reddit doesn't have a technology moat. It's a pretty standard web forum. They didn't invent it, they didn't perfect it, and not only could it be replicated, it has been many times.

So should the platform get paid? Definitely. Reddit-the-corporation should have enough cashflow to cover the bills and support the necessary staff. But right now the tail is trying to wag the dog, and Reddit-the-community is not having it.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#276

The cheek of Reddits management is incredible. They've taken hundreds of millions in VC money hired an army of developers and yet delivered nothing to improve the user experience. All we seem to have have got out of is new reddit, a terrible, slow facebook like version of the site and an absolutely terrible mobile app. Where the hell did the money go? They use the time, labour, creativity, stories, humour, talent, wi…

Did you see the post where someone had reversed engineered some key encryption/obfuscation(?) function from the Android app which was just a substitution cypher and had a 66 byte memory leak on every call?

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the most dedicated users are fundamentally hostile to the idea that the social media site may need to limit features for the sake of profitability, it seems likely. Rhetorically the activists here are a step or two away from treating Reddit as a public utility and free API access as a human right. At least until they shift focus to finding wrongthinkers that they want to ban again, then we'll shift back to the u…

You are fighting a straw man you yourself erected. Nobody believes they have a right to reddit but nor does reddit have a right to viewership. They are trying to leverage the value their communities bring to the platform. There is nothing morally wrong with this.

>Nobody believes they have a right to reddit

When people castigate the mere idea that Reddit should be trying to guarantee a return to its investors - and I can point you to examples of this if you wish - it's hard to interpret this as anything other than people saying that their interest to unfettered API access is more important than the interest that investors have in a positive ROI. I guess you could say that this isn't establishing a "right to Reddit" but that seems like hair-splitting to me - "we don't have a right to Reddit but anything that would take Reddit away from us would be evil."

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here. Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.

> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform."…

They shut down a sub called “jailbait”, I’d say the vast majority of people are ok with that type of “censorship”. And if being against that disgusting trash makes me “pro-censorship”, fine.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. You probably also want to make it a bit more modern, supporting images and video, or those subs won't come here. Plus scaling is not trivial. There's a gap between being the nerds' text-only board and the board for everything.

> You'd need a bunch of dangs to mod every conceivable interest group, like soccer and German politics. People forget that reddit was popular and succeeded during the digg migration because it was pro free speech and minimally moderated. It was one of the reasons people migrated to reddit instead of here. The first 10 years of reddit, the community and the company prided themselves on being a "free speech platform."…

> it was not censored like HN!

I don't feel like HN is censored. Does anyone think HN is censored? dang steps in mostly with technical edits or to break up a particularly nasty fight once in a while, can this really be called censorship? of course, you can take a karma hit from other people, but reddit always had that as well.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, I've already made a modified version of Apollo and sideloaded it onto my phone with a tweak to set my own key instead of Apollo's However there is a line on the developers page now that says all apps need to accept terms and sign up for a developers program, so I have my doubts it will continue to work either

How? Apollo’s dev never released the source code to the app, only the server which sends out push notifications.

Probably jailbroken phone, but honestly I am equally clueless.
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