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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#181

Post by AlexandrB »

veave wrote: post #94
Fauntleroy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so that the admins of reddit can exploit their content instead?

Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise that it will be available and then massively deleting (or hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them out for it, but by now, it's the mods.

> The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet).

Haven't they? Isn't making the API economically unfeasible to use limiting access?

My personal plan is to delete all my posts and my account once Apollo goes down. I made most of that content using Apollo, so it seems fitting.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#182

Post by actionablefiber »

rblatz wrote: post #29
idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.

I also love old.reddit.com with RES, but I have no illusion that Reddit likes it too.

It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third party frontends will also motivate it to do away with old.reddit.com and RSS.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#183

Post by dehrmann »

veave wrote: post #53

I hope the admins of reddit will start taking control of the closed subs and opening them up. The content of each one of those subs has been written by the users and it makes no sense that a handful of mods are taking the content and holding it hostage by keeping the subs private. If I were a contributor to one of those subs (for example by posting answers to programming questions) I would be fuming.

Or those users could go start a competing subreddit.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#184

Post by ketchupdog »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31
idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it. A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their ri…

I block ads, nuke cookies, and use old.reddit.com exclusively, but somehow I still manage to spend a lot of money on shit I don't need. Most of it was found on reddit. All of it got a google search that included "site:reddit.com" before buying. This anecdote is not unique. The fact that reddit gets $0 despite being part of my typical buyers journey is a failure of Steve Huffman, not the users.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#186

Post by gs17 »

vkou wrote: post #16
icapybara wrote: post #11

The main problem with the protest is that there’s no viable Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for everyone to jump ship to Reddit.

This is the root of the problem. Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it. Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose discoverability.)

Some large communities have migrated by force previously. Not that it's any good, but communities.win (or whatever they go by now) does seem to have maintained its population of right-wing refugees, /r/drama seems to be keeping their own site afloat. /r/startrek set up their own Lemmy instance, so we'll see how that goes over time.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#187

Post by beowulfey »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an inte…

Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive.

Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#188

Post by greiskul »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31
idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it. A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their ri…

I have literally paid for the Reddit app that I use. And I would not mind paying a recurring fee if it was reasonable. Users for third party apps are most likely to be the most addicted users of reddit. If investors can't tell that, they deserve to watch their investment fail.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#189

Post by hedora »

idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

I've posted this a few times, but there's a snapshot of reddit from 2017 that you can self host:

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)

Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not sure why.

Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

#190

Post by Phelinofist »

DelightOne wrote: post #154
chongli wrote: post #37

I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by investors or executives attempting…

Lemmy comments are broken on Safari - they do not render.

For me on Firefox drop downs are unusable as the selection keeps jumping around. Also when scrolling the whole content jumps.
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