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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

#771
post #661
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…

Dead on arrival. There are 6 separate "general" instances. Normal people will never use this.

All of the ones I've tried just result in a spinning ball of death when trying to sign up too, I'm not sure if any of this actually works, or if registrations have been disabled so god forbid anyone can migrate from reddit. Do I seriously have to set up my own instance so I can make a fucking account or what?

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

#772

Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit to override this at any moment now. Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert back to public and the ability to change from public to private will be temporarily disabled. It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's another thing to wait out something "indefinite".

I think even reddit is not arrogant enough to attempt that. It would require removing every moderator from every subreddit that has gone private at the same time. Even if reddit forces subreddit's public, the auto-mod script to remove all new comments and posts is 2 lines of YAML. Having a public site with a bunch of upset and unaccountable mods is only inviting them to become bad actors and actively sabotage the sit…

Turns out... they're exactly that arrogant. They've already begun the process.

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

#773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The communities you see on my instance so far are communities that have been created on that instance specifically. So https://zapad.nstr.no/c/rust is distinct from for example https://programming.dev/c/rust I have added some other instances to my list of allowed instances and these are now showing up as linked instances in https://zapad.nstr.no/instances I have seen other people leave comments on posts across instan…

So now I tried this and it works Here you can see a post from a different instance, shown on my instance: https://zapad.nstr.no/post/42

Interesting... I might still be getting the concept clear in my own head but that can definitely work. It does seem to me that it will shake out with larger communities still under the control of a specific instance, like, I'm sure there will end up being one big canonical Rust community, cause nobody wants to check multiple forums about the same topic.

There have definitely been cases where I did attend multiple forums of the same format and same topic, but generally because I was in transition from one to the other, such as when alt.music.ween was dying and I started trying out the popular Web Forum of the time. In the end I gave up the community of Internet Ween fans, because coming from Usenet, which was absolutely beautiful if viewed using a good client program, web forums were like trying to write a business letter in crayon.

For me, it was actually the first round of enshittification, and we did it without any VC help at all; fact of the matter is that the web forums were easier to use, and so more people came to them, and up to a point, that does result in better community, particularly with non-technical subjects like obscure bands with cult followings.

But, it really did boggle my mind that anyone could use those things without going completely insane at the terrible bad and no good interfaces with no filtering or thread view etc etc (especially early on), but it was an important lesson in psychology for me: they did not have the context of the only-a-tiny-bit-harder, but galaxies-better thing that already existed, they only saw "here is a thing I can use to talk to people about a thing I like, which never existed in my world before," and from there they can tolerate any shortcoming, because it's all novelty. People thought Pong was mindblowing.

Eventually, as the ever-growing blob of spam goo make the Usenet landscape radioactive and impassable, and there was clearly a huge party going on in the forums, everyone just left, other than the diehards that always stay out of some misplaced stubborn urge. A lot of those forums hadn't even figured out how to pay for themselves, and in many cases never did, they just did it so that something would be there where before there was nothing.

All in all, things are really starting to look like the old internet, and it warms the cockles of my heart, truly it do.

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

#774
post #737
post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My university professors are low effort users. Some of them are even CS adjacent. Selective low effort is what those professors exhibit. But their ideas are valuable and worth publicizing. Twitter is an example of many low-effort scientists writing some good content.

Well, this one got a lot of response heat, I'm picking you to respond to.

Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?

But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.

And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."

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

#775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lemmy.world's fast growth is working against it. The site has been flooded with low effort content, leading others to start defederating them. The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from appearing in my feed.

And it seems the whole site is down right now.

18 hours later, I still cannot sign up.

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

#776
post #407
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out if lemmy has.

Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the different content in all the different servers/communities. Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn’t be the only one. It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

> It’s so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I just haven’t heard about it yet.

I had the same thought, there must be many smart programmers with some good UX skills who must have done this (I hope)

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

#777
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…

> It's the dilemma of the maintainer

Why not publish some stats every week/month about what kind of content/users were banned/suspended etc.

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

#778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not concern trolling, drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem. Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the inevitable abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd c…

> drama exists because everyone gets distracted by organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good answer for this problem. Neither does Reddit. Have you not heard of brigading?

Reddit bans users who participate in brigading, at least when coordinated from reddit.

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

#779
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

Early internet was good because there were technical barriers to entry. Then the floodgates opened.

IMO, this will be the future of high quality interaction. Either small communities that are federated to prevent the same issue forums had, or places that charge a monthly fee for entry.

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

#780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The front page of lemmy: Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse. Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github. It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no…

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?

IRC is long dead. The only time I even see IRC groups anymore is for piracy.
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