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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

#321

Post by nullindividual »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #223
boredtofears wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. It's just a plain old HTML website pretty much the same as hacker news (no coincidence that it's built in the same era). Completely fine for reading purposes and mostly free of all the UX "optimizations" for ads and such.

HN is fine on desktop but I don't really enjoy it on mobile much. Tiny tap targets, font sizes and spacing seem a bit "off", etc, and so I use a third party client. Have similar feelings about old reddit on mobile. What it comes down to is that yeah they're better than new reddit, but that's not much of a bar to clear and if I'm going to be spending extended periods of time using a site/service the experience needs t…

There are some good HN mobile clients. On iOS I use (and purchased) Octal [0]. I find this particular mobile experience far superior to the HN website.

[0] https://github.com/dangwu/Octal

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

#322

Post by TechBro8615 »

bastardoperator wrote: post #215
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…

Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for data, I want data presented to me.

Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption, not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink" (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to implement it, because they already have a loyal user base to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s) their users prefer.

Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.

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

#323

Post by daniel-cussen »

stiltzkin wrote: post #195
ghostpepper wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just don't tell them that this place exists or we could have an eternal september situation on HN.

HN is already in Eternal September for a while. 10 years ago HN was different.

[dead]

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

#324

Post by beowulfey »

babypuncher wrote: post #249
beowulfey wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you…

lemmy.world's fast growth is working against it. The site has been flooded with low effort content, leading others to start defederating them. The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.

That's why I recommended it as a Reddit alternative ;)

Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.

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

#325

Post by LordKeren »

cmiles74 wrote: post #15

IMHO, Reddit's charging such a high price for API access that it's as good as unattainable is more of a last straw then anything else. Reddit has been clear that they view the data as their sole property, when you think it through, why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid? I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.

I’ll add my personal experience as a long-term lead mod of a subreddit for a specific video game. Broadly, I view subreddits are two camps:

1. Popcorn subreddits — r/pics, r/funny , r/twitterScreenshots

2. hobby & employment related

During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did not accept any moderator applications from users that were the prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other mod teams.

And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current career.

I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to learn more about video game production, go on studio tours, meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever will.

The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the game developer for free— but for us, it was a mostly straight forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges. For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and old.Reddit.

I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does attract some of the worst internet users and many people have very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods —but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.

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

#326

Post by hinkley »

qznc wrote: post #196
voisin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if I knew how to find communities. This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.

What is a pain is „joining a remote community nobody on your instance has joined so far“. For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.

Adoption cycles are older than dirt. Only the innovators have to go alone, and they have a thick skin and a romantic notion of adventure. Just wait for someone to point out the new thing, and you can still be an early adopter. You can join in telling the late adopters that this forum is not appropriate for your peripherally related topic and you should post your question in X.

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

#327

Post by hinkley »

Solvency wrote: post #214
soundsgoodtome wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let us know if/when you figure out how to find communities. Discoverability seems to be a real problem with Lemmy.

I literally can't even sign up for Lemmy.world. The button after entering a new username/pw just spins indefinitely, forever.

If I were a smart man, and that seems to depend on the day of the week, I’d put the services that can swamp the whole system on a separate VM that’s resource constrained so it has its own back pressure built in.

It’s possible you’re seeing a bug, and it’s also possible that The System is Working.

I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser they’re using and what quirky tools they have installed?

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

#328

Post by Phlarp »

dawnerd wrote: post #137
blindflip wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the other places that has strong niche communities is discord. It seems like a good time for discord to release a product that could compete.

Can’t stand discord, it’s too noisy. Joined one server from a subreddit and the mod team @everyones all. The. Time.

It's insane because Discord has the usage stats to see that the first thing a majority of users do when joining a new server is to force mute group @ notifications.

I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support, but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.

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

#329

Post by koonsolo »

This whole thing is for sure an outraged mob that the internet sees plenty of times.

Just look at this poll for r/indiedev: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/149uqfc/rindiedev...

Majority of votes want it closed down, and basically all comments want to keep it open.

You don't have to be a community member to vote, so this can mean only 1 thing: users from outside of r/indiedev are voting to close it.

edit: if you downvote, please solve the mystery of the disconnect between votes and comments.

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

#330

Post by [deleted] »

x86x87 wrote: post #283
crazygringo wrote: post #82

Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit to override this at any moment now. Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled. It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".

Lol. Sure, make it worse and piss people off even more. What could possibly go wrong? The best bet reddit has now is to just stay quiet.

[deleted]
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