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Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

buzl.uk

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Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#111

Post by celdon25 »

dale_glass wrote: post #102
celdon25 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> altruistic billionaires finance more discussion forums that don’t exist to be profitable, at least not directly. A certain person tried that, but HN has given them nothing but hate over it. If there’s a specific idea you or others had in mind that was different, I haven’t seen any serious proposals or roadmaps posted. I’d love to see it though, I’d rather things be more decentralized without the contemporary gateke…

You mean Twitter? It's pretty much opposite from what I want from a platform. What I want is more or less Mastodon. A feed ordered by date, a complete lack of algorithmic suggestion (unless maybe I explicitly ask for it), a complete lack of advertising, and stringent moderation that enforces things in my preferred direction.

I’m sure there’s some bozo GitHub repo out there that does exactly what you’re asking for. But you or someone needs to make a serious pitch with a viable roadmap and explain how it will add to society, and be prepared to tirelessly champion it as a movement, not just another shitty pet project.

If it’s to service a nostalgia kick then that’s not going to be a big enough sell. Otherwise it needs to be a business, which is obviously not an option either.

Xitter obviously made a lot of mistakes, but the appeal to society wasn’t one of them (the execution is another story), but that’s the only reason it is still around. There’s obviously a demand for it that isn’t being fulfilled.

I’m not referring to “free speech”, I think that is the wrong message to focus on, though I do think big tech and Reddit had that wrong. Social media is responsible for the enshittification of society at large. It just takes a click to make someone an un-person at the slightest offense. Whether that be to exclude them from their social community with a block or ban, or expose something they said out of context.

It’s not really a censorship issue as much as it is a self-censorship issue with the secondary effects that has on society as a whole. To put it more plainly: people are too afraid to express themselves, even under pseudonyms. There are exceptions but when they stand out it has a tendency to look weird, so it’s passively discouraged in that way as well. Even if you are allowed to do so, that doesn’t stop cancel culture from taking things you said or did out of context. You can’t have the old web culture back until that’s solved, and I don’t even know if that’s possible to do.

So instead, we are stuck with gatekeepers and overzealous moderation (though the latter was a problem in the old days too). What a way to live, eh?

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#113

Post by rglullis »

sumeno wrote: post #105
rglullis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to charge per message. Just make every user pay an annual membership fee for entrance. This is how https://communick.com works. I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse.

> I have a small userbase, but zero issues with spam and abuse. You have zero issues with spam and abuse because you have a small user base, not because of the fee. Twitter has TONS of paid accounts for spam.

First: citation needed in spammers using paid accounts. Why would they pay to spam, go through credit card fraud detection and so on when a free account is (by definition) zero cost? Mind you, I am talking about pure spam and not crazy sophisticated phishing scams. Those certainly exist in Twitter.

Second: scale. Twitter has millions of users, it is not profitable and is suing advertisers in a desperate attempt to justify its lack of revenue. Let's just say that a miracle happens and I get my dream number of paid accounts (10k at $29/year). The operation would be profitable enough to pay myself more than I ever made in any job and still contribute back to the downstream projects. I could literally close registrations on my service, or start a different vetting process.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#114

Post by lotsofpulp »

sschueller wrote: post #24
Iulioh wrote: post #7

Another point i would like to discuss, if someone has more knowledge than me: How the fuck was reddit not profitable? The founder said it but i still don't belive it. Was all the money spent in bullshit features no one still uses or it was before that?

It's not profitable enough. Investors all expect double digit continuous growth. No one seems happy anymore to "just" make a profit. This results in companies rapidly growing until no more profit can be made in the short term at which point they start cutting costs to continue show profit. The cuts result in destroying the long term value (firing valuable know how etc.) for a short term profit. At the end the company…

Reddit has not yet earned a profit.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/reddit/earnings/

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#115

Post by amiga386 »

Etheryte wrote: post #34
maipen wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. Pretty much sums up every popular social media platform these days. HN is still a good place to learn about whats going on in the tech world and what not because it's simple and filters out alot of "brainrot", although there is an increasing number of comments that soley react at the headline. Reddit has become like meta, you either have an account or your us…

I feel like this is another example of a problem that could be easily solved if we had integrated, anonymous and frictionless payments on the web. For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent. For a regular user it takes a while to build up even a hundred comments, meanwhile for a spammer, this could quickly become costly. The hurdle of course is that no one wants to put thei…

> For example, imagine a Reddit clone, but every comment you want to post costs one cent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwELepvBAVY

> He said "if I was in charge of Facebook, mate, I'd be saying like 'fucking QUID A GO!'"

> It gave me a small sense of hometown pride when I realized the guy was serious... small sense of hometown pride that there must be very few places in the world where Mark Zuckerberg would be offered financial advice from a guy who was 15 pence short for [his bus fare]

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#116

Post by firesteelrain »

satvikpendem wrote: post #35
mubu wrote: post #12

Reddit was my favorite website growing up. I'd discover new interesting subs, read random posts and comments. The frontpage was somewhat interesting too, but now it feels like a bot fest and propaganda machine. I still use Reddit but way less than I used to before, and I no longer use it for fun but just to read niche tech subs. I refuse to use the official mobile app. I've always used Baconreader and then Relay on A…

It's not just the app, the content itself has regressed. Where previously many subs actually had content related to their name, now it's 90% American political content. Evert r/pics is not immune. It's not just the posts, the comments too have political stances in them too, for many posts even unrelated to politics. It's tiring to read.

It is sad. I don’t browse Popular anymore and stick to the subreddits I care about which aren’t political.

Even if you run across a “news” subreddit and comment on something that doesn’t seem Left, you will get banned right now. It’s very toxic.

Best to stay away from Popular

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#117

Post by rglullis »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #108
rglullis wrote: post #86

Looks like it's time for me to plug my fediverser [0] project. It can help people migrate away from Reddit by letting people sign up to a Lemmy instance [1] with their Reddit credentials and automatically subscribe them to the corresponding Lemmy alternative. The alternatives are crowdsourced. There is a "flagship" deployment at https://fediverser.network but if you want to fork it, you just need to run your instance…

Congratulations on the NLnet grant! I'm one of the 'silent' contingent on Reddit - frequently reads, but never posts. It is possible to use Mastodon or another ActivityPub application to interact with Lemmy (and vice-versa) to some extent, which will hopefully allow the two types of social networks to help each other grow. Would it be viable to add a setting for your own Fediverse account so that you could click on t…

Thanks! Something like what you want is in the works, but I'd like first to be able to authenticate Lemmy accounts in a way that does not scare users.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#118

Post by spyder »

gdiamos wrote: post #74

I unplugged from Reddit when they did this and my life is much better. Reddit had a good community and content in the early days, but as it grew in popularity and squeezed profit the value dropped. I think it’s funny that early LLM projects were bootstrapped by scraping Reddit. I guess it was better than random garbage from common crawl, but the world has moved on.

Huh... Moved on to where?

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#119

Post by throwuxiytayq »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #107

I still don‘t understand why apps like apollo did not add a balance account used to pay the necessary API requests. Combined with heavy caching this should have been easily possible and financially viable. Someone could have even built a cache gateway backend for multiple 3rd party apps…

How many rug pulls do you think are acceptable before you'd stop wasting your time trying to work with a corporation?

I think one is a perfectly sane and acceptable answer.

Re: Reddit banned me for developing Geddit

#120

Post by subsection1h »

badsectoracula wrote: post #61
hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, reddit became worse than that ~10 years ago because of the inconsistent, absurd, immature unreasonableness of a sizable fraction of mods who added suck and subtracted cool from the world. Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media platforms where community mods skew towards being drama-oriented, elitist, and/or crazy because no one else wants the job and so, like policing, it attract…

> Maybe this is a pattern common to most all group-oriented social media Channel operator drama was a major thing with IRC back when it was popular (sometimes ending to like channel splits or even whole netsplits if the people involved were related to the server operators, bot/flood wars, etc), so yeah, there isn't anything specific to Reddit about it. I wasn't part of it but i am pretty sure you'd see the same patte…

> despite the romantization, i somehow doubt that Usenet was all roses before the "Eternal September"

Usenet was the best discussion platform I've ever used. People who posted questions to comp.lang.c without first reading K&R were commonly killfiled. People who posted questions to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring newsgroups without first reading relevant W3C specs were commonly killfiled. It was awesome. Can anyone direct me to a discussion platform created during the past 25 years where people are blocked or banned for failing to RTFM? I'm not aware of any.

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