Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just don't tell them that this place exists or we could have an eternal september situation on HN.
HN is already in Eternal September for a while. 10 years ago HN was different.
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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
491–500 of 795 posts
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#492It's already ended for several subreddits. Several are in limbo of deciding what they want to do next, so it's not well coordinated.
I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org petition.
Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely, indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not enough weight to it.
And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really want X subreddit will just make a new one with a similar name. That happens regardless on almost a daily basis. Most of the major subreddits have a half-dozen alts.
As for alternatives to Reddit as a site, that's not going anywhere fast. What makes Reddit Reddit is not the tech, it's the content. Alternatives can exist that seem nearly as good on paper, but unless a sizable number of users go there, it means nothing.
And most users do not care about this API situation. It's a very vocal, very small minority.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#493Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit to override this at any moment now. Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled. It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
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.
I guess it depends on how they do it. If reddit simply asks mods to step down and let others apply if they don't like the new rules, then it takes away some of heated rhetoric.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#494It 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…
I would think people are hesitant to go down the exact same road as before. How will this address long-term scaling costs and concerns of the new-reddit repeating current-reddit's path?
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
> what's different? IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.
ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms? I think there were many options at the time. Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim. Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the channels afforded certain types of interactions that you wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever scrollbacks. I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about how you can't hav…
> ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms?
1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper was an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their definitions of working weren't different from IRC's.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#496It's already ended for several subreddits. Several are in limbo of deciding what they want to do next, so it's not well coordinated. I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org petition. Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely, indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not enough weight to it. And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really want X…
They don't even have to make new reddits. They could just kick out the current mods, install their own, and set it to public.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 not concern trolling, drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem. Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd c…
"Raiding behavior" has been around forever, including on Usenet. It's not a serious objection to federation, since "raids" and other obnoxious behavior can happen irrespective of it.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
> …and that is the way it should be. I don’t know, it’s looking like most people prefer businesses that eschew profits. Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do things that are good for people. Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits dedicated to community building… before Facebook becomes the sole source of internet social inter…
How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs? What makes you think doing things for the good of people is excluded by for profit businesses? They create all sorts of products and services that people want and need. Yes, there are abuses. Same with non profits. Because humans are in charge. The problem with doing things for the good of people in a general sense is that you still need to have a functioning economy where sc…
> How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs?
hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage fees?
no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at Wikipedia...
oh. right.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#499Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit to override this at any moment now. Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled. It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
I think they are too smart to override it. See the Streisand effect. If the old subreddits go permanently dark, new subreddits with mods who don't care about the protest will fill the void.
The old subreddits are too valuable both for people's existing curated preferences as well as for useful information showing up in search results.
There's no universe in which Reddit allows subreddits to go permanently dark. Not gonna happen.
Re: Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
#500Earlier 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?
Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies? You are the archetypal technical person snapping about the workaround instead of engaging with the user problem. If everyone can have access to all the content (which is what most people want), why are they being herded into choosing an instance in the first place?
Federation might run 100x better if instances were suggested based on geographic proximity rather than semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of servers in no particular order' is like demanding that people who are considering taking a holiday decide where to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane ticket.