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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?

#431

Post by davidgerard »

dragontamer wrote: post #398
davidgerard wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is…

> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. Yeah. I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and t…

Blocking obnoxious servers on the lemmy/kbin network works well enough, same as on Mastodon. There aren't Mastodon-like lists as yet, but there are some servers that just aren't worth talking to.

Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups.

Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.

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

#432

Post by davidgerard »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #408
davidgerard wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is…

Do you see the main issues inherent to Lemmy as likely to be remediable?

oh sure. As I said, it's good enough to do the one job.

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

#433

Post by davidgerard »

dragontamer wrote: post #417
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Lemmy be re-established or forked in a similar sense in which Lemmy itself is a "fork" of Reddit, if that makes sense?

I mean, Kbin.social is right there? Lol. Lemmy isn't a "fork" of Reddit, as much as it was just a Fediverse thing that existed and happened to become popular in-and-around the Reddit blackout. The Fediverse-model is good. Mastodon is good, but a poor-fit for people looking for things like Reddit. I think what Lemmy is, and what the Lemmy-users want Lemmy to become, remain an open-question. Some of these problems also…

we're finding federation is great fun, fwiw. Our groups have lots of regulars we'd never have met otherwise.

The other fun thing about federation is that when you ban an idiot coming in from another server, you never have to see them again and they can post their last word out there in the ghost version of the thread that you never have to think about.

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

#434

Post by dragontamer »

davidgerard wrote: post #433
dragontamer wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, Kbin.social is right there? Lol. Lemmy isn't a "fork" of Reddit, as much as it was just a Fediverse thing that existed and happened to become popular in-and-around the Reddit blackout. The Fediverse-model is good. Mastodon is good, but a poor-fit for people looking for things like Reddit. I think what Lemmy is, and what the Lemmy-users want Lemmy to become, remain an open-question. Some of these problems also…

we're finding federation is great fun, fwiw. Our groups have lots of regulars we'd never have met otherwise. The other fun thing about federation is that when you ban an idiot coming in from another server, you never have to see them again and they can post their last word out there in the ghost version of the thread that you never have to think about.

Federation is definitely here to stay. Its a good idea.

Implementation details do matter however. I could see something like Kbin.social winning out as PHP-developers could be more popular / available than Rust developers, for example.

Hard for me to look into the future. Weird decisions ripple out over time. People are definitely "onto something here". So I'm trying to keep an open mind to the different possibilities.

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

#435

Post by nerdponx »

kmlevitt wrote: post #292
nerdponx wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.

Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.

If anything, the more popular the site, the more bots and astroturfing it would attract.

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

#436

Post by Throwawayh89 »

Pathogen-David wrote: post #403
Throwawayh89 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit? Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.

For me it's primarily the amount of time spent. Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at. The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts. I…

Thanks for sharing. Makes sense and I can relate to many of the things you say about Reddit (too bad it’s so hard to do things in moderation these days).

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

#437

Post by x86x87 »

dymk wrote: post #421
x86x87 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would your life as you know it disappear if Facebook disappeared tomorrow? Facebook is a cancer to our society. Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.

You're confusing sufficient with necessary. "Your life as you know it will disappear" is an absurd necessary bar to determine if something is relevant or not. > Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town. Ah, you're just unaware of Facebook's DAU/MAU trends. They're not hard to find.

Oh wow. DAU trends! Must be legit

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

#438

Post by johnnyanmac »

pcdandy wrote: post #372
elmepo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, albeit with Reddit is Fun. Personally I used to visit Reddit multiple times per day but now I typically visit it once or twice per week, if at all. I'm sure the official app is fine, but the approach they took to third party developers soured it for me. Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders shou…

Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like. By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Andr…

Biggest mistake by far was letting adtech completely TANK the performance of sites just so they can satisfy paranoid adverts. It's an absolute travesty that a top 3 reason to install adblock comes from a performance POV, because these simple static webpages* are forced to inject MB's of ads into your feed first.

Reddit as a site was never optimal to begin with and it only became worse when they decided to homeroll their own image/video hosting. But the biggest consequence of surrendering to ads turns base Reddit into feel like its 20 years older than it is.

>It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.

money and control, the root of most evils in the world.

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

#440

Post by johnnyanmac »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #345
dmix wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes. Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot. Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (h…

No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods w…

I mean, everyone's going to have different moderation patterns, and experienced with moderation. And you can't please everyone.

I actually don't like locking posts either; the concept is fine, but in execution it felt more like a band-aid for when a moderator was tired of moderating, often because of 1-2 specific chains of comment and everything else was perfectly civil. Rotten apple ruins the barrel, and the feeling of mod laziness means they throw out the apples and the barrel instead of pruning the fruit.

>You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs.

which is what proportionately most people will experience. moderating 100 people and 10m people are different problem spaces, similar to sorting 100 items and 10m items. They need different solutions and approaches to perform them optimally even if the end result is the same.

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