Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Well that kinda aged poorly.
To his credit, Ohanian hasn’t been involved with reddit for a while. He and u/spez sold the company years ago, then spez came back.
Fuck u/spez.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez.
Simultaneously looking like a 12 year old and crib death warmed over and we’re supposed to be impressed by this chud lol fuck him.
Everything does unfortunatelly… remember Google’s “do no harm” quote?
“Don’t be evil” was their actual quote. The fact that they removed it says a lot about their new direction.
Yeah, probably, forgot the exact quote 🤷.
Digg executives had to get a job /somewhere/
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
13 year club here too. It sure seems like a lot of us long timers have been the first to move. I guess there’s a certain sense of ‘I’ve seen where this goes’ from experience with other sites in the past.
Also part of the 10+ year club (long time lurker). You’re right about that “familiar sense”, but for myself it comes with a forgotten sense of optimism.
Reddit’s been on the decline for years before the Vitoria incident or The Great Purge… but as long as I had my niche communities, baconreader, and old.reddit.com - I could “get by”… as Reddit became more and more aggressive in selling “me as the product”.
The federated and open source nature of Lemmy will solve the issue of “corporate presence”, but it will require us to “roll up our sleeves” - which I find refreshing.
No bots or astroturfing here yet though (or ChatGPT posts), so who knows, maybe Lemmy will spiral faster than expected
It’s really strange how civil and relaxed the discussions have been. Makes me wonder how much of Reddit is either children or bots stirring the pot constantly
I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.
The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.
Security through obscurity!
Though be careful, too obscure and you’ll get the most horrible people hanging around. I discovered this while Bitmessage community…
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.
Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.
But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.
only 12 years for me, but almost a decade of premium ends now
dude same. 13 years. Reddit has been a huge part of my life for a long time. I even lurked for a year or so before making an account. It feels like a break up in a weird way, but lets remember we’re breaking up because they’ve become a controlling abusive spouse and we deserve better :)
Now we’ve entered a polyamorous relationship (multiple Lemmy instances)
Honestly it’s all pretty confusing to me I’m getting better and better but I think its gonna take a couple weeks.
Honestly? I fucking love it.
Its SO fast (I have my own instance), and instead of subscribing to subreddits and one server, now I subscribe to communities and multiple instances.
The people are responsive.
Only problem is missing niche communities, and discoverability, but that will improve with time hopefully with something like multi-reddits.
See like I dont even know what you just said lol. I don’t know what an instance is or what a server means in this context, and i know what a community is kinda but no idea why they are called something.something//Lemmy.something.biz.kbin haha. and I dont know what multiple instances is.
I’ve got a lot to learn. But hey I managed to reply to this so im getting somewhere.
Okay, here’s how I explained it to my kid.
You’ve got the united states, that’s lemmy.
You’ve got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.
Communities are cities.
Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they’re working on the same basic principles.
The fediverse is the UN.
It ain’t exactly right, but it ain’t exactly wrong :)
haha that gave me a good laugh :)
This has helped me more than anything else I think lol love it.
Think of lemmy as like an email (except everyone can see it). You have an email address “steakfries” and the domain you registered your email on “@lemmy.one” so if I want to email you I have to enter in @steakfries@lemmy.one
I can “email” you from any domain, be it Gmail, yahoo, my own server, etc and you can likewise respond.
Yeah that’s the problem I think, is that the majority of people aren’t familiar with how web technologies work and how all the communication happens.
Basic users can just signup on lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org forever and just treat it like their new Reddit home.
I also have my own instance. But it feels so lonely being the only one on a sever haha. That being said, do you know if upvotes and downvotes are also federated? In fact, I’m using jerboa on beehaw and I don’t think I see any upvote / downvote metrics
beehaw disabled downvotes, but other instances haven’t. the sidebar said disabled downvotes encourages more active discussion, and prevents unpopular opinions from being silenced by a flood of downvotes. they want people to engage by saying “i disagree with you, here’s why” instead of passively downvoting and moving on.
you should be able to see you the upvotes on your comments though.
Fairly sure upvotes/downvotes on comments have been federated into my instance. I can’t see it on Lemmy’s webUI but it appears via the mlem app.
and like why is your name so long. it says @nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev that just seems ridiculous. why not just nii236
Says you:
I’m chatting to you from https://lemmy.jtmn.dev, and you’re chatting to me from https://lemmy.one, on a community on https://beehaw.org.
okay I’ve learned a bit because I’m pretty sure I understand that now. Like I said it’s gonna take a few weeks but I’ll get there. I’m pretty determined to leave reddit and have been for a long time just needed a push. I’m already making my way around my new “frontpage” alright. I do like how fast everything is and how comments and upvotes seem to be live.
I keep having to force myself to use Lemmy instead. I literally just caught myself on Reddit. Ugh
I solved that problem by deleting the app I used for Reddit. I mean, it’s going to stop working in about two weeks anyway, so might as well delete it now.
yeah i deleted Sync :( and just replaced the app with the Jerboa app for Lemmy. Now i open my phone and automatically click Lemmy and its working pretty well for me.
I made my reddit app not have access to data over wifi or the cell network, so when I open it, it opens and forever is “loading” until I realize my mistake.
I’ve had the best day. Most I’ve accomplished in a while IRL. And of corse exploring around this place.
That’s awesome!
Same here. been on reddit for around 12 years, of nearly constant daily use. it’s a weird feeling.
There are dozens of us!
Yeah, I’ve learned so much from people on that place.
I’m getting my 13yr badge in November. Idk. I don’t think I’m deleting my account. I couldn’t even muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account that I’ve had since 2009, that I’ve barely used for the last several years.
So to delete my reddit account, that I use everyday – except at least today and tomorrow; probably first time in several years, maybe even a decade – feels wrong.
My goal, however, is to reduce my activity on reddit over time. Give up my remaining mod positions. Start unsubscribing from subreddits little by little. Maybe just use it for researching work related thing. So far, Beehaw/Lemmy and Tildes and Mastodon have been holding my attention pretty well. We’ll see.
I can relate. I’m a sentimental digital hoarder, I guess. But I’ve beaten my impulses to get on reddit today at least!
This is how I feel, too. I’m leaving my posts and comments up; ironically, I used to habitually purge my profile every year or so because I was worried about IRL people finding me through my activity, but now, I’d prefer to just leave it. Even if I stop being active on Reddit, it’s currently one of the best ways to find answers to niche problems; I’d like to keep my stuff accessible for anyone looking for extremely specific answers. I’ve been fairly private on Reddit, though, so it feels less sentimental and more practical. (Twitter, on the other hand… I never use it, but everything on it is way too sentimental to nuke.)
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
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Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Honestly the subreddits for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
Childish smirk of the day…
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…
Going to download my data tomorrow and delete my own 11 years worth.
Sad day, but also very cathartic.
What are you using to download it?
If you use Power Delete Suite there is the option to download your comments before editing (or just download). However it’s not great if you’ve got years of comments. If you click the download button it caps out at about 65k. But if you inspect the button the full export is available in the href so you can copy that into notepad. However the formatting is not great (CSV unfriendly characters are escaped), so it’s a bit of a clean up.
There is the alternative of requesting all your data from Reddit itself. A preview I saw from someone else shows a more extensive dataset than you get from PDS. I’m still waiting on my data request (it’s only been a day and it can take up 30 days).
Thanks, Power Delete Suite was exactly the type of thing I’ve been trying to find for the past few days.
I want my contributions out of Reddit’s hands, but still leave a protest up. PDS allows me to edit all comments and self posts to “[this user data has been purged]”.
Is there a difference between the various types of data requests? There are 3 options based on different laws, but do they give different information?
Honestly I was genuinely so sick of reddit that I didn’t even bother deleting.
The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.
that right there is the biggest reason I never swapped to the new reddit redesign. Looks and aesthetics are one thing, but constantly having fake notifications about “you may like this post” or “you may like this community” shoved into my feed with the same notification icon as an actual reply to a post kept getting on my nerves.
Yes that’s it. It feels sort of manipulative.
I just joined kbin and have no idea what i’m doing lol. ended up making this account on fedia and another on kbin.social since they can’t seem to see the same posts. not sure what to do long term…
Reddit kinda feels like a sinking ship right now. I wonder how many subreddits will go public again?
Kbin.social is going through some tough times handling the load right now, so federating a bit hard due to the cloud flare DDOS protection.
It should smooth out, then you’ll be able to see the same posts
It brings to mind the careful docking of western and soviet spacecraft!
Hmm, note to BeeHaw or maybe it’s just me but it’s very easy to fumble the delete button on mobile web.
The instances all store separate versions of the same data. However, federation only starts, when your instance gets a reference to the community. So say you are on a different instance. Initially, you won’t see your favourite communities, so you’ll have to start searching for them and linking them up in your instance. Once that happens, your instance will start receiving the posts, with the caveat, that old posts and comments will not be visible.
I think kbin.social is also struggling with federation as a whole right now. But as for the “starts only when youre instance get a reference to the community” what all counts for that? someone searching in the search bar? someone posting cross-instance?
Someone from your instance subscribing to a community on that instance (server).
I have no idea how to join kbin. This is all too confusing
I know, you’re just used to the centralized approach. Give it a few days, things will start sinking in.
You just make an account like on a normal website.
The main kbin site is: https://kbin.social/
While I’m posting from an alt-instance right now: https://fedia.io/
Both sites will give the same UI. Though the main kbin site is having some difficulties federating properly atm. hence why I’m on fedia right now. You just sign up with a username/password/email like normal and then you’re on.
Okay so like is this website now on the same fediverse as kbin? Because I have the same username on both now
Normally, yes! You’d be able to see threads across the Fediverse no matter where you signed up.
If you think of the Fediverse like a shopping mall, think of kbin and lemmy as two different bus companies that go to that same mall. It doesn’t matter what bus you take, both take you to the same place where you can browse the same stores. Maybe you like the seats in the lemmy bus better than the kbin bus so you prefer to use that one. That’s like if someone prefers the interface of lemmy more than kbin. While both go to the same places and see the same things, you might prefer the look and layout of one over the other so you use your favorite primarily.
However, keep in mind that kbin.social has had a massive amount of people sign up in the past few days, and as such it could not handle the large amount of new activity. They are working on a fix for this, but for now kbin.social has been cutoff from the Fediverse while it updates to handle the new load. Think of it like the kbin.social bus is not currently going to the mall – you can get on, see and talk to the people on that bus, but until maintenance is done it won’t actually go to the shopping mall where you can interact with everything across the Fediverse.
There is more to it but that’s a simplified gist of it!
kbin.social and fedia.io are two separate websites. They are called “instances”. Collectively, these sorts of sites are referred to as the “fediverse”.
Posts on one “fediverse” site can be see on another “fediverse” site. For instance, right now you’re apparently posting from beehaw.org, which isn’t a kbin instance but instead appears to be a lemmy instance.
I’m currently using fedia.io, which is a kbin instance.
The group we’re in right now is
technology@beehaw.org, which is hosted on the beehaw.org website/instance, which is the site you’re using right now. But I can see and interact, since we’re together on the “fediverse”.If you signed up for kbin, you have a kbin username as well, but it’s separate from your beehaw account. For example, I’m Otome-Chan@kbin.social but also April@fedia.io, I don’t have a beehaw account so any posts I make on beehaw groups will have to be from either my kbin account or my fedia account. whereas you can respond with your beehaw account as you’ve done here :)
So yes, it’s the same “fediverse” between kbin, fedia, and beehaw. Though notably kbin.social is having some issues with federation right now due to lots of people joining it.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
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As a former sysadmin and a [still, for the moment] reddit moderator, my bet is that most of the subreddits that switched to private forgot to (or didn’t know to) go into “new reddit” and switch off the thing that allows people to request being added to the now-private subreddit.
A HUGE influx of people pounding on the “let me in, add me to the sub” button, which sends modmail, may have overloaded the whole modmail system, which in turn sometimes goes kaflooey for no apparent reason (my theory is: it gets bored).
I see this as a positive aspect of the protest.
I am also amused that random people are pounding on the door for access, as if they think approved submitters are having a private tea party inside.
Clearly you’re not someone who would have to go back and clear out 259238 modmail messages and make sure that none of them are legit “I have a problem” notes.
None of the subreddits I mod are that huge but just the thought of more than 100 at once makes me wanna cry.
At this point, they should just leave the 259,238 modmail messages for the admins to deal with. Let them sort through all that since this is all their doing.
Oh clearly I’m not. I just don’t understand the thinking of people demanding access. It’s like the kind of person who pounds on the door of a closed restaurant because they can see the employees inside.
People are selfish. People subconsciously think the rules apply to other people.
People who demand to come into closed stores and restaurants are not the exception. What’s even crazier is when you turn one away, anyone who has seen the door open even though the person was told no and didn’t get inside suddenly decides that maybe if THEY pound on the door, they’ll magically get access!
Oh man, my partner made a somewhat popular weapon calculator spreadsheet for Elden Ring, and the number of random Google Sheets edit requests they received was… quite a lot. (the instructions were right there for people to make a copy of the sheet to edit themselves! that’s how all of these sheets calculators work!) 🤦
I’ve had some of those. I’ve been responding with a link to Louis Rossman’s video and “Please consider limiting your own reddit use.”
Ah, but you see they “improved” modmail recently. It would certainly never go “kaflooey” anymore. It now fails all like “kerpow!” instead… much cooler, you see.
Well, of course, that’s just good engineering.
You see, kerpow!s scale much better than kaflooeys due to cache invalidation problems in the ooey inductors, that’s like first semester knowledge.
I’m not sure if it’s just a load balancing issue. if all of Reddit can only access specific subs, maybe they split their servers that way
but I’m just guessing, because it doesn’t make much sense to go down, when there is less data to process…
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yeah, well, maybe…
usually unexpected situations have unexpected errors. so yeah, you could be right
This makes a lot of sense to me (as an Operations Engineer).
I could imagine the architecture team has low watermark triggers to rescale the architecture, kill and restore hosts, or other changes based on expected user load. When that load just… isn’t there, the automated tooling just loops the same actions causing site instability.
I’ve had similar issues before, so it seems like a feasible explanation
I’m having flashback to the early Reddit and Twitter days. Those platforms would get a ton of press os buzz on a random day, then they would explode.
The fail whale was iconic back in the day.
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If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
It’s like the kids today don’t know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?
Dunno. I’ve never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.
? why are you pinging me
Hey man, seem like a cool dude. Who wouldn’t want to ping you? Keep being awesome my dude
Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month
@Gaywallet Replying in your mega-thread. KBin here is tagging you when I do that and I didn’t delete it.
Haven’t used Lemmy much, perhaps that behaviour is different?
I paid for the Apollo app when I used iOS, and I do not regret it in the slightest, because I’ve never been paid for any of the programming I’ve ever done. In fact, it’s all been done under the auspice of a student loan that I never earned a degree from. I’m happy to see someone get paid for their programming work and the fact that a multi-billion dollar company is trying to extort these programmers disgusts me to the highest level.
This made my day, as a person in your situation i can relate this…
I actually like the Reddit app (which apparently makes me the only one), but I’m not for Reddit fucking everyone over.
I think you may actually be the only one. whoa. I’ve never downloaded it so I wouldn’t know. But doesn’t it have ads? Because I hate ads so much and would never use an app that pushed them. Fuck ads honestly, I actually put in a good amount effort to make sure I see exactly 0 minutes of ads per day.
Yeah, my wife uses the official app and she complains about the ads. Constantly, certain subreddit posts show up in her feed as an ad.
I tried the official app and didn’t like it. It was too bloaty, comment chains felt annoying, navigation was annoying, lack of features was annoying.
I initially used Reddit Is Fun, then moved to Sync for some reason. Then moved to Boost after the Sync dev went MIA last year.
Each one of those was leagues above the official app.
Thats funny my wife had the official app for a while and deleted it when I showed her Sync, I didn’t even realize she wasn’t using Sync to browse reddit i just assumed she did and never asked. I used Sync for years and years. Alien Blue I think before that. I assumed reddits app probably looked something like they’re new browser site and I hated that thing. I only ever used old.reddit with RES. Now I’ll never go back there again if I don’t have a good reason too.
If you’re on Android and tech-handy you can remove the ads from the official app with Revanced Patcher.
I used it for a good long while but what inevitably pushed me away were the absurd loading times and the ads. Things just took forever to load. Like, multiple minutes to watch a video, even more to load a subreddit. And there were ads every 5 posts.
@TheButtonJustSpins It’s like letting oligarchs monopolize the means of communication is a bad idea or something!? Who knew.
Have you even tried the alternatives? This might just be a “not knowing any better” situation
Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Oh, they know. They just don’t care.
The mobile web interface sucks diarrhea geysers, so yeah, those of us who use our phones more than our, ahem, desktop terminals prefer an app that’s actually optimized for mobile.
@CeruleanRuin their website says right there on the nag popup. This website is deliberately user hostile, to drive you all onto the app where you can be efficiently transported towards the rotating knives.
I mostly just didn’t look at Reddit much to avoid the trap.
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.
At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem
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!!
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.
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.
I don’t like eating any kind of shit
This is some terrific no context life advice.
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
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.
I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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All those OnlyFans links and not a single photo of a fan!
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist the dad joke.)
"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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
