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

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

#351

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

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.

There's not going to be a populist revolt against Reddit stopping angry mods from destroying their communities and/or actively siphoning them to other sites. The people who are already angry may get angrier, but they're already leaving so who cares?

Once you've chosen Exit as your protest strategy, you lose Voice.

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

#352

Post by tyg13 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:24 PM UTC

Firmwarrior wrote: post #301

danudey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

What tools do they actually need? It seems to me like Reddit mods mostly automatically ban people for participating in subs they don't like. Last time they went on strike en-masse they were upset that Reddit didn't give mods more ability to track and spy on users in an Orwellian fashion I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people fo…

It's sad to see comments like these. It just reminds me that people will so readily take the work of others for granted.

The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong, can be bad.

But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10 years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much higher.

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

#353

Post by thrtythreeforty » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:24 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…

I've thought about similar techniques (mainly a static redirect for all reddit links to a read-only archive, as a browser plugin).

Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement, unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does have a vested interest, even if they had no standing) bankrolling the whole thing.

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

#354

Post by monnok » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

veave wrote: post #94

Fauntleroy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise that it will be available and then massively deleting (or hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them out for it, but by now, it's the mods.

I personally contend that the official Reddit app has already hidden that knowledge. And that it is abusive. As do many others. We are overwhelmed by the urgent imminence of deliberate enshitification. Waiting to be “surprised” is insanity at this point.

I’m not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit will be effectively blacked out for me the moment old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet now, if I’m otherwise going to be forced to change it anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in the near future.

I don’t own my contributions any more than the mods do. My contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass discussion, and in the context of mass audience participation. All broad changes to the context of this collaboration are abusive… and I’m throwing my lot in with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.

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

#355

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:25 PM UTC

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.

Not all value is monetary. Some moderate because they like having a functioning community to take part in. They don't mind that the company is for-profit because everyone is winning.

With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.

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

#356

Post by wvenable » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

traverseda wrote: post #260

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'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.

Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts discoverability a bit.

There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.

https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml

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

#357

Post by yamazakiwi » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

DangerousPie wrote: post #246

yamazakiwi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch revenue was 2.8 Billion last year. In what way does prioritizing more revenue mean they will achieve a viable business model when they're already generating billions. Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the chance to shift more power away from workers.

Revenue != profit

If you're making 2.8 billion in Revenue with no profit on a Twitch-like product, that's a you problem, not the creators problem. They already extract a ton of money from creators and generate revenue with ads. Twitch is spamming ads like it's TV in the 90's.

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

#358

Post by sixothree » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

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…

To support your observation, I've noticed posts getting many more upvotes than normal in the subreddits I subscribe to.

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

#359

Post by yamazakiwi » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

thunderbird120 wrote: post #245

yamazakiwi wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitch revenue was 2.8 Billion last year. In what way does prioritizing more revenue mean they will achieve a viable business model when they're already generating billions. Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the chance to shift more power away from workers.

To state the obvious, total revenue does not tell you if a company is actually making money. If operating costs exceed revenue you lose money. It doesn't matter how much revenue you're making. Given the costs required to run twitch, they are likely still losing money, not making it. Losing money is not a viable business strategy.

I am aware that revenue is not profit, we are on HN after all.

While it is possible to run a company at a loss with extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making excuses for a company that could easily keep running with 2.8 Billion dollars yearly.

It's likely that after they extract more money from creators they will increase their spend more to maintain operating at a loss. At what point does it end?

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

#360

Post by wvenable » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:29 PM UTC

nomilk wrote: post #159

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…

Do all lemmy servers host the same content or does selecting an appopriate server really matter a lot? (I was just signing up and had no idea what considerations one should make when selecting a server) Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term site:reddit.com` for lemmy?

From my experience no. I picked Lemmy.ca and I'm subscribed to communities all over the place. You can go the Communities tab and just select "All" and start searching for communities regardless of where they are.