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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

#91

Post by brucethemoose2 »

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.

It scales horribly.

But that has not stopped some servers from exploding in size. And its "fine" if you are just trying to shoot the breeze or shout into the void, not look for specific information (which is truly horrendous) or answer FAQ (which is even more horrendous than reddit).

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

#92

Post by chrisnight »

bovermyer wrote: post #81
taylodl wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enou…

I already have infrastructure that it could be put on. Assuming the traffic remains low, that doesn't worry me. I've decided to go ahead and do it. Now I'm looking at my options. Flarum and Lemmy seem reasonable.

Lemmy apparently has controversy with its developers, with Kbin being given as the alternative. So you could look into Kbin aswell.

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

#93

Post by MacsHeadroom »

IAmNotAFix wrote: post #35
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #24

The front page, ie. /r/all and /r/popular a virtually indistinguishable from the same three days ago. There are memes, news, tik tok videos, sports, etc. Power users aside, I suspect the typical reddit user's experience is virtually unchanged.

Mainstream's reddit experience is clicking on Reddit links from Google. Many of which are dead as of right now.

According to the API, reddit post and comment frequency is higher than it was 4 days ago: https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/

Seems like the blackout is not working even a little bit.

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

#94

Post by deskamess »

bhouston wrote: post #19

Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control. This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable. Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on t…

I was thinking about this too... this seems to be the most likely end game. The best way for the company to 'handle trouble makers'. They will definitely lose some users but enough should come back to hold the popular subs up. I mean, really, if you asked me who the mods of the subs I frequent were, well... I do not know.

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

#95

Post by deskamess »

Remember how when Linus got mad/tired of the previous version control system (Bit-something?) he went ahead and started git. I wonder if anyone is mad enough.

Is it possible to implement an alt-reddit in git? Every comment is a branch of the parent. Every post thread is a tree after all. If you could attach metadata to a branch you could keep counters (for upvotes-downvotes), golds given, etc. I know not much of how git works internally so there are probably many caveats (how does editing a comment work without branching). Sharing whole posts could be a matter of letting someone else checkout a post URL and you could dig to get all the comments under there. You could also have 'post aggregators' (like torrent) and some sort of UI that displays what reddit does today. So technically you could have decentralized alt-sub-reddits that advertise themselves/content to aggregators.

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

#96

Post by yowzadave »

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…

> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.

This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API.

The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. They seem to have forgotten this, and by violating the unspoken contract with the actual creators, they are at risk of losing them entirely. Social media platforms are useless without creators.

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

#97

Post by [deleted] »

McDyver wrote: post #65
bhouston wrote: post #19

Countdown to when Reddit leadership does some drastic moves like (1) forcibly making some of the most popular private subs public again, (2) removing the mods who want to keep things private. This would effective take these communities under company control. This will create even more uproar as well though, but I think it is inevitable. Given the mess they have put themselves in, and their unwillingness to budge on t…

Reddit is using the same approach as Apollo: basing their business on a free resource. For Apollo it was the api (for which they were willing to pay if the price was fair) For Reddit is free labour and content, which they still want for free

[deleted]

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

#98

Post by andrewmunsell »

nmcela wrote: post #80
andrewmunsell wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Definitely use some of the platforms as a user, first. I personally use Lemmy & to a much lesser extent, Mastodon. I think once you start using them and understanding how the web UIs work (or don't), it'll help you build a mental model around the problems with UX and (partially) scalability of how federation works in these systems today.

You can always go down the ActivityPub rabbit hole (maybe starting with something like https://dev.to/thasmin/getting-started-with-activitypub-2mgm) to understand the federation protocol, but this may be less useful if you're interested in the UX problem

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

#99

Post by voisin »

I am somewhat shocked that Google or Facebook or TikTok haven’t taken this as an opportunity to rush to the market to fill the void. Never before has this space been so ripe for the taking by a company with the resources to get something to market.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] »

iamdbtoo wrote: post #54
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…

> I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit. This is a direction I would like to see things going. It could just be that I mostly frequent tech-oriented communities, but with "self-hosting" as a hobby growing the way it has and servers being much cheaper than they used to be, I think (hope?) a lot of communities will retreat from these places to ones where they ha…

[deleted]
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