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Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

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

#261

Post by intended »

Uptrenda wrote: post #116
thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

Reddit mods have some of the worst reputations for power abuse on the entire internet. People in the comments are saying that many of these people quit with the implication that this is bad. But what if it's not? There are quite a few stories of these people being horrible gate keepers that pushed certain pet agendas. It's possible with these people out that new ideas can flourish and more people will be able to part…

My constant answer to this is to volunteer oneself.

Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues.

If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs.

Spez recently joined a mod team.

It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences.

Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.

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

#263

Post by brewdad »

x86x87 wrote: post #172
dymk wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the criteria for relevancy, if not "do people still use it"?

Are you innovating? Are you top of mind for people? Is your tech transforming people's lives? I use electricity every day. Is electricity relevant in most contexts for me? Nope. I drive a car every day. Is the type of car I drive relevant in any way? Nope.

Your life as you know it would disappear if electricity stopped flowing tomorrow.

Facebook is no longer the trendsetter but it still influences the daily lives of millions of people and will probably, once again, have a major impact on who the United States next president is. Facebook is highly relevant.

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

#264

Post by arp242 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #246
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…

For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead . Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on thr…

> overrun by onlyfxns spam

I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic.

I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't.

Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.

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

#265

Post by adra »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

Poor, poor Slashdot. For me it was murdered during the 2016 US elections when they welcomed infectiously click bait political shit fest that literally spread to like every story. I contributed at that point for like 12+ years? I couldn't stand the vitriol and moderation clearly didn't function, so cest la vis.

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

#267

Post by wkat4242 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #246
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…

For what it's worth: many of the NSFW subreddits are dead . Even r/gonewild, one of the OGs - either they've gotten closed due to being unmoderated or they've been overrun by onlyfxns spam, or they've been hit by some weird downranking like GW. Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on thr…

The thing is, that was the desired outcome anyway. Reddit wants to get rid of the NSFW because the big money they want to attract doesn't like anything remotely fringey.

I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.

Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already

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

#268

Post by rglullis »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

It has been far from a stalemate. Reddit has won this battle, but the war is not over.

Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there.

About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits.

I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday

[0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028

[2]: https://portal.alien.top/

[3]: https://fediverser.network

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

#269

Post by intended »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #223
tensor wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a right yes, but they will also rightly suffer from their approach. I not only participated in the blackout, but because of the CEOs arrogant comments about how valuable my data is and how they deserve to sell it, while destroying the tools I value and use, I also deleted all of my valuable data from reddit and after handing off the one sub I moderated I left the platform forever. I think reddit is a wonder…

I'm a blogger and freelance writer. I've spent years saying that programmers make good money, then expect slave labor from writers and content developers. If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.

In that case Reddit should die.

Reddit’s decision changed it previous equation with mods, and redefined the limits of power.

Reddit, since inception, had never made specific hire fire decisions for mods, especially for purely monetary reasons.

This makes it less volunteer moderation, and purely unpaid labor.

NB: I would add return on investment to your cabinet of villains.

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

#270

Post by splonk »

rabbits_2002 wrote: post #43

A massive decline in post quality. I don’t know what happened but ever since the blackout only garbage gets posted. Even the quality of niche subreddits has fallen. I think the blackout meant that all the well moderated “good” subreddits closed while the bad ones stayed open. Now the bad subreddits are more popular and have eclipsed the good subreddits. As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators hav…

I concur with this. I've spoken with friends at Reddit who tell me that overall post volume is basically back up to normal, but my participation was mostly in smaller subs. Some of them got killed for lack of moderators, some are basically dead because people left and didn't come back, and a couple that are at similar levels of traffic seem to have had a lot of the good posters leave and be replaced by a bunch of shitposters, self promotion, and bots. That said, sounds to me like the conclusion Reddit will take from this is that everything's fine.
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