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

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

#381

Post by TechBro8615 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

compsciphd wrote: post #345

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…

sounds like a reinvention of usenet...

Yeah, or even Gopher. I would love an app that lets me run custom scrapers to fetch content, or post my comments to threads about that content, on whatever sites that one of my scrapers can read or post to with my account details. For example, an "NYT article fetcher" could implement the "content module" interface, to fetch an NYT article, remove the paywall, and render it for me. Then a "reddit fetcher" and an "HN fetcher" could implement the "discussion module" interface to fetch reddit and HN comments about the NYT article. And then the app could merge it all together into a nice unified interface, and give me tools for posting replies to Reddit or HN, or whatever sites are supported by my installed discussion modules and my locally saved credentials.

Let developers create each "source" of content or discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me choose which modules to install. Then delegate the infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my requests are my own. You could argue it's just another form of a web browser.

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

#382

Post by bradjohnson » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

ahahahahah wrote: post #101

hanniabu wrote: post #87

I've put together a comparison of Reddit alternatives if anybody is interested: https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/6f96c6e820d58d8736f3c15d4c0... There's also some notes above the linked table

The more useful thing to users would be a list of alternatives for each closed subreddit. No reddit alternative is going to grow to anything useful from this.

Why not? Typically users of reddit are subscribed to more than one subreddit, so migration to a single destination that can handle all of those communities seems like an obvious choice. The network effect of many users advocating that their second favourite community migrate over to the "new reddit" seems reasonable once people start to establish a userbase there.

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

#383

Post by cantsingh » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:39 PM UTC

The biggest issue is that it doesn't seem like these subreddits are doing anything beyond closing down.

Point people to an alternative. Not just in the vague direction of The Lemmiverse or Squabbles or whatever; if your sub is going dark, you should have somewhere to receive all your refugees.

Even better if the mods coordinate so that all subs are pointing to the same place(s).

Even a shared Discord would have been a big step up imo.

This protest was just gone about the wrong way.

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

#384

Post by MAGZine » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #304

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it. Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Reddit was a better alternative to Digg, which is why people migrated. What is a better alternative to Reddit from the point of view of a community mod? Self-hosting a phpBB forum isn't it, it's way too much work.

it's not enough to be marginally better. you need to be a LOT better to overcome network effects and activation energy.

reddit became substantially better when digg ruined their product. actually, digg didn't work at all when they rolled out their new version, so it was (approximately) infinitely better.

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

#385

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #356

traverseda wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[deleted]

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

#386

Post by jdiez17 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:41 PM UTC

ls612 wrote: post #320

thunderbird120 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are starting to come to terms with the new reality where tech companies actually need to have a viable business model which takes in more money than it expends. The return of nonzero interest rates means that the runway is no longer infinite, you can't just raise more money to cover costs forever, eventually you have to either take off or crash. This is revealing just how much of a nonsensical anomaly most of…

The other major issue is that the ability to start a major reddit competitor has been regulated out of existence. Same with any other large platform. The EU especially (although the US has also done this to a lesser extent) has created regulations and laws which are near-impossible technically to fulfill, so anyone operating a new website is in violation of them if you look hard enough. And believe me for a new socia…

> The EU especially (although the US has also done this to a lesser extent) has created regulations and laws which are near-impossible technically to fulfill

Which regulations specifically are you talking about and what makes it “near impossible technically to fulfill” them?

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

#387

Post by nullityrofl » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people.

I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some server? Which server?

Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.

This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression of their idealogies.

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

#388

Post by nph278 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:43 PM UTC

And reddit.com is down again

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

#389

Post by rchaud » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:44 PM UTC

ketchupdog wrote: post #184

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 block ads, nuke cookies, and use old.reddit.com exclusively, but somehow I still manage to spend a lot of money on shit I don't need. Most of it was found on reddit. All of it got a google search that included "site:reddit.com" before buying. This anecdote is not unique. The fact that reddit gets $0 despite being part of my typical buyers journey is a failure of Steve Huffman, not the users.

If Reddit automatically added product links to comments like Viglink did in the bad old days, you wouldn't be using it. Reddit's failure to capture affiliate revenue is precisely what prevented it from being gamed, thus making it a credible source of information.

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

#390

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 5:45 PM UTC

Social media is one of those bizarre parts of the internet. If one social media site becomes unpopular, literally everyone will just leave and go to another one. Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, all abandoned once something "cooler" came around, and nobody wants to sit around on a platform none of their friends are on.

That said, I could really give a crap if any of these sites goes away. I'm only here for the articles, and these sites aren't generating them, they're just linking them.