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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#471

Post by rchaud »

hcks wrote: post #338
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.

It's a messageboard. The only people who need to think of users as "consumers" are Reddit execs hoping somebody will buy "reddit gold" or an NFT avatar. The mere fact that these e-trinkets are considered "products" should be indicative of how un-monetizable public messageboards are.

Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#472

Post by goykasi »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #456
goykasi wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If lurkers don't exist, the community doesn't exist. It's well established that internet forums and communities consist of >=90% of users not contributing -- but consuming[1]. A small portion produce where as an overwhelming portion consume. To say lurkers shouldnt exist is extremely reductive and callous. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

I am well aware that the overwhelming majority does not contribute but consume. Communities need participation, if you are not participating you are not giving back, you are leeching. If everyone is leeching, there is no community. Consumers are not entitled to the content of the producers. Producers both consume and produce. > To say lurkers shouldnt exist is extremely reductive and callous. I didn't claim that they…

You're right that you didn't say that should not exist, but you did say

> they might as well not even exist

I guess that's technically different. But you're being extremely hostile to the make up of a community. Can only active participants be allowed to claim they are part of a community? That seems very insensitive. Im a lurker, but I feel that I am a part of many online communities. But maybe... "You don't contribute, you don't matter."

In reality lurkers (or leechers as you say) play a big role. First of all they represent the community count -- they show a realistic interest in a topic/view. They also participate in other ways like up and down (validation) voting of topics/interests, report off topic/offensive content, etc. And they play a very significant role by supporting revenue for web forums -- their eyeballs and clicks do count too.

Just because lurkers aren't visible, doesn't make them any less important to the community.

> If a tree fell in the forest and nobody heard it, did it make a sound?

Yah, because 90% of the people in the forest heard it; they just didn't make a post about it.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#473

Post by meetingthrower »

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

Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#474

Post by rchaud »

skc wrote: post #263
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…

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

The 3rd party apps are still alive. The real test will be what viewership looks like once the official app is the only way in.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#475

Post by rchaud »

greatpatton wrote: post #72
xwdv wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the CEO backs down then he’s weak. He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.

Main question is why is Reddit a 2000 employees company?

Reddit acquired 3 companies in 2022, although they might all be pretty small operations:

https://www.crunchbase.com/search/acquisitions/field/organiz...

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#476

Post by rchaud »

larksimian wrote: post #122
NovaDudely wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brian Lunduke back in 2019 when Reddit took $150 million from Tencent basically said that Reddit would be a company in trouble with in 5 years. His argument was that it shouldn't cost that much to run the place and as such they would have to start pleasing investors and not users. The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is eve…

If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged. Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible. It's way…

It's not about actual profitability, it's about what you can convince an investor is the potential future profitability.

Merely by recording an actual profit, you have shown your hand to the investor, who can now estimate what your ceiling is. And it's never going to be as much as what it was when profits were merely hypothetical.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#477

Post by Zren »

weejewel wrote: post #114

Why don’t they just introduce Reddit Premium, for say $5/mo, which is ad-free and allows 3rd party clients.

Then you can get an LLM company to easily scrape Reddit for $5 instead of $100000. The main reason for this change is to monetize the usage, not the access.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#478

Post by yanderekko »

foodjinn wrote: post #432
yanderekko wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ones that are going to push for long-term blackouts don't control 80% of the site. Whatever share they do control will probably be redistributed to other powermods pretty quickly, I would guess.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#479

Post by fsflover »

brigandish wrote: post #282
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…

> The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord. I think the average person likes 1) only logging in once (even using an FB or Google login more than once, sign up etc, is too much friction) 2) a consistent interface 3) while being able to jump to another "forum" easily, which internal links obviously do. Solve those 3 things for decentralised forums (or whatever, seeing that…

Isn't this how Mastodon works?

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#480

Post by djvdq »

INTPenis wrote: post #444
djvdq wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Creators" are not a single entity. There are tons of very creative people in the fediverse already. There will be pockets of creativity all over the internet, maybe more in the centralized social media but the decentralized social media might be more attractive to creators who value and understand digital freedom.

I know that there are already on Fediverse, I'm there and I love this idea.

What I tried to say (but came out poorly), that Fediverse, even with big growth in last months, is still kinda small and most of those "creators" are still on centralized social media, so regular people are also mostly there.

it was clearly visible when Musk took over Twitter and mass migrations to Mastodon started. Some journalists and different public people moved there, so regular people also moved. But with time, some of the creators got bored and got back on Twitter, and outflow of ordinary people also was visible.

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