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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#551

Post by account42 »

Kiro wrote: post #503
havilland wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are creating data that can be sold to other companies. Additionally everything you write or do can nowadays be used to train an AI model.

Why would anyone pay money for random nonsense chat logs? Seems useless for the regular reasons data is sold and outright bad as training material for AI.

It's exactly the right data if you want to make a realistic-looking chatbot, e.g. in order to astroturf.

It also likely contains information about you and your friends like holiday plans, medical conditions etc that can be used to more effectively avertise towards you.

But most of all, you are a captive audience that Discord can sell in the future.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#552

Post by account42 »

cykros wrote: post #388
dagw wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polici…

> 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

That very much depends on whether you agree with the curron popular opinion on what is appropriate for children.

Also, kids can just as easily find porn, gore, etc today as they could back when I was a kid. Hiding it on some platforms hardly matters.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#554

Post by account42 »

Xelbair wrote: post #345
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 :(

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…

Forums still exist. They may be less visible but they are still many of them around, especially for computer-adjacent hobbies.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#555

Post by account42 »

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…

Does the Reddit CEO seriously address their employess as "Snoos" and people put up with this??? SV culture is more fucked than I even though possible.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#556

Post by account42 »

buildbot wrote: post #226
mattmanser wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough with the ChatGPT already. If you didn't write it, don't post it.

I’d support instant bans for drivel like this, it’s somehow way more annoying than low effort/meme comments. Like, we get it, you can type shit into a chat interface hooked up to a LLM. So can we all.

Same for all the "what if we add an LLM to this" comments. Worse than the unispired blockchain "problem solving".

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#557

Post by fsflover »

brigandish wrote: post #538
fsflover wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this how Mastodon works?

The confusing sign up seems to be a huge friction there.

I don't see anything confusing. Choose any instance and it will federate with others. For the minimal friction, choose the mainstream one, mastodon.social.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#558

Post by michaelcampbell »

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…

The new "leader" model which CEOs are cottoning on to is doubling down on belligerence no matter how bad the idea.

As goes politics, go corporations.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#559

Post by l72 »

reso wrote: post #71

Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue? I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with ne…

I'd just like to point out, that I run a side business selling vinyls/cassettes in a very niche genre. I looked into advertising on reddit, as there were two or three communities that I was already active in with collectors of this type of music.

I thought it'd be better to advertise than self promote. However, Reddit's ad management is a complete cluster. It is confusing, frustrating to set up, and difficult to analyze.

The reason I really wanted to advertise on Reddit rather than Facebook/Instagram is that Facebook's "profiles" of people aren't specific enough for what I am selling. But with Reddit, I literally just want to target anyone who is a member of or visits these specific subreddits.

For me, it is perfect targeted advertising without any invasive tracking of users!

But Reddit wouldn't let me. Those subreddits aren't on their very limited list of approved subreddits. Instead my only choice was to be able to target a really, really big subreddit (/r/Music) which 99.99% of the people there would have no interest in my product, or to use their profiles, which are not nearly as complete as Facebook's.

So, I gave up, and decided I wasn't getting my return on advertising on Reddit.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#560

Post by BizarroLand »

cvwright wrote: post #533
BizarroLand wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interne…

> 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's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content. This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years…

I know I'm working with the Good King hypothesis where things are great as long as a good king sits on the throne, and I also don't know many people who if they were running a federated server that was just scraping by were suddenly offered a boatload of cash to throw some ads in or to hock some shiny new toy for people wouldn't take it (even if they would be transparent about it the way Linus Sebastian does).

Despite that, I think ads will probably evolve to fit the new ecosystem, where two people like you and me are having a conversation and I will at an appropriate time and with a proper amount of discretion mention (shiny new toy) and that (I'm enjoying it) and then move on.

Annoying, blaring in your face spite ads and out of place porn ads will change, the new ads will be powered by AI personas that match their online spaces, have appropriate day night cycles and backstories, and will be practically indistinguishable from real live humans and they will occasionally gather together and talk excitedly with each other about (shiny new toy) or how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (awesome) and then us real human will stumble onto that conversation (without the parenthesis), leaving us to wonder if we should give them a try.

And if someone were to offer me thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue to host a site that seems hustling and bustling with activity that is appropriate for the space where sometimes people will be urged to get into flame wars about how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (Better than / not as good as) (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' Original recipe), thus preventing any conversation about (Plain old Oatmeal for breakfast) then who wouldn't take that?

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