Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 478 posts

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#191

Post by _ink_ »

miki123211 wrote: post #171

I have already said this multiple times in different threads, but I think the protestors took entirely the wrong approach here. The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slu…

They did this, tho. Many subs did suddenly allow nsfw content. It was very effective. Reddit Corp needed to remove the mods of those subs and replace same with ones that would implement ad friendly rules again. It really showed that the mods are not free in how they run their subs.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#192

Post by adr1an »

irrational wrote: post #159
valianteffort wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.

This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.

What would be a non anonymous social network, Facebook? This very much applies to them too, iiuc..

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#194

Post by thaumaturgy »

arp242 wrote: post #189
thaumaturgy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415 You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed t…

I didn't see that text either. I just did a quick "let's verify this data" check because it just doesn't match my experience. > If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance. I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.

A little bit of snark, not directed at you specifically. Several people now have pointed out either the red text at top, or that the numbers aren't an exact match, or both, without themselves bothering to read through this thread to see if those had already been discussed.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#195

Post by crtified »

As a casual but persistent user, it pains me to say it - because ethically I support the grassroots side of the equation - but as a path of least resistance to casual, anonymous public engagement on a wide range of topics, there seems no viable alternative. [For a given subjective value of 'viable', naturally!]. So after a period of abstention, I gradually ended up back there, simply because I know of no other sizeable gatherings on certain topics that aren't either annoyingly gatekept (technically, and/or socially), and/or are far more toxic themselves.

Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.

In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#196

Post by dimmke »

unshavedyak wrote: post #5
h2odragon wrote: post #3

Had as much impact as a fart in a hurricane. May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.

I disagree, it was impactful. More than a fart. What we have to look at is the impact though, not some specific objective that was impossible anyway (ie killing Reddit). The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity pub, etc etc. It’s just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and…

This was always what annoyed me about people who took this position before the changes. The goalpost was "Reddit is going to topple" - it turns out that the effect of these platforms is so strong that short of them literally going down you aren't going to see a full on collapse.

I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now.

My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#197

Post by kmlevitt »

swores wrote: post #126
arp242 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That data seems wrong. I don't use Reddit much, but I checked the data aginast some smaller subs I sometimes check, and according to those charts they have just a few comments per day, but I know for a fact that's wrong. It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob…

Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit com…

>Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is

Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?

The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#198

Post by jjcm »

58x14 wrote: post #122
jjcm wrote: post #109

For me at least, it gave me the motivation to launch. I had been working on a Reddit-like platform for several years, and didn't really have pressure to launch. There was always "one more thing" to build. I was pretty stunned with the positive response to it on HN[0]. With Apollo going down as well, I've since been creating an iOS app for the site fairly heavily inspired by it[1], and hired a dev as well. Traffic has…

I spent half my day following your launch, and it looked like things were going downhill pretty quickly. How have things been since? You turned on your paid subscription signup?

I apprecate you joining in on the chaos! It was definitely WAY more attention than I was expecting. That's why I had encouraged people not to pay during the announcement post - I was more aiming to show off a side project rather than launching a platform. It was an absolutely crazy week, especially considering I was launching a larger feature for Figma (my day job) two weeks after that.

Three of the biggest issues was there was an off-by-one error in the payment amount selector (which imo is unacceptable for anything paid), the subscription cancellation button didn't work, and the mobile view (which made up ~60% of the user agent requests) was broken (especially when logged out). I fixed those and started rolling out regular updates as well: https://non.io/#updates

Launched a bunch of new features since, but really what I'm waiting on before promoting and trying to get things off the ground is the iOS app. Overall it's been wild ride, but the thing I'm most proud about is the $119 I've paid out to users. It's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but it proved the platform worked and that the distribution of funds worked.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#199

Post by kmlevitt »

kmeisthax wrote: post #175
valianteffort wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.

While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating…

It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.

And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#200

Post by TMWNN »

I've heard it theorized that the API change screened out a lot of bots that had been driving conversation/voting. This is borne out by, say, /r/europe, which has taken an abrupt, substantial turn away from its traditional mantra of "more 'refugees', please".
Post reply on HN