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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

#641

Post by skydhash »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #463
lozenge wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have written this comment about tape decks, CD ripping or Napster. In the end, what's technically possible always wins. As long as adblockers are technically feasible they will continue.

Napster didn't win though? It got crushed by giant media conglomerates. They were able to stifle easy piracy. With legal warfare, and actual decent products, they pretty effectively funneled people into legally consuming digital content, limiting piracy, and replaced physical ownership (CDs) with ephemeral subscriptions.

Because what most people wanted was listening to music, not owning music. And a lot of them are ok paying a fee periodically to do so. It could have been the same for movies, but siloes and prices are making this frustrating.

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

#642

Post by nullityrofl »

redundantly wrote: post #554
nullityrofl wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're insisting things have to work a certain way in order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't have to operate in a specific, fixed way. No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing: fixating on the ideology and taking an opportuni…

> Federated services will never become mainstream > Centralization works... It's approachable for laypersons. You are arguing that things will not change because it doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what you said. This isn't a straw man argument. There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit. Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your assumption of what's difficult to do isn't…

I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0 before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.

I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I think they have made a conscious decision about what they want and value.

What I think is that people have become accustomed to having a wide array of information on a wide array of topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is that people value that accessibility of information. And I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that requirement and so something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.

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

#643

Post by goykasi »

phkahler wrote: post #338
traverseda wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero of them have tried the lemmy instance. So make of that what you will.

Give them a reason to switch, not just the option. Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day and see what happens.

> no new posts here, go there.

Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason and more like a mandate.

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

#644

Post by pauby »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #624
rakoo wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> benefit from the product and gain an incentive > An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards. I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the fediverse. The philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely useless. This is not a product, it's a vision of how we manage communicati…

This is a horrible way to get the mass market. It seems like a perfect way to recreate the issues with desktop Linux

That's assuming the goal is to get to 'mass market'.

Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist when they all go back.

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

#645

Post by bena »

boolemancer wrote: post #279
bena wrote: post #43

All reddit has to do is remove the ability for subreddits to be private. Or put the ability to make subreddits private behind a paywall. Much like how Github treated private repos. End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many users are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to be private, would users honor the protest? The subs…

Okay, so you take away the power from the mods, and expect them to still do the work to moderate the subreddits for free?

A single power. And I don't think it's a power all mods have. If it is, it would only take one rogue mod to re-public the subreddit.

And really, whether or not the mods continue to moderate is the thing being tested with such a move. Reddit did the API thing, the mods responded by escalating to this. Reddit can either blink and walk back some of their choices, wait for the mods to blink and reopen (of which, some have already), or reddit can escalate further and see if that makes the mods blink.

I believe a non-zero number of mods will continue to moderate. I also believe there are more than enough people willing to moderate to replace any of those who refuse to return.

Then you have weird situations. Because I'm willing to believe that some people believe it is extraordinarily difficult to moderate a subreddit and that they are uniquely gifted at it. Some of these people will believe that they have to moderate the subreddit because they believe the community will go to shit without them. Others will believe that their replacements will cause the community go to shit and Tim Reddit himself will come begging them to rejoin the moderation team.

And neither of these things are true. Moderating a forum is mostly drudgery and the only real skill it takes is having the time to do so. This is a battle I don't think the current mods can ultimately win.

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

#646

Post by reddit_refugee3 »

fny wrote: post #201
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…

Are these moderation tools any better on other platforms?

What platforms? No, seriously, what platforms, I'm looking for a reddit alternative.

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

#647

Post by [deleted] »

aniforprez wrote: post #208
blendergeek wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site. What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with 'old.reddit.com' next?

In spez's AMA, he said "old reddit is not going anywhere" Years ago, when announcing the new website, he said "the API is not going anywhere" old reddit is 100% on the chopping block

[deleted]

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

#648

Post by mahogany »

zelifcam wrote: post #504
cdelsolar wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account. I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be, as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients become more friendly and add features to leverage the tech. We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is everyone wants a…

Couple questions as I try to understand:

> I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon app/account.

So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world? Is there a difference?

And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org - but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to post?

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

#649

Post by HWR_14 »

isykt wrote: post #128
organsnyder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But those people are also generating a large amount of the content that is being used to monetize users.

It’s not clear there’s anything “unique” about the set of users that both generate the content and will leave the site because of the API changes. From an investor standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it’s better to have monetizable users that generate content than non-monentizeable users who generate content.

Most mods (who oversee the generation of new content) use the API because third-party apps offer superior mod tools. Instead of thinking about "shutting down third party apps" think about it as "asking your volunteer labor to do the job on hard mode". You can see why those people might get pissed off.

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

#650

Post by LexiMax »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #462
kristopolous wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?) fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here: https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm ) Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's not a failure by any stretch. How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed to intuition or speculation?

> what's different? IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a centralized alternative that worked when they were born.

I actually don't think IRC is doing that well. I used to have a bouncer but I shut it down a few months ago because most of my communities had moved over to Discord. But I think the reason why Discord and Slack took over was not because IRC was decentralized, but because the protocol was never designed for mobile devices where you might not always be connected to a server.

It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely glacial pace with very uneven support across various networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts of channel management had to be done through a bot. Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord starts causing problems for its userbase.

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