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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

#151

Post by mtrower »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #94
fsflover wrote: post #66

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?

Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.

N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#152

Post by bobpaul »

JeremyNT wrote: post #142
mathieuh wrote: 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.

> This sounds ridiculous even to me, but it’s a strange feeling to see the death of Reddit. The reports of Reddit's death are greatly exaggerated. I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.

>I imagine everything will go back to the status quo as soon as this protest is over. The mods have no real leverage, and a temporary outage like this isn't going to suddenly make a bunch of people switch to some other site.

I don't think reddit will be dead by the end of the year or anything quite like that. But we know from past studies (using that API, heh) that a very tiny percentage of site visitors post content. I think it was something like 10% of visitors are logged in, 1% of visitors comment regularly, and 0.01% post content. But something like 90% of the content is from only 1% of the users who post content, so the 0.01% isn't even that important, it's the 0.0001% who drive the site. And there's a lot of cross over between these power users who post all the content and the moderators of the largest subreddits.

So what will happen when the power users quit the platform? It's not just that lots of communities will go unmoderated and shutdown (if their mods don't shut them down first), but a lot of the content will dry up.

Now, vacuums fill and naturally any void left by the power users leaving will be filled by others who start posting, but that could very well be the beginning of the end. We saw this with Digg. There were several mass exoduses from digg to reddit and other sites that caused the quality of digg content to get worse and worse for the 3 or 4 years before Digg v4 put the final nail in the coffin. Had Digg kept old.digg running along side digg v4 it might have continued to suck for many more years, but Digg's influence on internet culture was decidedly in decline before Digg v4.

And that I think is what we'll see with reddit. Many communities will collapse, content will reduce in quality, and the slow attrician will begin. It won't disappear in a year or 3, but it won't be nearly as important in a couple of years as it is today. Remember when "slashdotted" was a term?

The big questions is "where will the users go?" When digg was fucking up, there was already reddit. Can fediverse link aggregators (lemmy, kbin.social, etc) really serve as a replacement? I'm not convinced. I've read there's efforts to make a link aggregator using BlueSky's AT protocol, but that's not yet here.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#153

Post by midoridensha »

epolanski wrote: post #45
mathieuh wrote: 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.

Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely. It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit. I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too. Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years…

Yeah, this seems like a good thing really, to break the addiction. It's easy to get caught up in doom-scrolling.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#154

Post by bobpaul »

redundantly wrote: post #7
mathieuh wrote: 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.

It's definitely surreal. Will apathy help Reddit to succeed? Will users and communities end this protest and go back to business as usual? Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes? Is this the beginning of the end? Or will Reddit drastically change because of this and it will be unrecognisable in the years to come? It's an interesting time.

> Will Reddit buckle under pressure and go back on the API changes?

If they do, it won't be for several months and only if there's a drop in traffic that looks to be permanent. The protest itself won't change anything.

A change in the API certainly makes sense (OpenAI showed the value of the reddit's comment data, and I think spez is pissed that OpenAI is not only profitable, in a large part due to the availability of reddit's comment data, but because OpenAI is run by another reddit co-founder). And maybe that's the plan all along...

There's an idea that users will hate any change you preset. If you give users minimal-change, they'll hate it and revolt. If you give users drastic-change, they'll hate it and revolt. So give them drastic-change, weather the revolt, then walk back to moderate-change and by-in-large they'll accept it.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#155

Post by lightedman »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #85
throwaway202351 wrote: post #19

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.

I expect nothing less out of the person that was head moderator for r/jailbait

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#156

Post by mtrower »

johnfernow wrote: post #41
mathieuh wrote: 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.

Reddit is highly addicting but usually brings me little joy. Most of the time when I'm just browsing the front page I don't laugh or learn anything particularly useful. But in a web full of bots and SEO blogspam, it's refreshing to have a place that is predominantly filled with content and comments by real people. Sure, it has tons of low effort posts and comments, but it's one of the few places on the Internet where…

> but I'm just not convinced the average user is going to switch to decentralized/federated/peer-to-peer social networks.

This is probably true. We could still be using USENET, or at least something built on netnews, but we aren't. I don't know what it would realistically take to get traction into a durably federated system again.

> discoverability is going to be an incredibly difficult

I'm not sure, how are you doing discovery now (and what sort of content are you looking to discover)? I don't really sub to subreddits, so much as I just end up at posts through google searches. That should still function fine. For example, as an owner of a Honda Shadow motorcycle, I didn't have any trouble finding hondashadow.net --- most good quality google results regarding those machines come from there. And given the quality of the content, I eventually decided it would be a good idea to join up. I imagine without reddit/discord/, this type of situation would be common.

On the other hand, if you're looking for a feed aggregator to passively discover interesting new posts, that might be harder. RSS, if built into common forum software, could be leveraged here...

If what you're looking for is a master list of communities to browse/join, USENET had a not unreasonable structure, mostly. But we're back to the federated problem.

> and in any case it's far easier for a user with little technical knowledge to start a subreddit vs starting and maintaining a forum.

This is a sticking point =(

> SEO spam

Add to that the developing situation regarding AI generated soup, and... well, I'm not sure how things will settle, but it definitely throws a wrench into any dreams of paradise.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#157

Post by bobpaul »

core-utility wrote: post #78
mathieuh wrote: 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.

I think a large part of my grief of Reddit is the vast amount of knowledge and usefulness that's there. I use it as a hub of information far more than I use it as social media, and yes a lot of that may still be accessible (especially with archive) but the creation of that content dies today.

Yes! I've been leech blocking Reddit the past couple of days and I intend to keep doing so until I've broken the habit of absent mindly typing "Reddit" into a new tab whenever I have brief downtime waiting for something.

But in the mean time I find that search results for things point to Reddit at least as often as stack exchange.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#158

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

evandale wrote: post #146
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is better than other social media because it doesnt ask for phone number, and HN is better yet because it doesnt even ask for email.

Reddit asks for email but it's not required. They use dark patterns to make it seem like it's required though.

good to know)
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