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

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

#341

Post by VWWHFSfQ » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #313

ZunarJ5 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing new for the Fediverse. It'll stabilise.

This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me. If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server th…

> not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server

I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox

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

#342

Post by badwolf » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31

idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

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…

I've had a Reddit subscription for mulitple years, and spent more than I care to admit buying coins to guild/gift posts and comments. I also paid for Apollo.

I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person who is quite bothered.

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

#343

Post by tensor » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

facet1ous wrote: post #30

People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.

I personally don't care one way or the other about any reddit IPO payout. Happy for them if they get paid, reddit has been an amazing service for many many years.

What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be mostly fine with that I think.

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

#344

Post by jayknight » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

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.

And it seems the whole site is down right now.

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

#345

Post by compsciphd » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

beowulfey wrote: post #187

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…

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…

sounds like a reinvention of usenet...

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

#346

Post by ZacnyLos » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:21 PM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

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…

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…

Average internet user has no idea how subreddits work.

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

#347

Post by xen2xen1 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

isykt wrote: post #128

organsnyder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those people are also generating a large amount of the content that is being used to monetize users.

It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.

I go to Reddit to look for information on specific things. People talking about Med interactions, app support, very specific things. I don't interact with Reddit because it's a cesspool, and very politically slanted. I'll probably go wherever real people talk about real stuff, and it's almost always reddit. I wonder what percentage are like me, who have no value in "community"?

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

#348

Post by patrickmay » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31

idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

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…

I've paid for Apollo and I would pay at least a few dollars per month for my personal API access to keep Apollo working. Those of us who don't want to use the official app aren't unmonetizable, we just have good taste.

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

#349

Post by comte7092 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

ihateolives wrote: post #231

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…

As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170

That’s kind of part of the model.

Governance is up to individual instances/communities rather than one faceless megacorp.

It’s a feature not a bug.

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

#350

Post by Kiro » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:23 PM UTC

OnlyLys wrote: post #234

pseudalopex wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The active users voted to go private in many cases.

This seems to be what I've observed as well. Across many subreddits, the announcements to participate in the blackout were highly upvoted (>90%), while announcements against participation were heavily downvoted. Examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146xzgk/meta... https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/145s613/rgames_and_t...

That was only for the initial 48 hours blackout.