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The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

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Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#421

Post by johnnyanmac »

dmonitor wrote: post #400
johnnyanmac wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project mor…

Take a look at Zephyr RTOS, for instance. It's all behind a fucking discord. It's a pain in the ass compared to something like Nordic Semiconductor's Devzone. The fact that I have to join a tech support channel for my job with the same profile I use to join 18+ furry roleplay servers (discord requires a phone number that can receive texts and I don't have a work phone) is a sign that something here is a problem.

well yes, that's always an issue with popular social media. That's why I make sure my 18+ furry roleplay account is different from the professional one.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#422

Post by johnnyanmac »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #402
johnnyanmac wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Participating in such group requires so big an investment of time and attention that it instantly shuts off anyone who has a day job or other interests and responsibilities. depending on the kind of OS project, that may be more of a boon than a hinderance. There is always good talent put off by some factors in life, but there are always a lot more actors (some bad, some simply ignorant) that may make the project mor…

> I'll also emphasize that unless you are a part of an enormous hub without proper structure, the "chat flow" isn't as heavy as you'd expect at first blush. For values of "enormous" starting at "a dozen people". Elsewhere in the thread I wrote about my Hackerspace experience. At the point I started drifting away from the community, we had ~100 people active at least every now and then, some ~30 present and at least o…

1000 messages in a work day sounds like a lot even for a decently popular game discord. That sounds like it goes beyond "active participants" and more like "eternally online" people.

You already made your choice, but there is something worth considering on if you even want to be a part of a group (even if you had all that free time). I find it interesting that this post came up later after I came back to this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36323888

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#423

Post by xnx »

EscapeFromNY wrote: post #9

My theory is that Google lost the spam war. All the leetcode in the world won't teach someone to build an ML model that can tell whether a website is spam. So Google outsourced the spam detection problem -- they heavily bias their results towards only the most popular sites, who either have human moderators or paid contributors, and those sites do the spam management that Google's automated approach is incapable of.

Expecting Google's code to flawlessly understand the truth and trustworthiness of all possible sources for every conceivable question is a fair/unbiased way for all topics past present and future is a very high bar. This is a really hard problem, and unlike many other hard problems (rocket science, neurosurgery, particle physics, etc.), Google has millions of financially motivated adversaries actively trying to trick them.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#424

Post by toastercat »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #420
toastercat wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean is that it's inevitable for a closed-source, proprietary solution like Discord. The service does matter, and there are better alternatives to Discord for online OSS communities.

Sure, just like how there were better alternatives for Facebook, and Twitter. Even when they were at their peaks. I think we've seen often enough in history that the best, most technically impressive tool is rarely the most popular one. If you have the power to move the people you can help try to fight that aspect of society. But at large we can't even lead the horses to those theoretical oases (let alone make them d…

I think you're missing the context of the thread. An open-source project doesn't need to choose a tool that competes with Discord in popularity -- popularity is not important here. The aim is not to attract millions of users, the aim is to provide a valuable and sustainable resource to its community that it can link in the project's README file. A tool like Discourse or Zulip is more sustainable than Discord because they are open source, history is exportable, and the software is trivially self-hostable in case the managed hosting solutions don't pan out.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#425

Post by Danathar »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

As long as TCP/IP exists there will always be a way for people to communicate, it just won’t be at the scale of what we see right now.

As an example, use that news groups still exist. It’s a shadow of itself but it’s still there and it still works despite the fact that Reddit and all sorts of other form based communications, took over.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#426

Post by michaelchisari »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #392
michaelchisari wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| Don't kid yourself though into thinking the non-profit foundation Those aren't the problems I was expecting to solve. Those are other problems that exist regardless of funding model, because they're fundamentally social problems. A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits.

>A non-profit funding model simply solves the problem of venture capital undermining the core product in search of profits. It also introduces a larger problem of shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs. That's always going to be a bigger problem than VC's. Wikipedia only does so because it is bankrolled by universities and other institutions. And we should note that Wikipedia doesn't have to host v…

| shutting down entirely if they can't pay for server costs

Keeping the lights on is never a guarantee for anything. VC funding can also run out. Being for-profit locks an organization out of crowd-sourcing, institutional grants and other funding sources that non-profits have available.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#427

Post by rafark »

hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and now I don’t. I don’t even remember most of them.

Even when googling, I usually just stick to the sites that allow interaction like reddit, stack over flow or this site.

A few weeks ago I remembered the names of a couple of blogs I used to browse and it’s sad to see them become spam and/or low-content farms.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#428

Post by krapp »

rafark wrote: post #427
hourago wrote: post #75

The problem is that the open internet is dying. What used to be blogs and forums now is Reddit. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of communities that had their own wiki, blog, forum, ... are now reduced to be a Subreddit. The Internet has become fragile. One service goes down and everybody suffers. If the top 10 services went down most people would think that there is no Internet at all. E-Mail is the last s…

The trend that I hate the most is blogs without comments. I don’t know when it started, but a few years ago I suddenly noticed most blogs started to turn off their comments section one by one. I don’t know why they’d do that. Interacting with the author or other people was half the fun. Now there’s just silence. It’s what made me stop visiting blogs altogether. I used to browse a bunch of the same blogs everyday and…

It isn't the 1990s anymore. The vast majority of comments on blogs will be spam, bots or, in the extreme rare case of an actual human reader, raving lunatics. The chance of an actual human being reading your blog and leaving a sincere comment in good faith is so low that you can safely assume it will never happen.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#429

Post by rafark »

jeffbee wrote: post #104
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I’d LOVE to revert to the old phpBB or vBulletin forum days There’s literally no reason why not and it’s never been cheaper to run

99% of phpBB installations were pwned and distributing malware. It’s a terrible model. If we want small distributed operation of software like that we need a revolution in software operability and quality.

Most forums run on xenforo nowadays which is extremely solid and reliable.

Re: The Reddit blackout has left Google barren and full of holes

#430

Post by rafark »

sacado2 wrote: post #410
low_tech_love wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what’s worse, the contents of subreddits are incredibly homogeneous; there is no place for dissent. A subreddit named ”music” or ”films” or ”games” (just conceptually, ok?) fancies itself as the reference for that specific thing, when it’s actually just a reflection of whatever political stance the mods have (usually simply reduction to average). Outside people will see that and think ”oh nice a centralized discu…

And the public upvote / downvote system make it even worse. Soon, you're reduced to a small subset of opinion because any slightly dissenting opinion will be downvoted to hell and hidden at the very bottom of the page. Not necessarily an issue for small communities focused on a non-controversial topic (mostly anything about jokes/memes, or very niche technical stuff), but bigger communities focusing on slightly polit…

Yes. The mob mentality is an issue on reddit and has made me refrain from giving my honest opinion on a lot of topics because of the fear of being downvoted to hell. I think an upvote or like only system like Facebook or twitter would be much better.
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