It'd be nice if there was a count of the total # of subscribers across all of the subreddits that have gone dark
Reddit Strike Has Started
611–620 of 1001 posts
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure it isn't profitable the way he's running it. And honestly, I don't care about Reddit being profitable. I care about it being sustainable. A VC-driven push for profitability doesn't mean breaking even. It means making a shit-ton of money, yielding a very large return on their very large investment. And they are perfectly willing to destroy an adequate business if that means they are getting a chance at someth…
Of course you as a user don’t care that is profitable. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not picking sides, but if you were the ceo/owner, you’d probably care about its profitability. If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
> If you were the owner of such a big site, wouldn’t you be thinking of ways to get yourself a -very comfortable- early retirement?
As a small business owner myself, I can very much assure you that we're not thinking of that at all; we're thinking of ways to get back into the black!
Once we're in the black, we'll start thinking of ways to get an early retirement.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#613Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
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Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…
Meh, Twitter and Reddit monetize just fine with ads. The problem comes in with VC expectations where everything must 1000x or die. These are not bad businesses, they're just small compared to Facebook or Google. What's needed is mature leadership that recognizes the value comes from the community, and following the private equity playbook of strip-mining the value is short-sighted.
According to the spez AMA, Reddit is not profitable.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#615They put an impressive amount of work into that site. There are notifications and an autoupdating counter, and even a livestream. https://www.twitch.tv/reddark_247
Doesn't show the sub I mod though, and the search box isn't working for me.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a fundamental conflict, in that these network effect businesses are terrible as for-profit businesses. They're of great value to those who use them, and indirectly to society as a whole. Yet there's no good way to monetize them (nor does there need to be monetization), and trying to do so damages the functionality of the network. Both Twitter and Reddit would likely be better off (from the POV of the…
Exactly. I'm headed back to wikipedia, where I found community as a teenager. I think you can draw a direct line from wikimedia's nonprofit status to 22 years of greatness and steady improvement.
There is definitely interests that have captured Wikipedia. It takes the form of editors that have slowly built up a lot of credibility and power that then use it years later in some manner that does not agree with the neutral nature of the site.
The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.
In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.
After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.
Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.
We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#617Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Twitter rapidly decaying? I am a daily, but very light user so I may not be observing the trends as well as you.
As a user, I think Twitter is better now, notably with the Community Notes feature that even Zuckerberg commended on Lex's podcast - I hope he introduces a similar concept. The option to post extended threads is appreciated. I hardly come across political content as I avoid engagement with it, and I find it beneficial that creating an account is no longer necessary for viewing Tweets and responses.
If I understand correctly this was a feature already nearly completed as Twitter was being acquired and Elon just rolled it out and took credit.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a power user. I've seen this repeated elsewhere but I've seen zero actual evidence of it. And the counterpoint is quite easy: that people use these apps/extensions for a better viewing experience. Because on the creation side, typing into a text box or pastin…
> Quick Google searches reveal that Reddit has something between 0.5 and 1.5 billion monthly users Not disagree-ing with your points, but do you have a source for this? It doesn't pass the sniff test to me. 1.5B people is ~ 20% of the world population, and probably closer to 50% of those with computers & internet capable of downloading reddit.com, an image heavy forum. I'm in the demographic for Reddit (30s, male, we…
Everybody's reporting "Reddit had 430 million monthly active users in 2020", so that's the half-billion that seems to be fact-based.
Then the current 1.5B number seems to be based on extrapolation (1.66B in [1] for one estimate) based on previous growth rates.
I shared your initial skepticism, but Reddit is the 20th most popular site in the world [2]. I know I have definitely been surprised and even shocked that certain extended family members and coworkers of mine have turned out to be heavy Reddit users. It's turned into this incredibly widespread site that almost nobody talks about "in real life".
Of course, monthly active users presumably includes people who click on a Reddit search result once in the month. It doesn't mean they're using it daily and upvoting.
[1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-reddit-users/#sect...
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
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This is so many layers of unhinged rhetoric, picking out individual points to break them down and debate them will be fruitless. One thing though... Moderator is most certainly a noun, and can be an adjective when placed in front of a "candidate". What are you even on, man. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/moderator
> moderators are supposed to be the people who actually take actions to steward a community, not people who claim a title and never take action, not people who abuse the privileges to push an agenda, not people who do things that aren’t in the interest of the communities they serve. Not absentee founders.
I'm not the OP but that context makes it pretty obvious the OP is being figurative.
Re: Reddit Strike Has Started
#620There's a good number of people saying this strike is meaningless and reddit's API change will only affect a tiny % of users. I want to explain why I believe they are wrong. Engagement is a power curve. Most content is created by a small subset of users. I think it is a fair to say that if you use and especially pay for third party tools, whether that be a client or something like RES, you are more than likely a powe…
Most of the content is also modded by a small subset of mods—literally dozens. You've got maybe a hundred mods who are "power mods" that control the vast majority of large subreddits, and these are the ones "protesting". They don't own the subreddits. They have no rights to them, but they like to pretend that they do. Their moderation has, in many ways, become oppressive to the userbase. You don't hear about it becau…
I do agree this is an issue that needs to be addressed but you are also posting this on a website that is heavily moderated and runs as smoothly as it does because of the efforts of dang and the other moderators so I can't agree that reddit should just be the wild west.