Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 795 posts

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

#411

Post by bradjohnson »

nullityrofl wrote: post #387
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 use…

Personally, I think it's interesting to see federated services get put through the ringer as possible alternatives. Lately there's been a perfect storm of entitlement from corporations (i.e. Twitter and Reddit) over their userbase that is great to see funneled into a stress test for federated alternatives.

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

#412

Post by JumpCrisscross »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #401
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on some private corporate social media service Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds t…

> Creating an ideological and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is absurd. So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier?

> pick a large, popular instance and be done with it

.world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I know that's one of the larger servers is because of this thread.)

I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users who don't care about federation, they just want it to work.

> you don't care what the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending this is a barrier

You really don't see the barrier?

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

#413

Post by chongli »

Loughla wrote: post #403
comte7092 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of governance. They care that it's easy to use.

Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people who create that content (1% of users) are currently getting screwed over by Reddit.

So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it’s aimed at the actual contributors who make communities possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can go wherever he wants. I doubt he’ll stick around at Reddit when the content stream disappears.

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

#414

Post by BaseballPhysics »

Loughla wrote: post #403
comte7092 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of governance. They care that it's easy to use.

Funny, because if the US political discourse is to be believed, people, particularly on the right, really care about governance. I mean, hell, Musk bought Twitter specifically so he could change governance of the platform.

So no, I reject the premise.

People absolutely do care about governance. They care if they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political views are being censored or things they find offensive are being promoted.

The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and they've gotten used to that as the status quo.

And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem solved.

As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no doubt those issues will smooth out with time.

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

#415

Post by EatingWithForks »

jtode wrote: post #371
candiddevmike wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.

It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve. And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero e…

I think you're making the mistake that just because people on the forum have the skills, knowledge, and general capacity to learn a new tool that they are convinced to put in the effort to learn the new tool. Social media specifically has thrived on a culture of extreme low effort to learn how to start having fun with it (think TikTok showing you cool videos, then an easy prompt to sign up, then an immediate "for you" page before you ever need to engage with the TikTok community like commenting, liking, following, etc).

The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general) breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one of the ways a user would establish if the application is "good", and thereby it looks "bad".

It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years old and already integrated into every language I know, so I'll do Joe.Sort().

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

#416

Post by hospitalJail »

Poor move. The major subreddits will just be replaced.

The correct thing to do was to do a weekly blackout or similar. This would have affected the bottom line and hurt the experience of the website.

Instead, you are asking people to change their routines permanently. They will adjust.

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

#417

Post by x86x87 »

yanderekko wrote: post #351
x86x87 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's true. The numbers of lost mods/members will matter. Also, this isn't about having a voice.

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

#418

Post by addandsubtract »

bena wrote: post #43

All reddit has to do is remove the ability for subreddits to be private. Or put the ability to make subreddits private behind a paywall. Much like how Github treated private repos. End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest? The subs…

If reddit opens up private subs without their mods, users will lynch the place.

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

#419

Post by viknesh »

yamazakiwi wrote: post #359
thunderbird120 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If your claim is "2.8 billion in revenue is enough to run twitch profitably", I'd love to see the numbers backing that up. What's the cost of serving videos, acquiring advertisers, etc.

Otherwise it's just wild speculation.

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

#420

Post by jacooper »

berkle4455 wrote: post #173
bbor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this sarcastic or am I missing some point? More users == more money, and India is the biggest under-tapped single market in social media, if you consider it a "single market". I don't get why being popular in India would be a bad thing...

Investors do not care about just DAUs (daily active users) anymore, they care just as much about ARPU (avg revenue per user) At Facebook, users from Asia Pacific region monetize at around ~1/15th of US&CA users. The costs to serve those users remains relatively fixed on a per-user basis, so expect those costs to inflate by 10-15x to earn the same revenue. Will Reddit drastically change their business model to appeal…

Can you please clarify how indian users killed Quota? Is it because India ads weren't paying enough?
Post reply on HN