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The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

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Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#61

Post by avgDev »

iamdbtoo wrote: post #54
avgDev wrote: post #28

I'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge. I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to c…

> I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This is a direction I would like to see things going. It could just be that I mostly frequent tech-oriented communities, but with "self-hosting" as a hobby growing the way it has and servers being much cheaper than they used to be, I think (hope?) a lot of communities will retreat from these places to ones where they ha…

This is also my hope.

I think 'slim' sites like HN really show that you do not need a lot of hardware to run a forum.

When you own a forum you can preserve the knowledge indefinitely, even if the forum is taken offline.

Reddit can close down your subreddit just because, they own it.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#62

Post by babypuncher »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #48
avgDev wrote: post #28

I'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge. I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to c…

Subreddits like yours are the true loss here.

They are also the reason I think people stick around on Reddit.

Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.

Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.

Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#63

Post by islon »

sjckciodjcr wrote: post #43
CleanCoder wrote: post #29

Who owns the user-generated content? Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit? One could potentially even claim the same username by verifying their ownership of it on Reddit. Of course it's not easy but a mass social migration might be more practical than mass segregation in hopes of something else to slowly gaining traction.

Reddit owns the content so you can’t do that.

Tell that to OpenAI...

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#64

Post by SnooSux »

AdamN wrote: post #34
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #17

This is reminding me of when all the Vine power creators banded together and tried to make demands or they would "stop creating" and all it resulted in was Twitter deleting them and their entire website. Don't be surprised if Reddit starts taking some pretty drastic action here on the grounds that they're violating one of the site's oldest rules which is "don't break Reddit". Not saying it's good or bad, but just tha…

Reddit will take over the subreddits and a few moderators will lose their privs. About 25% of users will permanently leave. Reddit will go on but it won't be what it was unless the board takes drastic action but even then it's probably too late.

25 seems a bit high. I would be surprised if it reached 1%.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#65

Post by McDyver »

bhouston wrote: post #19

Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control. This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable. Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on t…

Reddit is using the same approach as Apollo: basing their business on a free resource.

For Apollo it was the api (for which they were willing to pay if the price was fair)

For Reddit is free labour and content, which they still want for free

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#66

Post by growingentropy »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #49
bhouston wrote: post #19

Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control. This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable. Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on t…

I completely support Reddit doing this in some cases. Mods have no right to hold my city’s sub hostage indefinitely without consulting the community. If they don’t want to mod, that’s there right, but namesquatting is not. Not the city I live in now, but I imagine support would be about the same as r/NewOrleans for an indefinite blackout (non-existent). https://www.reddit.com/r/NewOrleans/comments/1491zmn/moving_...

[flagged]

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#67

Post by bhouston »

taylodl wrote: post #59
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't replace reddit, but Discord is serving community building needs. A lot of large successful projects do support via Discords. I know it is incredibly inefficient with the same questions being asked and answered constantly, but it appears to be what we do now. But even with that downside, it creates more intimacy/connection instead between members. So it likely leads to more engagement, even if it is ineffic…

But does that scale? It's one thing building an online community serving 100-5,000 users. It's quite a different thing to build an online community serving 100,000-10,000,000 users.

It doesn't scale, but most communities are not 100,000+ users. Most communities are relatively small.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#68

Post by growingentropy »

taylodl wrote: post #59
bhouston wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't replace reddit, but Discord is serving community building needs. A lot of large successful projects do support via Discords. I know it is incredibly inefficient with the same questions being asked and answered constantly, but it appears to be what we do now. But even with that downside, it creates more intimacy/connection instead between members. So it likely leads to more engagement, even if it is ineffic…

But does that scale? It's one thing building an online community serving 100-5,000 users. It's quite a different thing to build an online community serving 100,000-10,000,000 users.

Absolutely not. The noise of a Discord server of that size would be immense. The substance would quickly be lost to the non-stop noise.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#69

Post by bhouston »

vile_wretch wrote: post #52
bhouston wrote: post #19

Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control. This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable. Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on t…

While I don't have a ton of faith in Reddit power-mods, my HOPE is that there would be enough solidarity amongst the mods to make finding replacements difficult and I can't imagine investors would be happy to see leadership excising a potentially significant percentage of their current volunteer labour force.

You can always replace mods, especially if Reddit pays the new mods.

Re: The end of Reddit? Why the blackout is still going – and what happens next

#70

Post by endorphine »

If any subreddit mods read this, thank you for doing this. I understand that taking down something that you poured so much energy and effort into is a tough decision. But it's for the best.

I used shreddit[1] to remove my account's posts/comments. It's infuriating to read this line:

> Back in April, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the site wanted to start getting paid for helping to train some of the big AI chatbots.

I hope this protest shows the leadership that users have the power.

[1] https://github.com/x89/Shreddit/issues

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