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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#281

Post by eric-hu »

klipklop wrote: post #117

Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord. I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make th…

> I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class.

I would be pretty surprised if that happens. Digg sold for $500k. I'm expecting something similar.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#282

Post by brigandish »

klipklop wrote: post #117

Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord. I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make th…

> The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.

I think the average person likes

1) only logging in once (even using an FB or Google login more than once, sign up etc, is too much friction)

2) a consistent interface

3) while being able to jump to another "forum" easily, which internal links obviously do.

Solve those 3 things for decentralised forums (or whatever, seeing that Discord is touted as an alternative) and it breaks the hold of Reddit and FB etc.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#283

Post by KeplerBoy »

pmoriarty wrote: post #233
selcuka wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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.

the vast majority of users doesn't comment, let alone post.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#285

Post by makeitdouble »

rightbyte wrote: post #261
makeitdouble wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The friction and the money perhaps. I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform. Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying…

> experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info. That is only a problem if you have user info. On classical forums, everything was public if there was no PMs.

I guess you still need to manage accounts ?

Also under GDPR IP address retention can fall under that in your logs depending on how you manage the info, same way analytics would need attention.

It should really be more simple, and I wish we'd have more people just building small sites here and there without having to care much about these details.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#286

Post by rurban »

4dregress wrote: post #104
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…

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 :(

sorry, but forums killed the internet.

forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.

oh, the good old days.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#287

Post by davidgerard »

hax0ron3 wrote: post #40
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polls were held in many subreddits; if a subreddit is the community - which it is - then the will of the participants is the will of the community and those who communicate it.

I think that such polls tend to vastly over-represent the small subsets of those communities who care enough about the issue to vote. Voting is very rare in subreddits so I imagine that probably most users of those subreddits did not even realize that the votes were happening. And knowing how authoritarian Reddit mods usually are, I doubt very much that for the most part they would not have done whatever they wanted…

you mean, it's massively biased to the actual participants and contributors? Yeah, that's good.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#288

Post by [deleted] »

goplayoutside wrote: post #180
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…

+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.

[deleted]

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#289

Post by pmoriarty »

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. 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."

That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit users are capable of. A couple day blackout is really just about what they can manage, and just about what most Reddit users will tolerate.

I would be absolutely shocked if this whole thing doesn't blow over in a couple of weeks, though I also wouldn't be surprised if Reddit's owners didn't compromise in some way either.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#290

Post by paulmd »

dale_glass wrote: post #257
paulmd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo. Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed. Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermo…

They can do that of course, but if they do so, I'm leaving. Basically what I do on Reddit is to subscribe to the vision of a given group of mods. They're the ones I come to the site for, not Reddit the company. Eg, r/AskHistorians is good because it's run with an iron fist by the mods. When I come there I come seeking precisely that -- a well curated content archive that contains all wheat and zero chaff. If Reddit f…

And that’s fine because the commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting.

People don’t get it, Reddit is fundamentally pivoting away from being a message board and pivoting towards being TikTok. In the TikTok model your comments and discussion are not the commercially viable product. The eyeballs are the product, comments are a flavor to show that other users engaged the content. You know how New Reddit doesn’t show you the comments very well? Think about that in this context - the comments are no longer what matters anymore.

And it’s ultimately not that hard to generate enough reasonably compelling content to keep people scrolling on those mindless frontpage subs. People will happily repost tumblr and TikTok just like they did a month ago. There will be a short term dip and in 6 months it’ll be completely back to normal.

People are fundamentally making a mistake here and thinking theres a scenario where the Reddit they knew 10 years ago will still exist in a year. It already has been dead for a couple years, and it is going to pivot even harder towards shallow content and mindless scrolling, user comments are not something they can commercialize.

It’s not that “Spez doesn’t get it!!!” it’s actually the users who don’t get it. Yeah they’re going to lose 10-20% of their users, they know. And they’re going to make 5x or 10x the revenue on the remaining 80%. Yes, it will be bland and suck for you, and it will make them a shitload of money. Not sure why this is so confusing for people - they don’t want you as the customer anymore. So long and good luck.

If users want to stay, customize their feed for whatever keeps their own eyeballs engaged, great. But Reddit can’t commercialize it unless it’s on a first party app or website. The mod stuff is fixable and they’ve said they’ll be flexible on that (not that it makes anyone happy), but average users will not be consuming Reddit on a 3rd party app in a year, period.

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