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Yeah, don’t hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:
The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.
Great interview from Christian there, it really is so frustrating that Reddit is and has been so hostile towards him. :(
Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol
The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.
Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he’s doing his job perfectly. He’s looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He’s put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He’s a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.
Ah, the business world.
Fucks over Ellen Pao so that all hatred is directed at her, discovers a few years later that corporate can do the same to him.
surprisedpikachu
Although, I think he hasn’t actually learned this yet and still believes he’s doing a great job. His comments a few years ago about how he “sees [himself] as a leader, rather than a slave” speak to his arrogance (and also his weird philosophies; I’m pretty sure this is a dude who unironically considers himself a real life Hank Rearden… shiver).
It’ll actually be really funny if they just knock him out of the way just before the IPO. CEO makes bad decisions and proves to be a liability. IPO not looking as profitable. Get rid of CEO to gain trust from investors? Launch IPO. Take the money and run. Of course, the decisions were on them as well, but of course they’ll claim no credit for it.
I’m sure he has contingencies in place, but still. It would be a hilarious end to his tenure if something like that happened.
This is pretty much what I was going to say. I don’t think that people understand quite how the pseudo libertarian tech bro mentality still permeates this space, and in particular with reddit. The site has always been this way, so if you’ve been around for a while, you’ve been around to this play out many times. Free speech is some absolutely inviolate principle that requires reddit to platform pedophiles (jailbait) and pics of dead kids, until it’s not because it gets bad press and starts to affect financials and some overlord steps in, and then, just like in the real world, when my libertarian ideal starts to negatively impact me, it goes out the window. Repeat ad nauseum.
These people also tend to think that every bit of success they have is only because of them, even though in the case of reddit, most of the success that it’s had has happened in spite of them. One of Reddit’s defining aspects used to be ama’s. Reddit fired the person responsible for making them great. Reddit completely missed mobile even more than Twitter did, and then when they finally got there they did it poorly and can still attribute most of the success to third party developers. Nothing really since the core product stabilized in like 2008 has been meaningful, it’s been about the community the entire time.
I would still be willing to bet that spez and reddit think that their rugged individualist genius is the reason that reddit is as big when that’s all largely happened in spite of them. None of them will admit the truth - they had a good basic idea at the right time, and they’ve succeeded since based on the backs of a bunch of people they’ll never give credit to, and as soon as they stop listening to those people they fade from relevance. And even though they have plenty examples to look to (the juxtaposition of this compared to twitter is really something) they don’t learn from it.
I disagree that the punching bag strategy is effective - even looking beyond the obvious example w/ knock-on effects Elon has done from Twitter -> Tesla, you’ve got Adam Neumann w/ WeWork, Travis Kalanick w/ Uber, etc. who’ve taken similar personality deflection strategies - it only caused more long-term harm than good for both medium-term operations and brand reputation.
It’s not a sustainable strategy and it’s pretty cringy to see it happen from an investor perspective.
He should opensource it, then. Someone else will do it.
I’m pretty he just wants to go take a week long nap before answering any more questions.
Has anyone considered creating a bridging API interface for lemmy? Something that can translate between the lemmy and reddit API to make this easier?
Still new, but this was gaining a bit of traction a few days ago:
Do you know if there’s a drop-in replacement for PRAW in the works? It would be nice to be able to port bots over easily for communities that relied on them.
I’m surprised how quickly I’ve adapted to fediverse, Mastodon just didn’t fill-in for twitter in the way that the lemmy instances have, once I learned how they work together.
Now that I have gotten over the first hump, it feels new and exciting enough to make up for the lack of diverse content. I really think lemmy/kbin can be the ones that push forward an interoperable internet.
Presumably it’s only going to get better over time. I was afraid I’d lose this part of the internet when Reddit went full corpo, but to be honest the quality of discussion on Lemmy makes up for the diminished content.
Honestly, my discussions have been nicer over here on the fediverse than they were on most parts of Reddit.
It’s like small town, big city. Smaller communities are usually happier and more friendly.
I do want it to continue growing, but I will be enjoying it while it lasts.
For sure. Which is another great thing about this decentralization. If it a community gets too big and has too many asshats, you can easily break off into another instance!
I don’t think Lemmy will be immune to that, but I think the decentralization will help a lot in controlling that negative aspect.
Yeah, it’s 'cuz we’re all the bleeding-edge nerds. The best people, in my opinion. ;)
I agree, the inherit fragmentation in the fediverse architecture has a certain negative impact on the microblogging experience for me (but I still won’t go back to a centralized platform ever again), but for Lemmy/kbin it fits perfectly. Link aggregation sites are already fragmented into separate communities by design.
Yepp, it works surprisingly well. I assume one of the similar communities will eventually “win” on one of the instances, like with similar subreddits over time. Also some instances will go full specific, like nature or movies or gaming etc. See the growth of lemmynsfw already, lol.
I’m really liking it a lot. I wasn’t too amused by Mastodon either, but as you say: for link aggregation, for specific communities, for discussing topics (and not being about people, but about topics) this is a perfect match.
I even view the fragmentation problem in niche communities as a feature not a bug. Don’t like the coffee community on one instance? Try checking out the coffee community on a different instance. You might like the second group of people better
Seeing as you’ve mentioned it, do you happen to know of any coffee communities on here?
Edit: I’ve found !coffee@lemmy.world
Same. Ive already started using lemmy as a place to find solutions to my problems. I just dont google “problem reddit”. I go to lemmy search bar and browse “specific keyword not working”. Been working with certaib topics, and its only gonna get better from now on
Oh yeah, Lemmy has a usable search bar! Kinda forgot that it can be useful after using Reddit for so long.
What I am also doing is when the solution is only on reddit, I will create a new topic with it in a lemmy instance.
Also important topics should be backed up in internet.archive.
I tried searching for top 10 eyelash extension brands for dogs on lemmy and it didn’t find anytthing pfft
Oh that’s good to know, I’ll be doing the same now! 😄
I said it elsewhere, but I fuckin like Lemmy man. I’m glad I found it, regardless of how/why I did.
Same. Good mobile and desktop UI, and a passionate community are big wins here.
Try a calckey instance for a nice Twitter-like fediverse experience.
Same for me
AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.
I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.
Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.
Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.
The askhistorians subreddit and it’s mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I’ve seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.
But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.
I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.
Not to worry, every post and comment on reddit has been archived, and is freely available as a 2tb torrent on Academic Torrents.
Is there an easy way to access this? I wanted to point out to some older reddit posts.
Oh, I hope so as well, that sub is absolutely precious. When people talked about nuking their account(which I get it) it was for post like those that I feared for.
I’ve checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don’t necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren’t the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; © much, much smaller than Reddit.
People say Lemmy is too complicated for most people, well that’s probably a good thing as it naturally filters out the people who only want to incite anger for upvotes. There’s no love on Reddits main subreddits anymore
Also it’s not that hard to understand anyway.
In terms of complexity, becoming conversant enough in how Lemmy works to do basic things feels on par with IRC. The expectations about how easy it is to hop on a service and start using it have shifted significantly because of the centralization of the past couple of decades, but the evidence available from comparing the tone of Reddit to here suggests the speed bump is helpful.
I disagree, it’s easy to say that a barrier to entry is good because it keeps out trolls and those that just want to insight hate, but really those people will find a way when anything gets popular enough to bother with. Meanwhile, that same barrier prevents a lot of underserved people joining in and they’re left to deal with the same toxic people we’re trying to avoid ourselves.
The centralised services didn’t succeed because they were centralised, they succeeded because they lowered the barrier to entry drastically. It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re centralised, but that’s something we’ll have to overcome if we want this community and others like it to succeed. Otherwise we’ll just slowly die inside our own echo chamber.
Agree and disagree … when we say “people shouldn’t have to learn anything to use a technology,” that shifts any focus on better education to dumber services.
I think it’s not necessarily just dumber or more impatient people who can be soft-locked out by this, though. People who are too short on time to put a lot into hobbies (e.g. single mom working two jobs, and others with very busy irl lives) or learning a new unfamiliar system may also be left out, or older people with a anxieties or self-defeating beliefs about their ability to learn. And remembering here also that we are used to learning new internet systems, but that’s a skill in itself even though it feels easy to us.
Leaving people on platforms that have ad-drive, hate-elevating algorithms also has consequences for all of us when it comes to politics and conspiracy spread.
Technology is a tool, and the tool should be as intuitive to a human newly encountering it as possivle, imo. If people make the same mistakes or have the same confusion with something again and again, it means the system is badly designed for humans, not that the humans are dumb.
I don’t get where all this talk of the Fediverse being daunting to learn comes from. I thought it would be like setting DIP switches on a dot matrix printer…but I selected my usual username, provided email for backup, short summary of why I’m here - bam! Connecting to the rest of the Verse, how it’s all interconnected, well, that’s a titch more involved - but to me it’s just registering again at lemmy or kbin, and I can link things up when I have the time.
The analogy of continents/states/counties/towns sums it up well. There was a really good post at reddit summarizing things.
You’re right Lemmy is going to take a bit to get used to, but the kicker for me (and maybe a lot of people) is going to be at the end of the month when the 3rd party apps shut down. I’m either going to have to get used to something new either way, whether it be Lemmy or the official Reddit app and my understanding is that the official app is littered with ads and promotions that no one cares about so I probably won’t even bother.
Yeah. I’m not willing to use the official Reddit app. I tried for a day, and it was terrible. Using Lemmy with Jerboa feels natural, because the interface is very similar to the app I used for Reddit - Boost. There are communities I will miss, but it’s nice to actually see the fediverse start to grow, and participate in it. It’s hard to change from being a lurker to actually commenting, but the community feels more tight-knit.
They’re going to start adding ads targeted to comments and posts by keywords used in those comments/posts, too. Which obviously sounds horrendous.
I’m old and easily bamboozled by all this newfangled tech, and at first the whole fediverse thing was overwhelming. But eventually I realized it was not too different than an MMO’s multiple servers, and the idea of cross-realm and connected realms, and it functions not that much differently than a network mesh. You have multiple stand-alone nodes that are capable of cross-communications, so participate in a shared experience, and if one of the nodes goes down, the network will work around it.
It’s really not complicated once you give yourself time to think. And as long as the interface allows for the aggregation of random tidbits of data as we were accustomed to with Reddit, how the technology feeds that is not something the average user needs to worry about.
The only real difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that there is a bit more “hard wiring” that needs to be done by the user in order to set up a custom feed on Lemmy, but other than that, the user experience isn’t dreadfully different once the dust settles.
I appreciate talking to people from all walks, though. If a community wants to filter people it should be explicit and on purpose.
@CanadaPlus @Senseibu well I’m reading this on mastodon, so that’s pretty wild.
In general, it’s probably going to be difficult for a community to filter people out
And I can see this back on Lemmy. Fascinating!
I’m pretty sure you could still be banned from Technology@beehaw.org. I wonder how that would show up back on Mastodon?
I’ve been really enjoying the Mlem client on iOS as well. Definitely still has a long way to go but it’s a wonderful start
Where do you find the key to activate it on TestFlight?
This iOS App Store link should automatically handle that: https://testflight.apple.com/join/xQfmkJhc
Appreciate it. Thanks!
No problem! Fair warning, it crashes pretty frequently for me so I’m mostly sticking with the browser for now. Also it expands every post in your feed, so you need to scroll through the introduction post stickied to the top of lemmy.world every time you reload the app.
I’m going to keep checking the app out though since it’s a nice start and is clearly gonna improve.
Mlem is awesome, been really fun to engage and grow with this new community
I’m really hoping that lemmy can see a larger uptick in engagement. I know I should be the change I want to see in the world. However the thing I miss the most is pointless arguments in the comments section. :D
No you don’t.
That’s not an argument. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
No it’s not.
Yes it is.
Sorry, is this the five minute course or the full half-hour?
An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
It’s like going back to an abusive relationship…🤣…ahhhh feels like home
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Well I think it’s stupid and pointless that you miss pointless arguments. Are we doing it right?
Ohh for sure!
What you just want substance in your life? No debates over if Captain Picard could kick Luke Skywalkers ass? Everyone knows it’s Picard all the way. :D
To me Reddit was always the comments and less about the news story. The pulse of what was happening in your country, or town, or hobby, etc. I’m sure that will happen here on Lemmy too in time.
Did you just say Pickard can kick Skywalkers ass? Luke is a jedi. And a trained knight who has fought many battles.
Pickard is a desk jockey who sits in a fancy chair. It’s not even close.
Sure, the enterprise can best the falcon, but in a 1v1, there is zero chance of Pickard taking out Luke
I think you’re underestimating Picard. Like, not only was the man a wild punk in his youth before Starfleet straightened him out, but it’s shown throughout the series that he’s more than capable of bluffing opponents with access to things like literal time travel.
If nothing else, if he fights Luke, he’s not going to fight on Luke’s terms if he can help it.
Bluffing isn’t going to stop a lightsabre through the face.
In all honesty, I’m probably over estimating Pickard. Luke can force choke him from across the room while Pickard is doing his fancy speech
You mean the same Luke Skywalker who threw his lightsaber away while confronting the most powerful men in the galaxy on board their planet-killing superweapon? And also tried to talk down the ruthless crime lord who had both his sister and her boyfriend as hostages? :P
But wouldn’t they both win as neither would want to even fight the other so there wouldn’t be a battle to begin with?
There’s no need to get into a fight when you can call for a site to site transport an intransigent Jedi into a hard vacuum.
“Mr. Worf, please facilitate Mr. Skywalker coming to a more complete understanding as to the relativity of his position by transporting his lower spine two feet to the left.”
We haven’t established the parameters of this fight well. If outside/friend help is not allowed, Skywalker wins. If outside help is allowed: Picard wins
Also it is canon now that jedi can survive a hard vacuum for a moment at least, per Leia in The Last Jedi (iirc). But Picard is definitely smarter so he’d find a way I think. Probably.
Hard vacuum is survivable for a short amount of time, but The Force won’t really help Luke if he’s half a light minute away from the closest breathable atmosphere.
What IT related communities have you found? Keeping up with tech news was one of my primary reasons for keeping in Reddit. I’ve found a few things here, but not a ton. I’ll gladly take any suggestions
The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’
There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
That’s an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I’m not surprised, but man, whoever’s running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.
If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Is he wrong though?
We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don’t really care about third party apps, a lot didn’t even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.
For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.
so - as one of those people who really didn’t know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you’re downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the “dissenting” opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don’t think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I’m not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind… for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it’s not happening.
Yes… I feel the same way. We will see. The last big blowup there was not a place to go (I went to voat for awhile, but it was just another walled garden filled with a certain type of vibe I did not really like that much). Lemmy seems pretty good now. We all know that moderation and a heavy “Do not feed the trolls” has always been the rule all the way back to Usenet and the early internet. One reason I choose Behaw is they seem to believe in that basic philosophy. Plus federation, people that do not like that, they can go to instances where they are happy too. Seems win win.
The big counter issue is scale. There are some areas where Lemmy does not cover well. These tend to be technical areas like Law.
I wish Lemmy had a really easy way for people to self host their own instances without having to know really much of anything at all about how it works (or at least an easy and comprehensive Guide to Self-hosting for Dummies!), so that we were less likely to end up with too many people on too few instances.
I’ve never self-hosted anything, and I know I could learn it, but it’s still a project.
I do some self hosting for my own projects… if you want to and have the time an resources it is fun in a way. It is trivial to start with 1 thing so try it out. Probably your OS already has servers installed.
However it is my opinion that it is better, for the most part, for most people to use tools hosted externally. There are economies of scale. It would really be truely stupid for masses of people to all have their own little homelabs. And being an admin is a serious trade with a lot of skills and it is a time sink. And it is risky. If we are doing stuff online that we want to last, that is important, there are reasons to leave it to smarty pants nerds. Just like home maintenece or health care or hair cuts… there is a role for hobby DIY and a role for getting a pro.
If you cant parse the documentation to figure out how to set it up, you are not competant to do it. The software is not ready to be run by a person of your skill level. And im not saying that to be shitty to you; i looked at the requirements and i think it would be more than i have the time/knowledge to do. I have tried and failed for this reason at lots of things.
This is really complex project. Try something simpler Here is a list (simple to ultra complicated): https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
There are a couple of selfhost(ed) communities on lemmy too
Wrong? No. But leadership is about communication and diplomacy as much as strategy. Short term gameplay aside, it doesn’t take much effort to pretend to attempt to placate power users and it doesn’t cost anything besides pride to do so. At least Reddit had a half-decent communication strategy with the Boston Bomber debacle - can’t say the same with this one.
In any case, whilst you won’t get the r/funny’s of Reddit going private indefinitely, you do have some big ones like r/iphone saying they’re blacking out immediately.
It’s pretty myopic of the leadership team to think that you shouldn’t at least attempt to make an user relations play here.
it seems no-one on Reddit’s leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.
Which is good news for us because even if this does blow over they will fuck up again and every time it happens we’ll profit from it in new users. Spez’s problem isn’t that his dream is unattainable, his problem is that the person having that dream is him.
I’m pretty sure his dream is just to make increasingly absurd amounts of money, every year more than the last: Line Go Up, forever. That dream is attainable in the short term, but utterly unattainable in the long term on a planet with finite resources.
He’s just in it for the $$$, regardless of how, not for any of the things that’re good about reddit. Someone who cared about reddit for any other reason wouldn’t do this to it.
Everything passes. Including reddit. waves hands this is all just temporary.
Type O Negative - Everything Dies has surprisingly fitting lyrics for the search of people for a place to stay.
I wasn’t familiar with the band and for whatever reason based on the names I had thought it was going to be either an indie pop or a folk punk song.
I was not expecting I LIKE VITAMIIIIIIIIIINS to be growled at me like that, I had a good laugh.
I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.
The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.
/r/ModCoord thread working on extending the blackout beyond tomorrow, as a response to Steve’s email: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
That’s great news 👏. I really hope most of the subs currently participating end up going indefinite. Especially with Spez shrugging off the whole thing in the media.
People commenting on there calling them lame for trying to protect the communities that they care about. Yet these idiots use the platform (for free) and just gobble up promotions and ads from daddy corporate and say thank you
this is a great interview with Christian, fyi, for people who haven’t seen it yet
He is MUCH more diplomatic and polite than I would be.
Then again, he’s Canadian and I’m an American lol
Smart of him not to set the bridge on fire before he’s made it all the way across.
True, though I kind of want to watch the bridge burn at this point. Reddit deserves it.
I mean, he doesn’t have to light the match, the bridge is already aflame. He’s just pointing out he’s not holding the match.
Nova Scotian, even. He could have gone full on Trailer Park Boys on them but went more sort of Mr Dressup route.
Great article, thanks for sharing. It’s a real shame that Reddit seems so determined to just force all the changes through and have no dialogue with the community.
Props to The Verge and David Pierce for his coverage of the redditing in general. I have been critical of the Verge and Patel in the past, but since the big site changes I have been forced to admit that the changes have been for the better.
It looks like the URL you shared contains trackers. Here’s a shorter, cleaned-up URL:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-private-apollo-christian-selig-subreddit
I’m glad to see there’s been more of a push for previously ‘48 hours only’ subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.
I’m not giving up. 11 year account deleted. I might read stuff on Reddit from time to time, but it will be without an account, in a private tab, through a vpn, with an ad blocker on.
hang on, what leaked internal email, do you know where I can find that?
i want to call complete BS on them making it out like the Redditors protesting would physically assault the staff. Guess that’s probably a reasonable thing now though. People are whacked in the head.
Seems on brand after the CEO doubled down on falsely accusing the Apollo dev of blackmail, even though the Apollo dev posted the recordings proving otherwise.
Yep. That was the point I became what he calls a ”whiny “ person and deleted my account.
He wasn’t content on slandering the Apollo Dev, now he’s slandering all of us
I thought that was quite an escalation also. But maybe their health & safety committee reccomended it. Probably just trying to make the workers feel embattled and unsafe so they would avoid engaging with the issues and stay to reddits side. Its a PUA kind of doublespeak; spez is the one actually making the threat. But in a way it seems to come from us.
To be a fly on the wall at the water cooler. Please reddit workers, leak a zoom call.
Well in a world where people will attack a fast food worker for their order being wrong, it’s probably prudent to make sure the employees you are responsible for are protected.
I wonder if things are as tense as was shown in that video from reddit HQ.
was hovering over the link like “is this going to be a rick roll or something?”
so I click it and YES this is literally what I was imagining. not the rick roll, the previous comment. fucking brilliant. in the comments it says it is the last post to /r/videos
a lot of people mentioning ./ and digg here. on ./ there was this “first post” joke. it was very boring even at that time IMHO. but now is the moment to be thinking about “last post” if you are a person who has “last post” powers.
It at least seems like an attempt to push an “us” vs. “them” mentality.
i like the part where he implies that redditors are so deranged they will physically assault his employees.
there are also a lot of subreddits that went readonly. which doesn’t hurt much. when the first google result for something is a functional readonly reddit page, reddit has succeeded. When the first result I click is a message about the issue we’re facing that is much worse for reddit.
At the same time, the couple of subs posting the images and only the images are causing /r/all to have some anti-reddit commentary.
Either way, r/all doesnt look that different. Ok, normal-reddit-for-thing isnt on the front page, instead smaller-reddit-for-thing is there.
I’m sure moderators will plan more, but I think it’s going to be difficult to maintain coordination and whether I like it or not, I get reddits approach to just ignore this.
It’s functional for the users, but not for Reddit who wants more data/engagement.
But yeah, the smaller reddit thingy is true. r/thesims4 was open when r/sims4 was not.
Sadly, most of my subs don’t really care about the Reddit drama, and I can’t find anything replacing them here. But at the same time… I kinda realized I don’t really miss them, and overall getting away from Reddit feels like a good thing for my mental health. For now, I think my lights stay out at Reddit, and it will be replaced by a mix and match of lemmy stuff and old school forums. And maybe discord for some special live events.
So while the blackout and all that happened leading up to it didn’t really change my Reddit experience, it changed my overall feeling about Reddit as a platform. Let’s see how this will hold up.
That’s my situation as well. Out of curiosity I went into reddit today to see how different it would look. It’s close to the same. A lot of the subs I go to are in the “Yeah it sucks but we’re small so we won’t make a dent so fuck it…” other subs like /r/games with their BS excuse of “we support it but don’t want to do anything about it”. Overall, kind of the same. Kind of makes me sad
All you can do is be the change you want to see and work on starting competing communities. Before long things will settle out.
Wherever you go, there you are.
There is only one sub I use that has not attempted to do anything about the API issue. They stickied a post forwarded to an explanation of what is happening in support of the blackout, but it is an important time period for us so no one was going to allow a full shut down. It’s one of the few non-toxic places to discuss our fandom. Beyond that sub, the others don’t matter much to me.
r/starfield?
No, it’s actually for BTS, the kpop group. It’s their 10 year anniversary today so celebrations have been going on for the past week or so. Unfortunately, a lot of kpop-based subs are toxic due to fan wars, antis, and the parasocial (also, music subs in general snub their nose at the group because they don’t realize the lyrics are all about mental health, societal commentary, etc. and that most of the fandom are adults). All that to say, the sub I am a part of is great at moderating the negativity out and keeping it a positive, chill place of discussion.
Man, sorry, I guess I wrote a lot there instead of just saying no lol.
So, apparently the mod purge started, one of the mods of /r/tumblr confirms getting booted out of the mod team and opening the sub
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Missed it, same thing?
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Not surprised in the least that they’re purging mods here, but I’m a little surprised they’re doing it during these 48 hours. Seems like it’d be a better move to at least wait until the protest ends before cracking down on delinquent subs/mods. Not that reddit has done anything to suggest that they’d act intelligently in this.
Saw that coming.
But r/tumbler is currently private
This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.
However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.
To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.
Just my 1/2 cents.
Spez has told Reddit staff that the Reddit blackout “will pass”.
He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.
A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.
The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.
There are a couple of subreddits that will go blackout indefinitely. I think r/video is one of them, and it’s quite big. This can be annoying for the platform.
They can, and probably will, replace the mods I wager
But a bunch of people will be permanently gone by then I hope
As others mentioned, if any worthwhile subreddit goes dark, then the mods will be replaced and it’ll be brought back.
Creating some noise works only if anyone is listening and willing to respond and enact change. Absolutely not in this scenario. The sad reality is the vocal ones are in the minority in the grand scheme of things. The 50k people leaving is, probably, pocket change and aren’t the ones that the platform is geared towards nowadays.
Excellent, I can only hope more join them.
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I think lemmy is pretty much at the number of users now where it can self propagate. I dont care what happens to reddit past this point, as long as lemmy stays active
Agree. It is not about negotiating. The point is we need a open Forum platform. Usenet use to be that platform, and it got shutdown basically by ISPs that did not want the cost and hassle. Then everything fragmented into separate websites, then it re-consolidated around one commercial platform for each segment. I.E. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Youtube, Instagram, … That is the fundamental problem. The Fediverse frankly is the only thing I have seen to at least makes a credible try to change that. ALL of these should be decentralized or federated, one or the other.
Other point I would make, Forums have a lot less network effect then friends networks like Facebook. My point is that less scale is required.
Blacking out indefinitely won’t change a thing. Reddit has before and will again, if threatened this way, re-open shuttered subs if they believe it is valuable for their bottom line.
Agreed, but I don’t think negotiating is going to do anything. If they were to negotiate, it would likely only work temporarily. They would likely just changes the terms of the deal when it suits them.
I really feel like Reddit is in “pumping money out of the users” mode at their own expense.
Sadly the only solution feels like parting ways with them.
Maybe so. It wouldn’t be the first time - I’ve left platforms that have gone downhill before and I’ll do it again. But it is psychologically difficult to let go of a site that I’ve used for over a decade and made so many connections through. That’s how they get you I suppose, the sunk cost fallacy.
For sure. I feel the same way. I feel like I’ve developed hobbies from niche subreddits I’ve discovered over the years. Makes me wonder what other interests I could get into if I stuck it out. But I won’t be doing that with their horrible mobile app, or to be spammed to use the mobile app every time I access the site from a mobile browser.
I’ve made my peace with it and I’m going to move on.
Not to mention, it doesn’t feel like the blackout did anything either. I opened up r/all on Sync just now and it didn’t feel any different than it did a week ago besides a bunch of posts that say that Reddit is killing 3rd-party apps.
Yeah, I noticed the same. All it really showed me was how many subs didn’t black out…
Being out for a few days or a week could be enough for a disapera to form and go elsewhere. For me, I am finding Lemmy and Mastodon are more usable. If even 1% go to Lemmy or Masatadon, a critical mass might be established and people will stay.
The blackout is definitely having an impact on Reddit traffic, especially the level of commenting on posts. Look at https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/ and the posts and comments per minute. The comments are usually up to the top or above the number of posts and they are way down. Posts overall are way down as well.
Hmmm the effect is not as dramatic as I was anticipating. Am I reading this right? Say the daily average in comments/minute is around 5k: seems the average today is around 4k. A 20% dip only. Not much compared to 50+% of the subreddits going dark :(
Yes, but most of the traffic is from people going to the front page and seeing /all (this is what I read yesterday, I am assuming it is correct). My guess is most visitors who use Reddit’s apps or go in through the browser are not participating in the blackout, or maybe don’t care, so there will still be a large number of posts. The people supporting the blackout likely make up a large percentage of users who comment on new posts, and that is way down. I’m seeing a lot of posts, but far fewer comments on those posts.
Not to mention the sudden impact of reddit cutting off all 3rd party access on the 30th/1st.
It’s unclear how useful aggregate post and comment totals are in terms of measuring the effect of the blackout on content.
I feel comfortable saying that 80% of Reddit content on my subscribed subreddits has no impact on my day or understanding of life. Thus, the question becomes what 20% has been lost.
Yes, good point. I really feel something like this is more of a building surge, rather than a tsunami. A lot of us leaving is not going to sink them in the near term, but they will slowly see an erosion of quality posts and more importantly quality comments. I’ve heard they really want to monetize access to all the conversations for data harvesting, and if the overall quality of that drops, the whole thing is worth a lot less.
I see it ending up like Facebook
That’s why the blackout really needs to be indefinite.
I agree. Let’s see if the mods have the stomach to keep the subreddit’s dark indefinitely. I also wonder if Reddit will just take over the larger subs and install new mods?
One thing to note that noticable amount of Reddit traffic is actually bots and they’re not taking time off. Be it legit bots or bots farming karma to peddle corporate ads later.
Also remember that the 50% figure (and all figures on that page) are only taking into account the top 1000 SFW and 500 NSFW subreddits. So while it may appear that 50% of them are dark, a lot of the more medium subs may be staying open
This website seems to be down for me right now, dunno where else we can see comments and posts numbers. All the other blackout trackers seem to just be tracking #subreddits
It seems to be up for me, but I imagine it is getting a lot of traffic.
I just used Power Delete Suite to remove all my comments and submissions
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I am just a drop in the ocean, but I won’t be going back to reddit now that’s I’ve discovered the fediverse
this feels like the internet I fell in love with back in the mid 90s with smaller communities and no corporations trying to control what I interact with
oh man I’d love to run that but I feel it’d be wrong to purge all of the technical answers I’ve posted over the years. I think it’s better to pass on that one
You can filter by subreddit in Power Suite Delete, so if your tech answers are in specific subs, you can leave those alone and delete everything else
it had an option to export your comments into a .csv, so theoretically you could post them elsewhere if you want
but that could be a lot of work so I understand just leaving comments as they are
Archiving copies of my Reddit history would be nice, but here’s a somewhat idiotic question.
I use commas in copy a lot, so a CSV file sounds like a nightmare. How’s that handled?
Csv is not always comma delimited. It could also be delimited with a tab, semicolon, or pipe (|)
Isn’t a tab delimeted spreadsheet normally called a TSV, as in “Tab-Separated Values”?
Isn’t CSV literally Comma-Separated Values?
Sorry, pedantry doesn’t die.
A little bit yes, a little bit no
Tab delimited csv are sometimes called tsv, but just as often you’ll see csv (tab delimited) as a file type option
See the wiki section on standardization for details.
Csv currently includes the following delimiters:
Comma, space, tab, pipe, or semicolon
I believe CSV format has quoting rules. Hope the software understands them. :)
so I just looked at the .csv it spat out, it encloses everything in quotes. here is what it looks like with the actual details changed:
“Title”,“Body”,“Permalink”,“Score”,“Timestamp UTC”,“Actions”,
“”,“example comment start, example comment middle, example comment end”,“https…/”,“2”,“1686084708”,"deleted ",
HOWEVER, looking at this .csv I don’t think it actually exported all of my comments. I don’t really care about saving my reddit comments but I’m 99% sure it is missing my oldest comments from this account so use at your own risk I suppose
it did a wonderful job of deleting everything though, my account looks totally empty from the profile page
Considering doing what someone else suggested and editing all your comments to explain why you left, to mess with the data it has access to rather than outright removing it
Haha this sounds like such an amazing F you to reddit.
This is what I did, too. I even included a little blurb about Lemmy.
I suspect the account might just get banned and comments deleted, but nevertheless they were (or will be) there for at least a little while, and it removed my participation in reddit’s profit machine. It was oh so satisfying to do even if it only had a super small impact.
Just kicked it off on my account, it’s currently rewriting every Reddit comment I ever made. Feels good.
