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The Reddit blackout will continue

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Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#421

Post by scheeseman486 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #373
scheeseman486 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed. But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparen…

"Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed." For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place. Meta squandered billions in the dead-in-the-water metaverse. Discord is constantly growing and gai…

"For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place."

Like Myspace did to Geocities. Like Facebook did to Myspace. Like TikTok did to Facebook. It's been a churn of platforms scaling too large, becoming too expensive to run, subsequently attempting to monetize users in a way that causes a flee that collapses the platform, with everyone running to the new hot thing thats burning through investor cash to promote unchecked growth. Sunrise sunset.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#422

Post by AndrewKemendo »

pjc50 wrote: post #356
dale_glass wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it. > Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish? Th…

> each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster This is why services usually make it a condition of being allowed to post in the first place that you grant them a worldwide perpetual irrevocable license to the content, via the EULA. And you can see why: having to ask all the users for permission in the future is completely infeasible, so just ask once upfront for everything.

It’s not infeasible it’s just not in the near term economic interest of the server owner to help facilitate the commenter’s rights

This is one of the biggest STRUCTURAL issues with the legal structure of property - you are not incentivized for supporting a common good.

The technology to build an embeddable comment widget on top of a framework that would compensate commenters based on their inputs is trivial at this point.

Good luck funding such a project though because every source of capital wants infinite return. So unless you’re willing to volunteer your technical time or have your own money to spend nobody will create and grow services like that because the economic incentives aren’t aligned between people who want to invest and … society at large at this point

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#423

Post by mnsc »

mjburgess wrote: post #395
mnsc wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is value: https://i.imgur.com/QGEwbPI.png I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.

Well I can comment with authority on my motivations. I can expand your point further than you made it. I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit". So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I w…

Thanks for expanding. I think for me I get confused with getting a lot of value out of something that's free, user friendly and highly moderated (self moderated and actively) and wanting to show that I value that. Naively it would be that thing "money" in some way or another. But the gotcha is, it's lots of these little threads where a writer is going out of their way to shed insight on something and it clicks for me (aka great value). So I would have kinda liked to give post facto user driven "tips", but then imho micro transactions perverts incentives on a micro individual level. So you might still say all these things you said now (without any chance of getting "a coffe" or a couple of "bits") but you could also start to change your tone to make it stand out more, to provide "better content", so you spice up your takes and act more distinguishable to get tips. Or as in your case, stop posting all together. So I don't want micro transactions here even if I sometimes actuall would like to pay someone thanks somehow.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#424

Post by itronitron »

DirkH wrote: post #237
itronitron wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous. It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.

This is interesting, but can you further explain how yoy get broad ranging social influence from focusing on ads? I don't quite get that.

Several social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter, have (or had) marketing campaign teams that help their clients focus their marketing campaigns on particular segments of interest.

The belief that they could further wield influence may drive them to be less concerned about near term profitability.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#425

Post by foodjinn »

pmoriarty wrote: post #301
mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in." This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades. There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized plat…

Reddit was already consolidated prior to this, the moderators in question and the subs that are shut down are run by the same handful of moderators that run the entire site. Something like 20 people are the top mods of 80+% of the subreddits.

It's naive to believe they are just volunteers either given how many of them are active for 20+ hours a day, and how moderation on some of the big subs are done in such a way that is effectively consensus making. Almost certainly some, if not most of the biggest power moderators on the site are run by multiple people, potentially other corporations or government agencies.

The old/wild internet is dead and buried, and it was before this blackout too. The API changes certainly aren't good, but let's not kid ourselves that Reddit's main moderators organizing the blackout are anything like volunteer mods of old.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#426

Post by pmoriarty »

dale_glass wrote: post #420
pmoriarty wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins." Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then. No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to h…

What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam. Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant. But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and…

"USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot."

We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago.

"It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in."

Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated.

I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#427

Post by jimcsharp »

pmoriarty wrote: post #221
klipklop wrote: post #117

Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord. I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make th…

> The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord. It's not that. Reddit is where much of the community is today, much like Usenet was where the community was in the 90's. People are going to go where most people are. Unless something can replace those network effects, nothing's going to change.

I checked, and my pre-Reddit Internet experience is still there. The networks are small, on-topic, you recognize people, (we're all 40 now), (all their user databases are on haveibeenpwned). These are all things "subreddit snobs" exalt about their lil' <100k user subreddits. I'm not seeing a super compelling reason not to go back to this mode of Internetting.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#428

Post by falloutx »

mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

I had really high hopes for the internet, that it will bring knowledge and wisdom to every corner of the world, but instead it just decreased our attention span, made us more angry and now even the fun things are going to be ruined because some old VC demands their money back. Internet built on VC money is inherently unsustainable and I would never ever join a website that can't demonstrate its sustainability.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#429

Post by falloutx »

narrator wrote: post #264
mjburgess wrote: post #56

The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations. The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps. What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's abi…

What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda. It's going on with real farmers in the Nethe…

Its not just for farmers in the Netherlands, it happening to everyone who thinks they own anything. In some countries we are back to government telling what we can grow or not grow on our own fields.

Re: The Reddit blackout will continue

#430

Post by AndrewKemendo »

pmoriarty wrote: post #289
zmmmmm wrote: post #136

I think a different approach would work better at this point. They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version. The key in a negotiation is…

"They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version." That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit user…

I agree and think this is probably going to go the way spez anticipates unfortunately.

It really is an indictment on the movement that we weren’t able to find better leadership that had real practical organizing experience and a plan.

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