291–300 of 485 posts
Anybody, just give something to read or look at that is not reddit,but had new mildly interesting content often. I'll remove Reddit and never look back...
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I think this question is far more interesting than the blackout drama. It seems Reddit hasn't made a cent of profit in 15 years. That's absurd even by SV standards. Is it incompetence? Not a priority because the focus was always on growth? Or just difficult/impossible as nobody wants to pay for anything and block ads? I don't know the answer, but the answer matters. Both in this strike and the Stackoverflow strike ma…
> Reddit earned a $456.38 million in revenue in 2021 from ads and premium user subscriptions. Im curious about spending..
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I support the blackouts but > Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.
If that happens, wouldn't the next obvious thought for the "rebelling" users be "spam and troll these subreddits as much as humanly posssible"? And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.
And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?
there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.
Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.
The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.
Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.
Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.
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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??
It took you 8 years to realize that's how that place operates? Hell, that describes the culture on HN pretty well.
Freewheeling downvoting was a flawed idea from the beginning. 20 years later it turns out Slashdot had the right model for moderation.
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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 just logged out of my account everywhere, and turned off "remember me". It's shocking how I'm catching myself just reflexively, almost subconsciously alt-tabbing to Firefox and typing "reddit.com". Thanks, /u/spez, for helping me break the habit!
Bummer, I'm sure it was floated, and probably shot down for some stupid non-sensical reason, but I would have insta-paid something in the neighborhood of 20 bucks a year for a personal access token that I could plug into an app like Apollo and continue using Reddit via API.
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There hasn't been a strong need for alternatives so there was little motivation to make one (or improve the ones that exist). I think that's going to be changing now. I don't expect a rapid fall of Reddit or Twitter but rather a slow decline. It's not unprecedented.
That's the risk they take, indeed. Also the risk for anyone who migrates as chances are the alternative is not profitable either. In the end, to sustain the offering party needs to be profitable or at least break even.
The cycle will repeat for sure -- it's been repeating for over 20 years now.
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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.
There's no scenario where the AI moderators don't become superior to human moderators in a broad sense (only in select, very narrow cases will humans still be better at it). That's one of the easier areas for AI to wipe out in terms of human activity.
This isn't then. The game has changed, permanently and dramatically. Anybody calculating what I'm saying based on GPT 3.5 or 4 is doing it very wrong. That's a comical failure of not looking ahead at all. Look at how far OpenAI has come in just a few years. Progress in that realm is not going to stop anytime soon.
Nvidia is unleashing some extraordinary GPU systems at the datacenter level that will quite clearly enable further leaps in LLMs, and they'll mostly trivially handle moderation tasks.
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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…
> 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. Phpbb-style forums are a mess. Simultaneously too ordered and not ordered enough - you don't get threaded replies, but you do have to put everything in the right topic and the right forum. No notifications that do the rig…
I've never made lasting connections with people from Reddit/HN for exactly that reason.
I wonder if that's gonna work against the boycott here. If for most people Reddit is more StackOverflow question+answer + TV (mindless background scrolling) than a sticky community/communities, than that will make mass migration that much harder to coordinate and manage.