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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#301

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in."

This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades.

There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players.

If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated.

The old, wild and free internet is gone for good.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#303

Post by aksss »

xigoi wrote: post #210
azangru wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums What's stopping anyone today to have a community around a forum? phpBB still exists...

The network effect. Everyone is on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, so nobody will visit the forum.

Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#304

Post by mtslzr »

seydor wrote: post #98
abashore wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those mods held polls in their communities and among their peers before going dark. I don't think the large subreddits are getting unilaterally shut down.

it's always like that -- reddit users always like drama so i did not expect they would vote otherwise. i think the whole idea is bad though Reddit has much bigger problems to solve. First and foremost, that users have no recourse from moderation abuses, and this is killing the community more than the API changes.

You hand-waved the response that users voted for this, and then simply repeated the (seemingly wrong) stance that mods are forcing this in anyone.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#305

Post by pmoriarty »

rurban wrote: post #286
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 :(

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.

"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."

Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then.

No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client.

Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users.

Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#306

Post by 8organicbits »

jrflowers wrote: post #224

What an odd post. In the same post ostensibly meant to posture strength and solidarity they go out of their way to point out that there is a good chunk of people that simply cannot live without reddit dot com (in this case a subforum about stopping drinking and a subforum about the war in Ukraine). These groups have not, can not, will not move away from Reddit. Not only is there no real long term plan in general, the…

There's tons of alternatives, just not many that look like reddit clones. If you want funny meme go to tiktok, if you want to talk about news go on any of the news aggregators, if you want to talk about tech come to HN (as many have these last two days), if you want to socialize with people you know go to Facebook, if you want porn the Internet is full of it, art: deviantart, and so on.

I've been impressed with the fediverse, and I think I'm going there for good, but I agree it's not ready to replace reddit for the masses. There's real effort happening to build communities there. I'm hopeful.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#307

Post by shusaku »

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 keep thinking back to the Arab Spring. Everyone thought Twitter could bring down dictators. Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. It should be easy for users to take over a platform and dictate terms, but the instant dopamine of infinite scroll can’t be resisted.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#308

Post by pmoriarty »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #283
pmoriarty wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't, but those that do are just ordinary users.

Power users are a tiny minority, and most of them don't post either.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#309

Post by mypastself »

narrator wrote: post #264
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…

What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda. It's going on with real farmers in the Nethe…

No one was ever deceived with promises of monetary compensation for their moderation work. Moreover, moderators in particular are a very small subset of the site's total users, so they have even less claim on data ownership. Comparing voluntary message board moderators with farmers starving to death sounds like satire.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#310

Post by scheeseman486 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #301
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…

"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in." This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades. There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized plat…

Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed.

But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.

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