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

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

#481

Post by roastedoolong » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

Maxburn wrote: post #78

idiotsecant wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many moderators will actually quit as long as the users are there, especially since reddit gave back some moderator API call access. Moderating is already a terrible, thankless job. The people who do it enjoy moderating because (I assume) they're 'in charge' of something big and important. I don't think reddit closing off third party access will be enough to convince most of these people to stop giving…

This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts? Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE. There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very susp…

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

#482

Post by apocalyptic0n3 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

ShellfishMeme wrote: post #81

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…

They would be perfectly monetizable if they wanted to. I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo, because I use it for the better UX, not to skip ads. But clearly they would rather kill third party apps than take their money.

> I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep using Apollo

This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier for those that is much more expensive. Something along those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-unmonetizable users.

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

#483

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #341

TechBro8615 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it could be solved by shifting the federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments for me. If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server th…

> not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time. IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox

The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they get blocked.

With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any message. A lot of people may not like furries or communists or what have you, but demanding that every other instance ban them as a prerequisite to interoperability is how you kill the network by suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.

This problem is created by tying accounts to instances. Because then other instances, instead of banning the accounts they don't want from only their own instance, can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which is poison.

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

#484

Post by irthomasthomas » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

cpncrunch wrote: post #374

brainfish wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment contains one of the most-repeated pieces of misinformation from the whole blackout: moderation tools. Reddit has stated repeatedly that moderation tools will be exempted from the API changes. "We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation tools, have free access to our API."[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_update...

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.

Only after the outcry. And only non-commercial accessibility apps. Why are people not allowed to pay for accessibility tools?

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

#485

Post by jtode » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:27 PM UTC

isaacremuant wrote: post #470

jtode wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Average internet user thinks Bill Gates has a robot arm with vaccine-delivering microdart shooters and if you shake his hand you'll have Windows 11 installed directly to your nervous system.

Actually. The average internet user would think himself pretty smart repeating low effort strawmen like yours while repeating heavily propagandized mantras such as "It's safe and effective" and "It's just 2 weeks! Can't you just stay put for 2 weeks?"

You're cute.

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

#486

Post by mrcrumb1 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

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?

You say this as if it has not already proven to be a barrier. That is to say: it's already preventing adoption, whether you think it's a good reason or not.

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

#487

Post by jasode » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:28 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…

>It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? [...] USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.

USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.

If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point, then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had extremely short retention of old messages history.

So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the newsgroups with months-to-years retention.

Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as USENET because running servers costs money and different people have different thresholds of spending. This independence/freedom of the admin running the server the particular way they want is touted as a positive but it also has inherent disadvantages.

The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw explains they have limited resources and can't handle the influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.

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

#488

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:28 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #252

bastardoperator wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for data, I want data presented to me.

What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join multiple servers either, just one.

[deleted]

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

#489

Post by basscomm » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

cdelsolar wrote: post #425

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…

I’m a technical person and I still don’t understand what federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like email. What is like email? To who? I don’t understand how all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the servers?

It's kind of like email in the sense that I can email someone @gmail.com from @hotmail.com. As long as I have an email account on some server somewhere on the Internet I can email anyone else that also has an account on some server somewhere on the Internet, even if the accounts live on different servers.

The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can interact with people if you know how to find their account, the address of which is formatted similarly to an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with don't have to have accounts on the same server to communicate with each other.

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

#490

Post by Ecstatify » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #230

Maxburn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do everything within their power to enable them so why kick them in the nuts? Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE. There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very susp…

Moderators are more than guilty of abusing their powers. Reddit should remove powers from them instead of enabling. They can easily find replacements

The people complaining about moderators are the very same people who don’t read the rules and complain that the moderators are on a power trip. I moderate a small sub 15K and the amount of spam is insane. I can’t imagine the amount of work involved in a 1M sub.