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Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

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Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#91
One thing that stands out to me right now is that Reddit might actually be better without the big subreddits.

With all of the big subreddits going "dark" my feed is dominated by all those small community subreddits that I actively subscribed to.

Honestly it's somewhat refreshing to open reddit and nothing has changed on my frontpage.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#92
post #9

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but if Reddit doesn't backtrack what's the endgame here? I've seen multiple subs indicate they intend to fully shutdown if the API changes continue, but for the popular ones what's to stop Reddit from just appointing new mods and starting the sub back up?

See Freenode as an example for what comes next.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be pretty easy to make a clone, but everyone who tries seems to end up getting nerdsniped making something federated instead.

Only federation defends from what is now happening with Reddit. See Freenode and Libera Chat.

Reddit was great for a decade, why can't we just switch website every 10 years?

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#95
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist. It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc. Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather. I have to wonder…

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

There are a lot of alternatives that replicate Reddit's functionality. I've tested out three or four of them over the years.

The quality differences are 100% due to the differences in the communities. They are social deficits, not technical ones.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#96
It's really kind of crazy to see. I just checked some of my favorite subs and out of 22 subs I checked, 20 are currently private.

I've seen some people claim that it's just the "powermods" pushing for these blackouts, but that's not my experience at all. Several medium-size subs I frequent (none of them moderated by powermods) made polls and the result was always the same: an overwhelming majority (like 90%+) of users were in favor of shutting down the subreddit.

I really hope Reddit can be saved. It'd be a shame to lose it like this.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I'm taking this as an excuse to quit Reddit completely. It eats around 60 to 90 minutes of my days, which realistically means I spend 10% of the time I'm awake on Reddit. I've already eliminated all the other socials and that has been very good for me, my mental health, my productivity, now it's time to move from Reddit too. Besides, the user experience on the website has been nothing but degrading for years…

Same here. Time to go back to reading books and talking to people.

>Time to go back to reading books and talking to people.

Bold strategy. How is it going so far?

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

Why use an alternative when you can use the real thing? Reddit was open-source until 2017: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit I think that qualifies at trivial.

Running things like this is not exactly trivial, even if code works run well as-is 6 years later

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hacker News is a Reddit clone that PG wrote because subreddits didn’t exist yet and he wanted to write an application in Arc.

Hacker News is what I refer to as The last bastion of the "Old Internet". Like back when the internet was a thing that people actually had to put effort into participating in so the average quality of content and engagement was consistently high more often than it was low. Back when you actually had forums dedicated to single areas of interest, run by people who were interested in that thing "just coz". I feel like H…

Almost all that is good on the internet these days are holdovers from the Web 1.0 era. Everything else seems to crumble under commercial interests and withers in sea of ads and IPOs.

Re: Livestream of Reddit subreddits going private in protest

#100
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist. It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc. Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather. I have to wonder…

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

Creating a decent Reddit clone is a weekend project. I've done similar stuff as a demo teaching an hour long 'Intro to Rails' class at the local code school.
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