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

331–340 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#331

Post by AxeVice »

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…

Charging for the API wouldn't be a problem if it was either cheap and short term notice, or expensive and long term notice. The biggest problem is that it is both extremely short term notice (a month) and expensive as hell. You don't do this in good faith if the goal is to provide a sustainable business; you do it if you want to kill the API, but have a fallback "despite our best efforts" angle to work in PR pieces.

Providing a per app, per user API key would be the most sustainable way of doing business with 3rd party app developers while keeping users that are willing to pay happy. Plenty of the users that use 3rd party apps already pay something to use them, so it's not out of the question that they would be willing to pay even more to keep using them. I know I would.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#332

Post by Timon3 »

seydor wrote: post #248
Timon3 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the people voted for it, how are the mods holding them hostage? Both the mods and the people want it.

voted for 2 days, right?

Initially yes, but multiple communities made new polls for the continued blackout.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#333

Post by palad1n »

azangru wrote: post #205
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 :(

> 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...

I have tried to at various points in the past. What usually happens is that spammers will come and post crap, and those will be 90-99% of all the posts.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#334

Post by madeofpalk »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #278
hacb wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Discord has forum like features these days. Still a terrible choice though.

Discord's attempt as 'forum' is... incredibly bad and difficult to read. It is not what anyone expects a forum to be.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#335

Post by tyg13 »

gniv wrote: post #275
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…

> Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. There is a chance the protest wins. The interesting twist here is the moderators, which currently have unusual power. The sad part is that this power might go away down the line, as a result of this protest and irrespective of its outcome.

If the protest fails, there was nothing of value left to lose. Reddit has had ample opportunity to make things right in a way amenable to the people complaining. Instead, they've consistently signalled that they want to keep dumping the value that long time users see in the site down the drain. Personally, I have no interest in continuing as steward of the trash heap. Sad to mourn the loss of niche communities, but enough is enough.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#336

Post by PrimeMcFly »

dale_glass wrote: post #243
azangru wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create. Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them?…

> Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it. > Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? Th…

> Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it.

The way around this is to make users agree to some terms of use to assign rights when signing up, which is what Reddit did.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#337

Post by reaperducer »

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.

you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in

That was true about ten years ago.

Most forums that keep their software up to date support logging in with a number of SSO systems.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#338

Post by hcks »

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…

Reddit users and mods are not ´volunteers’. They’re consumers of a service.

If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#339

Post by valdiorn »

drumhead wrote: post #269

It's 80:20 isn't it, the big subs are the draw, so they probably only need to force those to open to get traffic back. They can probably afford to pay for mods on those subs, as for the smaller subs, they probably don't care.

But if the 30 small subs I frequent all go elsewhere, my eyeball time on Reddit is going to go down significantly. Each of those 30 subs might be a tiny slice of my overall use, but together they make up the vast majority of my time on the site.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#340

Post by grishka »

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, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers.

That's what the fediverse is all about.

Post reply on HN