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Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

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Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#231

Post by thefourthchime »

depereo wrote: post #74
xyst wrote: post #50

Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers. - regular people get a break from their echo chambers - VOLUNTEER mods get a break - journalists get their news article The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users dat…

I added reddit.com to my ublock filters - it was kind of an automatic click a few times a day and it's been a nice way to break the habit so strongly. I've got friends doing the same, and our microcommunity has formed around another platform already, after collectively losing reddit. It was so clearly a half-assed, badly thought out policy. No mention of mod tools. No mention of accessibility tools. No mention of res…

I deleted my 8yo account. It was right after someone downvoted me because pointed out something that broke with their opinion.

That kind of summed up my view Reddit. Groupthink circle jerks. Why was I part of any of that??

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#232

Post by karaterobot »

sdfghswe wrote: post #210

ELI5: Why can't reddit just unblackout whatever subs they want?

From a technical perspective, there's no reason they couldn't. God help me, part of me wants to see what would happen next if they did. There would certainly be some positive consequences to doing so (more of that sweet, sweet traffic, and establishing once and for all who is the daddy) but also some huge negative ones: for one thing, some already angry moderators would likely quit, and for another it would basically destroy any shred of remaining good will or feeling of community. It would be a slap in the face. They can still walk back their API pricing changes, they can even hope this bad press blows over, but I don't know if they could salvage their reputation if they just exerted autocratic control over their community-based platform. If moderators don't feel like they're in charge of their own subreddits, that they're just fungible, unpaid workers, they'd probably realize they're being used and go away.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#233

Post by tarkin2 »

Uh. I’m not really following this. But are people moving to other services?

If you’re just going dark Reddit will know you’ll eventually cave in.

Blackouts feel like you’re saying “we love you so please change”.

I’d be happy to see people use other services. I’d appreciate the decentralisation.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#234

Post by seydor »

gsatic wrote: post #161

All the Freebies on the Internet of the past 20 years be it email, search, chat, news/content, video, streaming, social etc have been funded by Ads. The expectation has been there is no upper bound to what Ads can fund. But thanks to Covid and now Chat GPT et al, we know (or atleast all the freebie providers have learnt) there is an upper bound to the Ad/Attention Economy. Theses changes, what's happening at twitter,…

mainly because google+FB gobbled up the whole of advertising

AFAIK historically the % of GDP spent on advertising was more or less constant so it s not like advertisers bailed

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#236

Post by hn2017 »

xyst wrote: post #50

Good. This works out for everybody except the brain dead C-level executives that tried to bully indie app developers. - regular people get a break from their echo chambers - VOLUNTEER mods get a break - journalists get their news article The only loser here is the corporation side. Significant loss of value from decreased user activity. Subsequent loss of revenue. Inability to extract as much value from the users dat…

[dead]

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#238

Post by czx4f4bd »

majormajor wrote: post #140
CincinnatiMan wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your view is a little simplistic. There is plenty of useful information on Reddit. I'm a big fan of home-related subs for example, where a lot of trade-knowledgeable people seem to hang out. There is a wealth of information on subs like r/DIY, r/HomeImprovement, r/paint, r/woodworking, etc.

I've often wondered why people use Reddit for stuff like this since the information and conversation management and organizational tools seem vastly inferior to most any pre-Reddit forum software. My current working theory is largely that internet search is just broken. It's easier to search for subreddit once you're on Reddit than to wade out into the sea of SEO crap and try to find a live, reliable format on the br…

Reddit also offloads the complexity of forum management from moderators and removes the friction of registration.

If you want to create a traditional forum, you have to figure out how to host it, what forum software you want to use, how that software works, how to configure it, etc. If you get attacked by spammers, hackers, or trolls, you have to figure out how to stop that more or less from scratch. It requires a significant amount of technical knowledge, time, and money to make it work.

Then, even if you use a dedicated forum hosting service, your forum is still basically on an island. You have to find a userbase and attract them, convince them to register dedicated accounts for your forum specifically, and keep them coming back, which is really hard if you don't have an existing userbase to make your forum compelling in the first place.

With Reddit, nearly all of that goes away. Creating a subreddit is extremely easy and costs nothing but time. Moderators still have to moderate, but they don't have to figure out how to manage forum software or handle DDoS attacks. Since any Reddit user can join and participate in any subreddit, and since posts appear on users' homepages in one feed, communities can grow much more quickly and are less likely to die out due to inactivity. And there's only one UI for the whole site, so users don't have to learn how to use whatever random forum software each site has chosen.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#239

Post by __loam »

rcarr wrote: post #212
Tangurena2 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are not enough volunteers to handle the load. Companies depend on free labor to moderate things and will never be able to afford the actual cost of doing business without that free labor. I currently moderate 2 subs (down from 5). I'm looking to offload those 2 without having them get banned for being unmoderated (again).

You say this, but it’s only a matter of time until we get AI moderation.

We already have AI moderation at places like Facebook and they still need a small army of moderators. Zuckerburg has been trying to automate moderation for years.

Re: Reddit subs with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely

#240

Post by esotericimpl »

predictabl3 wrote: post #167
SecurityMinded wrote: post #112

I am unable to understand this bruhaha about reddit as I am an occasional user of this website and mostly in lurking mode. Was there a promise made to those 3rd party app authors and users that their access would be perpetual, not to be taken away from them, no matter what ? I don't think any for-profit company makes such promises. If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rul…

> If you play in someone's walled garden, you should be ready to see them change the rules as they see fit. And no one should be surprised when I pick up my ball and walk home.

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