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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

#71

Post by taylodl »

bovermyer wrote: post #51

I mod three niche communities on Reddit. Two are for sites I own and run, and the third is for TTRPG generators. I made the first two private with no intention of making them public again. The third I'm not comfortable making unilateral decisions on, so I'm just un-modding myself for it. Now I'm considering starting up old-school forums to replace the first two subreddits. It would be a lot of work to manage them ove…

Fully under your control and fully on your dime. Your traffic may be low enough where it's not all that expensive. But it is on your dime.

Then again, that appears to be the future of Reddit, doesn't it? I've never created a subreddit but from what I've been able to gather you all are using tools to assist with your moderator duties and now those tools are going to have to pay Reddit for API access, meaning soon enough you're going to be paying for using those tools.

Either way it looks like you're going to have to pay. It's going to be a question of how much are you going to have to pay and how much freedom of control you'd like.

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

#72

Post by babypuncher »

ParetoOptimal wrote: post #20
brucethemoose2 wrote: post #3

> What happens next. Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord... Which is awful, with how siloed and noisy Discord is. I hope I am wrong, and that a good alternative gains traction.

> Its going to slightly accelerate the migration of some communities to Discord I wish they'd at least try Discourse first. Discord is where knowledge goes to die.

Discourse and similar traditional forum style platforms have horrible UX.

The fact that topic replies are presented sequentially and not as nested threads makes large topics downright miserable to navigate, and responses almost impossible to follow. And I will die on this hill, I don't care how many grizzled old timers try to tell me this is better. I'm not a zoomer who doesn't remember the internet pre-2010, I've been here since the '90s. I know exactly how bad it was, and the better UX is a massive part of why Reddit largely replaced these old communities over the last 15 years.

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

#74

Post by the_snooze »

bhouston wrote: post #69
vile_wretch wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that square with Reddit's profit-seeking goals? Reddit isn't profitable when operating with an army of unpaid volunteer mods. I find it hard to believe they'd actually invest in proper moderation.

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

#75

Post by kolbe »

the_snooze wrote: post #74
bhouston wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does that square with Reddit's profit-seeking goals? Reddit isn't profitable when operating with an army of unpaid volunteer mods. I find it hard to believe they'd actually invest in proper moderation.

I think the biggest problem with employing moderators isn't the cost, but that it now makes reddit liable for the moderation failures.

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

#76

Post by acmecorps »

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.

Also discord stuff are not searchable publicly. The experience is completely different, it's not even comparable.

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

#77

Post by safety1st »

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…

The venerable sdf.org might be a good home for your community. It's a nonprofit that's been online since 1987 and hosts a variety of communities. Usage is mostly free. They recently launched a Lemmy instance where you could set up a "subreddit" with a couple of clicks - https://lemmy.sdf.org/

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

#78

Post by the_snooze »

nineplay wrote: post #42

A few hard truths - No alternative is going to show up which can host anywhere near the amount of traffic that reddit receives/received. That takes a lot more money than any new contender can drum up. - reddit isn't going to decide it no longer wants to make a profit - A lot of users are going to wander back over to post-blackout replacement subreddits - A lot of communities are just going to disappear. It breaks my…

> It breaks my heart as a member of a sport-based subreddit, there's just no good substitute.

I'm in the same boat. I love /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball, from the consistently formatted game threads and post-game threads, to the clever offseason shitposting [1]. It's sad to see reddit putting on the brakes on their API that power the moderation tools which make those subreddits so good.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/5nbcgu/examining_the_e...

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

#79

Post by seydor »

EA-3167 wrote: post #11
seydor wrote: post #5

Reddit can fix this by simply promoting alternative subreddits to users. There are many. Competition will fix things

The thing about alt subs is that you quickly figure out why they're alternatives and not mainstream, and it rarely has anything to do with promotion. I'd add that the very act of promotion changes a small sub into a giant, unwieldy one very quickly. e.g. Look at anime_titties, the ill-named main alternative to News and Worldnews, and tell me if you can see a problem with that being promoted. I sure can.

for every titties there are 20 other news subs that are just not gaining traction. You only see titties because it's sufficiently differentiated from the news subreddit

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

#80

Post by nmcela »

andrewmunsell wrote: post #12
everfree wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have federation now, which should hopefully kill the datagarden model once and for all.

There's serious usability & scalability issues with existing federation right now, but these traditional social platforms killing 3P clients is a huge boon for federated ecosystems. Just look at Tweetbot-- which used to be considered one of the best UX for Twitter-- and how it's transformed into Ivory. I'm hoping that a 3P developer brings some of their UX skills to Lemmy or Kbin, which would be really beneficial for…

I would love to contribute. I don't know much about federated ecosystems, though. If you do, could you point me to the right direction? (Google is shit as you know.)

I installed Matrix and Synapse to my local server, but the installation process is not good, and the usability is bad. Clients are super buggy. Unusable, basically, as information got lost all the time.

I'm a game designer and a low-level game engine programmer, grumpy about slow hard-to-use software, so maybe there's a higher chance of doing more good than harm, lol.

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