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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#311

Post by giraffe_lady »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #204
username332211 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? There is - it makes little sense to buy ads, when you can buy comments. https://xkcd.com/1019/

Interesting perspective. But it does beg the obvious question: how effective are comment sections? How many casual redditors in this case actually read the comments and aren't just scrolling through titles? Either way, the experiment is very cheap and honestly we're dreaming if these were the rates they paid. It's probably more like $2/hour to people in 2nd/3rd world countries.

For advertising your target isn't necessarily someone organically scrolling who happens upon it. It's definitely the people who are googling "best cordless drill reddit" or digging through the stickied megathread of a specific interest's sub. In those cases it would be very very hard to beat the effectiveness of a well-placed comment.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#312

Post by kibibyte »

hacb wrote: post #209
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…

If my favorites subreddits go to Discord, I'll simply not go there. Discord has nothing to do like a forum, it is almost impossible to search for valuable information, and is really hard to use when dozens and dozens of people are talking simultaneously. I really don't get why so many people want their sub to go to Discord tbh.

I like Discord but I get that it's not for everybody. Jumping into a very active wide Discord community (with many channels) can be an incredibly jarring sensory assault, and if you don't have a narrower community (e.g. a private server for just your friend group, or honestly just a server with very few channels to keep track of) to figure out things, it can be very off-putting.

That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#313

Post by pmoriarty »

movedx wrote: post #193
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 :(

I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?

Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools.

Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing.

Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#314

Post by haunter »

Rzor wrote: post #262
haunter wrote: post #202

tbh more and more commenters questioning the mod actions. Just one example I follow: /r/StarWars is kinda falling apart + the push for Discord is so pointless https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/148xygd/rstarwars... /r/hockey is the same, total pointlessly came back + missed the championship game too https://old.reddit.com/r/hockey/comments/148xsck/rhockey_has...

StarWars has a bunch of upvotes. Not sure about falling apart.

Read the comments questioning the whole point of all

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#315

Post by ornornor »

shusaku wrote: post #307
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.

This is true of every system we live in and yet it very rarely happen because most people just want to get on with their lives and not think about it, or don’t have the means to pressure (jobs where you’re just a cog making barely enough to survive and can’t afford to lose any of the income for instance)

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#316

Post by dale_glass »

paulmd wrote: post #290
dale_glass wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

> 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.

That's a good point but I don't see what about this would magically make profits rise 5x or 10x.

Like what's the value proposition here? TikTok and the like already exist. I don't see what Reddit has to offer especially since they've been very lazy offering their users anything.

> The rest is just the ex-partner making a scene after you dumped them. They’ll get tired of it eventually, if not you get the cops to clean it up and move on.

I mean, both parties can make a cold rational calculus.

Reddit can calculate they'd be better off pivoting to mindless scrolling, fair enough.

But the people unhappy with that can also calculate that they'd be better off making this process as unpleasant for Reddit as possible. Best case they win, and Reddit is forced to backtrack. Worst case, they still made a lot of noise and that likely decreases the chance of somebody else pivoting, and bolsters alternatives.

I think an unpleasant truth some ignore is that tantrums have a purpose -- they're extremely unpleasant to be on the end of, that's why they're a thing at all, because they often do have power.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#318

Post by 8organicbits »

deafpolygon wrote: post #182
spartanatreyu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> definitely more of a mod revolt than a user revolt As a user I completely disagree. As a user, I want to use a UI that works for me. I don't want to use a mobile website that prevents me from reading comments and forces me to use an app. As a user, I want a service that releases quality of life fixes, not a service that says the fixes are coming for years but instead decides to release half-baked features every 6 m…

You'll be back.

Many of us left Twitter not too long ago, and have not returned. I wouldn't be so sure.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#319

Post by nkuttler »

paulmd wrote: post #290
dale_glass wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

> commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting

That's incredibly short sighted but probably in line with how reddit execs view things. /r/aww and /r/earthporn are trivial to replicate on any other site, /r/AskHistorians is not. It's the small subs with loyal users that build an environment where the cookie-cutter content aggregators are profitable. Oh well, all for the IPO pump n dump.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#320

Post by johannes1234321 »

b3orn wrote: post #267
movedx wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?

Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.

There is some benefit in sharing the user account, however there are reasons for using different identities on different forums.
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