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

381–390 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#381

Post by lelanthran »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #60
BlackJack wrote: post #28

I read the comments and many are in this vein: "Agreed, moderators with a power complex are the worst thing about this site. Don't even care about this API crap." Never realized mods were so disliked. I thought the blackout sent a message+got coverage, but don't like subreddits extending it without consulting their users. I use reddit about 5-10 minutes/day so I don't care either way.

It's possible that the comments are legit, but it's interesting how many of the comments in the Moderator Coordination subreddit are from people who hate mods have have newish accounts. Considering Reddit has edited comments critical of the CEO in the past AND that reddit is known to use fake accounts to simulate engagement, I'm a bit skeptical (the fake account thing was how reddit got it's start, but they're still…

> it's interesting how many of the comments in the Moderator Coordination subreddit are from people who hate mods have have newish accounts.

Well, duh.

Would you complain about a mod with your main account? A contributing factor is that people with newish accounts have newish accounts because a powertripping mod banned their oldish account.

All-in-all, having newish accounts complain about mods makes their complaints more legitimate, not less.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#382

Post by dopidopHN »

bibabaloo wrote: post #357
Xelbair wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays. It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel. I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. a…

What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this

Hackaton in my city, geocaching, fucking origami. Hiking.

I do miss phpBB forum with the curated read only section, the lore of important post that all the forum has read and so on

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#383

Post by cykros »

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 :(

I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s.

Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers.

I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#384

Post by dopidopHN »

fallingknife wrote: post #368
klik99 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought. I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to th…

Reddit was much better 10 years ago when it was much less moderated. If anything I would expect nerfing the mods to improve things.

They keep saying they are saving us from the hordes , is that a lie ?

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#385

Post by frankacter »

rcxdude wrote: post #360
frankacter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not accurate. From the data presented, in aggregate, >90% fall well within the free tier of usage (100 API calls per minute for OAuth logged in client). The majority of the remaining fall into a $1/month tier [1]. Certainly there are some outliers that exceed those ranges and unfortunately the majority of the spotlight seems to be on the smallest of the populace. It is also worth noting that app developers ca…

OK, so if each user were to use their own API key, reddit would still have the same costs but nowhere near the revenue, which speaks to a pricing structure aimed at the status quo where the API key is per developer instead. What's the betting that if apps switch to allowing users to specify their own API key that reddit actually allows most users to do this? The '90%' number is meaningless: apps which use the reddit…

I'm not aware that reddit ever presented user level API keys as an option, they'd likely instead base it on Reddit premium tiers tied to the OAuth account. But again, that's not currently a viable option on the table and if users started enmass requesting API keys intended for developers, yes that would get throttled quickly because that's not what they're intended for.

>90% of users is not a meaningless number by any measure. I'd suggest that punishing the average users due to the power use of the outliers is a terrible value proposition.

Developers hold the ability to throttle and/or price based on that.

I am a developer that has built clients and tools around the reddit API. If most apps don't bother to optimize, then that's a choice they can make.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#386

Post by dopidopHN »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #112
jampa wrote: post #22

It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down. The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation: > We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as…

I love this bit: > While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia. What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of e…

In French : Les jaunes

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#387

Post by dopidopHN »

mitchell209 wrote: post #341
skc wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately he's right I think. Most of the sports related subs I follow are indeed back after a 48 hour hiatus.

People started this blackout without any alternatives. Twitter users had Instagram, Facebook (even though that’s a worse shitshow and IG is owned by Meta), tiktok, Mastodon, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting. There’s nothing equivalent to reddit with half as much daily activity as even the worst Twitter-alternative, so they’d never catch on. People append “reddit” to google searches now, that’s how integral…

I knew about lemmy before hands, and I got « pitched » at least 6 or 7 Reddit alternative yesterday.

All are sad empty forum but well. That’s what it is.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#388

Post by cykros »

dagw wrote: post #207
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 :(

On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing. Oh the good old days :( As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.

The difference was, back in the good old days, you were making friends with the people who owned and ran the platforms you were on. And they weren't (usually) slurping up all manner of data about you to sell off access to in one form or other.

That is not the case now.

On the other hand, from a parent's perspective, the "good old days" were an absolute nightmare, because nobody was particularly responsible for policing content your kids were being shown (except for, well, you). Whether or not you SHOULD be willing to offload that responsibility set aside as a matter for debate, you for the most part CAN assume that the volume of heinously inappropriate content being foisted upon your unwitting 15 year old is a bit more limited, at least on these big platform sites (aside from some of the more ephemeral content, where it's usually a matter of taking it down only AFTER the kids see it). But you can also usually rest a bit more easily knowing your 15 year old isn't uploading naked pictures of themselves to reddit like they may have been to a vbulletin or phpbb site in the days of yore (though, nothing stops them from going off the beaten path and doing so elsewhere unless you've got that firewall and/or actual monitoring going on).

I guess the point is, there are pros and cons. Personally I approach the kids on the Internet thing with some pretty hefty firewalling and monitoring and would really just love a return to the greater amount of decentralization (and for the love of god, search engines that just find what's out there, and report back based on terms, rather than curate "acceptable" and "promotion worthy" content...but this may be wishing for too much). But others may have different priorities.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#389

Post by AshamedCaptain »

chipsa wrote: post #378
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Or you can just rely on manually approving all of the new accounts. It's not like you need to cater to the bunch of new users that have an inmediate need to post _today_ and just cannot wait 1 week for a mod to approve their initial posts.

Collecting IP address will not reduce the need for manual moderation, nor even reduce bot spam...

(I do admin a topic-specialized technical web forum which has been running for over 20 years, which doesn't even need to ask for cookie consent.. but of course, has never been legally tested, so YMMV)

Post reply on HN