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

371–380 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#371

Post by boomboomsubban »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #12
boomboomsubban wrote: post #3

Organizing the continued blackout on Reddit is a bad look. I know it's not their aim, but it seems like "users should be prevented from using reddit, but us mods are exempt." That said, short of preemptively having coordinated something, I don't know where else they'd organize. Particularly as I'm unaware of any real "leaders" to this movement.

That said, short of preemptively having coordinated something, I don't know where else they'd organize. Then instead of saying how bad of a look it is, perhaps lament that there isn't a better alternative to organize. A place where reddit both absolutely knows what is going on (after all, they can look at their own subs), the public can see what is going on, and where all the mods would know to go. Seriously. This co…

>Then instead of saying how bad of a look it is, perhaps lament that there isn't a better alternative to organize

That's what the part you quoted is doing. It still looks bad, it's like organizing a boycott of Walmart and seeing the boycott leaders leaving Walmart with supplies to make placards. Maybe it was their only real option, but it looks terrible.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#372

Post by SilverBirch »

tyg13 wrote: post #329
SilverBirch wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really fascinates me that people think Reddit is hostile to their users, because when you really look at it, aren't reddit's users incredibly hostile to reddit management? Like really if you look at it from the outside you have this community that does this incredibly nasty things and then every time management steps in to try and correct it the community goes into uproar. I'm not saying the management have handle…

Who was nasty first? Are you trying to say the community brought this API change upon itself?

I'm not saying that at all - this API change has to do with business, nothing to do with personal feelings. But I just think it's interesting people criticise the leadership of reddit but look at what the users of reddit have been up to over the years - /r/jailbait, the harassment of Ellen Pao, the fappening, FatPeopleHate, the Boston bombing vigilantes, Pizzagate. Like yeah, sure, Reddit has been a total fuck up of a business proposition, but that really is partly because the site has harbored some really disgusting stuff over the years and it's only extremely recently that the company has even started to try to steer away from that stuff - and when they do large portions of the company react extremely badly.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#373

Post by pmoriarty »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #310
pmoriarty wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 apparen…

"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."

For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place.

Meta squandered billions in the dead-in-the-water metaverse.

Discord is constantly growing and gaining new users.

This is far from a corporate apocalypse, and where are the serious alternatives? The vast majority of ordinary people are certainly not using them.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#374

Post by _Donny »

pmoriarty wrote: post #313
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?

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…

Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.

I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.

Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...

I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person. Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.

At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#375

Post by rakoo »

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 more with you, unfortunately there's a real C check of our position and our history to do, us being technical people:

- we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male

- we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported.

Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives.

A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#376

Post by joshuaissac »

mitchell209 wrote: post #347
FeetYeet wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn’t Twitter the most popular social media site on the planet and still losing money?

> Twitter the most popular social media site on the planet

Twitter is not even in the top ten most popular social media networks.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#377

Post by dale_glass »

lelanthran wrote: post #364
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…

> If Reddit forces them off, and they create www.askhistorians.com, then I'm making a account there. And that's fine, but you're talking as if everyone is like you, with only 1 subreddit that they browse. In reality (and reddit probably has the numbers to verify this), most people jump across maybe 10 or more different mods. They're not going to go create 10 different accounts elsewhere. I personally am not a big red…

> In reality (and reddit probably has the numbers to verify this), most people jump across maybe 10 or more different mods.

So do I. I expect there to form some viable alternative to Reddit eventually.

> This is also the reason why the federated system is broken by design: the type of users who use reddit don't want the friction of logging onto a dozen different instances to see all the posts related to ONE top.

Federation means separate servers talk to each other and can share content.

Eg, I'm on fosstodon.org, but I see posts from an user with an account at tech.lgbt. That's how federation works.

> I think what a lot of people are missing is that centralisation is what provides the value reddit has. Moderators (seriously, those people are a dime a dozen - in fact you can charge mods a fee and you still won't run out of mods wanting to sign up) are not the primary value in reddit. Posts are not the primary value in reddit.

But this centralization can be provided by anyone else. I don't care that it's provided by Reddit Inc. I come for the posts, where they happen to be hosted isn't very important.

I think it can also be provided in a federated manner. There's really no reason why Reddit couldn't be split into a myriad servers that then get aggregated into a giant feed for those who want it.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#378

Post by chipsa »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #355
makeitdouble wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why on earth would you need to retain IP address or have analytics at all? This scaremongering about GPDR always conveniently forgets that the stuff the GPDR makes scary to do is stuff you should not be doing anyway.

For regular forums, you need the IP address for helping to protect against SPAM and making sure banned users stay banned. Analytics can help see if you're having issues with the server, or if someone is putting unnecessary load (client-side analytics staying flat, but server-side rapidly increasing, or similar).

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#379

Post by pmoriarty »

_Donny wrote: post #374
pmoriarty wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would g…

"I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server."

This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you.

Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history.

On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#380

Post by PrimeMcFly »

dale_glass wrote: post #369
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, but it's still a limited license to use it. The primary ownership is still with the comment writer.

It really depends what's in the terms the user agreed to.
Post reply on HN