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Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely

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

#541

Post by omginternets »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169
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…

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…

I’ve often found myself thinking that the discoverability barrier might be an asset. It keeps the community mostly free of low-quality posters.

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

#542

Post by BaseballPhysics »

anigbrowl wrote: post #500
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ra…

> Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to newbies?

I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be improved.

The problem is you're losing the plot, here.

The original commenter complained about having to "read up on what rights server admins have over my account, why I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-federating which others, et cetera."

But you don't have to do that if you don't want to. If you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can blindly join mastodon.social.

And the app is already now driving people to do that if they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).

So this is already being improved (and yes, can absolutely be improved further).

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

#543

Post by chongli »

anigbrowl wrote: post #457
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #302

Earlier 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…

Ordinary, non-posting users (lurkers) are not the target right now. The goal is to attract the creators: users who already put in tons of effort posting on Reddit. They are much more likely to put in the effort to grow new communities and migrate existing ones to lemmy.

If enough creators move over then the lurkers will follow. But attracting lurkers at this stage is pointless if there isn’t any content for them to look at.

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

#544

Post by throw16180339 »

brainfish wrote: post #317
danudey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

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...

Many moderation tools relied on the Pushshift API; Reddit cut their access off last month. Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift or most services using it will ever be restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based around selling the data to intelligence agencies (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for moderation tools isn't really part of their business model.

Reddit's CEO has also publicly lied about discussions with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with developers is almost nonexistent.

An additional factor is that the third-party app cutoff cost Reddit a lot of goodwill. Many mods reply heavily on third-party apps; they're much easier to use for moderation. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...). Some popular bot developers such as u/Blank-Cheque have already taken their bots down. My other comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists some of the affected bots.

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

#545

Post by cyrialize »

ryanSrich wrote: post #510
danudey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

“…but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself” Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally does…

Moderators also ensure quality, by removing posts that don't follow rules.

For example, /r/ExperiencedDevs is one of my favorite subreddits. They have rules around the types of questions you can ask. These rules are put into place to prevent the subreddit from becoming like /r/CSCareerQuestions, or to prevent an influx of memes.

Without these tools or these moderators, I have a feeling some subreddits will become more generalist and possibly drop in quality.

I go to /r/ExperiencedDevs (and other subreddits moderated in a similar fashion) for a very specific set of posts and expectations for questions. I don't really want to see memes, jokes, etc. in the subreddit, as I have other ones to go for that.

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

#546

Post by toastal »

kristopolous wrote: post #476
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #462

Earlier 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…

You can join an XMPP MUC today to bring back that feeling and the server options are light enough to self-host on a home network unlike some other FOSS decentralized chat options.

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

#547

Post by DropInIn »

vruiz wrote: post #407
_8j50 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.

Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one. It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

So... Sounds like you want what I keep thinking about:

Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later edits deletes etc).

Sound about right?

Because you me it seems like every provider in that list should be able to make a profit off the data and interactions... With users who want increased privacy able to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data on that end.

And we already have all the parts to make it work...

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

#548

Post by mvdtnz »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #301
danudey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

What tools do they actually need? It seems to me like Reddit mods mostly automatically ban people for participating in subs they don't like. Last time they went on strike en-masse they were upset that Reddit didn't give mods more ability to track and spy on users in an Orwellian fashion I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people fo…

Absolutely agree with you. My experience with Reddit moderators is that they are largely abusive, arrogant egomaniacs and I have absolutely zero sympathy for their hardship caused by lack of API access.

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

#549

Post by SirPsychoMantis »

vruiz wrote: post #407
_8j50 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.

Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one. It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

I've been drawn to kbin, it is part of the "Fediverse", so you can see kbin, lemmy, and I believe also mastodon posts from it. If you just anonymously browse to https://kbin.social/ (the main instance right now) you'll have something similar to the reddit front page, content from a bunch of different instances. It is definitely still a little rough around the edges, but considering it is one dev and the first commit was only two years ago, it seems pretty good.

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

#550

Post by molsongolden »

ryanSrich wrote: post #510
danudey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't affect them directly , but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient. Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that…

“…but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself” Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This seems like it’s more and more just tantrum throwing from mods who almost feel embarrassed they’ve devoted thousands of hours of free work to a corporation that literally does…

> Less moderation and more open speech would drastically improve most subreddits.

This just isn't true. Subreddits without moderators get buried in spam (both thinly veiled self-promotion and outright unrelated spam link dumping).

(I've both moderated a small subreddit and tried to participate in subreddits with absent moderators.)

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