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

511–520 of 565 posts

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#511

Post by rsync »

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. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money."

I don't think this is correct.

In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes:

"... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation."

... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure.

Youtube is always becoming TV.

My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#512

Post by menus »

evandale wrote: post #465
menus wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to get reddit back to the site I enjoy Those "whiny mods" are the reason you "enjoy" your reddit experience. Are there some mods that abuse their power? Yes.

The whiny mods are not moderators - they're curators, and they don't do thing to help me enjoy my Reddit experience. They make it worse by being biased and censoring opinions they personally don't like. They have an unreasonable amount of control over the narrative and diversity of the opinions expressed. If they were actually moderating they wouldn't invent vague rules to ban whatever they want and the moderator act…

I have already agreed that some mods are power hungry but to claim that all moderators are is disingenuous.

https://i.imgur.com/qccGA91.jpg

if you think moderation is bad why are you on a moderated HN and not 4chan \b\?

> and the moderator action logs would be public

Blame reddit for not making this feature and not mods. There are 3rd party tools for public modlogs that REDDIT is trying to kill.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#513

Post by mjburgess »

rsync wrote: post #511
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. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money." I don't think this is correct. In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes: "... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only af…

This is a disanalogus analysis, because the value of these platforms it the labour of their volunteers --- they *are* the commons.

"Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit.

My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit.

You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required.

I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#514

Post by BizarroLand »

cvwright wrote: post #489
mjburgess wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I can comment with authority on my motivations. I can expand your point further than you made it. I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit". So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I w…

Unfortunately, if you don’t want your data “monetized” through creepy tracking and annoying ads, and you’re also completely unwilling to pay, then you’re going to have a bad time. Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.

You're wrong. Things can be publicly funded. They can be sponsored. Wikipedia does no creepy tracking and the only annoying ad is when Jimmy Wales is begging for money (even though they have the funds to run the company for 10 years without receiving another penny right now).

Your mindset of "everything costs money and so everyone is the internet's paypig" is broken and exemplifies the problem with the modern internet.

Yes, everything costs money, but honestly, not that much money. $20-$40 a month is enough to run your own kbin/lemmy/mastodon instance on a VPS with your own domain name and everything. If you have 300 regular users, getting them to throw $500 a year in support at your site is nothing.

Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.

Yes, that means money changes hands. That's capitalism. But in that system the site users are not being spammed with annoying ads and the only tracking being done is with the interest category itself and not on a per user basis including all of the other sites they've ever visited before visiting your site.

Just like forums used to do.

Sure, forums are outdated because the site navigation is clunky and user participation is difficult, but federated systems can bridge the gap between the forum based glory days and the modern interface without costing everyone so much money that it boggles the mind.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#515

Post by archon810 »

hacb wrote: post #209
zmmmmm wrote: post #136

I think a different approach would work better at this point. They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version. The key in a negotiation is…

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.

Same, Discord to me is like a more confusingly implemented and laid out Slack.

Now Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ would be a much better choice.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#516

Post by anotherhue »

saaaaaam wrote: post #365
mnsc wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is value: https://i.imgur.com/QGEwbPI.png I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.

I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is about this but I can’t help feeling that there’s a certain irony in you taking a screenshot of a perfectly readable, accessible post on here and posting that as (to my mind) a less readable less accessible, decontextualised piece of content - an image on an image sharing site. Is it because people will genuinely engage with that content there? Is it a “this is such good content I’v…

"Ceci n'est pas un fil de discussion"

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#517

Post by exreddit »

stevenwliao wrote: post #447
exreddit wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the return of /r/creepshots and /r/jailbait, but on defaults.

Some users think "this platform is so good, it doesn't need moderation." Somehow it never occurs to them that unmoderated platforms end up at best like 4chan and at worst like a site that gets shut down by the FBI.

It's sad that 4chan is the best case outcome.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#518

Post by codalan »

hacb wrote: post #209
zmmmmm wrote: post #136

I think a different approach would work better at this point. They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version. The key in a negotiation is…

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.

I think Discord is a stopgap until mods figure out the next platform to move to (e.g. Lemmy).

I view it as more of an addition to Reddit, rather than a replacement.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#519

Post by code_duck »

dale_glass wrote: post #70
code_duck wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, while I understand and appreciate this effort, Reddit is actually seems better without some of the giant default subs. It's more like it was 10 years ago. The site has hardly been a ghost town over the past couple of days. Smaller more obscure subs are hitting the front page, which is interesting, and to me it illustrates that if the large ones were to shut down entirely, there'd be no shortage of content and o…

Actually many smaller subreddits don't want to hit the front page. Reddit has different dynamics depending on where people are coming from. Small subreddits hitting the frontpage tends to be disruptive more than helpful by bringing in users that don't care about the local culture.

I didn't say all communities wanted to. I said it was interesting. Mainly my point is that it wouldn't be death for reddit if some of the largest subs went away entirely, along with the 'power mods' who control dozens of communities.

I have no doubt that mods of some of the smaller news subs, for instance, would be happy to start getting offers for tens of thousands of dollars to promote various articles.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#520

Post by predictabl3 »

archon810 wrote: post #515
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.

Same, Discord to me is like a more confusingly implemented and laid out Slack. Now Discourse https://www.discourse.org/ would be a much better choice.

I can't believe I'm saying this but I'd almost rather use Discord than an unthreaded flat forum.

Still hopeful that Matrix will get Zulip style threading/UX and then I'll be so so so happy.

Post reply on HN