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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

#91

Post by iaw »

Exuma wrote: post #56
iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

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 gross simplification but hopefully gives the idea.

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

#93

Post by TeMPOraL »

isykt wrote: post #48
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it. A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their ri…

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here. The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

Who else is making Netflix money? Their catalog is currently so small and bad that it makes no sense to keep an account per person. Proliferation of streaming services doesn't help - individually, none of them is worth paying full price per person or household.

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

#94

Post by veave »

Fauntleroy wrote: post #73
veave wrote: post #53

I hope the admins of reddit will start taking control of the closed subs and opening them up. The content of each one of those subs has been written by the users and it makes no sense that a handful of mods are taking the content and holding it hostage by keeping the subs private. If I were a contributor to one of those subs (for example by posting answers to programming questions) I would be fuming.

...so that the admins of reddit can exploit their content instead?

Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise that it will be available and then massively deleting (or hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them out for it, but by now, it's the mods.

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

#95

Post by codetrotter »

silverbax88 wrote: post #79
codetrotter wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a viable, popular alternative Popular? No. Viable? Yes. Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it’s my instance. If even a handful of people would join I think that would be nice.

Will you be adding the ability to create communities?

Yes.

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

#96

Post by s1artibartfast »

organsnyder wrote: post #60
isykt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing controversy. People who aren’t generating the company any profit are shouting the loudest. I don’t think there’s much of a loss here. The era of free money was always going to end and now it’s over.

But those people are also generating a large amount of the content that is being used to monetize users.

That's a claim, but only time will tell to what degree it is accurate. Some people certainly want to continue continue creating content and we will see the degree to which they figure out alternative subreddits if the blackout continues

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

#97

Post by cragfar »

Exuma wrote: post #56
iameli wrote: post #19

The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is, charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the revenue of their top creators, who are furious. What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to go so user-hostile?

This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money supply from investors? Or is it something else

3 month T-Bills are 5.2% (was .04%). 2 years are 4.7% (was .15%). Hypothetical future profit for companies that have been around for 10+ years is no longer good enough.

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

#98

Post by danudey »

rblatz wrote: post #29
idiotsecant wrote: post #12

It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of people still want to read content, so what's happening is people are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still seeing quite a bit of post…

Also most people don’t really care about the API/3rd party app thing. It doesn’t impact them and it looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing. I’ve been on Reddit since the digg migration and I’ve never felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit’s mobile site.

It doesn't affect them directly, but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when those stop working then the job of moderating large and active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and frustrating, and far less efficient.

Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1% of users do a lot for the site that depends on functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.

It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger subreddits are starting to see how little their users understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more than they already do by those users, because of the issue that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over nothing".

Curious to see how this all shakes out.

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

#99

Post by shadowgovt »

This may be an unresolvable problem. Or rather, more specifically: a problem solvable via load-shedding, which is what Reddit is now (tacitly) encouraging.

Reading between the lines: Reddit is charging money for 3rd-party integration. The Reddit community has interpreted this as greedy (or, more specifically: the mods community has interpreted this as "We will have to start paying money to use services that are necessary for us to mod our subreddits"). But Reddit has not backed down. What if they can't? What if the problem is that the cost to provide the bulk-data API accesses is starting to add up for Reddit itself?

If so, then the problem is hosting Reddit has become too expensive and one solution is, indeed, to make it cheaper by having fewer high-traffic subreddits.

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

#100

Post by pawptart »

WhiteDawn wrote: post #80

I am curious how this will all settle out in the end. I think the majority of users don’t really care about the API or subreddits going private as they primarily just lurk. However, the people that do care are the ones that moderate and contribute the vast majority of the content that the larger group enjoys. I am pessimistic that the minority here will win out in the end, but the majority may begin to lose interest…

> I think the majority of users don’t really care about the API or subreddits going private as they primarily just lurk.

I agree. These protests have missed the point. There is a (very) loud minority raising hell right now, but spez is right, it's just noise. The silent majority is still hanging around.

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