Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by seydor » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

Fauntleroy wrote: post #73

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.

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

Isn't that the point of the website?

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

#262

Post by goostavos » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

indymike wrote: post #156

rblatz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. This may be a case where certain people are more important than most people. > looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been making Reddit work for most people.

Are they? Despite everyone saying this, Reddit seems to be humming along. I log onto the front page and have something of the "normal" reddit experience. For instance, "heh. Look at that fish, that's crazy". I mindlessly scroll past all the "REDDIT IS BEING BAD" posts the same way I scroll past Youtube drama posts, or "How Elon is ruining Twitter" drama posts. I'm here to look at funny pictures.

Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what protest?"

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

#263

Post by faangsticle » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #140

iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

they’re not profitable. twitch probably loses money, reddit definitely loses money. economy has changed to where money is harder to get, and investors are probably much more skeptical now. and in order to get profitable, they have to start some user-hostile practices.

The funny thing is that reddit could be rolling in cash if they hadn't decided to become a (very crappy) video and image host

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

#264

Post by TechBro8615 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #227

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.

Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which can still be open source, with competing implementations that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense that each user can have one app that connects to multiple backends for fetching and posting content.

And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.

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

#265

Post by zzbzq » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

anoonmoose wrote: post #176

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #151

Can't Reddit just un-private all the popular subreddits? Why haven't they done this yet?

because they'd also need to remove the mods who made the subs private in the first place lest they just make them private again immediately and removing those mods would/could/should be perceived as an escalation in this fight that could make the problem worse not better

Doesn't sound that bad, I hope they do it. And word on the street is they've started. I'm not really sure why they have to even ban the mods. Just tell them it's over and ask them if they want to resign, and keep an eye on them incase they misbehave.

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

#266

Post by x86x87 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

moffkalast wrote: post #209

dawnerd wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone is wondering it’s still not quite perfect as some instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust settles

> have inadvertently blocked federation I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the issue diplomatically

The Enterprise also tried solving the ridiculous Reddit api pricing, but could not interfere because of the prime directive.

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

#267

Post by bbor » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

gingerrr wrote: post #162

bbor wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems self-explanatory. They're fighting for profitability, prioritizing mass-appeal, prioritizing ads, and maintaining two UIs in an advertising business sounds like a huge hassle. I'm too lazy to edit the URL so I don't even know - does old.reddit.com even support the giant image ads?

I don't know if many people can answer this question, bc nearly all folks I've seen using old. also use adblock so we don't see them anyway :P

This whole Adblock thing is gonna come to a head with the modern “economic headwinds” I think. Like, how did people think it was gonna work out…? YouTube and Reddit would just keep going forever with some sizable percentage of their user base earning them 0 money?

we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure), accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I’ll get HN hate mail for even suggesting such a thing), or nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these companies. I don’t see “the two main online forums for public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous return on investment, respectively” as an acceptable thing. Sadly my preferences aren’t exactly big news, and I assume the reaction from society at large will continue to be “oh no! Anyway…”

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

#268

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by x86x87 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

Solvency wrote: post #197

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…

I know it would be technically feasible, but would it be fully legal for Lemmy to scrape and re-populate posts from all of Reddit's niche community subreddits (and threads and conversations), 1:1, even maintaining the original user names associated with them... but not connecting them to actual accounts? Almost like static content. And they could use that as a basis for the new community, so that there is at least a…

Idea for a commedy show: the above but actually pay for Reddit api access.

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

#270

Post by lenerdenator » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

isykt wrote: post #48

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here. The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

The loss is that those people might not be generating content, but they do have eyeballs and those eyeballs aren't looking at the content generated by the monetizable people. That means they're also not looking at the ads Reddit wants to serve to users in exchange for payment from advertisers.

You're right about the era of free (well… really, really cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope for unknown future returns. There's going to be a contraction.