761–770 of 795 posts
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> How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs? hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage fees? no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at Wikipedia... oh. right.
That's literally what Reddit does now and it's not enough
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I'll try to be quick and simple: - The US government sets a base interest rate it will pay if you buy bonds from them - Bonds are basically loans - People with money want that money to make money so they buy bonds and invest in stocks/companies - When bonds aren't giving any money rich people put more into companies - When bonds are giving money rich people shift money into bonds, less money for companies This is a g…
Ahh, thank you. That helps a lot. I suppose it's interesting that the return from companies is even remotely comparable to the return from bonds. That's probably a dumb realization but I don't know much about this stuff.
Now, bonds are guaranteeing a 5%+ return, so a non-profitable business is much less attractive as a proposition.
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For a more precise background* I don't believe a representative democracy, where we must abandon all power to someone else who we hepe will do the right thing is a model we should be pursuing. Polls are not a good thing per se, they're only better than the worse methods. What happens here is that we have the occasion to take control of our community gatherings. How do you take control if you don't even know what you'…
Brilliant. This properly frames so much of what I have been seeing. I actually worked at a social media building their applications. When our business people spent so much time telling us to build things to show the user what we wanted to show them, I always thought how idiotic it was that we would pretend to know what our users want. It's a form of corporate narcissism. I left :) So if I buy the philosophy (which I…
Then when you want to participate, that's your starting point. Lots of people are lurk-centric, but you are already in the comments section here, so moving your posting probably will not be the issue so much as contextualizing it, which the different software and instances do help with.
A lot of "community" is in having some ritual, some events to show up for, or some events you organize yourself. It doesn't take a lot of those to fill up a calendar, but it definitionally needs to be non-zero.
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Yes although me being primarily a lurker I need even less. More than post or comment, if I have an account it would be to block some things and prfioritize other things more closely. What you describe would make sense for more extended functionality, but there is silent majority of lazy lurkers like myself that could be served very easily.
So my model would be one where you pick a site as your front end, most of which would have default curation and subscription to various subs, providing an experience like /all by default. Though it would look like /all what it would really be is more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources according to your preferences. A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this ecosystem, with smaller alternative fron…
If you do it, please keep in mind merging submissions and their comments, 6 separate entries for the same thing each with a couple of comments is a much worse experience than a single entry with a dozen comments. You can start by simply using the URL as a grouping key and try more sophisticated things later.
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I think you're making the mistake that just because people on the forum have the skills, knowledge, and general capacity to learn a new tool that they are convinced to put in the effort to learn the new tool. Social media specifically has thrived on a culture of extreme low effort to learn how to start having fun with it (think TikTok showing you cool videos, then an easy prompt to sign up, then an immediate "for you…
Perhaps low-effort users are part of the problems we're experiencing? I think maybe it's time to dial back the user-friendliness just a weeeny bit. Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else. Edit: Just sitting here thinking about this. Who exactly gets a…
Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.
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I've said it in a sibling post, but I don't believe our political systems are perfect models of democracy but are closer to benevolent dictatorships. It's comfortable, but that's not xhat the fediverse is about. There are plenty of centralized platforms with exactly the same problems as reddit, the fediverse is about building something else.
If there are no successful, extant examples, then I don't think it's a good basis for anything. As I said, it's a Utopian ideal. That's fine, but it's not practical (and it's not trying to be). I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there. However, all of that will be capitalized by a nimble, forward-thinking, idealistic-yet-ce…
The "product" mentality is the cancer that led us to where we are. We must get rid of it.
> I think there are going to be incredibly valuable lessons-learned from these federated models, and interesting things will happen there.
I totally agree with that. The control an admin has over an instance is still problematic, and someone shared something about confederated protocols (https://nexus.blacksky.network/zine/00000001/confederal-prot...) and that is an interesting way forward.
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It works for what? Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data. If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost? If you're competing a…
If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very difficult angles. Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc. If I start a new hobby I don't need to g…
I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.
While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.
i see the arguments and i wonder why the way to protest is not to just stop participating, rather than taking down the subreddit. if moderation is hard without the third-party apps, stop doing it?
to my understanding, the mods want to preserve their powers and the subreddits' integrity. so prolonging the blackout does not seem much more effective to me than the initial publicity in tech media. especially if people running the site understand the above point.
Reddit has become pretty popular in India and this new population is okay with new site and policy changes because they simply are not aware of what Reddit use to be. Reddit blackout has almost 0 effect on Indian subreddits. Reddit still has numbers to show even if most subreddit are down. Just check r/India r/Mumbai r/Banglore r/Delhi r/Pune and other India subreddits and you will see.
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Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my profession but the attraction of decentralized services just isn't there for the vast majority of people. I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I care if use…
> Federated services will never become mainstream That's kind of the point Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or Facebook. They're an alternative. A social network doesn't require millions of users to be useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone. > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons. For a technically inclined person on…
Well unless you want to cover some only some very specific niches, yes it very much does.