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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#431

Post by dingaling »

slg wrote: post #217
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…

>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. And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the hum…

> AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations.

AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#432

Post by foodjinn »

yanderekko wrote: post #239
onion2k wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable. I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the s…

Reddit has replaced mods before, they'll do it again. If they can't do it for hundreds of subs at once, that's fine - they'll start with the largest ones and go from there. Once it becomes clear that top mods will be removed if the subs don't reopen, the protest will largely crumble, if it doesn't do so before this becomes necessary.

The power mods that are pushing the blackout run something like 80% of the entire site.

I honestly don't see how they allowed this to happen in the first place.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#433

Post by ParetoOptimal »

SilverBirch wrote: post #372
tyg13 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> but look at what the users of reddit have been up to over the years - /r/jailbait, t

You mean the /r/jailbait subreddit current Reddit CEO Steve Huffman was a moderator of?

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#434

Post by AndrewKemendo »

mnsc wrote: post #418
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only guess that they simply wanted a pointer to a contained set of data with bounded reference So that was easier or more impactful to communicate via image than typing “this thread is valuable” At least that’s how it made sense to me

You're right and sorry, It was just a online way of me enthusiastically pointing at a thing and trying to say: This is value, just a snippet of text on a pale yellow background, where no-one were actively trying to create this value. I can't really put my finger on what I'm trying to say though so i guess that is the root the confusion. :D Like, I don't get paid for this content so it doesn't have to make sense. edit…

Please don’t apologize, your approach is pretty normal - I probably send a dozen screenshots around per day and it’s always easiest to just show people what I’m referring to directly with an image.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#435

Post by foodjinn »

paulmd wrote: post #167
paganel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.

Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo. Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed. Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermo…

>The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.

Those mods are active 20+hours a day, there is no chance they are actual people.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#436

Post by pmoriarty »

tommit wrote: post #292
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.

Then what is your definition of a power user?

Someone who, like the GP says, uses third party clients and ad blockers, who is very technically knowledgable, who may even use Reddit's API directly themselves, or write tools/clients for Reddit.

Contributing to Reddit's content doesn't require any of that, and I'd wager the overwhelming majority of Reddit users don't do any of that but do contribute most of Reddit's content.

Just because you're a content creator doesn't mean you're a power user. The concepts are mostly orthogonal. Though if you're a mod you probably use some mod tools, which makes you a bit of a power user by definition. But mods are a tiny minority of Reddit users and don't contribute most of Reddit's content.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#437

Post by suddenclarity »

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.

> Now users can’t even effectively pressure management.

Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#438

Post by ParetoOptimal »

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.

Well places like r/mattresses are frequently astroturfed so I take that as at least weak proof casual readers read comments.

I think it depends on the subreddit. For instance many r/news readers likely only read the title.

But r/ama readers likely always read the comments because they are the core content.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#439

Post by djvdq »

INTPenis wrote: post #295
djvdq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's good article about it: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23672769/social-media-ine...

Very gloomy title though. And the content is very niched. I believe a majority of internet users will still use large corporate social media, simply because it's easier. We as developers have to understand that most users are not like us, they only want an accessible and simple experience when staying in touch with people and sharing their lives. But the power users, the ones who made up the majority of internet user…

IMHO, if 1-9-90 rule is true, then it depends on what this 1% of creators will do. If they'll stay on Reddit/any other centralized social media, then nothing will really change. But if creators will move to a different place, then lurkers might see that there are alternatives and maybe eventually they'll even move to them, if the content will be _better_ in their opinion.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#440

Post by pmoriarty »

scheeseman486 wrote: post #421
pmoriarty wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 gai…

"For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place." Like Myspace did to Geocities. Like Facebook did to Myspace. Like TikTok did to Facebook. It's been a churn of platforms scaling too large, becoming too expensive to run, subsequently attempting to monetize users in a way that causes a flee that collapses the platform, with everyone running to the new hot thing thats burning throu…

I don't see monetization efforts as what drives users away, but rather seeing a new, trendy alternative and the old sites seeming antiquated by comparison.

"It's where all the cool kids are" draws people in.

The extreme outrage amongst mainstream users over Reddit trying to earn a buck here is an anomaly.

In Reddit's case there is no trendy alternative to migrate over to, so all the users taking their ball and angrily stomping off will be back.

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