Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Reddit blackout will continue

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#231

Post by jaimex2 »

lmm wrote: post #229
mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

As far as I can see Wikipedia has even worse relations with its users/contributors than twitter/reddit/facebook/et al..

how so? genuine question, it looks rosy from the outside.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#232

Post by null0pointer »

What is Reddit’s plan? They seem to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas:

1. Third party app users represent significant enough lost revenue to make it worth making the API prohibitively expensive for third party apps to run, forcing those users back to the official app.

2. Third party apps users are few enough that Reddit can afford to not compromise and lose those users just to kill off third party apps.

Are they expecting the third party app users will come crawling back to the official app? As far as I’m concerned the official app is borderline unusable compared to Apollo, for example, and I’d expect most users who have seen the light to find the official app completely intolerable.

Perhaps the presence of unofficial, basically un-monetized third party apps was flagged as a risk for their IPO by some investor types. Still, they could have found a better route to monetize those users than just killing off the apps altogether.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#233

Post by pmoriarty »

selcuka wrote: post #25
KnobbleMcKnees wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's purely a numbers game. If the amount of revenue you'll achieve from less users gives you a more positive multi year outlook financially then losing the users is "worth it", especially if those users fall into cohorts that are less financially valuable. Unfortunately that includes people who take part in blackouts as they correlate highly with people who e.g. run adblockers, use third party apps, etc.

> [...] especially if those users fall into cohorts that are less financially valuable Maybe, but my guess is they also produce the majority of the content that other users come to Reddit to consume. So it's a dangerous game.

I don't know where you got the idea that power users produce most of the content.

As far as I can tell it's ordinary users who produce much of the content.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#234

Post by yanderekko »

zmmmmm wrote: post #136

I think a different approach would work better at this point. They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version. The key in a negotiation is…

>They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community.

I have to wonder if this would be allowed, in the past this has only been tried for subreddits that feared being banned in an imminent fashion. On the other hand, you have rules against mods purposefully destroying their own communities, and trying to force an off-site migration in a heavy-handed fashion (eg. stopping user contributions/participation) may be seen as running afoul of these rules.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#235

Post by FeetYeet »

xwdv wrote: post #196
baconmania wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But may…

1) Every social network sells ads 2) Building and maintaining an API is as rent seeking as building any kind of subscription service, I don’t see the issue. 3) Why would you pay a volunteer? They’re volunteering. In exchange they wield incredible power over the community, which is the real reason they volunteer. 4) The UX sucks, but there’s still old.reddit.com, so you have options. 5) What additional value can be pr…

1) Every social network sells ads

Yes, but all other social networks are GOOD at it and make a fuck ton of money. That’s the issue. Reddit has had plenty of chances to turn profitable, but they can’t seem to figure it out. Now they’ve run down the checklist and apparently “kill 3rd party apps” is their newest brilliant idea to make money.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#236

Post by t0bia_s »

dagw wrote: post #207
4dregress wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented. Oh the good old days :(

On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.

They make friends because of product they sell and gather around. It's different.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#237

Post by DirkH »

itronitron wrote: post #155
larksimian wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged. Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible. It's way…

>> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous. It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.

This is interesting, but can you further explain how yoy get broad ranging social influence from focusing on ads? I don't quite get that.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#238

Post by Anon4Now »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #214

i find my self mentioning this in several of the reddit threads on here because i think it is an important if only historic fact that reddit was not just founded by aaron swartz (i hope you know who that was) _and_ huffman! let that sink in. that's a sad irony and refutes the notion huffman doesn't know what reddit is about. also even if reddit will just continue as if nothing happened - which i believe it will - it…

Huffman co-founded Reddit with Alexis Ohanian. Aaron Swartz joined later when his company was acquired by Reddit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#239

Post by yanderekko »

onion2k wrote: post #115
paganel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.

I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable. I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the s…

Reddit has replaced mods before, they'll do it again. If they can't do it for hundreds of subs at once, that's fine - they'll start with the largest ones and go from there. Once it becomes clear that top mods will be removed if the subs don't reopen, the protest will largely crumble, if it doesn't do so before this becomes necessary.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#240

Post by basch »

zozbot234 wrote: post #201
yellowapple wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses…

Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?

Between chat and branching threads, is it really worth going back to linear pagination?
Post reply on HN