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Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

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Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#161
post #51
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but can someone please explain what this reply means? It isn't the first time I've seen "* * *" and I'm wondering what it's significance is?

Odd, maybe it's a quirk of the harmonic app, as I can see a normal comment now. Please ignore my previous reply.

I believe @dang has addressed this before. You see it when someone has configured a "delay" (see the input field at the bottom of your settings page [0]) which is an integer value representing the number of minutes before which your comment is "published" (visible to other users) - it's meant to be a short window of time where you can edit your comment before anyone has seen it. Once the delay has expired, other users will see the comment.

I've personally never observed it, but I use the HN website, which I think just doesn't render the comment during the delay period. IIRC, you'll see the asterisks when viewing comments in alternative clients that fetch them from the API.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#162
post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

You can move those connections to other channels. But yeah without a free market / progress driven system you aren’t going to have a phone, mail service, etc either. It’s a double edge sword.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! And they're so incredibly cheap to run, in the scheme of things. They're TEXT and LINKS ffs. Even Snapchat, which deals in video, costs about $2.50 per user per year to run. Honestly, we're some set of dopes to let people like Zuck and Huffman build yachts and apocalypse bunkers, with bloody advertising money, all for the genius idea of sharing text and links on the internet.

Do you have a source for that $2.5 figure?

That number seems incredibly unlikely. I’m a relatively casual Snapchat user, and from ~45GB of cellular use, ~3.5GB is from Snapchat. That’s just egress bandwidth (from Snapchat’s point of view), they also have to ingress my snaps as well as temporarily host stories and snaps in transit.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#164
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, where everything will be siloed off and then enshittified again :(

That is my prediction as well. It's unfortunate as we'll enter the unindexed web where all that helpful content you can find by appending "reddit" onto any search will no longer be getting produced. All of it hidden in discords, out of sight. Who knows, maybe there will be an easy way to get stuff published out to the proper web. Things like community FAQs or guides that would be broadly of use. I think the loss of t…

The content being out of sight also makes discord communities harder to grow.

I bet that a considerable fraction of Reddit users became users by googling something and finding an interesting Reddit discussion about the topic in the first results of Google.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#166
post #139
post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

What gives me hope is if you ever take a break from social media you realize how worthless it all is. It really doesn’t hurt to disengage. For similar reasons it’s possible for new networks to show up which disrupt the old, such as TikTok. The point is as individuals we are way less dependent on social media than we imagine.

I loaded Facebook for the first time in five years yesterday because there was a fire nearby that I was trying to track. That's about the only value it's provided to me in that time. So, not totally useless, but I certainly have no regrets being social-media free.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#167

Watch out folks - critical discussions about Reddit seem to be getting flagged as flame bait. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347400 Idk why. We should be able to have a civilized, intellectually curious discussion about this. The future of Reddit (and its implications for the future of the Internet) is pretty on-topic to me for HN. @dang can we get a stance on this?

It’s quite possible that people are just flagging these stories because it’s not interesting enough to facilitate 20 discussions without it turning into threads with 500 comments rehashing the same arguments.

Reddit might be a big deal to you but many people over here just don’t care and they don’t want to see topic after topic about a site they don’t care about. And it’s going to have the same impact on the ‘future of the internet’ as the demise of Digg. Not a whole lot really, sites come and go, in a year nobody cares. Remember MySpace?

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#168
post #76

We (the internet community) made such a terrible mistake with social media. We formed connections and communities and friendships on sites like Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, but those companies need to make money, so those connections are only allowed to exist as long as they are part of a profitable system. How awful it is to reduce human connection to that. To think that I am only allowed to maintain certain soc…

Where's the non-profit foundation to replace them? Has someone already started it?

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#169

Reddit has handled this pretty terribly but I also think people are being unreasonable. This is no different than me creating a third party YouTube client, charging for it and displaying no ads. Why would YouTube allow me to do that? And why should Reddit allow third party apps to do that? Reddit screwed up in the first place allowing third party apps that they have zero control over to build a full frontend replacem…

I think it would be more comparable if YouTube had an API that the developers had built their apps on, that mods and power users had come to rely on, and YouTube shut the API down or demanded ridiculous fees for the use with a 30 day notice.

The Apollo dev initially sounded okay with the idea of changing to a paid API access model, but when the pricing and timeline came out, things went from a reasonable change to a swift boot for a lot of apps.

Re: Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts

#170
post #83
post #30

For someone kind of out of the loop, can someone explain what they think reddit should do instead of charging for their API access? After all Reddit is a business right? What alternatives do users want reddit to do instead?

My best take? Make 3P API access require a reddit gold sub. $6/mo and it lets you use whatever client you want and reddit gets that $4, not a dev who has to pay it forward.

This was my original take as well, but I now suspect the reason for all this and their refusal to accommodate the app ecosystem is that they don’t want third party apps at all. They want users on the official app where they can monetize the additional profile data in ways beyond their ad platform.
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