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Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

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Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#101
post #4

This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. It’s the only quasi-social network I’ve used for a decade, and there are many communities that I feel at home in. It’s almost like grief, or feeling untethered somehow.

"untethered" is right for me. I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years. I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.

"enshittification", per Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

an instance of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like some of the "smaller" communities can't really have their mods replaced without some work. Programming subreddits need mods with the right programming background to make executive decisions like banning the next NFT-like scheme, for example, which a generic person going through posts and deciding if it's against the TOS couldn't do.

/r/Programming's head mod is spez, second in command is another Reddit employee. Needless to say, they've done fuck all and the sub is very often a dump.

[deleted]

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only federation defends from what is now happening with Reddit. See Freenode and Libera Chat.

Reddit was great for a decade, why can't we just switch website every 10 years?

Because you usually loose a large part of the community on the way?

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#105
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> appointing new mods and starting the sub back up That's what I'd do. Most subreddit mods are easily replaceable. And in many subreddits, the people who are mods aren't necessarily the best suited for the job. They often got there through luck, bootlicking, etc. It isn't a meritocracy.

While it's true that some subreddit mods might not be the most qualified for the job, and may be in it for the ego boost or as a perception of entitlement, it's also important to remember that being a mod is not exactly a glamorous position - for many it has been a thankless janitorial role that involved dealing with spam and abuse on a continuous basis, with a very limited toolset available from Reddit to do this. T…

Most of the major subs are modded by people who get paid by advertisers and other promoters to astroturf support for whatever. It's not hard to replace them.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say with you being a passive observer, you are clearly not a part of that community. Voting wise, all communities I’ve seen were pretty overwhelmingly in favor.

That exclusiveness is exactly my point. It seems for some people the "community" is narrowly defined to mean only those who are highly active Reddit users of very specific forums - so much so that they both visit frequently enough and feel strongly enough to vote on voluntary polls about shutting those forums down. The broader community of people who visit the site and post from time to time most likely never saw any…

One who does not vote does not have the privilege of complaining about the outcome.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#107
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.

What would be funny is if as a result of this everyone moved back to Digg (where the Reddit users initially came from).

There's no Digg-that-was to move back to. Digg in 2023 is only connected to old Digg by a $500k check and domain transfer. They eventually added comments, but it seems sparse.

edit: apparently an ad company bought it in 2018. Doesn't seem to have affected the quality of links.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#108
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't stay on Reddit where will you go? I'm eager to join communities that are moving to something less user hostile than Reddit. Bonus for anything OSS or federated.

That's not really decided yet. Without going into too much detail, a lot of our moderators are not as engaged as they once were: Eternal September has washed out many of our core contributers long ago, and the subreddit's focus has shifted over the years. Mostly to topics that (IMO) most mods don't care too much about (self-promotion, "beginner friendly content" instead of expert discussion, fluff...). So in my view,…

Its /r/machinelearning isn't it?

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is what I refer to as The last bastion of the "Old Internet". Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low. Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz". I feel like H…

Almost all that is good on the internet these days are holdovers from the Web 1.0 era. Everything else seems to crumble under commercial interests and withers in sea of ads and IPOs.

Ironic that it’s funded and maintained by one of the main organisations responsible for what you’re talking about.
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