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

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

#441

Post by ihateolives » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:11 PM UTC

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #302

ihateolives wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170

It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an instance that's currently being bombed by trolls. Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding federation is almost comical. Apparently when major private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating locally or de-federating from problem…

It's literally throwing thousands of babies out with bathwater. Beehaw in their attempt of building a happy place has disabled downvoting so community can't downvote trolls and only tool they apparently have to fight trolls is to defederate two of the biggest instances. Problem solved? It's like blocking entire small country by IP because your had two port scans from there.

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

#442

Post by jacooper » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

marklar423 wrote: post #33

icapybara wrote: post #11

The main problem with the protest is that there’s no viable Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for everyone to jump ship to Reddit.

I wondered about that myself - isn't a subreddit just ("just") a forum with 1) threaded comments like HN and 2) the ability to sort by upvotes? phpBB + a few addons might go a long way to replicating that, it just takes some effort. There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or eve…

I'm sure all the people doing the protest because of third party apps want to go back to using phpBB on mobile....

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

#443

Post by cpncrunch » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

roastedoolong wrote: post #430

cpncrunch wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it seems that most of the reddit users/subs participating in this "strike" aren't interested in the facts. I see /r/science says it is private due to accessibility changes and it links to a Verge article, but the Verge article actually says that accessibility apps are exempted.

the whole point is Reddit says that accessibility apps are exempt except in those cases where the app that offers accessibility does, you know, other things that people want their apps to do.

Ok thanks for the explanation. From what I can see the issue is also whether the app is commercial or not, so it makes sense for reddit to restrict commercial apps that make money off their content. As people are saying, the best solution is for reddit to just make their own app/website more accessible.

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

#444

Post by goatlover » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

lmkg wrote: post #88

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…

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If those users leave, or are no longer about to function, that has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.

There's always more people willing to be mods, and mods from smaller subs wanting to step up. Reddit is a massive community.

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

#445

Post by JumpCrisscross » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #424

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an inte…

The front page of lemmy: Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse. Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github. It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no…

> No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github

Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it.

Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.

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

#446

Post by MisterBastahrd » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #365

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…

reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that joining federation is their path to survival. fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times, destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations were ne…

We HAD an ubiquitous, federated social network that was widely used and it died because the real world has more sharp edges than the stuff of dreams.

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

#447

Post by zozbot234 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

Applejinx wrote: post #421

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.

Centralization due to ease of use IS social media. Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away. It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or som…

The whole point of federation is to connect these private gardens to each other. So you avoid the disadvantages of both (1) big centralized walled gardens that are not sustainable as "public squares" due to enshittification, and (2) tiny individual instances. This is very similar to how email and the Web work. It's why we use the internet nowadays instead of just dialing up to Compuserve.

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

#448

Post by jtode » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:13 PM UTC

hedora wrote: post #189

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…

I've posted this a few times, but there's a snapshot of reddit from 2017 that you can self host: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken over by malicious people is lower than the risk that centralized reddit will (since it already…

Maybe because there's a fediverse.

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

#449

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:15 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…

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by weaksauce » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:15 PM UTC

rblatz wrote: post #29

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…

Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.

i used to think old reddit was great and all i needed on the ipad until someone convinced me to try apollo... it’s simply 1000x better in all regard. stupidly fast and clean.