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Reddit Strike Has Started

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#691

Post by hparadiz »

unreal37 wrote: post #503
civilitty wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Facebook not a network effect business? It’s not only wildly profitable but bigger than those two combined. Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.

Twitter and Reddit are messageboards. Like Hacker News. Every time they do something controversial, someone thinks Usenet needs to be reincarnated. Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd. Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people. I don't see Twitter and Facebook being i…

It's not hard. Reddit has every niche community right there. I go to subreddits to find advice on product and there's no reason why reddit can't be selling it.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#692

Post by memefrog »

discardedrefuse wrote: post #439
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #428

As I’ve continued to repeat, a change in user preference (mostly from one ideology) is to blame for this. Reddit went from pretty much complete free speech to one of the most censored websites in existence. Huge portions of America now prefer censorship so Reddit has in essence created a moat for themselves. If Americans were more accepting of all speech like before, Reddit clones would be easy to switch to. Now, you…

Reddit didn't censor itself because Americans are not accepting of free speech. Reddit started censoring itself to appease corporate overlords. And the only reason those corpos embrace censorship is to stay out of the political crosshairs. How long did /r/jailbait exist before getting shutdown in 2011...and only because it was featured on Anderson Cooper?

That's not true. Reddit "censorship" that is the problem isn't things like banning questionable subreddits. Some of them were stupid. For example they claimed many were banned for "harassment" when there was no way for any subreddit to control whether subscribers harassed people, and it was inconsistently applied only to certain subreddits.

No, the real problem is that now on reddit you get side-wide banned by the administrators for saying words that they've deemed to be unspeakable slurs, regardless of any context. You might want to debate whether it is a slur on a debate subreddit. You might want to talk about how you were shouted at on the subway. You might want to talk about the fact everyone used to use it, and now doesn't. Today, you have to do all those things without actually saying the word you mean. That's the kind of censorship reddit does now: site-wide, unappealable, automated and contextless, based on keywords and not intent.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#693

Post by foobarbecue »

nebula8804 wrote: post #616
foobarbecue wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I'm headed back to wikipedia, where I found community as a teenager. I think you can draw a direct line from wikimedia's nonprofit status to 22 years of greatness and steady improvement.

There is definitely interests that have captured Wikipedia. It takes the form of editors that have slowly built up a lot of credibility and power that then use it years later in some manner that does not agree with the neutral nature of the site. The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got at…

Sounds like a regrettable epsiode. However, looking at the deletion, I see he was deleted as non-notable. Debates about notability are common on WP and not inherently political.

Back in the day (2006-2010ish, I think) I was a pretty active member of the Association of Deletionist Wikipedians. I was kind of on a crusade against people who would put up their own pages to try to promote themselves, in violation of the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy. Mainly, I was worried that it would be untenable to keep WP accurate if we had too many pages. I also went on a rampage deleting pages for individual pokemon, which I'm not proud of. There was a well-established consensus at the time that most individual pokemon did not meet the notability threshold (I don't remember the exact criteria, but it had to do with multiple sources of the information being available) and therefore their pages should be deleted. Looking back, that was kinda silly... The Wikipedia is not Paper policy probably outweighs the Wikipedia is an Encyclopedia policy when it comes to Pokemon.

Anyway, I don't doubt that there is a political element in the case of this Kyle guy, but it's probable that I would have voted to have him deleted on completely apolitical grounds. (I haven't heard of him and haven't read enough to form a political or notability opinion on him at this point)

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#694

Post by WalterBright »

wpietri wrote: post #641
WalterBright wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a profit is how it becomes sustainable.

No. Profit maximization is often in conflict with sustainability. That's part of the devil's bargain of VC money. If it looks like your company will be a modest success, they will push you to make it a giant one no matter how much that increases the risk of failure.

You cannot sustain a business by losing money.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#695

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomcam wrote: post #350
wpietri wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter too! When I worked there they jokingly referred to the head of product as the defense against the dark arts teacher, in that every year or so they'd disappear mysteriously and there'd be a new one. Most of Twitter's successes came from watching what users were actually doing and supporting that (e.g., at mentions, retweets, quote tweets). Many of their failures have been trying to graft on something irrelevan…

How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as you.

> How is Twitter rapidly decaying

As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.

Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)

Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#696

Post by dm319 »

dasil003 wrote: post #327
GolfPopper wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…

Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from the community, and following the private equity playbook of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.

I think we have to stop chasing growth like this. It's destructive to many things.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#697

Post by aniforprez »

marcomourao wrote: post #676
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now I want to explain why you're wrong. The vast majority of people who are visiting subreddits are doing so because they're actively seeking out the material being presented to them. These people are subscribers to the subreddits. Subreddits that "go dark" are not blocked for everyone. Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit. So this giant display of enlightened ass…

> Their access is restricted ONLY for those who have not yet subscribed to the subreddit. When a sub is set to private "Only approved members can view and take part in its discussions."

They're wrong. I was subscribed to EarthPorn before it went private. It is inaccessible to me now

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#698

Post by bink »

thefourthchime wrote: post #639
dom96 wrote: post #523

I honestly didn't expect this from Reddit. It seems like investors are really tightening their grip and they are banning subreddits and long-time users who oppose these changes left and right. I built a free API emulating the Reddit API[1]. It was returning the same data as the existing publicly accessible .json endpoints on reddit.com (for example https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps.json ). They not only block…

Wow, that’s a low blow. These guys seem to hate their fan base.

I don't know of any site that will allow someone to set up a "secondary" API where they proxy all user requests, especially if they're using a variation of a trademark.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#699

Post by andrei_says_ »

OldManRyan wrote: post #314

There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a powe…

> slowly bleeding itself to death

If it’s slowly then it likely doesn’t matter in the context of going public and making a lot of cash for the investors. It’s hard to imagine that the people who are given the power to decide the fate of Reddit don’t care about its long term fate at all - but it might well be the case.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#700

Post by munchler »

eksapsy wrote: post #361

Strike you say? That's like, as Louis Rossmann on his yt channel wisely said, "I am so angry, so infuriated that you're abusing me, that ..... I WILL... leave for 3 days and then come back for the rest of my life". Like it's literally like saying "hey I need you in my life". Do you know what message that sends? What would you think if your customers would say "hey Im not gonna come for 3 days but I'm coming for the r…

Many of us are quitting Reddit for good on June 30 when Apollo and the other third-party apps are killed. This week's strike is just a warning shot across Reddit's bow.
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