The Reddit blackout will continue

If you require logins you don't need to store the IP address for preventing abuse. The user gives you the identifier on login. The IP is a quite bad id anyways since it changes alot.

Thank you a lot!

This speaks very well to something that's been bugging me about these discussions. marginalia_nu posted a blog about community yesterday that got linked here and you're hitting on a topic related to that. When the value is in the community itself, not the location they happen to be gathering in, how should ownership and funding of that location work?

In reality, we've got several options. People have house parties. One or several members of the community volunteer property they already own and maintain for another purpose to be temporarily used as a gathering place. The web analogy would be if we all had our own private blogs that we ran on self-hosted servers and we moved from the comments section of one to another and had our discussions there. Classically, Usenet was basically this but without the web.

Commons exist. These would be something like a park. That can be funded via taxes, or if you're militantly anti-government, via some more voluntary form of communal funding, like an HOA or a non-profit that accepts donations. The web equivalent of the latter would be something like Wikipedia, which could easily host threaded discussions if they wanted to. It's arguably a problem that nothing like the former really exists. A lot of people in the past several years have been saying platforms like Twitter deserve to be treated as equivalent to government-provided commons, so why not just have them actually owned and funded by the government? Ironically, the US government does own and operate a classified Twitter clone called eChirp, but nobody from the web can access it unless they have a JWICS account, workstation access, a security clearance, and IC PKI identity.

When thought about this way, do private for-profit parks exist? I know amusement parks exist, but they are clearly different. The value there isn't in going to see the other park guests who you know and would gather with anyway. The park itself is the attraction, filled with entertaining rides, shows, and restaurants that play off of brand loyalty and nostalgia. It feel like places like Facebook and Reddit want to make the same or even money compared to Disney, but without putting in the century of work to build a brand and back-catalog of high-quality entertainment franchises. So they rely on users to generate content instead and it's at best a shitty, ephemeral attention grab that nobody will look back on in 2120 and cherish.

What many of us want are parks, public parks with funding models, not amusement parks with business models, let alone shitty copycats of amusement parks where all the rides suck, but we go anyway because our friends are there and we have no regular parks to hang out at.

The parent commenter you're replying to here is effectively proposing I should get paid to hang out with my friends. I don't want to get paid to hang out with my friends. As soon as that happens, they're not friends. They're customers and I just became a business. I don't want to be a business. I'm just trying to talk, not generate monetizable content.

I get value out of clarifying my thoughts amongst people capable of refining them -- the membership fee is "something to say" and the reward is "something to read".

I'm quite capitalist myself, but for my own passions, an elite socialist -- that is, of course the value to me ought be non-financial; and likewise, to you.

A kind of "collective elite" is very intuitive for one's owns passions --- but it wont get you an economy.

But I dont wish to turn my thoughts into an economy. My words pay their own way.

> That's a good point but I don't see what about this would magically make profits rise 5x or 10x.

Because right now everyone is using third-party clients, or at least old.reddit, and that means they're not viewing the ads. Even worse, they might be (shudders) commenting instead of scrolling.

new.reddit and the native app are what your tiktok drip-feed looks like, and it's way easier to insert ads into that. In fact, it's actually exceptionally hard to insert ads into comment trees, whereas you can just throw the mcdonald's ad into the list of frontpage posts or whatever. So comments are being deprecated in favor of posts overall, because they're easier to monetize, and the new.reddit and native client are how you monetize them.

It's not a coincidence that comments/etc are de-emphasized in the new-reddit interface, they don't want you commenting, they want you scrolling, just like tiktok.

> Like what's the value proposition here? TikTok and the like already exist

Tiktok is at risk of being banned in a lot of places, and is at minimum going to come under a lot of regulatory scrutiny and oversight. Because it has the strong potential to be, instead of your "AI girlfriend", your "AI best-friend with ties to extremism" that slowly algorithmically radicalizes you in whatever ways feel best for you personally according to your own interest.

You're left-leaning? Fine here's some bernie videos and protesters getting beaten. Right leaning? OANN, and videos of protesters burning down a store. They can tune the engagement for each user, and push certain topics and stories while it not only feels organic, but is actually extremely engaging and compelling for each particular user. Just like Google controlling search means they control what surfaces in that medium. But Tiktok's not gonna blow it on adwords, that's way too powerful a propaganda tool.

Reddit wants to position themselves as the alternative if/when the hammer starts to come down for Tiktok. And yes, there's instagram and snapchat and other things I would think of first instead of Reddit... but Reddit would say that the comment-based site hasn't been commercially successful for them.

> I think an unpleasant truth some ignore is that tantrums have a purpose -- they're extremely unpleasant to be on the end of, that's why they're a thing at all, because they often do have power.

Yeah, probably true.