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Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

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31–40 of 179 posts

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#31
post #25

I started to build an alternative: https://flingup.com It’s not much, but it’s honest work. If all this does is create a tiny fragment with a hundred people, I’ll call it success. For now, me and a handful of people use it to share articles we find interesting.

I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.

That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth.

notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both serverserver federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated servers. But like above, it was quickly over-run with genuine assholes which made using it distasteful and it eventually died. The technology was and is amazing.

    notabug is a p2p link aggregator app that is:
    distributed: peers backup/serve content
    anonymous: but don't trust it to be
    psuedo-anonymous: users can create optional cryptographic identities
    immutable: edits are not supported for anonymous content
    mutable: edits are supported for authenticated content
    PoW-based: voting is slow/CPU heavy

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#32
post #4

I understand the purpose of this and that if they raise a sufficient enough stink, it will likely get them to cave for the time being. However the problem is that they have already showed their true intentions. The business of Reddit is not beholden to users, it’s beholden to its investors. They have an obligation to provide value to them and they decided this is a way to do so. There might be a temporary price reduc…

I'm not sure how a "one-day anything" is supposed to get anyone to cave. This seems like those performative one-day big-tech "walkouts" where it's just people waving signs over an extended lunch break and then getting right back to work as usual. How does that practically have any effect? "Go dark indefinitely until change happens" might get someone's attention. This is barely a blip on the radar, and even if there's…

> The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action.

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this idea, but the content I'm seeing on the front page right now is turning me off from using it. A lot of fringe political content (pandemic trutherism, Bud Lite culture war shit, etc.), which is not my idea of interesting since I can find plenty of that anywhere else.

That's because the first users pushed off any community and looking for alternatives are mostly genuine assholes. They're only the first but it makes it so "alternative" sites are really off-putting during their early days and this limits growth. notabug.io was favorite reddit-alike: https://github.com/notabugio/notabug . It was designed to be both server server federated and p2p to bridge content between unfederated…

That makes a lot of sense. I'd imagine one way to counter this is to be proactive with content guidelines and moderation (even if you take a light-handed approach), but content moderation is obviously a lot of work, so you either have pay people to do it or find people willing to do it for free. And then we're back at the Reddit conundrum, lol.

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#34

The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale. Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance. I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing…

> The days of ... Digg losing to Reddit are over.

I disagree. Especially somewhere like reddit where the power lies in a relatively small pool of moderators (ie. a couple of hundred people), who aren't well controlled by Reddit the company.

These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.

And I'm sure reddit-clones have been approaching the moderators with lucrative offers to do just that...

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#35
post #30

Subreddits are literally controlled by volunteers who get paid nothing. What is stopping them from just going out for a month? It ought to be a month of vacation time, right? You could argue they might lose users, but who cares, Reddit suffers more from loss of users than them anyway.

Addiction and the fear that reddit staff will just appoint new mods, like they've done before.

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three big issues off the top of my head: * Hosting costs. Reddit was very lucky to have imgur pick up a lot of its bandwidth in its early days, but free image/video hosting sites are cyclical: absent a benevolent billionaire, the costs will rise with popularity, and the site will eventually need a source of revenue, which will introduce friction and start its inevitable decline in popularity. * Moderation. Always a h…

If the hosting entity is in the US don't forget lawyer fees ....

Or if you have EU users

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#38

The days of MySpace losing to Facebook or Digg losing to Reddit are over. We reached a phase where the biggest networks are too big to die quickly. It no longer seems possible to replace these sites wholesale. Their decline will look like Craigslist's. They'll still be around a decade from now, but having slowly and steadily lost traffic and cultural relevance. I fully welcome Twitter and Reddit suddenly sacrificing…

> The days of ... Digg losing to Reddit are over. I disagree. Especially somewhere like reddit where the power lies in a relatively small pool of moderators (ie. a couple of hundred people), who aren't well controlled by Reddit the company. These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days. And I'm sure reddit-clones have been approaching the moderators with lucrative offers to do…

Surely, Reddit would just remove and replace these moderators at the first taste of real pain. Yes?

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#39

What is the hard thing about building an open, user-friendly Reddit alternative? Hosting the posts shouldn't be that hard. Storage is so cheap these days. Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content? Ranking the posts is another issue. Is that where the value of Reddit lies? Maybe one could build some hybrid thing which capitalizes on existing structures? I could imagine a frontend which only shows pos…

> Is it the legal aspects of handling user generated content?

Section 230 of the CDA shields operators of interactive computer systems from liability for user generated content.

Re: Popular Subreddits are organizing a strike on 2023-06-12 b/c high API prices

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest part is going to be the community itself. Reddit (the board and shareholders) are betting that the community is too large to migrate to a better alternative.

Do we really need a big part of the community to have a good "forums for everything" site? To me it seems, that 99% of Reddit is just "content fast food" and low quality comments. If we would get just 1000 HN users to use an alternative, that could already be something.

A golden rule of using Reddit has been to unsubscribe from all the default subreddits and subscribe to niche interest ones. /r/politics etc are huge but they’re dumpster fires.

There’s essentially two reddits in one: the default one and the enjoyable one. You don’t get the enjoyable one by default.

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