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Reddit Strike Has Started

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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#991

Post by JJMcJ »

fknorangesite wrote: post #783
keyle wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair I think Reddit predates "web 2.0" by a big gap. Which is probably why they were successful; they did it before everyone else.

> The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999[3] and later popularized by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Dougherty at the first Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 Reddit was launched in 2005 (which I admit is a year or two earlier than I remember/would have guessed).

I think 2004 is when the concept really gained currency.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#992

Post by Panzer04 »

moneywoes wrote: post #931
Panzer04 wrote: post #868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord won't make it. I find reddit useful because for any particular query I want a mostly user-based answer for I can google term + reddit. Discord jsut doesn't have the same discourse because it's designed for quick back-and-forth chats, not more in-depth self-supporting commentary. It just doesn't fulfill the same purpose. IME, I ignore discords from most subreddits because they do basically nothing for me unles…

What about discord threads?

More a way for already engaged users to start another conversation while in the same channel. It doesn't serve the same purpose as reddit.

Regardless of anything discord does, the lack of searchability will always be a core problem compared to reddit.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#993

Post by jshen »

stevenwliao wrote: post #944
jshen wrote: post #780

The strikers need to turn to the fediverse, open protocol systems, otherwise what’s the end game?

Is the fediverse ready for 9 digit MAU?

I have two different answers to this, one technical and the other about power and leverage.

1. Technical. I don't think it's apples to apples. You don't need a single You don't need a single fediverse instance to handle 9 digit MAUs, and if you think of each subreddit as a different instance of a fedi-server then I think it would hold up, and I'm sure it could with some work.

2. Social: I don't think the strike/black out will succeed in any significant way unless the mods have more leverage. Threatening to go fedi, and starting to do it for some of the subreddits, will dramatically change the power dynamics. As a thought experiment, game out the current situation. Reddit needs to make money, and if they want to IPO (i am anti IPO but that's not my choice) then they will also be expected to grow exponentially. They can't do that with third party apps that don't show ads so they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The community very much wants to have these communities, and everyone knows that. If they can stick to the strike it's mutual self-destruction but from reddits perspecgive given in is also self destruction. The CEO is right, the community likely won't be able to maintain it for all kinds of reasons. The main one being reddit can just make the subs public again if they want to. So what leverage do they have? None if reddit believes their only option is reddit.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#994

Post by Breza »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #518
themagician wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…

Disagree with this for lots of reasons: 1. First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of a large subreddit: it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation. The vast majority of people with a life are not going to want to do this. So of course it appeals to people who can power trip off it, and I can't see those dynamics really changing. I do think that reddit should change…

Well said! I saw a chart on r/dataisbeautiful a few years ago showing that a small percentage of Reddit users ever comment or post. Most people just read content. I topped the front page a couple of times and I used to moderate a default sub. It's a huge amount of work. You don't need to lose many power users to change the feel of Reddit forever.

With that said, maybe Reddit management wants the site to change. In the future, this could be seen as a shortsighted failure or as an MTV-stops-showing-music-videos pivot to a different audience.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#995

Post by stevenwliao »

jshen wrote: post #993
stevenwliao wrote: post #944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the fediverse ready for 9 digit MAU?

I have two different answers to this, one technical and the other about power and leverage. 1. Technical. I don't think it's apples to apples. You don't need a single You don't need a single fediverse instance to handle 9 digit MAUs, and if you think of each subreddit as a different instance of a fedi-server then I think it would hold up, and I'm sure it could with some work. 2. Social: I don't think the strike/black…

If we imagine, say, /r/funny as a Fediserver, it'll need to be ready for 8 figure MAU, if not 9.

You make a good point about leverage.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#996

Post by id02009 »

Nas808 wrote: post #757
762236 wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped visiting reddit after too many mods censored me and others that don't conform to the left's ideology. Twitter is where I get content now. And I'm a liberal.

Many of the old default subs like News, Politics, etc are ran by the same group of moderators, and they will heavily censor things they don't like. But it's the same thing on the other side of the spectrum, a lot of the conservative subs aren't tolerant to whatever they think is "woke".

That's true if you talk about content posted on those subs. But I'm yet to be banned from a conservative sub just because I'm involved in wrong other sub. I once posted on a sub criticizing vaccines, my post was not even friendly to the post- I was debunking flawed logic. And I got autobanned in few other places just for posting there.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#997

Post by jshen »

stevenwliao wrote: post #995
jshen wrote: post #993

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two different answers to this, one technical and the other about power and leverage. 1. Technical. I don't think it's apples to apples. You don't need a single You don't need a single fediverse instance to handle 9 digit MAUs, and if you think of each subreddit as a different instance of a fedi-server then I think it would hold up, and I'm sure it could with some work. 2. Social: I don't think the strike/black…

If we imagine, say, /r/funny as a Fediserver, it'll need to be ready for 8 figure MAU, if not 9. You make a good point about leverage.

It's really interesting. A bunch of news came out today about Reddit doubling down on their position which is what I expected. I was thinking about the MAU problem, and I think the problem is not so much the ability to handle that scale from a tech perspective, but the cost of doing it. It really isn't hard these days to handle that kind of scale, but it comes with a big cloud bill.

From there I started wondering if there was a way to distribute the costs to the users, and I think there is a way to do that, but will users really pay because of abstract ideals? I don't think so, and I think this is the fundamental problem. Users really want these types of communities and social media, but the vast vast majority will not pay for it, so you get forced into the ad model. Overtime that turns into what we're seeing with reddit, in order for reddit to grow, they have to find ways to grow the ad model and locking down third party apps becomes an existential thing for them. Not sure how we get out of this bind, or if it's just noise, people will complain but they won't pay directly so the complaints will never affect any change.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#998

Post by paradox460 »

Somdubai wrote: post #989
paradox460 wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They killed compact a few months ago, in light of recent events probably to drive people to the "official" apps

Compact was perfect for me and its death really has curtailed my usage of Reddit

Glad you liked it. 13 years ago reddit had an absolutely atrocious mobile experience, and was unusable on my (then new) Motorola Droid (milestone). So it was mostly a labor of "what do I need to browse reddit".

KeyserSosa, reddit's GM at the time and now their CTO, was rather supportive of my development efforts; let me make the crappy little thing I was building an official part of reddit after a conversation on IRC

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#999

Post by skinnymuch »

Gareth321 wrote: post #873
skinnymuch wrote: post #845

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the veracity of your story. As a liberal you’re complaining about how one of the most liberal capitalist sites has too much left ideology. What is left ideology to you?

I’ve been banned on multiple subreddits because I wrote that I don’t think children should be medically altered for “sexual transition.” I’m fine with adults making that decision, but not kids. I was respectful, but firm. This is one of those “left ideology” issues, compounded by a new left ideology issue: authoritarian censorship.

What are you talking about? I said Reddit and HN and YC are classic liberal capitalist stuff. Then I jokingly brought up left ideology. You somehow took me making a transparent joke seriously. Leftism and liberalism have little relation.

Also. Did you know leftists get banned all the time. Leftist subreddits get banned In whole (Chapo Trap House).

Stop living in a fantasy world where you’re the moral victim.

Re: Reddit Strike Has Started

#1000

Post by alsargent »

Maybe this is a dumb question... but why doesn't Reddit lower its API prices to a point that Apollo and other app developers can afford?

Plenty of other companies have figured out how to price APIs in a way that works for developers: AWS, Twilio, Stripe, Okta, MongoDB, and Plaid, to name a few.

It's not like these companies aren't making money with their API pricing; they've all generated enough in revenues and profits to drive their valuations into multiple billions of dollars.

It's as if Reddit didn't do the basic work of rolling out API pricing: talk to customers, find price points they can live with, offer prioritized customer support in exchange for API charges, etc. Literally hundreds of software companies have followed this playbook, and have rolled out API prices without drama.

Am I missing something here?

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