Reddit’s blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by kelnos » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:36 PM UTC

rakoo wrote: post #580

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it. Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoo…

> 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…

If all you care about is the philosophy, then you're going to fail. Most people only care about the end product, the end experience. And unfortunately you still need those people (to some extent) since these sorts of things require some kind of critical mass to be successful.

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

#672

Post by dbbk » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #304

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it. Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1% rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill the site. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

Reddit was a better alternative to Digg, which is why people migrated. What is a better alternative to Reddit from the point of view of a community mod? Self-hosting a phpBB forum isn't it, it's way too much work.

You're not wrong, there isn't one

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

#673

Post by edgyquant » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

organsnyder wrote: post #60

isykt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here. The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

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

People keep saying this, do you have any proof?

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

#674

Post by tester457 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

floundy wrote: post #583

tester457 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a loud minority because they've invested more into the platform. It is the 1–9–90 rule in action. When the 1% leaves the platform's quality will go down.

My bet is that quality will go up. I'm not really interested in reading what the small number of people who spend 8+ hours per day on Reddit think, about any topic. Hopefully they'll take their silly Reddit mannerisms and inside jokes with themselves on the way out.

Unfortunately I believe the ones with the Reddit mannerisms and overused jokes are the ones that stayed as they are too addicted to leave.

The actual creators of content are different from the drones.

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

#675

Post by edgyquant » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

HWR_14 wrote: post #649

isykt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have a citation for the claim that most mods use third party apps?

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

#676

Post by mvdtnz » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:41 PM UTC

idiotsecant wrote: post #635

mvdtnz wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is pretty much like people who say that we could just get rid of the police because all they do is harass everyone all day anyway. Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic amount of work that goes into keeping the system well behaved. If you do your job right as few people as possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who everyone thinks…

You must have misunderstood me but just to reiterate, I have no sympathy for the moderators of reddit whatsoever.

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

#677

Post by rf15 » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:43 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #604

wccrawford wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a server. Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.

Torrents have magnet links, which don’t require servers at all.

That is untrue, you still need a server to facilitate discovery/passthrough. Peer-to-peer does not exist in the wider internet for most consumers.

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

#678

Post by paulmd » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

drdaeman wrote: post #614

TechBro8615 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm a technical user, I've spent last 3 days trying to figure out what should I really do to make a setup that I wouldn't want to nuke in a month (or a year). I'm still at loss how to get this deployed the right way (and not a lazy "install this in 5 minutes, feel the pains forever" way, thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough). My current list of grievances: - No standards of any kind on sharing the same iden…

> thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough

OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.

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

#679

Post by w1nst0nsm1th » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

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…

I became a fan of American politics by reading reddit...

Then, I stopped watching the walking dead

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

#680

Post by redundantly » Thu, Jun 15, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

nullityrofl wrote: post #642

redundantly wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 arr…

> I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position.

I'm not attempting to misrepresent you, that's just how you're coming across. You're effectively saying that people are either too lazy or not competent enough to use services that aren't packaged up and served directly to them. Hence the analogy.

> something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.

Maybe, but that's not the point. You're claiming that decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit. My point is it's narrow minded to have that mindset.