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Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Week 1
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website's core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I'm aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they're going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg...
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I've learned anything it's that Reddit's admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that's come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don't see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted "free speech." I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don't like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn't seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
IIRC it wasn't within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.
Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.
There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it...
I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of "this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that's great," which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.
If there's something I've learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it's that they can't be reasoned with. It's like a cult where people are brainwashed.
I've also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there's no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it's most likely a bad-faith ploy but I'll still take the gamble even though I've never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.
This is some terrific no context life advice.
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don't expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it's becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I've commented loads on here that I haven't felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it's getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It's become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I'm really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it's more engaging. IDC if it doesn't become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I'm 100% down.
Agreed, feels like a fresh start without some of the noise. Reddit will be bleeding users for a long while. A large number of power users have jumped ship and many of them technically apt. Lemmy will improve very quickly now. New UIs and features.
I'm excited.
Same man. I'm also trying to get out of my shell and contribute as well. I have thousands of reddit comments, but only a few posts in 12 years, mainly because I didn't see the point. But here, where there are 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer users, what I have to say or post may genuinely interest somebody AND be seen by said person. If people don't like it, that's fine, at least it was there for them to see and not like!
Well your username certainly wins my everything for the day!
Thanks! My reddit name got shit on frequently, so I'm not sad to see people appreciating the new one!!
@LemmyAtem @2deck
This is it. The algorithm amplifies the popular and in doing so mutes the rest.
Whether the algorithm is upvotes from the community times hotness or likes from the whole world times your social graph.
It is still inevitably muting more people than it is promoting.
People are worried today that there might not be a single place to find the one true forum, but in wanting that they are silencing the decentralized voices who can only get attention in a smaller group.
You can't have a sensible discussion when everyone is in the same room.
Yeah I was super surprised to see just how many improvements hit the Jerboa Android app in just a couple days since I installed it. So many PRs lol
I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users' mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.
I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The "darkening" of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover -- the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.
I think the Digg v4 moment will be when/if Reddit bans porn. And if they're gunning for an IPO, they're going to do just that.
I miss pre-G4 TechTV so much
Call for Help and The Screen Savers! Take me back 🥹
Those shows literally drove me to a career in software development.
I'll never forget Leo telling a young kid about my age about a new programming language called Python. I like to think he shaped a fair number of future careers with that one call
Thanks for the fond memory of TechTV. I also listened the heck out of the SecurityNow podcast.
There's already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about "What if this fails? What next?"
I don't think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven't figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn't cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.
OTOH, I do like Lemmy.
I'm surprised we haven't seen power mods collectively band together to form their own Reddit clone.
undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this
Sure it will survive. And it's certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn't fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won't know until long after the fact.
Even as a reddit addict I didn't know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn't even a mobile app user.
I don't know if it will ever fall or fail, but I think the days of reddit being a place for the future of the internet to happen is over. People just plain don't trust the site anymore.
Like why build fun tools for it? Why help moderate a community? Why do anything on reddit if the post quality is insanely low, bots are everywhere, and trolls have taken over.
Companies do this a lot. They sacrifice good will and community for money because it can't easily be put down on a profit graph. So reddit seems fine to burn most of their genuine community to make a profit. And that's fine, they'll go elsewhere.
My hope is that somewhere like lemmy can stop the need to keep changing platforms.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before...
It was getting really bad.
Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.
onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit
Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.
Why?
It directly falls afoul of Reddit's rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.
There's an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with the untrue notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.
In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them...
It's ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you'd otherwise have feel genuine, that's if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.
More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn't agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so added an Automoderator filter so I'm effectively shadowbanned from using words like "OnlyFans" on a lot of subreddits. It's awful when you have to get creative with words to get past draconian censors.
Rather than destroying the patriarchy, it reinforces the notion of gender roles.
I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
All those OnlyFans links and not a single photo of a fan!
(Sorry. Couldn't resist the dad joke.)
If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we'll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch. Long term that might still mean a transition.
Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn't around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn't know this stuff.
By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I've heard that before but I obviously had no problems.
It's not intuitive to find communities on other servers. You have to be adamant that one exists it order to get it to come up in search after multiple attempts. Communities I've created on midwest.social still aren't showing up in the search on lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz and I would rather people find my community than create a new one by the same name on their server.
In its current state, and if it stays in this state, this is why it will not replace Reddit. It's not just unintuitive, it's about as hard as you can make it without purposefully making it hard. You can blindly grope in the dark slapping r/ in front of a topic. Here it's a totally different story. And splintering the discussion does not a (viable) Reddit competitor make. If a first time user is expecting Reddit communities and gets the sub 1000 community counts Lemmy currently has they're gonna drop it like a lead balloon.
That's all okay with me because at the end of the day I personally don't care. For me I'm happy with what community there is. What itches I have that Lemmy doesn't scratch that Reddit did are replaceable with other content from other sites.
topic aggregation and finding communities faster is being worked on, as well as improvements to the cross-instance synchronization.
If there are multiple communities with the same name you should eventually be able to aggregate them together into one feed.
This influx of users will give the system a real test, as many users are lumping into a handful of large servers, rather than spreading out as there is no good way to find a local server with free capacity and a low ping.
Off-topic, but I'm glad you're a Midwest llama who eats casseroles instead of hot dish!
Oh yeah. If nobody on your instance is already subscribed, that's true.
I think it's down to the communities page more than anything else. Don't know if it's a bug with Beehaw specifically or Lemmy in general not having the feature, but you can't sort/filter the list of communities by number of subscribers or by instance.
Still a tonne better than Mastodon... My biggest complaint about Mastodon and the reason I barely use it is that if you look at all posts outside of your instance, you get riddled with bot spam. All I saw in the 'All' feed outside of my local instance were posts from a hentai reposting bot that regurgitated posts from various imageboards and anime porn subreddits...
lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you're right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it's going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be "the front page of the internet" anymore.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Reddit has a worse power-user problem than Digg. I mean at the very least Digg didn't give its most active users the power to remove other people's content. The difference is that Reddit already existed as a better alternative to Digg until it imploded, whereas until the recent API changes and blackout happened, there was no viable alternative to Reddit and a lack of people seeking an alternative.
Time will tell. My concern about Lemmy is that it's non-profit and server hosting costs are great. It's all well and good until you see some of the smaller instances shut down because they cannot afford to host.
It’s so frustrating. I deleted Apollo and don’t see myself downloading the garbage reddit app, so I really hope a new website can come out on top. I wish one of this community driven platforms followed suit of Wikipedia and allowed donations to pay for site costs but didn’t try to become profitable. These kind of community-run (aka free labor) pillars on the internet are bigger than just a dumb tech company
Fwiw, Tildes is non-profit and accepts donations. However they are gated by requiring an invite and are intentionally not growing quickly