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Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#391

Post by FatCat1978 »

pcdandy wrote: post #372
elmepo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, albeit with Reddit is Fun. Personally I used to visit Reddit multiple times per day but now I typically visit it once or twice per week, if at all. I'm sure the official app is fine, but the approach they took to third party developers soured it for me. Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders shou…

Reddit Is Fun (rif) was a well-designed app that just worked. It was fast, had a customisable user interface with defaults that didn't get in the way of enjoying the content, and could run on all of my devices easily, including an Android 7 phone from 2018. It's a shining examplar of what a mobile browsing app should be like. By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Andr…

Reddit devs are probably the least competent of any modern social media platform. Any talent goes to an actual site, leaving the typical "redditors" () to work for reddit.

Naturally, this leads pretty much any technical project to be doomed from inception.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#392

Post by unsupp0rted »

Reddit knew they could wait out the blacked out sub mods, or actively force them to either resume or be replaced... and Reddit were right. It's back to business as usual, minus 3rd party apps (goodbye one-time-payment version of Narwhal, I miss you) and perhaps marginally worse content.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#393

Post by unsupp0rted »

csomar wrote: post #301

I left. Came back and now left again. There isn’t a readily available alternative at the moment. However, the quality has declined so much that it has become garbage. The discussion seems to be driven by bots, mercenaries and AI. I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last. I think it’s still early…

I do find here on HN a lot more low-effort one-liner joke comments and "huh, glad I'm not the only one who misread the post title as XYZ" useless comments.

Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#394

Post by Zigurd »

valianteffort wrote: post #148
swores wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 81 of the 84 comments were either third party bot comments, or a Reddit-run LLM designed to make the sub look more active than it really is (the 2023, fewer people hours, version of what they did to launch the site), and subredditstats.com has detected that? I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit com…

One of my favorite conspiracies is that reddit is mostly just LLM's and paid agents talking to eachother. Employed by various intel agencies, governments, and reddit themselves trying to astroturf and sway conversation in one direction or another.

You are axiomatically not wrong about bots. That's what all the platforms in the Reddit genre do to fill content voids. It long predates sophistication like LLMs. It's like bots in a poker room site. The UX would suck without them.

But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#395

Post by davidgerard »

dragontamer wrote: post #71

Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic. ------ Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world.…

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.)

The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.

The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches.

OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really.

* https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#396

Post by nunez »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #393
csomar wrote: post #301

I left. Came back and now left again. There isn’t a readily available alternative at the moment. However, the quality has declined so much that it has become garbage. The discussion seems to be driven by bots, mercenaries and AI. I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last. I think it’s still early…

I do find here on HN a lot more low-effort one-liner joke comments and "huh, glad I'm not the only one who misread the post title as XYZ" useless comments. Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.

They're still getting mostly downvoted, fortunately. HN still encourages long form; one of the reasons why I love this site.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#397

Post by blt »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #345
dmix wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is still the default. People backlashed against excessive modding and power abuse. Top commenters are still top commenters and guide the conversations with authority. They are still in most threads with the most upvotes. Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot. Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (h…

No, people don't backlash against just "excessive modding". I have witnessed on several subs a belief that mods should never be able to lock a post of a question that comes up several times a week. The thinking goes, for example, that a person posting a discussed-to-death question isn't just looking for an answer to the question, but rather he/she is trying to socialize and feel part of a community. Therefore, mods w…

It's interesting to compare r/c_programming and r/cpp. C_programming has a lot of newbie questions, cpp less so. I assumed it was due to C's larger use in education, but now I wonder if it's something to do with moderation.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#398

Post by dragontamer »

davidgerard wrote: post #395
dragontamer wrote: post #71

Personal anecdotal experience here. Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return. But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic. ------ Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world.…

Lemmy's main problem is that the software is a buggy, insecure mess. I speak from helping with a small Lemmy* where a couple of subs decamped. (Both are going very well, and one has actually taken off like a rocket.) The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky. The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is…

> The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.

Yeah.

I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.

The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.

--------

The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).

But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.

But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.

---------

I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.

Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#399

Post by Throwawayh89 »

Pathogen-David wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #48

The end result was a stalemate. Reddit did not change any of its policies. Enough of the people responsible for posting and managing content left the platform to cause a noticeable impact on it. Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.: https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive https://subredditstats.com/r/videos All of the mo…

I took the protest as an opportunity to quit my 12 year Reddit addiction cold turkey and never came back, seems like I'm not the only one. Sometimes I miss /r/houseplants but I'm better off overall.

Why do you think spending time on HN is better than Reddit?

Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.

Re: Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?

#400

Post by rglullis »

timwaagh wrote: post #359
rglullis wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is a fundamental problem with reddit's userbase for smaller communities. But I think that we should avoid centralized platforms at all costs. Sooner or later, you will realize that "your" sub is not really yours and that you just gave a lot of your time and work for someone to exploit the data mine. Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that…

If you're obsessed with ensuring others can't make money running something like Reddit then sure

The obsession is not with "others making money", but "others making money by being Surveillance Capitalists" and "neutralizing oligopolies whenever possible".
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