[HN Gopher] Reddit's blackout protest is set to continue indefin...
___________________________________________________________________
Reddit's blackout protest is set to continue indefinitely
Author : rajeevk
Score : 616 points
Date : 2023-06-15 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| ekun wrote:
| I haven't seen people mention it really, but isn't this all in
| response to ChatGPT deriving a lot of it's content from Reddit?
|
| I know that Google search has gotten so bad in the last couple
| years that I normally have to add "reddit" to the search terms to
| get a good result.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| No it's reddits most engaged users don't use the reddit app
| with all the ads like reddit wants you to.
|
| If it was ChatGPT they could just manually approve api use for
| the few popular clients
| nph278 wrote:
| And reddit.com is down again
| perlgeek wrote:
| I supports the blackout.
|
| Yet, addicted me still occasionally opens reddit. And all the
| content I see is from communities that did not black out, or
| returned, so all the content is from communities that at least a
| part of my says I shouldn't want to see.
|
| Kinda kills the fun.
| stephenitis wrote:
| I feel you too, the boycott is hard.
| Applejinx wrote:
| That's my experience as well. Certain subs didn't black out,
| disappointing me (just about everything I used did, though). I
| can take a peek and what I see is a smaller number that
| returned, and in some cases I have sympathy (certain kinds of
| support forum) and in some cases it permanently affected my
| take on the sub.
|
| It's made me wonder why I've spent time shoveling engagement
| and words into the maw of a machine that didn't turn out to be
| the people I thought I was hanging out with. I spent a YEAR of
| my life traveling great distances to pursue a long-distance
| relationship I literally found on Reddit. That relationship
| turned out to not be as healthy as I wanted to believe it
| was...
|
| ...same with Reddit. More's the pity.
| bluetidepro wrote:
| @mods can we update this link to the real article and not just
| going to reddit? https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-
| blackout-date-end-...
| probably_wrong wrote:
| FYI, The Independent redirects based on location. I am not
| surprised to learn that Bill Cosby has been sued by 9 women in
| Nevada, but that's probably not what you wanted me to read
| about.
|
| If the link is changed, it would be better to do it to an
| archive version. Here's one: https://archive.is/NcsuT
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Good, it should continue until spez admits he needs to step down
| permanently.
|
| By the way, which Lemmy instance is the HN crowd gravitating
| towards? Programming.dev?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Social media is one of those bizarre parts of the internet. If
| one social media site becomes unpopular, literally everyone will
| just leave and go to another one. Friendster, Myspace, Facebook,
| all abandoned once something "cooler" came around, and nobody
| wants to sit around on a platform none of their friends are on.
|
| That said, I could really give a crap if any of these sites goes
| away. I'm only here for the articles, and these sites aren't
| generating them, they're just linking them.
| Logans_Run wrote:
| Would it be possible to create a read-only instance that was
| federated with every single other instance? Possibly there is
| already one or it's been tried and didn't work but the way I
| envision it is this -
|
| You sign up to the read-only instance and can see the entire
| fediverse's contents and posts and when/if you wanted to comment,
| the app would let you know that you had to sign up to the
| instance the comment came from to post your own comment and take
| you that instance's sign-up page.
|
| One of the biggest turn-offs for me was finding which ones to
| join and/or had content I was or might be interested in.
| DropInIn wrote:
| On the topic of alternatives:
|
| The current options suck.
|
| A proposal to address the failures of extant options:
|
| Users hold their own data in the account they use for SSO
|
| Every comment post etc is in your own account, with sites putting
| a request in the page from your SSO host
|
| The front page is defined by your choice of site or SSO provider.
|
| Eg I have a site and users can login with Google or make an
| account with my SSO provider, when they post a reference pointer
| is stored and the content is "reported" to the SSO provider by
| both the client and server with only those items reported by both
| being "validated" and stored. When site serves page with that
| content it puts in a js snippet that pulls the content item from
| the appropriate server.
|
| This means users have full control over their content, sites
| don't have to host as much content, SSO services have better
| monetization options (Subs or Sales of Data Analysis) while sites
| don't lose thiers, etc
|
| Subforums would just be different servers/sites, with your chosen
| frontend aggregating them all like a new age interactive RSS
| [deleted]
| facet1ous wrote:
| People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you
| really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a
| Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.
| tensor wrote:
| I personally don't care one way or the other about any reddit
| IPO payout. Happy for them if they get paid, reddit has been an
| amazing service for many many years.
|
| What I DO care about is being able to browse without ads and
| recommendations I don't want shoved down my throat. They could
| have done things in a way that preserved 3rd party clients but
| required payment for an ad-free experience. People would be
| mostly fine with that I think.
| WhiteDawn wrote:
| I am curious how this will all settle out in the end. I think the
| majority of users don't really care about the API or subreddits
| going private as they primarily just lurk.
|
| However, the people that do care are the ones that moderate and
| contribute the vast majority of the content that the larger group
| enjoys.
|
| I am pessimistic that the minority here will win out in the end,
| but the majority may begin to lose interest if the quality of new
| content drops.
|
| At least for myself, the blackout gave me enough space away from
| the site to consider if my time on Reddit was valuable/enjoyable
| and basically I concluded it is not worth the time. I've
| uninstalled the app and I haven't really missed a thing.
| pawptart wrote:
| > I think the majority of users don't really care about the API
| or subreddits going private as they primarily just lurk.
|
| I agree. These protests have missed the point. There is a
| (very) loud minority raising hell right now, but spez is right,
| it's just noise. The silent majority is still hanging around.
| x86x87 wrote:
| We'll see. Reddit will not die in 2 weeks that's for sure.
| But some people will leave and maybe a viable alternative
| will surface as a result of this shifty behavior
| tester457 wrote:
| They're a loud minority because they've invested more into
| the platform. It is the 1-9-90 rule in action.
|
| When the 1% leaves the platform's quality will go down.
| floundy wrote:
| My bet is that quality will go up. I'm not really
| interested in reading what the small number of people who
| spend 8+ hours per day on Reddit think, about any topic.
| Hopefully they'll take their silly Reddit mannerisms and
| inside jokes with themselves on the way out.
| tester457 wrote:
| Unfortunately I believe the ones with the Reddit
| mannerisms and overused jokes are the ones that stayed as
| they are too addicted to leave.
|
| The actual creators of content are different from the
| drones.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Now that the initial 48 hours have passed, I would expect Reddit
| to override this at any moment now.
|
| Any subreddits which had not been private previously will revert
| back to public and the ability to change from public to private
| will be temporarily disabled.
|
| It's one thing for management to wait out 48h (doable), it's
| another thing to wait out something "indefinite".
| LordKeren wrote:
| I think even reddit is not arrogant enough to attempt that. It
| would require removing every moderator from every subreddit
| that has gone private at the same time.
|
| Even if reddit forces subreddit's public, the auto-mod script
| to remove all new comments and posts is 2 lines of YAML. Having
| a public site with a bunch of upset and unaccountable mods is
| only inviting them to become bad actors and actively sabotage
| the site, which will do much much more damage than going
| private
| x86x87 wrote:
| Lol. Sure, make it worse and piss people off even more. What
| could possibly go wrong? The best bet reddit has now is to just
| stay quiet.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I guess it depends on how they do it. If reddit simply asks
| mods to step down and let others apply if they don't like the
| new rules, then it takes away some of heated rhetoric.
| [deleted]
| jug6ernaut wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, but this does seem like a pretty
| obvious move for Reddit.
|
| I don't think Reddit cares about appeasing moderators. Though
| with or without this move it will be very interesting to see
| what will happen to Reddit if there is a mass exodus of
| moderators. Moderation is IMO the hardest problem in social
| media, all other platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc) are
| objectively terrible at it. Reddit on the other hand with
| moderation at the micro level vs macro level seems to work.
| But its 100% on the backs of charitable time from unpaid
| users. If that falls apart, I can see it having a devastating
| effect on Reddit as a whole.
| yanderekko wrote:
| There's not going to be a populist revolt against Reddit
| stopping angry mods from destroying their communities and/or
| actively siphoning them to other sites. The people who are
| already angry may get angrier, but they're already leaving so
| who cares?
|
| Once you've chosen Exit as your protest strategy, you lose
| Voice.
| x86x87 wrote:
| I don't think that's true. The numbers of lost mods/members
| will matter. Also, this isn't about having a voice.
| yanderekko wrote:
| My point is that the marginal impact will be negligible.
| The people who would get angry over forced reopenings are
| the people that are already angry over the API changes.
| Why would Reddit care about upsetting the people that are
| already allegedly leaving the site?
| darkstar999 wrote:
| I think they are too smart to override it. See the Streisand
| effect. If the old subreddits go permanently dark, new
| subreddits with mods who don't care about the protest will fill
| the void.
| crazygringo wrote:
| The old subreddits are too valuable both for people's
| existing curated preferences as well as for useful
| information showing up in search results.
|
| There's no universe in which Reddit allows subreddits to go
| permanently dark. Not gonna happen.
| Havoc wrote:
| >I think they are too smart to override it.
|
| All recent evidence to the contrary
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Can't Reddit just un-private all the popular subreddits? Why
| haven't they done this yet?
| anoonmoose wrote:
| because they'd also need to remove the mods who made the subs
| private in the first place lest they just make them private
| again immediately
|
| and removing those mods would/could/should be perceived as an
| escalation in this fight that could make the problem worse not
| better
| zzbzq wrote:
| Doesn't sound that bad, I hope they do it. And word on the
| street is they've started. I'm not really sure why they have
| to even ban the mods. Just tell them it's over and ask them
| if they want to resign, and keep an eye on them incase they
| misbehave.
| anoonmoose wrote:
| I didn't say ban, I said remove, not that I think there's
| much of a difference. I hope they do it too, although I
| expect for entirely different reasons than you do. Funny to
| see "Reddit Delenda Est" come full circle in a way.
|
| I think mods might be a bit like members of US Congress. I
| expect that if you asked redditors if they think the mods
| on reddit are good, they'd say no...unless you asked them
| if the mods of the subreddits they use are good, in which
| case they'd say yes. Not convinced that removing the mods
| and reactivating the subs will go as well as you seem to.
| davelondon wrote:
| Virtually all the useful information about Notion is in the
| reddit group, which is now inaccessible. I sent a message to the
| group's moderators today "come on guys, this is dumb" and they
| reported me for harassment
|
| Reddit really needs to stop this.
| dom96 wrote:
| I'm beginning to think that these kinds of "public utility"
| websites should be run by non-profits. Why is Wikipedia the only
| success story here?
| sdfghswe wrote:
| I'm sure it's not the only reason, but one important reason is
| that because they don't get their revenue from selling ads,
| they resisted enshittification well.
| hanniabu wrote:
| I've put together a comparison of Reddit alternatives if anybody
| is interested:
|
| https://gist.github.com/hanniabu/6f96c6e820d58d8736f3c15d4c0...
|
| There's also some notes above the linked table
| iza wrote:
| Isn't Raddle open source? The footer links to
| https://postmill.xyz/ https://raddle.me/wiki/why_raddle
| ahahahahah wrote:
| The more useful thing to users would be a list of alternatives
| for each closed subreddit. No reddit alternative is going to
| grow to anything useful from this.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| Why not? Typically users of reddit are subscribed to more
| than one subreddit, so migration to a single destination that
| can handle all of those communities seems like an obvious
| choice. The network effect of many users advocating that
| their second favourite community migrate over to the "new
| reddit" seems reasonable once people start to establish a
| userbase there.
| elxr wrote:
| Based on that, Lemmy seems to be the most reasonable
| alternative. Can't believe collapsible comments is so rare,
| that's the main thing (aside from voting) making gigantic
| comment chains readable.
| pgrote wrote:
| When do replacement subreddits start forming? /r/picsnew or
| something.
| starik36 wrote:
| I quit /r/pics long time ago because 90% of the images were
| political. Instead there is /r/nocontextpics/ (which is also
| currently in restricted mode) which is what /r/pics used to be
| a long time ago.
| heyheyhey wrote:
| r/NBATalk is trying to replace r/NBA (r/NBAdiscussion will
| probably grow too)
|
| Haven't seen a decent sized one for r/NFL though
| Simulacra wrote:
| They already have, people who don't care about the API issue
| were creating their own "unlocked" subreddits of popular
| Reddit's that have gone dark
| floren wrote:
| Once enough of those get created, it would probably be more
| harmful to Reddit if the mods then opened up their original
| subreddits. Now users have to pick between /r/foo and
| /r/foo_unlocked. Communities are fragmented.
| paulmd wrote:
| Powerjannies probably aren't too worried. Most users will
| choose the r/foo instead of foo_unlocked especially in the
| 6-month+ timespan.
|
| Building some community of 1000 people is a complete waste
| of time, if it starts to get traction the powerjannies will
| unlock their own communities and maintain their personal
| power/influence.
|
| There simply is no circumstance where building a
| replacement community to bypass the powerjannies' control
| will be a worthwhile use of anyone's time.
|
| If there is a feeling that this is a loud minority waving
| pitchforks and that subreddits that re-open largely go on
| unaffected... the move to bypass the minority has to come
| from reddit themselves, otherwise the powerjannies will
| just regroup and come at it a bit more subtly once they
| realize they're on the losing side. They ain't gonna give
| up that mod slot when they know how much personal power it
| affords them.
|
| And people can say there isn't power in it, or they're in
| it for the community, but, this kind of "keeping it closed
| for everyone because some users don't want it to be open"
| is exactly the kind of thing that gets a powermod all
| bricked up. There's enough power for some people to get a
| thrill out of it.
|
| The current protest falls into a perceived gap in the
| "inactive sub" rules - if a sub is inactive and the mods
| are gone, that sub can be reassigned to new mods and
| reopened. The mods are saying "no, we're not inactive...
| we're just not letting anyone talk, but, there's 1 post a
| week in a private thread, see?". And the reality is that
| even if you accept that's a valid gap in the rules
| (arguably this is already covered by mod reassignment
| rules) this certainly will not be allowed to persist
| forever, Reddit will simply change the rules around what
| constitutes abandonment. The pressure is already on from
| community members who don't feel represented and are
| willing to take over the mod work if the current mods
| simply no longer wish to mod under the new system:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/req
| u...
|
| You can protest at the factory gate all you want, and shame
| people for "crossing the picket line". You can't obstruct
| the actual factory floor, and if that happens the cops will
| remove you. And that's what things are fast coming to with
| the whole situation.
|
| Mods are free to not mod. Users are free to not post.
| That's the "protest at the gate" approach. You can't be
| disruptive on a commercial platform, or you're gonna get
| removed. If mods no longer wish to participate and abandon
| the platform, Reddit is perfectly free to execute its
| "abandoned subreddit" procedures and reopen the sub, or to
| alter those abandoned-subreddit procedures in any way they
| want. If users/mods wish to behave in a disruptive fashion
| because they don't want to be members anymore, they will be
| banned.
|
| And yes, there are people willing to step in and do the
| work too. Powermods are not that special, actually they're
| kinda awful at times.
| baby wrote:
| I said it before, and I'll say it again. This is a huge
| opportunity for Facebook. They sort of tried to do Reddit in the
| past and ended up with shitty Facebook groups.
|
| If I were them, I would rush to add some reddit features to
| Facebook group (reddit-like threads, upvotes/downvotes) or try to
| launch something new that's more like reddit on top of the
| facebook/insta social graph.
|
| Just call it "Groups"
| starik36 wrote:
| > shitty Facebook groups
|
| Are you serious? That is the most useful and well done function
| of Facebook! The accounts are all mostly real names so there is
| much less toxicity. Instead you get enthusiasts around a topic
| that can discuss issues in a constructive manner - or at least
| more constructive than Reddit.
| willmeyers wrote:
| Meta's already launched channels for Whatsapp and planning on
| doing a similar rollout for Insta. Definitely going to shake
| things up
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/15/instagram-is-rolling-out-i...
| jacooper wrote:
| Channels are more of a telegram thing though
| paulmd wrote:
| nah, the real opportunity is for discord.
|
| why you guys think they're doing the unique usernames? because
| reddit with non-unique usernames would suck.
|
| everyone has been talking about how much discord is a blackhole
| for content and it's unsearchable etc. And that's really fine
| for the chat side of things, but people hammering it into being
| a wiki/documentation/etc is a sign that there's a product need
| not being met. Discord almost certainly knows this, but, non-
| unique usernames for a global community doesn't work.
| kramerger wrote:
| Facebook?
|
| I'm all in favour of bringing back G+
| bmarquez wrote:
| It would be interesting to see Facebook Groups divorce from
| Facebook itself. Maybe allow people to login using an Instagram
| or Whatsapp identity, or better yet an independent login.
|
| I don't really want my group activity to be linked to my
| Facebook identity for tracking/advertising purposes.
| jacooper wrote:
| An Instagram account is as bad as a Facebook account, if not
| worse.
| bmarquez wrote:
| How is it worse? From a privacy perspective they're both
| terrible and the data flows to the same Meta servers, but
| Facebook demands you use your real name (and demands photo
| ID if it thinks it's fake) while Instagram doesn't care.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| It's already ended for several subreddits. Several are in limbo
| of deciding what they want to do next, so it's not well
| coordinated.
|
| I'll say it again, this is the equivalent of a change.org
| petition.
|
| Unless all of say the top 10 (maybe more) subreddits completely,
| indefinitely went private - this will do nothing. There's not
| enough weight to it.
|
| And even then, Reddit could just wait it out. People who really
| want X subreddit will just make a new one with a similar name.
| That happens regardless on almost a daily basis. Most of the
| major subreddits have a half-dozen alts.
|
| As for alternatives to Reddit as a site, that's not going
| anywhere fast. What makes Reddit Reddit is not the tech, it's the
| content. Alternatives can exist that seem nearly as good on
| paper, but unless a sizable number of users go there, it means
| nothing.
|
| And most users _do not care_ about this API situation. It 's a
| very vocal, very small minority.
| cm2012 wrote:
| They don't even have to make new reddits. They could just kick
| out the current mods, install their own, and set it to public.
| refurb wrote:
| I'm not sure how this protest accomplished anything?
|
| If people blackout subreddits and Reddit continues to chug along
| nicely with ad revenue isn't it just proving that Reddit doesn't
| need the users who are upset?
| koonsolo wrote:
| This whole thing is for sure an outraged mob that the internet
| sees plenty of times.
|
| Just look at this poll for r/indiedev:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/149uqfc/rindiedev...
|
| Majority of votes want it closed down, and basically all comments
| want to keep it open.
|
| You don't have to be a community member to vote, so this can mean
| only 1 thing: users from outside of r/indiedev are voting to
| close it.
|
| edit: if you downvote, please solve the mystery of the disconnect
| between votes and comments.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| Literally every single submission on reddit has that sort of
| vote/comment ratio.
|
| But sure, keep dismissing it, enjoy not being able to google
| stuff I guess.
| jug6ernaut wrote:
| There is really no reason to comment if your vote is to shut
| down the sub. The position is already known and well described.
| What would the posts be? "I agree"?
|
| Vs if you want the sub to stay open and are against the
| shutdown, your position is not obvious, and has value in
| explaining why you are against it.
| a_carbon_rod wrote:
| I agree with your point but there definitely is some
| brigading going on by the "pro-blackout" crowd. I moderate a
| small-ish subreddit (~6500 subscribers) and while our poll to
| blackout received overwhelming support including from well-
| known members in our community, I definitely noticed that
| after sharing in the /r/ModCoord thread our intent to
| blackout the thread started receiving a lot of supporting
| comments from questionable brand new accounts (or accounts
| with low karma/had never interacted with the community
| before). And this was without linking the thread at all -
| these users were clearly coming to the subreddit, finding the
| post and making pro-blackout comments to push the community
| towards a shutdown.
| thwio wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think if this were really a threat to Reddit's bottom line they
| wouldn't allow subreddits to exist entirely for the purpose of
| coordinating the protest.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| "Let's use Reddit to promote boycotting Reddit!"
| Brendinooo wrote:
| "yet you participate in society, curious"
| bicijay wrote:
| I mean, why not, still works?
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| Why is that a bad idea again?
| George83728 wrote:
| Because it makes other people (such as myself, and probably
| reddit management I'm guessing) think you aren't very serious
| and you'll come crawling back to reddit after you get bored
| of this protest.
|
| Do prove me wrong, because I'd really like to see reddit die.
| But I'm not counting any chickens until they hatch.
| Gys wrote:
| I assume as long as people keep going to reddit (for whatever
| reason, does not really matter), reddit can show ads and make
| money. Reddit will only start having problems once the
| visitor numbers go down. So far (?) that seems not the case.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Other people's opinions are surely different than mine but...
| I think the subs that have gone dark actually made Reddit
| better.
|
| It's all the popular subs, and that's the really low effort,
| frankly, basic bitch comments.
|
| For me, in protesting they've improved it.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| I've been trying to fix first layer adhesion issues on my
| 3D printer and all of the relevant subreddits went private.
|
| So there's more subs participating than just the popular
| ones.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| To be fair, most of the replies to you would be the same
| old "have you tried leveling your bed?".
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yeah hair spray/glue stick and bed leveling lol. I bought
| an auto bed leveler and still can't get anything to
| stick/not curl up towards the nozzle.
|
| There are those hidden gems on Reddit though that aren't
| the typical response, replies that suggest that your
| plastic filament has absorbed too much moisture and that
| you need to dry it in an oven.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah those issues can be really frustrating. I find
| textured PEI sheets to be the easiest to get working, if
| adhesion suddenly stops being good, I first try washing
| with soap and water, then I try adjusting the z-offset,
| then drying the filament and playing with bed
| temperatures, curling can happen in both cases of if the
| temperature is too low and too high. Additionally, with
| corners lifting on certain prints, you might just need a
| brim.
|
| I had a BLTouch for a few months, but I found it to be
| way more trouble than it was worth (probably mostly due
| to its temperature sensitivity and the heated enclosure).
| I ended up switching over to a Klackender probe, which
| has been more reliable to me.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Yeah the only thing I haven't really tried is swapping
| out the textured glass bed for something else but I think
| that's my next move
| ddingus wrote:
| Try a Garolite Bed. Get a sheet about 1 to 2mm thick.
| Yes, that is PCB material. It is fantastic!
|
| Use the smaller sized office clamps to hold it in place.
| These can be placed on a few sides. Check that they do
| not collide with your printhead.
|
| Then, prep it with a light ScotchBrite scrub. Just enough
| to see the light abrasive marks and a bit of texture in
| the surface. Finish with high purity isopropyl and a dry
| cloth buff. If you want, you can do prep away from the
| machine. I do because I disturb the level less. You can
| use a fresh, green type found in the grocery store for
| cleaning dishes, and or the more industrial purple. Just
| need to scuff the surface a tiny bit.
|
| That gets rid of dust, oils and such. And the light
| abrasive gives the polymer a better mechanical bond.
|
| Set your bed height to about one half of your nozzle
| diameter.
|
| 0.4 nozzle = 0.2mm bed to nozzle tip distance. Ordinary
| weight printer paper is about this amount.
|
| Level your bed using the paper at all four extents. You
| should feel just a bit of drag resistance between nozzle
| and paper.
|
| For most PLA, heat the bed to 65, maybe 70C and set your
| first layer height to half your nozzle diameter. 0.2mm
| again.
|
| I like to print a skirt around the part to let flow
| settle before the first layer is made.
|
| No glue stick, hairspray or anything needed.
|
| Gatolite grips many other polymers when warm, releases
| nicely when cool.
|
| I prefer G10 type.
|
| For glass, do all the same things, skip the scotchbrite
| and add pvb gluesick in an even coating in the region
| your part will be. Let it sit a bit with bed at temp,
| then kick off your print.
|
| Regarding wet filament, it can cause some problems. If
| you doubt your filament, you can quick dry some. Unspool
| a few meters, turn your bed heater on, set to 50C and lay
| it on there. Cover with light foil, put a small hole in
| the middle, wait an hour, then try printing with it. You
| want the foil just sitting over the filament, but not
| tight. Some light airflow is good to carry moisture away.
| It will come in through the sides and out the hole.
|
| Use exact same settings to troubleshoot this moisture
| idea. If it sticks, dry your filament. If no change, your
| problem is not moisture.
|
| That same idea applies to everything. You need to isolate
| problems to materials, settings, machine, environment,
| etc...
|
| All this assumes some open bed type home machine, like a
| Prusa, or Creality type.
|
| Once you do get adhesion, archive that gcode and process.
| When you have trouble again, pull that filament out,
| repeat exact process again to baseline your setup.
|
| Always baseline when introducing a new idea.
|
| I like to use some little cubes, say 9 of them, spread
| across the build surface. Run that job, make sure it
| sticks, then run parts. A good baseline takes roughly an
| hour, maybe a bit less once you have done it a few times.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| Some notes about my setup: Ender 3 v2 (textured glass
| bed), added a CR Touch, swapped out the bronze for a
| hardened steel nozzle, and installed Klipper firmware. I
| have PLA, PLA+, and PETG, I dried the PETG at I think
| 140F (convection oven) for 6ish hours, and then was
| finally able to print a Benchy boat if I set my first
| layer print speed to 5-10mm/s. I tried to print something
| that had small shapes on the first layer (small circles
| for a bolt to go into) with no luck. I was never able to
| get PLA or PLA+ to print, now even with the same gcode I
| can't get PETG to lay down properly. Eventually it just
| curls up towards the nozzle, then gets dragged and clogs.
| Can't even print a raft. The only adhesive I have tried
| so far is a mixture of wood glue and water. I've cleaned
| the bed with soap, acetone, alcohol, you name it.
|
| I live in a very humid state, but I wouldn't expect my
| PETG to reabsorb moisture in the 2ish days after I dried
| it, can't print a Benchy or even just one of those single
| layer square tests you use for testing your leveling.
|
| I just soaked basically my entire
| printhead/extruder/nozzle in acetone to clean it out, I
| tried doing cold pulls with all 3 materials, but the
| filament would just snap off instead of give me that
| clean nozzle shape you are supposed to get.
|
| All that info. doesn't really inform my question for you,
| but I kind of wanted to rant a little bit :)
|
| Is G10 better than say a textured PEI sheet for first
| layer adhesion? Ideally I would like to primarily print
| everything in PETG for its physical characteristics
| (heat, water, strength). Is it true that G10 can easily
| be gouged by the nozzle? I am a bit worried by that
| considering the cheapest I can find a G10 sheet for on
| amazon is $30.
| ddingus wrote:
| I have used glass garolite pei and a number of other
| things.
|
| The garolite and the Pei are similar. I prefer the G10
| because it's stiffer and it doesn't wear away as easily
| and it seems to be a little more consistent in how it
| behaves. But either can work.
| ddingus wrote:
| You have a damaged feed path somehow.
|
| There is a PTFE tube in there that's supposed to help
| guide the filament and it is damaged. If you can't do a
| cold pull nothing will work because the shape of the
| filament will change inside the feed path and it will
| bind up.
|
| Some hot ends do not have the PTFE tube, but they have
| metal parts that must be mated together precisely in
| order for the polymer to flow through. If there are gaps
| the polymer flows into those forms little nuggets and it
| can't work.
|
| If I were you I would replace your hot end, and make sure
| your feed path is factory spec all the way through and
| try again. Clean the feeder gears, make sure you got nice
| Boden tube on there, the whole thing.
|
| Pet polymers take on water very slowly. And many plas
| will work whether they're wet or dry. I do not believe
| that's your problem. If you've got super aggressive Snap
| Crackle Pop when purging some material through maybe. But
| I would look elsewhere first.
|
| If I were you, I would also get a known setup that just
| prints a 1-in cube. And work that until it's perfect.
|
| The Telltale here is the curling up around the nozzle and
| the clogging. Your machine can't sustain a flow rate.
| Once the filament is moving it's okay but once it stops
| part of it is solidifying in there and preventing
| movement from then on.
|
| Once you get it all working, if you have replaced your
| hot end, you can then compare that one to the one you
| have now and probably fix it.
| bick_nyers wrote:
| The cold pull is with the PTFE tubing taken out but yeah,
| I didn't realize how cheap it was to replace/upgrade the
| hot end, I will just do that. Thanks for the tip!
| ddingus wrote:
| Yeah. Totally worth it.
|
| I would run it bog standard. Use the nozzle it ships
| with, or add a simple brass one and assemble it with
| care.
|
| Once you have it working, it will probably work a long
| time.
|
| I have a CR-10 machine mostly running PLA, HIPS and PETG.
| I never change anything.
|
| The secret is warm up hot end, push filament through by
| hand, until flow is straight and clean. Then print.
|
| On material change, I do it hot. Pull one, insert the
| other, push by hand until flow is good.
| ddingus wrote:
| Also, with those materials there's no need for the steel
| nozzle or the hardening. They will work fine with the
| brass nozzle, and I would use a new one.
| artogahr wrote:
| Hey, I've spent considerable amount of time in those
| subreddits! Maybe I can help? You can reach me on
| artogahr@gmail.com
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Duh, just like protests are close to company buildings.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Yeah, this post is just a ruse to drum up DAU numbers for
| Reddit by making users unwittingly cross the picket line! /s ;)
| George83728 wrote:
| Reddit addicts gonna reddit.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| This may be an unresolvable problem. Or rather, more
| specifically: a problem solvable via load-shedding, which is what
| Reddit is now (tacitly) encouraging.
|
| Reading between the lines: Reddit is charging money for 3rd-party
| integration. The Reddit community has interpreted this as greedy
| (or, more specifically: the mods community has interpreted this
| as "We will have to start paying money to use services that are
| necessary for us to mod our subreddits"). But Reddit has not
| backed down. What if they can't? What if the problem is that the
| cost to provide the bulk-data API accesses is starting to add up
| for Reddit itself?
|
| If so, then the problem is hosting Reddit has become too
| expensive and one solution is, indeed, to make it cheaper by
| having fewer high-traffic subreddits.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Reddit told the Apollo developer the API pricing was more
| opportunity cost than actual cost. And many people suggested
| Reddit could make 3rd party access a subscription feature.
| boolemancer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the bulk of reddit's costs are the ~1800
| employees building things nobody wants, uses, or asked for.
|
| Live streaming, chat, avatars and NFTs are all features that
| should never have been built.
| chongli wrote:
| I was really skeptical of lemmy [1] when I first heard about it
| during the blackout. I joined yesterday and it completely changed
| my mind. Yes, it is going to face some growing pains (see the
| total user growth in the past few days) [2] in the coming weeks
| and months but it really has the potential to replace Reddit with
| a federated system of communities. One that won't be damaged by
| investors or executives attempting to pivot over to the latest
| social media trend.
|
| As many people have recently noted, Reddit quietly became an
| extremely important repository of text-based knowledge. Distinct
| from Wikipedia and Archive.org, but no less important, Reddit is
| full of valuable procedural (how-to) and consumer (product-
| related) knowledge. Reddit has countless small communities built
| around hobbies and other niche interests, which places it in the
| same role once fulfilled by Usenet and later independent web-
| based forums.
|
| While those technologies still exist, they face enormous
| challenges with discovery (try to find a new forum on Google
| recently?), single-sign-on, and moderation. These were all solved
| by Reddit and I believe lemmy solves them too. The fediverse [3]
| truly has the potential to liberate small internet communities
| from the vagaries of Big Social Media, of which Reddit is only
| the latest example.
|
| [1] https://join-lemmy.org
|
| [2] https://the-federation.info/platform/73
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
| jurassicfoxy wrote:
| Yes, I just saw the r/StarTrek migration, and visited Lemmy for
| the 3rd time or so this week, and quite frankly, I could drop
| reddit entirely now, if I knew how to find communities. I feel
| some real hacker/dev excitement for the future of Lemmy.
| hinkley wrote:
| When feed readers worked for me, which was all the way back
| when Slashdot was in its early phase of decline, I would keep
| tabs on the domain named for the threads I got engaged in,
| and if I saw a pattern I'd go look for an RSS link, and then
| sometimes I got to be the one to post the interesting
| article.
|
| I'm hoping Lemmy has a cross posting function that will serve
| a similar use case. You start in a woodworking forum here and
| someone reveals the DIWhy forum to you organically. After six
| to twelve months you have your hands full.
| shagie wrote:
| Out of curiosity... why not alt.startrek?
|
| Other than the "not a lot is happening there now", but
| there's _some_ activity.
|
| The most recent posts on the server I'm on:
| The Lower Decks crossover to live action in Strange New
| Worlds Star Trek Discovery Canceled 'Galaxy
| Quest' TV Series in Early Development at Paramount+
| Jack Crusher is how old? Star Trek The Lower Decks
| S03E09 was everything I wanted. (spam - into the kill
| file that poster went) TOS Film marathon
| (crossposted trolling - more kill file material)
| Captain Burnham mob/cops/big city episodes (Star Trek
| Discovery) (crossposted trolling - figured out how to
| do more complicated rules - "cross posted to more than 3
| groups and newsgroups match \.politics\." with this reader)
| (crossposted trolling - even more kill file material)
| Ode to Spot. (this post is from 2012) When will the
| new Star Trek merge with the Twilight movies? (this post is
| from (2011)
|
| No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes.
|
| Just text content.
|
| edit: and as I write this, a new post _just_ showed up in the
| past 2 minutes about Strange New Words S02E01.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _No emoji. No reaction gifs. No memes._
|
| So none of the things many people like. I loved usenet back
| int he 1990s, but the refusal to adapt to what users like
| to do is a large part of what killed it.
| soundsgoodtome wrote:
| Let us know if/when you figure out how to find communities.
| Discoverability seems to be a real problem with Lemmy.
| Solvency wrote:
| I literally can't even sign up for Lemmy.world. The button
| after entering a new username/pw just spins indefinitely,
| forever.
| hinkley wrote:
| If I were a smart man, and that seems to depend on the
| day of the week, I'd put the services that can swamp the
| whole system on a separate VM that's resource constrained
| so it has its own back pressure built in.
|
| It's possible you're seeing a bug, and it's also possible
| that The System is Working.
|
| I can tell you that the login link takes me to a form on
| Safari. When did tech people stop stating which browser
| they're using and what quirky tools they have installed?
| b5n wrote:
| It's a bit confusing because it doesn't notify you that a
| verification email has been sent when you sign up. If
| you've already checked your email maybe try the spam
| folder.
| chongli wrote:
| Try a different server, ideally one closer to you.
| Lemmy.world is currently the most popular server (located
| in Finland) which has seen the largest influx.
|
| Here's a big list of servers (and their countries) sorted
| by MAU [1]. Note that the MAU data is out-of-date now
| that there's been a huge spike in the past few days.
|
| [1] https://the-federation.info/platform/73
| camel-cdr wrote:
| I just use the communities tab [0], that's on every
| instance. Then select All to get a list of all communities
| federated with this instance sorted by size.
|
| Other wise I just, use the search bar. I just tested it
| with the goal of finding a photography related community.
| Found it with the first search result from "photography".
| [1]
|
| Another example, I wanted to find a risc-v related
| community, one simple search [2], boom, I found one [3]
|
| [0] e.g.:
| https://feddit.de/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
|
| [1] https://beehaw.org/search/q/photography/type/All/sort/T
| opAll...
|
| [2] https://beehaw.org/search/q/riscv/type/All/sort/TopAll/
| listi...
|
| [3] https://lemmy.ml/c/riscv
|
| Edit: Also, idk how I missed it, but the communities tab
| [0] also has a search, so there you go, I don't even know
| what else you'd want.
| gman83 wrote:
| On the communities page of your instance, select "All"
| instead of "Local" to search for communities on all servers,
| for example:
| https://lemmy.world/communities/listing_type/All/page/1
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Also, you can go to https://browse.feddit.de/ and find
| communities. If they're not available on your lemmy
| instance, you can copy+paste the URL into your lemmy
| instance's search field and as long as it's not blocked by
| the instance it will be federated from then on.
|
| It's not the best experience and it's not obvious or
| intuitive. A browser extension could simplify it
| substantially, at least. As could new features in lemmy
| itself, but you want to be careful about every lemmy
| instance consuming the content from every other one, as
| that won't scale easily for the average lemmy admin.
| dawnerd wrote:
| If anyone is wondering it's still not quite perfect as some
| instances have inadvertently blocked federation while they
| deal with growth. It should work itself out once the dust
| settles
| moffkalast wrote:
| > have inadvertently blocked federation
|
| I assume the Enterprise is on its way to resolve the
| issue diplomatically
| x86x87 wrote:
| The Enterprise also tried solving the ridiculous Reddit
| api pricing, but could not interfere because of the prime
| directive.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Important clarifying question: Kirk or Picard?
| goatlover wrote:
| Janeway.
| unixhero wrote:
| What for? The whiskey voice? Other than that she was
| quite erratic
| voisin wrote:
| > if I knew how to find communities.
|
| This is the biggest source of friction for Lemmy and the
| Fediverse. Non-tech savvy folks will not make the shift if it
| is such a pain to find the communities you want to join.
| qznc wrote:
| What is a pain is ,,joining a remote community nobody on
| your instance has joined so far".
|
| For the usual cases the normal UI should work fine.
| hinkley wrote:
| Adoption cycles are older than dirt. Only the innovators
| have to go alone, and they have a thick skin and a
| romantic notion of adventure. Just wait for someone to
| point out the new thing, and you can still be an early
| adopter. You can join in telling the late adopters that
| this forum is not appropriate for your peripherally
| related topic and you should post your question in X.
| traverseda wrote:
| I'm the head mod of a pretty big subreddit, /r/3Dprinting, with
| 7 million views a month and 1.8 million subscribers. At the
| beginning of this I set up a lemmy instance at
| https://rhombik.com and linked to it from that subreddit. From
| the roughly 150k uniques per day we had on /r/3Dprinting zero
| of them have tried the lemmy instance.
|
| So make of that what you will.
| Sunspark wrote:
| Speaking for myself here, I hate the Lemmy user interface..
| do I really need lots of wasted screen space on the left and
| right sides of my screen? I also have issues with the
| expanded line spacing.. I have never liked reading text that
| is 1.5-3 spaced instead of single-spaced.. the colours they
| choose and the text size are also issues for me. I don't like
| white text on a grey background for example.
|
| Lemmy as a user interface is not well designed. It wasn't
| made to be read on a web browser in a monitor. It was made to
| be read on a small smartphone screen.
| wvenable wrote:
| Perhaps setting up your own instance for a single community
| is the wrong approach. You're basically hosting an entire
| Reddit for a single subreddit. It probably hurts
| discoverability a bit.
|
| There are already 3D printing communities on Lemmy.
|
| https://lemmy.ca/c/3dprinting@lemmy.ml
| traverseda wrote:
| Lemmy.ml wasn't accepting new users at the time. This
| server has 200GB of ram, plenty of space. I do also try to
| connect people to lemmy in general but it's challenging
| when the "main instance" isn't accepting new users.
| llampx wrote:
| The crux of the problem right here. Modding is ultimately a
| power trip, and no mod wants to give up their power. A
| "head mod" of a popular subreddit wouldn't just join a
| random lemmy where they can't assert their power.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'm a mod for a 1.5mill sub community and I'd gladly drop
| it! The only thing I care about is the community being
| able to move somewhere where we can continue to have
| interesting discussions about the thing our sub is
| dedicated to. I could not care less about continuing to
| be a mod. I only do it at this point because the
| community is awesome and I still learn a ton there.
| [deleted]
| xbkingx wrote:
| I'm pretty active in r/3DPrinting and r/FixMyPrint, and
| strongly support the blackout. I've been avoiding Reddit
| entirely and getting my news from other sources, while also
| exploring the fediverse. I had no idea about the rhombik
| instance/magazine/whatever.
|
| The core problem with the migration is that the information
| on where to go EXACTLY is hosted on the platform being
| boycotted. I decided to not visit Reddit anymore and watch
| for instances to pop up on the fediverse. If others do the
| same, the migration will be slow. Don't be discouraged if it
| takes a few days to pick up steam. There's another 3DPrinting
| magazine that has some users already.
| https://kbin.social/m/3dprinting@lemmy.world or
| https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting
|
| That leads to the second problem of on-boarding migrating
| users to a highly distributed platform. I've mentioned in the
| boycott server the need for "racks" (the subjects within
| instances are called magazines, this would be a collection).
| These would be moderated aggregators of instances, like the
| invisible step between lots of disparate subreddits. There
| would be no limit of the number of racks, so technically you
| could have a permutation of every associated magazine-
| instance combination. The purpose would be to have a single
| link new users can click on to get subscribed to a set of
| magazines all at once, basically making the federation
| concept seamless to less technical users while still highly
| flexible on the backend. I'm going to shoot the suggestion up
| the chain for kbin.
|
| We want to avoid leaving folks like this:
| https://lemmy.world/post/97417
|
| That leads to the third problem, which is all these
| alternatives are new and going through growing pains. Trying
| to add features comes second to keeping the service stable.
| I'm hoping others with more coding experience can assist kbin
| devs.
|
| And I wanted to mention that last I heard (and saw evidence
| of), some of the main Lemmy devs were kinda garbage people
| (Tiananmen Square massacre supporters, not just questionable
| opinions on government). The more controversial instances
| have been defederated from the primary/intake server, but
| it's still worth mentioning. Kbin doesn't have that baggage,
| but there are only a couple devs, and really only one main
| dev, last I heard.
|
| Kbin users can see and respond to Lemmy and Mastodon
| instances that are federated, so it has been the migration
| choice for most of the Reddit boycott groups.
|
| edit: btw - I just looked at the comments on the one post. If
| you want to run a poll, fine, but most of the people
| protesting won't be there to vote. I thought the 3D printing
| subs were largely positive and supporting, if those comments
| represent the community I was supporting, I now have zero
| qualms about deleting my comments on Reddit.
| phkahler wrote:
| Give them a reason to switch, not just the option.
|
| Say "no new posts here, go there." Enforce that for one day
| and see what happens.
| goykasi wrote:
| > no new posts here, go there.
|
| Thats a horrible reason for users to go sign up on a
| completely new, unknown platform. Sounds less like a reason
| and more like a mandate.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| The problem with the Fediverse as it currently stands is it
| goes against my long time use of forums. I'm usually only
| logged in on a desktop where I would post comments from. Most
| of my reading happens on pad, mobile or work where I have
| little desire to log in and in the case of a work computer I
| refuse to log in to anything personal. Kind of defeats the
| purpose of the whole thing...
| truemoose wrote:
| Not sure why you couldn't continue doing so with Lemmy. Like
| reddit, you only need an account to participate, not browse.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Ya, I figured that out when I decided to give it a go and
| sign up. It takes two screens that look like one needs to
| sign up (just about everywhere else on the net would
| require it with a similar screen) but then it lets you pick
| a server without signing up. There is a big improvement
| they could implement: make it more obvious with less
| screens that you can browse without logging in...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Solvency wrote:
| I know it would be technically feasible, but would it be fully
| legal for Lemmy to scrape and re-populate posts from all of
| Reddit's niche community subreddits (and threads and
| conversations), 1:1, even maintaining the original user names
| associated with them... but not connecting them to actual
| accounts? Almost like static content. And they could use that
| as a basis for the new community, so that there is at least a
| baseline repo of content to peruse as real members start to
| join and post new topics/content?
|
| I feel like that's a nice unorthodox way of making it not feel
| so viscerally "new and empty", which is usually what leads to a
| kind of inexplicable ick factor most people have when
| evaluating whether or not to join a community.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| I've thought about similar techniques (mainly a static
| redirect for all reddit links to a read-only archive, as a
| browser plugin).
|
| Technically speaking, this is mass copyright infringement,
| unless it happens to fall under fair use. Reddit wouldn't
| have standing (for content its admins didn't create), but
| every other user would. I can conceivably see a copyright
| suit being granted class action status, and Reddit (who does
| have a vested interest, even if they had no standing)
| bankrolling the whole thing.
| x86x87 wrote:
| Idea for a commedy show: the above but actually pay for
| Reddit api access.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| That depends entirely on whether they want to get sued
| through the floor.
|
| I granted reddit the right to use my submitted content.
|
| I never granted that to lemmy. Someone would sue, and they'd
| win.
| covercash wrote:
| Just use the pushshift archives?
| [deleted]
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Can I just join "lemmy" or do I need to pick a specific sub-
| group to join? Which one did you pick?
| wccrawford wrote:
| I just joined. My understanding is that you pick your home
| server (I chose sh.itjust.works) and then you can add the
| local communities from there, as well as other communities on
| other servers. SJW (unfortunate acronym, IMO) had a list of
| local and remote communities that it already knew about that
| I could easily choose from, and my understanding is that
| there's a way to add more, but I didn't look into that
| because it had all the communities that I had considered
| joining directly anyhow.
|
| It was pretty painless, though I haven't tried actually
| posting anything yet.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Lemmy is a good idea with a terrible name and a
| misunderstanding of the experience users look for, much like
| mastodon. For example, I will never join any of these services
| but I will browse r/All, many lurkers drive traffic and reddit
| would be almost nothing without r/All which I can't figure out
| if lemmy has.
| jtode wrote:
| C'mon, you just wanted to name your thing after Lemmy and
| they beat you to it.
| vruiz wrote:
| Exactly, someone with more time than me please create a nice
| looking, lurker friendly, read-only aggregator with all the
| different content in all the different servers/communities.
| Ideally merging submissions and comments when possible. You
| would have me immediately as a user and I bet I wouldn't be
| the only one.
|
| It's so obvious that I guess someone must have done it and I
| just haven't heard about it yet.
| DropInIn wrote:
| So... Sounds like you want what I keep thinking about:
|
| Front end that works with feeds from multiple sources, like
| RSS, and permits comments, posts etc using SSO, with all
| interactions logged centrally in the SSO account (for later
| edits deletes etc).
|
| Sound about right?
|
| Because you me it seems like every provider in that list
| should be able to make a profit off the data and
| interactions... With users who want increased privacy able
| to pay for an SSO subscription to prevent the sale of data
| on that end.
|
| And we already have all the parts to make it work...
| vruiz wrote:
| Yes although me being primarily a lurker I need even
| less. More than post or comment, if I have an account it
| would be to block some things and prfioritize other
| things more closely. What you describe would make sense
| for more extended functionality, but there is silent
| majority of lazy lurkers like myself that could be served
| very easily.
| DropInIn wrote:
| So my model would be one where you pick a site as your
| front end, most of which would have default curation and
| subscription to various subs, providing an experience
| like /all by default.
|
| Though it would look like /all what it would really be is
| more like an RSS reader aggregating multiple sources
| according to your preferences.
|
| A Reddit alternative would naturally form in this
| ecosystem, with smaller alternative front ends abounding,
| and take dominance just as Reddit did, but unlike Reddit
| it would not be able to screw over sub mods etc.
|
| Subs would be truly independent of the front end site,
| even if they are themselves also front end providers.
|
| It's Distributed Reddit in a sense.... Though in my view
| it'd be best to make it content agnostic, so it can be
| adapted to other uses, specifically for a YouTube clone
| and such.
|
| Really, there's a model where for most it's essentially a
| Facebook alternative that integrates into thousands of
| third party forums seemlessly...
| badrabbit wrote:
| No SSO, because you're lurking without logging in
| DropInIn wrote:
| SSO only applies to those engaging, with those lurking
| being presented the default selection of subs for that
| front end site.
|
| Essentially, Reddit Appollo and all the others are the
| front ends, with the subreddits being independent back
| ends (which would certainly also have their own front
| ends, even if restricted to their own sub).
|
| Thus, the most popular front end would almost certainly
| just be a clone of old.reddit with the /all and /popular
| being made of the aggregate communities that front end
| has selected for default inclusion (with the most
| inclusive front end almost certainly "winning").
|
| Tldr - SSO only matters for commenting/posting, lurkers
| would/could get literally the exact same experience as
| Reddit...
| SirPsychoMantis wrote:
| I've been drawn to kbin, it is part of the "Fediverse", so
| you can see kbin, lemmy, and I believe also mastodon posts
| from it. If you just anonymously browse to
| https://kbin.social/ (the main instance right now) you'll
| have something similar to the reddit front page, content
| from a bunch of different instances. It is definitely still
| a little rough around the edges, but considering it is one
| dev and the first commit was only two years ago, it seems
| pretty good.
| vruiz wrote:
| Is it automatically pulling content from all other
| instances??? That was not clear to me, I though it was
| some form of cross-posting and required someone to submit
| things.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Yeah, but for the platform to succeed, there needs to be
| one /main aggregator site that I can point people to, I
| don't want to remember random servers.
| truemoose wrote:
| At the top of the front page of any Lemmy instance (e.g.,
| lemmy.world), you'll see a green and white button that reads,
| "[ Subscribed | Local | All ]. Just click _All_ and you 'll
| be looking at the feed equivalent of r/all. It will display
| the feed from all federated instances combined.
| koboll wrote:
| A single glance at your first link and it becomes blindingly
| obvious that this will never, ever gain mass adoption in its
| current form.
|
| This type of design, jargon, style, is just anathema to a non-
| technical audience.
|
| They don't wanted federated whatever, they just want reddit
| without the problems.
| DelightOne wrote:
| Lemmy comments are broken on Safari - they do not render.
| [deleted]
| Phelinofist wrote:
| For me on Firefox drop downs are unusable as the selection
| keeps jumping around. Also when scrolling the whole content
| jumps.
| basch wrote:
| reddit and steve are too overconfident to see and realize that
| joining federation is their path to survival.
|
| fear and denial will drive them to build garden walls when they
| should be transforming to stay ahead of obsolescence. turning
| into tiktok is fad chasing and a means to end of times,
| destruction, and relegation to has been status. myspace and
| tumblr realized too latomethi/ng e, and their transformations
| were never positioned to restore former glory.
|
| what i would like to see is federation separate itself into
| three components. identify, client, server. the identity system
| should be divorced from the other two components and allow me
| to sign into any server. (as much as typing this next sentence
| will lose some people, public blockchains are a good way to
| store identity, where different servers can collaborate to host
| a unified identity database.) anyone should be able to use any
| client with any server. adding servers to my client should be
| no harder than an rss subscription. my configuration, my
| subscriptions should be stored with my identity, (not in an
| instance) and instantly portable to new clients. having an
| identity protocol, many client vendors, and multiple
| standardized server implementations will create something long
| lasting and resilient. the firms who choose that path will be
| the leaders.
|
| how could reddit monetize this? run an identity server, have a
| direct messaging path to customers. fracture and make many
| competing clients for different peoplebases and community
| types. some free, some not. build an open source server backend
| and go the redhat model, selling enterprise support to large
| firms that want to host a community, and sell development
| services to honor feature requests from those customers.
|
| (i know the fediverse is close to a lot of this, but the way
| identity is tied to instance isnt something i see as ideal. a
| lack of nomadic identity / identity portability makes the
| fediverse as fragile as any other centralized site. the
| fediverse being grafted onto existing dns, and having identity
| owned by a specific downstream host is problematic. identity
| should be distributed above the dns layer, not below cnames.
| the same applies to communities not being able to push
| themselves to new instances in an .. instant. serving of data
| is too centralized, and a p2p cdn layer /ipfs would help. the
| instance and the client seem too closely tied together as well.
| the way i see the current instances is the opposite of
| portability. im sure there is a lot of fast moving development
| going on, and hope someone can correct me. top answer here is a
| bit of a dealbreaker
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/134oud8/are_there...
| and where a blockchain ecosystem could help.)
|
| [reposted from the star trek thread, probably belongs in this
| one more]
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| We HAD an ubiquitous, federated social network that was
| widely used and it died because the real world has more sharp
| edges than the stuff of dreams.
| basch wrote:
| I did stumble upon hubzilla/zot which looks closer to what
| I described than lemmy|mastadon.
| https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#Glossary
|
| What are you describing? Email? The Web? PGP?
| nomilk wrote:
| Do all lemmy servers host the same content or does selecting an
| appopriate server really matter a lot? (I was just signing up
| and had no idea what considerations one should make when
| selecting a server)
|
| Unrelated: is there a way to do `random search term
| site:reddit.com` for lemmy?
| theossuary wrote:
| Picking a Lemmy server mostly matters because different
| servers will have different moderation practices, UIs, and
| communities. So you should pick a server that gels with what
| you want from a community. Also keep in mind many servers
| have explicit federation block lists.
|
| Once you've picked a server and signed up, you can access any
| community on any other server by just searching for the
| community url on your instance. If you subscribe, your
| instance will begin federating that community to your
| instance.
|
| It's pretty well described here - https://join-
| lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/federation_get...
|
| So far for me, I've noticed about half of my communities are
| instance local, and half are federated. The expectation I
| think is different communities in different instances will
| _win_ and be the primary places for games, or technology,
| etc.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > Also keep in mind many servers have explicit federation
| block lists.
|
| available under server.tld/instances
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| >The expectation I think is different communities in
| different instances will win and be the primary places for
| games, or technology, etc.
|
| So there will be several r/games, r/videos, r/gifs, [...]
| on the Fediverse? This seems like a big hassle, no? Is
| there a built in solution to aggregate these?
|
| One could argue that on Reddit subreddits also competed
| against each other, but in reality most of the time, the
| subreddit with the most approachable name always won.
| r/godot is obviously going to be the main Godot subreddit,
| even if there is a r/godot4coolkidz "competing" with it.
| wvenable wrote:
| From my experience no. I picked Lemmy.ca and I'm subscribed
| to communities all over the place. You can go the Communities
| tab and just select "All" and start searching for communities
| regardless of where they are.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Is there a way to get RSS feeds the way you can with Reddit?
| camel-cdr wrote:
| Yes, just click on the little RSS icon next to communities,
| it's just right off the sorting selection icon next to the
| (?).
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Got it, thanks!
| rwetgerger wrote:
| I only use Reddit logged out. Are there any apps that give me
| the same logged out experience with Lemmy?
| truemoose wrote:
| The official Android app, Jerboa, doesn't require an account
| at all and defaults to anonymous browsing.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| The base Lemmy site does allow that. It looks like every
| button should lead to sign up dialogs but doesn't. Just
| select a serer, then join a server, hit communities at the
| top and select all in the green menu. I don't know if it
| shows you everything but it does give many pages of topics
| and what server they are on.
|
| The interface is not up to old.reddit standards but better
| than the modern reddit interface. I like that because there
| many servers, any popular topic will have a bunch of subs to
| choose from. Seems a bit sparse with subscriber numbers per
| community but if that grows, I could see it scratching the
| reddit itch...
| coryfklein wrote:
| Having heard the Lemmy recommendation multiple times, I went
| ahead and tried the Lemmy.world instance but it appears
| completely broken. As far as I can tell, clicking "Login"[0]
| doesn't even trigger a network request?
|
| [0] https://lemmy.world/login
| SrZorro wrote:
| > doesn't even trigger a network request?
|
| It does via websocket
| PKop wrote:
| How do these independent servers cover the costs of "success",
| if more users join it's more cost, more moderation hassle. Who
| pays for it?
| chongli wrote:
| Subscription and donation model could really work. Loads of
| people subscribed to Apollo. Why not bring it over to lemmy?
| Or if Christian is not interested, someone else will be.
|
| Reddit set such a high bar for API pricing that I think
| there's plenty of room to support both front-end and back-end
| development as well as hosting for lemmy servers. We just
| need to work out a revenue-sharing model that gives everyone
| a piece of the pie.
| crooked-v wrote:
| OpenAI, of course. They have to get their content somewhere,
| after all.
| gman83 wrote:
| The instance I joined (Lemmy.world) currently has 460
| financial contributors here:
| https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld & 303 on patreon:
| https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld . Should be enough to
| cover the server costs. Moderation is a matter for
| communities to handle on their own, just like on reddit.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Ah, so they've already had an IPO /s
| sempron64 wrote:
| Who pays the moderators of all the major subreddits?
| this_user wrote:
| Probably Disney or whoever else wants their PR pieces
| pushed on a daily basis.
| PKop wrote:
| The mod workload on fediverse is in addition to, and
| magnifies, the operational cost of running the servers. Put
| aside moderation then, I don't see how decentralized
| independent servers scale if "free", whereas centralized
| cos has VC and ad money to achieve this
| libraryatnight wrote:
| Communities with sufficient interest in existing with any
| control over their future and content may need to fund
| themselves via donation.
|
| Also, in the 90s and early 00s, game servers cost money
| for many online FPS games - people hosted long running
| communities. Sometimes surviving via donation, sometimes
| just the benevolence of a person into the hobby with
| money. Community finds a way.
| jtode wrote:
| The operational cost of growing marijuana, even indoors
| with pretty high-powered lights, is actually extremely
| low. You can make it expensive buying fancy nutrients and
| gimmicky hydro systems but when I was growing for the
| black market before legalization, me and every other
| grower I knew (we were legion) poured reasonably-priced
| nutrients into cheap pots under cheap lights and grew
| dank buds ferda.
|
| Now (here in Canada anyways), a few giant corporations,
| in theory, do all the growing for the legit market, and
| need to handle a lot of large-scale problems, like big
| central grow ops requiring 1.21jigawatts instead of a
| bunch of houses using a bit of extra hydro each,
| security, pilferage, all the big problems of scale. These
| are problems of _growing at scale_ , though, not problems
| inherent to growing weed.
|
| We didn't have the problems of scale as a community of
| indepdendent growers. We had other problems: cops,
| filtering the smell so as to be good neighbours, larger
| ops had to deal with moisture, the reputation brought on
| by low-rent gangster scumbags who rent houses, setup and
| then threaten the landlord. We had the problems of an
| unregulated market, and the quality of our product as
| well as knowing a dealer determined our success, but
| basically anyone with basic competence and the ability to
| keep their mouths shut (ie. the barest of street smarts)
| could make an okay living back then.
|
| I would say that Silo/Fedi is going to have a similar
| dynamic, minus the cops. Moderation happens by volunteers
| because people want to have a voice in determining what
| rules make the most sense for the communities they
| participate in, it's a non-issue in either world. Smaller
| instances will have smaller moderation loads, larger
| instances will either get supported by their users
| (money, work, whichever) or break up, or whatever, but
| it's going to settle into a congenial equilibrium in
| which the community of operators and users all look out
| for each other. We have seen the alternative, and we do
| not care for it, so we are going to put in the effort.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as
| Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much
| friction required to find their communities and aggregate them
| into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's
| assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is.
|
| I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten
| seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface
| that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by
| clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities
| on the page (which were presented in random order on every page
| load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community
| was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a
| federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is
| connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with
| sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded
| that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user,
| then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the
| average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the
| subs I like are done with their blackout.
|
| Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts
| away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to
| join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and
| the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut
| down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s)
| instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to
| Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to
| bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the
| problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise
| inhibit adoption of Lemmy.
|
| It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to
| integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing
| soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be
| for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability
| layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already
| exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one
| more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").
| Animats wrote:
| The front page of lemmy:
|
| _Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse._
|
| _Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere
| in the world_
|
| _Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and
| discussion platform._
|
| No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't
| Github.
|
| It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a
| server". But which one?
|
| These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no
| wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of
| where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed
| behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry
| point.
|
| USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it
| didn't look federated to the end user.
| sharperguy wrote:
| Nice thing about nostr is your account isn't tied to a
| server. The servers are just relays, and your messages are
| authenticated via pgp key. So your client will present you
| with a default set of servers, and if you need to change it
| later you don't need to recreate an account to do so, just
| tweak a setting.
|
| The nostr community right now mostly want to replace
| twitter rather than reddit, but in principle it would be
| possible.
| leesalminen wrote:
| I've been thinking about the "relays as subreddits"
| paradigm for nostr. It could work.
| leokennis wrote:
| So well said. After the Twitter apocalypse I joined
| Mastodon, but the instance I joined (mastodon.world) was
| missing a lot of people that did advertise they were on
| Mastodon... So I clicked some links from those people and
| managed to follow them. But I cannot just search for people
| or topics now? I first need a link to another instance?
| What is this, a second job?
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Truth Social is the most successful Mastodon instance by
| far despite being garbage because it has a clear,
| consistent design and user interface, and has exclusive
| content from an extremely popular influencer. Any
| Mastodon or Lemmy instance that wants to truly replace
| Reddit needs that, Gmail doesn't present itself as a
| federated messaging platform and make you jump through 30
| hoops to join while having arbitrary management that bans
| at random
| 6510 wrote:
| Or to put it more generally, you have to look at your
| product or tool from the perspective of the laziest dumbest
| most unreasonable kind of people you want as the audience.
| You are not to complaint about how lazy they are, how dumb
| or how unreasonable, there are thousands just like them -
| shut up and do your job :-)
|
| The mega pun is that if you are hard working, intelligent
| and reasonable this is going to be incredibly hard for you.
| You are going to need help from someone who is non of those
| things.
| jasode wrote:
| _> It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a
| server". But which one? [...] USENET had that problem
| solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to
| the end user._
|
| USENET also had the "chose the wrong server" problem.
|
| If I chose my ISP (e.g. Verizon) as my USENET entry point,
| then I would miss out on many newsgroups that Verizon
| didn't have. Or, Verizon had the newsgroup but had
| extremely short retention of old messages history.
|
| So, I paid $12.99/month for GigaNews to get all the
| newsgroups with months-to-years retention.
|
| Lemmy/Mastodon/etc replicate the same federation issues as
| USENET because running servers _costs money_ and different
| people have _different thresholds of spending_. This
| independence /freedom of the admin running the server the
| particular way they want is touted as a positive _but it
| also has inherent disadvantages_.
|
| The contemporary situation of Beehaw instance defederating
| lemmy.world -- is replaying the same tradeoffs that USENET
| went through. (E.g. similar to an ISP's USENET service
| choosing not to carry alt.binaries.* or whatever.) Beehaw
| explains they have limited resources and can't handle the
| influx from lemmy.world. Yep. Very understandable.
| Accujack wrote:
| This is actually as designed, and is a good thing.
|
| It creates the possibility for a business model where
| subscribers pay for access to a big news spool and lots
| of groups. Just like USENet.
|
| There will be some growing pains, but there will
| eventually be a continuum of "free" lemmy servers, for
| pay premium ones, and lemmy servers where the front end
| is only an app on your phone.
|
| And they'll all see the same messages.
| jasode wrote:
| _> And they'll all see the same messages._
|
| I think you should re-evaluate that assumption:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+instances+blocks
| +ga...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blocklists
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=mastodon+blacklists
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/kw8jht/how_do_
| i_s...
|
| Also, expand the ">Moderated servers" heading and scroll
| down through the instances they block:
|
| https://mastodon.social/about#unavailable-content
|
| Why do different Mastodon instances decide on not
| federating some of the other instances?!? It's because
| the owners pay money for running their particular server
| which makes them feel entitled to run it the way they
| want.
|
| The _" pick any server, it doesn't make any difference,
| you'll see _all_ messages anyway"_ -- is not realistic
| given that each fediverse node administrator _can
| exercise their freedom to choose what messages their
| server accepts_.
| LexiMax wrote:
| > The "pick any server, it doesn't make any difference,
| you'll see _all_ messages anyway" -- is not realistic
| given that each fediverse node administrator can exercise
| their freedom to choose what messages their server
| accepts.
|
| That is true, but most Mastodon apps make multi-
| accounting a breeze, and I imagine the Lemmy ecosystem
| will provide the same functionality.
|
| It also helps that Lemmy is trying to court the userbase
| of Reddit, who are already a pseudo-anonymous lot and in
| my experience don't seem to have as much of an attachment
| to their old content as Twitter users, deleting their old
| posts and accounts on a regular basis.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| And woe unto you if you join in the wrong place. I had to
| look up what the term "tankie" meant.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn
| 't Github_
|
| Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults)
| newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow.
| Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and
| gain an incentive to learn about it.
|
| Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you
| think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they
| had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for
| community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction
| of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when
| those values and decisions directly cause effects they
| follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat
| pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
| Tempat wrote:
| I don't know much about how the fediverse thing works.
| Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind
| of like how torrents work, with some central list of all
| servers acting as the "tracker list"?:
|
| - Servers choose what they want to host and what their
| personal bandwidth limit is
|
| - A user visiting a specific subforum automatically
| downloads from whatever servers are currently available
| to serve it
|
| Then you'd never have to manually choose a server.
| wccrawford wrote:
| You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a
| server.
|
| Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an
| identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private
| torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you
| can subscribe to other servers' communities from your
| original server.
| TylerE wrote:
| Torrents have magnet links, which don't require servers
| at all.
| rf15 wrote:
| That is untrue, you still need a server to facilitate
| discovery/passthrough. Peer-to-peer does not exist in the
| wider internet for most consumers.
| Izkata wrote:
| Trackerless torrents are very old now, they use the DHT
| network to find peers. I believe it needs to be seeded
| when you first start a newly installed client, but that's
| completely transparent to the user.
| Strom wrote:
| > _you still need a server to facilitate discovery
| /passthrough_
|
| You could just bruteforce IPv4 until you hit a peer that
| will give you a set of known peers.
| mistercheph wrote:
| This is not about an IPO or infinite user growth
| potential in the next quarter. If we want to build a
| better world, some people _must_ be left behind.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If we want to build a better world, some people must
| be left behind._
|
| This has to be parody.
| NeuNeurosis wrote:
| If you leave too many people behind you aren't building a
| better world, you're building a walled garden.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Progress is not linear. Young communities should and do
| alienate low effort and disinterested parties from
| participating while allowing anyone sufficiently
| interested to participate. We will find out if federated
| communities work because people will try to make them
| work in good faith, and if the core idea is good, it will
| be made universally applicable. The digital soldiers that
| thanklessly represent the technological status quo will
| always concern troll anything that isn't made by one of
| four companies for being insufficiently popular. Their
| input, like all the clamors of old-guard clingers-on will
| wash away, and they will be left with the basement full
| of floppy drives they thought would last forever. And the
| world will continue to turn and normal people will en-
| masse use technology that was once dismissed as having
| "too much sign-up flow friction" or "cognitive load" by
| patagonia wearing matcha sippers: people that will fall
| out from the world's grace just as quickly as they
| entered it.
| rakoo wrote:
| > benefit from the product and gain an incentive
|
| > An infintessimal fraction of users care about
| philosophy or architecture [...] Users came for their cat
| pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back
| end afterwards.
|
| I'm afraid you don't understand the concept of the
| fediverse. The philosophy _is_ the point. Making reddit2
| is completely useless. This is not a product, it 's a
| vision of how we manage communications as a society. It
| implies involvement, because in a democracy you are part
| of the decision process, _and_ you act as a community.
| Your egocentric, utilitarian, self-obsessed mindset is
| the complete opposite.
|
| I can't be really surprised to see this on hn, but oh
| well.
| fnovd wrote:
| If the philosophy is the point, it's a dead platform.
| Utopian ideals are fine, if that's your thing. Shaming
| people who don't share them is just rude. I don't see how
| you can compare the platform to the democratic process
| and not expect the same warts you see in democracies. A
| few people care a lot, some people care a bit, most
| people barely care at all. Grandstanding will never
| change that.
| kelnos wrote:
| If all you care about is the philosophy, then you're
| going to fail. Most people only care about the end
| product, the end experience. And unfortunately you still
| need those people (to some extent) since these sorts of
| things require some kind of critical mass to be
| successful.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _philosophy is the point. Making reddit2 is completely
| useless. This is not a product, it 's a vision of how we
| manage communications as a society._
|
| Nothing about cleaner onboarding requires anyone to
| compromise principles. And nothing about a guiding
| philosophy requires you constantly evangelize. Let the
| merits of the system speak for itself.
|
| > _implies involvement, because in a democracy you are
| part of the decision process, and you act as a community_
|
| Then the sign-up page is a poll test. Democratic ambition
| strives to make participation easy. That doesn't mean the
| _act_ of participating is easy. Just that we identify
| needless barriers and ideological tests as undemocratic.
| As a result, democracies--time and again--outcompete
| their centralized peers.
|
| What I'm seeing is not competitive, and it is not
| democratic. It's closer to theological. I'm hopeful that
| someone will embrace these principles more productively
| so we have middle ground between Huffman-Musk and
| crypto/web3.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| This is a horrible way to get the mass market. It seems
| like a perfect way to recreate the issues with desktop
| Linux
| Tainnor wrote:
| Some people like desktop Linux and don't care whether
| it's for the masses or not.
| pauby wrote:
| That's assuming the goal is to get to 'mass market'.
|
| Lemmy existed before the Reddit exodus. It will exist
| when they all go back.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| In that case, why even bring up Lemmy as a Reddit
| alternative? It just serves to attract people who won't
| be good users and waste their time
| smolder wrote:
| There is no mass market solution to both the problems
| Reddit solves and the ones Lemmy solves. Anything like
| Reddit which is optimized for easy access and broad
| engagement will draw a lot of non-contributing users, a
| lot of spammers, trolls, etc., is unwieldy to run, and
| will need to suck eventually when it comes time to
| monetize the network effects. Anything like Lemmy, which
| can be self-supported and necessarily allows people to
| run and manage their own fiefdoms in ways that are
| manageable for them, means there is an added layer of
| complexity which inhibits easy access and broad
| engagement. To the extent Lemmy can be made easier to
| navigate, sign up for, or create communities with, it
| should be. No one should have to recompile a Lemmy kernel
| or anything, not that it's anything like that. Neither
| should anyone expect or even want it to be Reddit, which
| just deferred figuring out how to sustain itself during a
| prolonged giveaway of utility before its inevitable
| enshitification.
| marcod wrote:
| > These federated things need to be set up so that there's
| "no wrong door"
|
| I would argue they are. Any of the servers will work fine.
| There needs to be a paradigm shift that only things that
| are centrally managed and have a profit motive are good.
| kristopolous wrote:
| Isn't this the same problem IRC had but IRC was (still is?)
| fairly widely used? (Wikipedia says its peak was about
| 10mil in 2004/2005 - which makes it 1% according to here:
| https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm)
|
| Regardless, if I was able to capture 1% of the net, that's
| not a failure by any stretch.
|
| How did IRC succeed here? Have any hard evidence as opposed
| to intuition or speculation?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what 's different?_
|
| IRC, like e-mail, is grandfathered in. There wasn't a
| centralized alternative that worked when they were born.
| kristopolous wrote:
| ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms?
|
| I think there were many options at the time.
|
| Maybe the DCC transfer and easy scriptabilty thanks to
| Khaled Mardam-Bey's mIRC might be a valid claim.
|
| Perhaps also the impermanence of the history of the
| channels afforded certain types of interactions that you
| wouldn't do with you know, theoretically forever
| scrollbacks.
|
| I guess this brings us back to classical marketing about
| how you can't have a sustainable differentiated product
| based on negatives. (as in, this is not the bad guy). You
| need to have something in the affirmative
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _ICQ? AIM? AOL chat rooms?_
|
| 1988 versus 1996 and 1997, respectively. AOL proper _was_
| an IRC competitor, as was CompuServe, but their
| definitions of working weren 't different from IRC's.
| kristopolous wrote:
| That's not a useful comparison. The fact that IRC existed
| in 1988 does not bring a user onboard in 2004.
|
| That same argument didn't save WAIS, Fido, or Gopher. Nor
| did it keep Tymnet or Bitnet around and didn't give
| Compuserve and The Well a seat at the winners table. It
| also wasn't a saving grace for Friendster, MySpace, or
| LiveJournal.
|
| Magnavox putting out the first home gaming console in
| 1972 hasn't made them a gaming juggernaut nor does Xerox
| run the desktop. Neither Palm, Go or IBM makes my
| smartphone nor is my laptop by Grid Compass, desktop by
| MITS, spreadsheet by VisiOn or my pants from Arnold
| Constable. I don't fly Western Air Express, drive a
| Rickett, subscribe to RealNetworks Rhapsody for music nor
| am I posting this on slashdot.org.
|
| Citing an early creation date is a survivorship fallacy
| here.
|
| The real question here is why didn't it die like
| everything else. Why is it one of the few legacy
| survivors?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Citing an early creation date is a survivorship
| fallacy here_
|
| Separate problems: getting off the ground versus
| surviving.
|
| IRC got off the ground because it didn't have centralized
| competition with a capability advantage. Why it persisted
| is a deeper story. Lemmy is still trying to get off the
| ground. It, unlike IRC, _does_ have such competition. As
| such, the old playbook is obsolete.
| kristopolous wrote:
| > the old playbook is obsolete
|
| I'm going to disagree. The old playbook is to empower
| users in unique ways that at the time feel almost
| forbidden and magical and to competently execute that.
|
| You could claim all those avenues have been explored but
| I disagree there as well. The surrounding context and
| possibilities are always on the move so the underlying
| potential is always changing.
|
| That's why say, YouTube, the 40th or so on-demand video
| company, which happened to launch when digital cameras
| and broadband internet were becoming widely used, was the
| first successful execution or why smartphones didn't take
| off until the rollout of 3G or, looking into the future,
| VR might finally take off at attempt 50 after some
| related thing changes.
| yardstick wrote:
| Probably a few reasons.
|
| Text only, transient/short life data, is a lot cheaper to
| process and serve than images, permanent posts, etc.
|
| It won the initial buy-in of us
| geeks/nerds/hackers/whateverthephraseofthedayis who gave
| it a rather solid base.
|
| It's a very personal type of communication. Real-time,
| immediate, and to a lot smaller audience (more intimate)
| compared to web forums, Reddit etc.
|
| And finally, I would posit that it did actually die. What
| remains now is small, compared to how popular the likes
| of Reddit Twitter etc are, vs how popular IRC was in its
| heyday.
| kristopolous wrote:
| > I would posit that it did actually die.
|
| This is an interesting question. Wikipedia claims 230,000
| users at peak times which is still quite a bit more than
| say, gopher. A 98% drop is real but you'll still see IRC
| occasionally for software purposes (like say, Debian)
|
| Maybe it was a coalition of people there for different
| purposes and some of those groups have fallen away for
| different places.
|
| For instance, people were doing dating and sextalk on irc
| back in the day along with file-sharing. Those
| applications have been superseded by many other places. I
| don't expect to see anyone sincerely asking "a/s/l?" in
| modern IRC chatrooms.
| MockObject wrote:
| In 1988, IRC's competition was a VAX program called RELAY
| that ran on BITNET, not the internet.
| toastal wrote:
| You can join an XMPP MUC today to bring back that feeling
| and the server options are light enough to self-host on a
| home network unlike some other FOSS decentralized chat
| options.
| LexiMax wrote:
| I actually don't think IRC is doing that well. I used to
| have a bouncer but I shut it down a few months ago
| because most of my communities had moved over to Discord.
| But I think the reason why Discord and Slack took over
| was not because IRC was decentralized, but because the
| protocol was never designed for mobile devices where you
| might not always be connected to a server.
|
| It didn't help that the protocol evolved at an absolutely
| glacial pace with very uneven support across various
| networks, and doing anything but the most trivial sorts
| of channel management had to be done through a bot.
| Matrix seems like the obvious IRC successor due to its
| seamless two-way interoperability with IRC networks, but
| I suspect that it won't hit critical mass until Discord
| starts causing problems for its userbase.
| silverbax88 wrote:
| Agree with this. When I first hit Mastodon and Lemmy, I was
| hit with 'Join a server'. OK, but I want to at least start
| with one that's a 'main'server before I jump somewhere
| else. I can always splinter off later.
|
| Now that I've been on Mastodon and Lemmy, it makes more
| sense, but this is a HUGE barrier to adoption.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and
| arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which
| were presented in random order on every page load). I was
| disoriented and didn't know what this community was
|
| Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit.
|
| But people fall on reddit by links to a public page
| somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short
| time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a
| comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community.
|
| And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface
| at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being
| name "join" doesn't make it obvious.
| elxr wrote:
| > there's too much friction required to find their
| communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with
| a nice client.
|
| This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com
| and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count,
| number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that
| particular story came from.
|
| All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from
| little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and
| clutter-free.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being
| honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The
| reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to
| the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption
| here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for
| data, I want data presented to me.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption,
| not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink"
| (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply
| here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to
| implement it, because they already have a loyal user base
| to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s)
| their users prefer.
|
| Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be
| something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance
| that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to
| authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and
| post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.
| chongli wrote:
| What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both
| lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how
| federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No
| more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join
| multiple servers either, just one.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I don't want to look for data and join things. I don't
| have to do that on reddit. Overall I would say even with
| blackouts, reddit is still more interesting.
| [deleted]
| gtsteve wrote:
| Lemmy has already massively improved since I first
| encountered it a few years ago. There are so many more users
| and so much more activity. I expect the usability issues will
| be worked on and resolved in time. Without a corporation
| behind it or some way to meaningfully monetise it, process
| will be slow of course, and I'm not sure it could ever become
| mainstream in the same way that Reddit has.
|
| In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community
| browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to
| go: https://browse.feddit.de
|
| However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn
| something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take
| longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the
| fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I
| enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts.
| Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has
| gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does
| something its users don't like and next time around more will
| stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| the equivalent lemmy community i am currently most pissed
| about losing on reddit (/r/bjj) has 1 post and 8 users :)
| omginternets wrote:
| I've often found myself thinking that the discoverability
| barrier might be an asset. It keeps the community mostly free
| of low-quality posters.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| ^ this is why all of these Reddit/Twitter alternatives will
| ultimately be tiny little gardens
| drdaeman wrote:
| I'm a technical user, I've spent last 3 days trying to figure
| out what should I really do to make a setup that I wouldn't
| want to nuke in a month (or a year). I'm still at loss how to
| get this deployed the right way (and not a lazy "install this
| in 5 minutes, feel the pains forever" way, thanks, my Matrix
| Synapse server is bad enough).
|
| My current list of grievances:
|
| - No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g.
| between Lemmy and Mastodon.
|
| - No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm
| currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with
| CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).
| paulmd wrote:
| > thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough
|
| OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what
| would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog
| post/HN article at this moment imo.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I would've explored alternative servers.
|
| The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have
| with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down
| and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my
| machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine,
| parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly
| more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS'
| us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :)
|
| I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different
| continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and
| my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting
| with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix.
|
| Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly
| works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported).
| Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it
| was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb,
| sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend
| architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my
| stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due
| to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps
| getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need
| to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and
| maintain their own shit.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Centralization due to ease of use IS social media.
|
| Without the centralization, why bother? Without the
| monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's
| no point going and standing in someone's private garden
| while they're away.
|
| It's seeking of the public square that is generating this
| situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the
| territory. Either there's a way to have best of both
| worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised
| way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the
| territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason
| or another until they're gone.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The whole point of federation is to connect these private
| gardens to each other. So you avoid the disadvantages of
| both (1) big centralized walled gardens that are not
| sustainable as "public squares" due to enshittification,
| and (2) tiny individual instances. This is very similar
| to how email and the Web work. It's why we use the
| internet nowadays instead of just dialing up to
| Compuserve.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be
| centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to
| "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a
| barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which
| can still be open source, with competing implementations
| that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense
| that each user can have one app that connects to multiple
| backends for fetching and posting content.
|
| And instead of relying on servers to federate with each
| other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing
| one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller
| gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to
| subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even
| merge comment threads when the same story is posted to
| multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
| fnovd wrote:
| They never will and popular tools will never expect them
| to. Some people will, but never most.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Or folks could learn how to do this stuff._
|
| 'Documentation? Just learn programming and it will be
| obvious.'
| jtode wrote:
| It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that
| everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at _least_ at
| the enthusiast /power user level. Nobody at that level
| should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of
| extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning
| curve.
|
| And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is
| full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me
| with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!"
|
| I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once
| and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter
| imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an
| active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck
| with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it
| because there was just no quality interaction on it at all,
| with people I agree with or otherwise.
|
| I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I
| figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have
| several quality conversations a day about things I'm
| interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just
| there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your
| habits a bit, it's fine and it's better.
|
| I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to
| do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or
| inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem
| they're describing exists in a much worse form on the
| silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I think you're making the mistake that just because
| people on the forum have the skills, knowledge, and
| general capacity to learn a new tool that they are
| convinced to put in the effort to learn the new tool.
| Social media specifically has thrived on a culture of
| extreme low effort to learn how to start having fun with
| it (think TikTok showing you cool videos, then an easy
| prompt to sign up, then an immediate "for you" page
| before you ever need to engage with the TikTok community
| like commenting, liking, following, etc).
|
| The fediverse (and decentralized social media in general)
| breaks the mold of extreme ease of use and therefore
| subverts the cultural expectations, thereby violating one
| of the ways a user would establish if the application is
| "good", and thereby it looks "bad".
|
| It's like, technically X algorithm is a superior algo to
| use. But I can import Algo Joe's library that's 50 years
| old and already integrated into every language I know, so
| I'll do Joe.Sort().
| [deleted]
| jtode wrote:
| Perhaps low-effort users are part of the problems we're
| experiencing? I think maybe it's time to dial back the
| user-friendliness just a weeeny bit.
|
| Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back
| from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I
| see even less evidence that the VC business model is
| going to do any better with anything else.
|
| Edit: Just sitting here thinking about this. Who exactly
| gets any benefit from low-effort users of a system?
|
| The members of the community? Absolutely not.
|
| The mods? F%@k no.
|
| The site operator who makes money from attention. Get
| this guy out of the equation and we can have nice things
| again.
| joemi wrote:
| You seem to be assuming that everyone who doesn't want to
| jump through hoops at signup is a low-quality user. This
| seems like a very flawed (or pretentious?) view. "Low-
| quality users" are a subset of "users who don't want to
| jump through hoops at signup", but the subset is small in
| comparison to the superset.
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| I actually don't disagree with your point. I'm merely
| explaining why fediverse-style platforms always get the
| complaint it sucks because it's harder to use than the
| centralized alternative, even among a community that
| should be used to such platforms.
| yadingus wrote:
| > Especially for non-technical users,
|
| Is this actually an issue?
|
| If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all
| its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want
| a _better_ iteration, then isn 't one more catered to
| technical users, perhaps be a good thing?
|
| To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you
| describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users
| who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI
| wise.
|
| But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and
| customized my linux experience, the result is just downright
| better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning
| the ropes, but it was worth it.
|
| Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the
| most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway
| between the social giants and obscure niches.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| That depends on whether you consider a community that's
| missing all non-technical voices to be "better." By
| contrast, operating systems are an individual choice with
| individual impact.
| yadingus wrote:
| That is a fair point, but as a thought experiment, I
| can't really say. I just think the immediate assumption
| that you need those non-technical voices should be
| reconsidered.
| monktastic1 wrote:
| It's not really a question of need. I appreciate
| interacting with a diverse crowd, and I think most others
| do, too.
| ZacnyLos wrote:
| Average internet user has no idea how subreddits work.
| jtode wrote:
| Average internet user thinks Bill Gates has a robot arm
| with vaccine-delivering microdart shooters and if you shake
| his hand you'll have Windows 11 installed directly to your
| nervous system.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| Actually. The average internet user would think himself
| pretty smart repeating low effort strawmen like yours
| while repeating heavily propagandized mantras such as
| "It's safe and effective" and "It's just 2 weeks! Can't
| you just stay put for 2 weeks?"
| jtode wrote:
| You're cute.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| 0 retort to a true statement. Better than yikes.
| ghusto wrote:
| Same, but thanks to some of the replies to your post it makes
| sense to me now.
|
| Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget
| about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing
| but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to
| read.
| beowulfey wrote:
| Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server.
| It feels basically like any other social media site, like
| Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post
| from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive.
|
| Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just
| need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is
| that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in
| your inbox.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I'm a technical person and I still don't understand what
| federation is. I also read somewhere to treat it like
| email. What is like email? To who? I don't understand how
| all the servers are interlinked and what it means to post
| from one server to another. Do I have identities on all the
| servers?
| beowulfey wrote:
| When you make an account on one server, it doesn't
| duplicate that account to other servers. Each server is
| independent, but they can interact together.
|
| It's like if you opened up a reddit thread while logged
| into your hacker news account, and decided to respond to
| a comment in the reddit thread. Federation would give you
| that ability. Your username, in that thread, would be
| something like "cdelsolar@news.ycombinator.com" or
| something like that, to show that you were posting from a
| _different_ server.
| basscomm wrote:
| It's kind of like email in the sense that I can email
| someone @gmail.com from @hotmail.com. As long as I have
| an email account on some server somewhere on the Internet
| I can email anyone else that also has an account on some
| server somewhere on the Internet, even if the accounts
| live on different servers.
|
| The fediverse is set up kind of the same way. You can
| interact with people if you know how to find their
| account, the address of which is formatted similarly to
| an email address. You and whoever you're interacting with
| don't have to have accounts on the same server to
| communicate with each other.
| zelifcam wrote:
| I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I
| created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at
| the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon
| app/account.
|
| I think what we are seeing is a taste of what could be,
| as the technology improves and the UIs of the clients
| become more friendly and add features to leverage the
| tech.
|
| We are watching it all happen in real time. Problem is
| everyone wants a polished experience day one. It's going
| to turn a lot of people off, but I'm not sure there's
| anyway around it. Once refined, this is the kind of tech
| could be key to the people controlling the future of
| social media.
| mahogany wrote:
| Couple questions as I try to understand:
|
| > I can log into Mastodon and search and find the user I
| created on lemmy. I can also search, follow and look at
| the posts @technology@beehaw.org. All from my Mastodon
| app/account.
|
| So is your user registered at lemmy? Or at lemmy.world?
| Is there a difference?
|
| And you can view the posts at @technology@beehaw.org -
| but do you have to have a separate beehaw account to
| post?
| beowulfey wrote:
| _Lemmy_ is the software that runs on all the servers.
| Lemmy.world and Beehaw are separately running that
| software. You make accounts on either server (just like
| you can make a Gmail account, or a Hotmail account), and
| do all the things with either account on either server.
|
| Well, you could, but Beehaw basically blocked
| Lemmy.world. But otherwise the metaphor holds true. If
| you make an account on some other instance, you can
| subscribe to communities on Beehaw, post on Beehaw, and
| reply to users on Beehaw posts. When doing so your
| username, instead of being e.g. "mahogany", changes to
| "mahagony@[LEMMYSERVER]". That's how you can tell who is
| a user of that particular server.
| ihateolives wrote:
| As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated
| lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun.
| https://beehaw.org/post/567170
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| Nothing new for the Fediverse. It'll stabilise.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This seems like it could be solved by shifting the
| federation to the client. Let me choose which servers to
| subscribe to, and let my client merge comment threads
| when the same story is posted to multiple servers. And
| let me choose a mod team to filter stories and comments
| for me.
|
| If the fediverse is like email, then filtering should
| happen on the client. It's not like I expect gmail to
| "defederate" an email server that's used by people I
| don't like. I expect it to facilitate my emails with
| anyone else, regardless of which mail server they use.
| And I want gmail to do some spam filtering for me, but I
| expect that I can see the filtered messages and show the
| filter what it missed or wrongly labeled as spam.
|
| If we leave the federation up to the servers, we'll just
| get a "fragmentverse" of walled gardens instead of a
| single big one.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > not like I expect gmail to "defederate" an email server
|
| I'm pretty sure gmail defeds email servers all the time.
| IP blocks are the oldest tool in the toolbox
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The difference is that email is a one-to-one medium, so
| it's easy to define spam. It's something the recipient
| doesn't want. Anyone who sends this or willingly serves
| users who do is unambiguously a malicious actor, so they
| get blocked.
|
| With forums there are arbitrarily many recipients of any
| message. A lot of people may not like furries or
| communists or what have you, but demanding that every
| other instance ban them as a prerequisite to
| interoperability is how you kill the network by
| suppressing everything but the lowest common denominator.
|
| This problem is created by tying accounts to instances.
| Because then other instances, instead of banning the
| accounts they don't want from only their own instance,
| can try to get them banned from everywhere by threatening
| any instance that allows them with disconnection. Which
| is poison.
| sngz wrote:
| its a feature not a bug. calling that drama is
| disingenuous. They are protecting their own instance from
| trolls that they don't have the tools / resources to
| handle. Don't like that they de federated? then join a
| different instance.
| COGlory wrote:
| This is a feature. Besides, everyone knows how on reddit,
| joining one sub can result in auto-bans from other subs.
| How is this any different?
| joemi wrote:
| I didn't know that. And I've been on reddit for at least
| a decade. What are you talking about?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Beehaw is basically the only server that's super
| defederation-happy. It will pass.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| It's not "drama", it's protecting their community from an
| instance that's currently being bombed by trolls.
|
| Seriously, the concern trolling around here regarding
| federation is almost comical. Apparently when major
| private corporation admins or volunteer mods arbitrarily
| intervene in the functioning of a platform it's totally
| fine, but when local server admins do it by moderating
| locally or de-federating from problem instances (whether
| temporarily, to deal with a flashpoint problem, or
| permanently in the case of problem servers), suddenly
| it's a huge problem and an indication of "drama".
| fnovd wrote:
| If the federated system can't handle the trolls and bad
| actors that Reddit is currently equipped to deal with
| then the whole idea is dead in the water.
| ihateolives wrote:
| It's literally throwing thousands of babies out with
| bathwater. Beehaw in their attempt of building a happy
| place has disabled downvoting so community can't downvote
| trolls and only tool they apparently have to fight trolls
| is to defederate two of the biggest instances. Problem
| solved? It's like blocking entire small country by IP
| because your had two port scans from there.
| mdhen wrote:
| Beehaw disallows the creation of new subs by users. It's
| run by total control freaks. Hard pass on them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the concern trolling around here regarding federation_
|
| I clicked, excited. I closed the tab when it required me
| to select a server. I don't want to read up on what
| rights server admins have over my account, why I should
| choose one versus another, which servers are de-
| federating which others, _et cetera_.
|
| This is a real and recurring hurdle to the adoption of
| these technologies.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Yeah, definitely better to just blindly click through a
| ToS on some private corporate social media service...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You don't take an aeronautics course when you buy a plane
| ticket, because _99% of people don 't want to do that._
| I've been a nerd for ~40 years, I used to live on Usenet,
| I understand federation inside out, and I don't want to
| learn another protocol just to try a new website.
|
| Blindly clicking through a ToS while chuckling that
| 'nobody reads that shit lol' is in fact a better user
| experience for almost everyone. If your approach were so
| great, there would be physical cities whose population
| consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >there would be physical cities whose population
| consisted entirely of architects and engineers.
|
| the analog to a digital federation in the physical world,
| is literally just that, an actual federation. People
| making choices about what community they participate in
| isn't technical, it's social. Everyone who lives in a
| democratic society does in fact participate in how their
| city is run and governed or understands how to move from
| one state to another.
|
| You do not need to understand the technical details of
| federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to
| pretend that people are unable to choose or build the
| communities they want, and take some responsibility in
| maintaining them. This 'consumer' mentality needs to die,
| people need to learn to be proper citizens on the
| internet. We ask it from people in the real world, so we
| can do it online. Why are we pretending the online
| version of some 19th century company town is inevitable?
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > You do not need to understand the technical details of
| federated systems, but it is absolutely infantilizing to
| pretend that people are unable to choose or build the
| communities they want, and take some responsibility in
| maintaining them.
|
| Not only is it infantilizing, it's _wrong_.
|
| People create communities online _all the time_. Whether
| it 's Facebook groups or subreddits or Discourse forums
| or Discord groups and on and on and on. That's literally
| how the internet has always worked.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _definitely better to blindly click through a ToS on
| some private corporate social media service_
|
| Philosophically, no. Practically, yes. Because it
| actually delivers the product. Creating an ideological
| and technical filter at the mouth of the funnel is
| absurd.
|
| This is heading straight for either Reddit getting its
| act together or one of Facebook, Twitter or Substack
| taking the prize. Because they spent two seconds thinking
| about onboarding. Perfect is the enemy of good.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Creating an ideological and technical filter at the
| mouth of the funnel is absurd.
|
| So then just pick a large, popular instance and be done
| with it. You've already made it clear you don't care what
| the platform's policies are, so why are you pretending
| this is a barrier?
| mrcrumb1 wrote:
| You say this as if it has not already proven to be a
| barrier. That is to say: it's _already_ preventing
| adoption, whether you think it 's a good reason or not.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to
| newbies? You are the archetypal technical person snapping
| about the workaround instead of engaging with the user
| problem. If everyone can have access to all the content
| (which is what most people want), why are they being
| herded into choosing an instance in the first place?
|
| Federation might run 100x better if instances were
| suggested based on geographic proximity rather than
| semantics, a concept which makes intuitive sense to
| people. 'Pick from a random and inconsistent list of
| servers in no particular order' is like demanding that
| people who are considering taking a holiday decide where
| to eat lunch after they arrive before they buy the plane
| ticket.
| [deleted]
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > Why are you pretending that this isn't confusing to
| newbies?
|
| I'm not. Absolutely the onboarding experience can be
| improved.
|
| The problem is you're losing the plot, here.
|
| The original commenter complained about having to "read
| up on what rights server admins have over my account, why
| I should choose one versus another, which servers are de-
| federating which others, et cetera."
|
| But _you don 't have to do that if you don't want to_. If
| you're already willing to blindly join Reddit, you can
| blindly join mastodon.social.
|
| And the app is already now driving people to do that if
| they really don't care (which is what the OP claims).
|
| So this is already being improved (and yes, can
| absolutely be improved further).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified as
| a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a
| decade ago. I don't know how to make this any simpler:
|
| Forced choices drive away users. People don't like making
| decisions without context because they feel like scams.
| That's why uptake is slow almost a decade into
| federation. _The UX model is bad._
| brewdad wrote:
| Picking a user name is a forced choice. By your logic,
| nobody would ever want to join a social media platform
| that didn't automatically assign a user name.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > It's 'being improved' even though it's been identified
| as a problem from the outset of the fediverse, nearly a
| decade ago.
|
| Ah, cool, so you just wanna complain. Got it. Carry on!
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _pick a large, popular instance and be done with it_
|
| .world is having technical issues. (I could sign up. But
| first login spawns an infinite spinny. The only reason I
| know that 's one of the larger servers is because of this
| thread.)
|
| I'm doing it. But it's tedious, and the hacker in me sees
| an opening for a competitor to scoop out the 90% of users
| who don't care about federation, they just want it to
| work.
|
| > _you don 't care what the platform's policies are, so
| why are you pretending this is a barrier_
|
| You really don't see the barrier?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The problem is that there's no reason it won't end the
| same as Reddit if you don't have federation, so you
| actually can't scoop out 90% of users because they might
| as well stay on Reddit.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there 's no reason it won't end the same as Reddit if
| you don't have federation, so you actually can't scoop
| out 90% of users because they might as well stay on
| Reddit_
|
| It _will_ end up like Reddit. But right now it isn 't,
| and that's good enough to make a play for the users.
| Given a choice between that and choosing a server,
| signing up, finding its log-in unresponsive, looking for
| another server, signing up... (I haven't gotten further
| than this) who do you think wins?
|
| By the way, we agree. I _want_ a federated system to
| work. But simple sign-up fuck-ups, where even someone who
| 's curious for curiosity's sake has to spend half an hour
| figuring out which servers even work at the moment,
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I think we do largely agree here. However, I think it
| should be noted that the current migration is largely
| driven by moderators and power-users, not the 90% of
| users that don't really care, so I don't think there
| actually is any competitive opportunity.
|
| I think that you're right in that the sign up UX is not
| great - there are also serious performance concerns, and
| in many ways the platform isn't ready yet. But I don't
| think that's going to persist for too long. I think some
| kind of "I don't care" instance (probably lemmy.world)
| will emerge, and the UX will improve. Perhaps it won't be
| in time, though.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _current migration is largely driven by moderators and
| power-users, not the 90% of users that don 't really
| care, so I don't think there actually is any competitive
| opportunity_
|
| Power users' power is users. We've frequently seen the
| celebs-first gambit by new social media entrants, most
| notably Clubhouse, and while it can generate hype for a
| bit, it's far from a proven strategy. It's frustrating to
| watch a re-play of Mastodon's fumbles, particularly since
| this time the protest is actually semi-organized.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| By power users, I'm referring to the small minority that
| generated the vast majority of content on Reddit. It's
| true that it isn't a proven strategy, but given that the
| Lemmy ecosystem has gotten around 100k users in the past
| 2-3 days, it's not failing as bad as it could be.
| [deleted]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It's not concern trolling, drama exists because everyone
| gets distracted by organized trolling and federation
| stans don't have a good answer for this problem.
|
| Federation is confusing and alienating to non-technical
| users, and nerds who love federation tend to have a
| mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over the
| _inevitable_ abuses. Federation stans need to grasp the
| fact that nobody who is not a full time nerd cares about
| how federation works at the technical level, they just
| want a place to socialize with the assurance that they
| won 't be overrun by assholes. All the Federation stans
| go into it the idea that 'you can just defederate'
| whereas non-technical users go into it with the idea that
| they don't want to get raided in the first place.
|
| The existing model of federation is not working. Users
| don't want to know about the infrastructure any more than
| people going into a coffee shop want to looka t the
| architectural blueprints of the building, and federation
| is clearly unable to pre-empt raiding behavior
| automatically.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Federation is confusing and alienating to non-
| technical users, and nerds who love federation tend to
| have a mediocre grasp of social dynamics and gloss over
| the inevitable abuses_
|
| Doesn't this also describe Reddit mods?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It does, and that's another opportunity to repost this
| evergreen paper describing how these issues manifest on
| Reddit.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03697
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| > drama exists because everyone gets distracted by
| organized trolling and federation stans don't have a good
| answer for this problem.
|
| Neither does Reddit. Have you not heard of brigading?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Raiding behavior" has been around forever, including on
| Usenet. It's not a serious objection to federation, since
| "raids" and other obnoxious behavior can happen
| irrespective of it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm not objecting to federation as such, I'm objecting to
| the belief that users want to become federation
| evangelists in order to engage in social conversation.
| It's limiting the uptake of federated services because it
| forces users into making a meaningless-seeming choice
| before they can participate.
|
| When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical
| friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by
| the necessity to choose an instance and the inability to
| make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. This
| is the exact same reason that Mastodon has never really
| taken off.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical
| friends, their eyes glaze over
|
| That's quite understandable actually, the Lemmy UX sucks.
| Try showing them fedibb.ml instead. It's Lemmy under the
| hood, and federation works perfectly - but you'd never
| guess that!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Hum... If I go to fedibb.ml, I get a bad cert domain
| error.
| chongli wrote:
| Ordinary, non-posting users (lurkers) are not the target
| right now. The goal is to attract the creators: users who
| already put in tons of effort posting on Reddit. They are
| much more likely to put in the effort to grow new
| communities and migrate existing ones to lemmy.
|
| If enough creators move over then the lurkers will
| follow. But attracting lurkers at this stage is pointless
| if there isn't any content for them to look at.
| tazjin wrote:
| What's the reason? US culture war stuff?
| ihateolives wrote:
| Sorry, added link with source now.
| archargelod wrote:
| Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of
| trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that
| doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to
| unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary
| measure, until there are better moderation options.
| mock-possum wrote:
| dismissing the ongoing campaign for equal rights as 'US
| culture war stuff' is awfully heartless, don't you think?
| open-paren wrote:
| "It is too big and we can't deal with that many users".
| omniglottal wrote:
| Albeit indistiguishable, trolls should not be consdered
| equivalent to users.
| dingusdew wrote:
| [dead]
| comte7092 wrote:
| That's kind of part of the model.
|
| Governance is up to individual instances/communities
| rather than one faceless megacorp.
|
| It's a feature not a bug.
| Loughla wrote:
| Yes, and what I don't think you're hearing is that Joe
| Blow consumer doesn't care who is in charge of
| governance. They care that it's easy to use.
| comte7092 wrote:
| Moderation on platforms has been a major topic of debate
| for years now. Joe blow _absolutely cares_ what gets
| removed.
| chongli wrote:
| Yes. Joe Blow consumer just wants access to all the
| amazing free content on Reddit. Unfortunately, the people
| who create that content (1% of users) are currently
| getting screwed over by Reddit.
|
| So my appeal to join lemmy is not aimed at Joe Blow, it's
| aimed at the actual contributors who make communities
| possible. If enough of them switch over then lemmy will
| gain critical mass, and the rest is history. Joe Blow can
| go wherever he wants. I doubt he'll stick around at
| Reddit when the content stream disappears.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > it's aimed at the actual contributors who make
| communities possible
|
| Contributors generally create content because they want
| it to be seen by more than a handful of nerds and don't
| want it to disappear within weeks because their instance
| has ran out of money.
|
| Those contributors will either stop contributing for
| good, go back to Reddit (because it's _still_ a better
| experience than any of the "fediverse" bullshit) or jump
| ship the second an actually competent _company_ builds a
| centralized alternative that _just works_.
| BaseballPhysics wrote:
| Funny, because if the US political discourse is to be
| believed, people, particularly on the right, _really_
| care about governance. I mean, hell, Musk bought Twitter
| specifically so he could change governance of the
| platform.
|
| So no, I reject the premise.
|
| People absolutely do care about governance. They care if
| they're getting spammed by crypto scammers or getting
| targeted by abusive trolls. They care if their political
| views are being censored or things they find offensive
| are being promoted.
|
| The difference is, on a traditional, privately owned
| platform, the users have limited choice and no say, and
| they've gotten used to that as the status quo.
|
| And if you're a user who really doesn't care, cool, just
| join mastodon.social or lemmy.ml and move on. Problem
| solved.
|
| As for complaints about onboarding, the official Mastodon
| app already drives people to mastodon.social (much to the
| chagrin of some folks in the community), so I have no
| doubt those issues will smooth out with time.
| compsciphd wrote:
| sounds like a reinvention of usenet...
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Yeah, or even Gopher. I would love an app that lets me
| run custom scrapers to fetch content, or post my comments
| to threads about that content, on whatever sites that one
| of my scrapers can read or post to with my account
| details. For example, an "NYT article fetcher" could
| implement the "content module" interface, to fetch an NYT
| article, remove the paywall, and render it for me. Then a
| "reddit fetcher" and an "HN fetcher" could implement the
| "discussion module" interface to fetch reddit and HN
| comments about the NYT article. And then the app could
| merge it all together into a nice unified interface, and
| give me tools for posting replies to Reddit or HN, or
| whatever sites are supported by my installed discussion
| modules and my locally saved credentials.
|
| Let developers create each "source" of content or
| discussions, packaged into a module ("NYT article
| fetcher," or "Reddit discussion fetcher"), and let me
| choose which modules to install. Then delegate the
| infrastructure for executing scrapers or curating feeds
| to a set of federated servers that I can opt into. Or
| better yet, execute the scrapers in a local sandbox on my
| own device, so that the NYT can't block me because my
| requests are my own. You could argue it's just another
| form of a web browser.
| [deleted]
| babypuncher wrote:
| lemmy.world's fast growth is working against it. The site
| has been flooded with low effort content, leading others to
| start defederating them.
|
| The instance I use hasn't defederated them yet, but I've
| already had to block most of lemmy.world's communities from
| appearing in my feed.
| beowulfey wrote:
| That's why I recommended it as a Reddit alternative ;)
|
| Nah, just kidding, it's a good point. But it's a good
| starter server, and once people get used to the idea, I
| think they'll naturally gravitate to other servers.
| jayknight wrote:
| And it seems the whole site is down right now.
| StrictDabbler wrote:
| BeeHaw just defederated from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world.
|
| A poster came onto sh.itjust.works claiming responsibility for
| that. They described the very minor trolling they used to
| achieve it. They say they work for Reddit and are personally
| invested in proving that federation is impossible.
|
| So hey, it's the internet, assume everything in that is a lie,
| but it shows that there's emotional resonance in the idea of
| preventing this shift.
|
| There are a lot of malcontents and radicals in the lemmy sphere
| and many of them are very angry about the Reddit exodus
| invading their space. It will be a few months before these
| things settle out.
| hinkley wrote:
| Internet search is fundamentally broken now due to perverse
| incentives and game theory. I won't say we are "going back to
| the Before Times" because that's not accurate, but we need to
| go back to the In-between Times when you searched for new-to-
| you ideas and found curated communities that had depth of
| experience.
|
| It's possible that google is overtrained, that it got too good
| at finding things in the structures of the Internet (see:
| PageRank), and that structure collapsed because we have Google
| for that now, so why bother? And then Google couldn't tell the
| Pulp from the Real, and SEO became far too powerful. I doubt
| that's what happened, but I can't rule it out.
|
| In some of my hobbies, Co-ops are a powerful force for good (or
| at the very least, mediocrity++). These federations are just a
| fancy word for Co-op, IMO. If I can't have Good, I'll settle
| for mediocrity++ over mediocrity---, which is the precipice we
| stand on with Reddit current events.
| silverbax88 wrote:
| Thanks for this. I can see Lemmy as a definite alternative now.
| I joined a couple of Lemmy servers and I definitely like it so
| far, and I'm looking to move away from Reddit anyway.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| My first reaction is:
|
| there should be an aggregator for all of these instances:
| https://join-lemmy.org/instances
|
| because my first instinct guess is, there's going to be huge
| overlap on submissions daily
|
| there's only so much new news daily and a certain niche of
| people who read it/contribute
|
| scattering them out to a bunch of obscure niche places probably
| doesn't help
|
| there are even boring days on HackerNews. how many monthly
| active users does this site have roughly? 500k? 1m? way less?
| assbuttbuttass wrote:
| The way the fediverse works is, you can see posts and
| interact with communities on other instances as long as they
| federate with your "home" instance
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I cannot for the life of me login to lemmy.world even after
| creating an account today. Is this due to increased traffic
| today or something else I don't understand about the platform?
| chongli wrote:
| Yeah. See my second link. If you scroll down you can see per-
| server user counts. Lemmy is exploding!
| [deleted]
| dbbk wrote:
| Dead on arrival. There are 6 separate "general" instances.
| Normal people will never use this.
| w1nst0nsm1th wrote:
| I became a fan of American politics by reading reddit...
|
| Then, I stopped watching the walking dead
| nullityrofl wrote:
| Federated services will never become mainstream. This is just
| the reality that people need to come to accept. I find them
| heavily talked about in circles with my colleagues and in my
| profession but the attraction of decentralized services just
| isn't there for the vast majority of people.
|
| I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just growing
| pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon frustrating. Do I
| care if username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters?
| Do I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some
| server? Which server?
|
| Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a
| user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
|
| This is just the reality. I wish people would focus on building
| services that meet peoples needs and not just as an expression
| of their idealogies.
| redundantly wrote:
| > Federated services will never become mainstream
|
| That's kind of the point
|
| Mastadon, Lemmy, Etc, they're not replacements for Reddit or
| Facebook. They're an alternative.
|
| A social network doesn't _require_ millions of users to be
| useful. It 's okay that they're not for everyone.
|
| > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't require a
| user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
|
| For a technically inclined person on a largely technology
| focused forum, you sound an awful lot like a luddite.
|
| There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the
| internet and making use of it. That changed over time. The
| same will likely happen for these types of non-centralised
| services.
| jangxx wrote:
| >There used to be a high barrier to entry for accessing the
| internet and making use of it.
|
| While this was a bit before my time, I can definitely
| relate to spending hours or days to get something to work
| that I want to use. I think the difference is just that all
| the fediverse services don't really seem all that useful.
| If I open the frontpage of any "reddit alternative" right
| now, the top posts have a few hundred votes and a few dozen
| comments at most. There is simply too little activity here
| (that I care about) that would make it worth it for me to
| really get into it. I browsed reddit for entertainment and
| discussions and right now, none of the fediverse services
| I've looked at actually provide that.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| > you sound an awful lot like a luddite.
|
| I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of childish
| insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in representation of
| luddites.
|
| > A social network doesn't require millions of users to be
| useful. It's okay that they're not for everyone.
|
| That might be true if you only ever want to read technical
| things with a technical audience in a technical forum. But
| that's not why Reddit is valuable or popular. Lemmy is an
| alternative to Reddit like water is an alternative to beer.
| Sure, they exist in the same kind of universe, but no sane
| person would tell you to switch from water to beer because
| they don't meet the same needs.
|
| Reddit is popular because I can read /r/netsec one day and
| /r/lawncare the next. Because when I wanted to learn to
| make my own coffee at home I knew I could just go to
| /r/espresso and get a 101. When my 3D printer broke, I knew
| I could go to /r/bambulab and ask for help. When the
| historic winter we just had in NorCal ripped shingles off
| my roof, I knew I could go to /r/roofing to ask for advice.
|
| Sure, you might want to live in a world where you only talk
| to software engineers about software and maybe Lemmy is a
| good fit for that.
|
| That wasn't my point, though.
| redundantly wrote:
| > I'm not sure if this is meant to be some kind of
| childish insult or gotcha but no: I'm talking in
| representation of luddites.
|
| No, it's an observation.
|
| You're insisting things have to work a certain way in
| order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't
| have to operate in a specific, fixed way.
|
| Saying decentralisation will never catch on because it
| doesn't fit your description of accessibility is like
| saying someone won't be able to operate in society
| without knowing how to read or write cursive.
|
| Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they use
| technologies, how they think about them, it all changes.
| It was once a widely shared opinion that computers would
| never catch on. Or that the internet wouldn't catch on.
| Or any other number of things wouldn't catch on. And they
| did, despite anyone's objections that it would.
|
| As people's mindsets change, as technology advances, so
| will how it's used. And you don't seem to be open to that
| idea. Hence the luddite comparison.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| > You're insisting things have to work a certain way in
| order for them to have value and be usable. Things don't
| have to operate in a specific, fixed way.
|
| No, I'm not. I'm staying on the topic of the thread
| you're posting in: Reddit's future and where people may
| or may not migrate to. You're doing exactly what I
| accused the creators of Fediverse technologies are doing:
| fixating on the ideology and taking an opportunity to
| preach.
|
| I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I
| understand it. It's not complex.
|
| But it isn't a replacement for Reddit. I don't even think
| you're arguing that. I think you're trying to get me to
| debate some strawman. I never said the Fediverse has no
| value. I said it has no mainstream appeal so long as
| people prioritize the ideology of the technology over the
| use case.
|
| > Things change. How people learn about stuff, how they
| use technologies, how they think about them, it all
| changes. It was once a widely shared opinion that
| computers would never catch on. Or that the internet
| wouldn't catch on. Or any other number of things wouldn't
| catch on. And they did, despite anyone's objections that
| it would.
|
| This is an argument that things _can_ change not that
| things _will_ change. Plenty of things never caught on.
| On that note, Diaspora existed as a widely available
| alternative to Digg when Digg died.
|
| But people ended up on Reddit anyway.
| redundantly wrote:
| > Federated services will never become mainstream
|
| > Centralization works... It's approachable for
| laypersons.
|
| You are arguing that things will not change because it
| doesn't work in a very specific way. I'm replying to what
| you said. This isn't a straw man argument.
|
| There doesn't need to be a direct replacement for Reddit.
| Things don't have to continue to work like that. Your
| assumption of what's difficult to do isn't an absolute.
| People have shown they're able to adopt new ideas, new
| ways of doing things.
|
| > I'm talking in representation of luddites.
|
| You're not giving enough credit to society. They're not
| cattle. They don't just sit in a field and chew cud.
|
| Mindsets and ideologies change. How technology is used
| changes. Your insistence that there _has_ to be a direct,
| fully equivalent replacement for Reddit to be successful
| is incorrect.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0
| before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.
|
| I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a
| deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position. I don't
| think people are cattle. I think they are anything but: I
| think they have made a conscious decision about what they
| want and value.
|
| What I think is that people have become accustomed to
| having a wide array of information on a wide array of
| topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is
| that people value that accessibility of information. And
| I think that products like Lemmy don't meet that
| requirement and so something like Reddit will always
| exist, regardless of the centralized corporate ownership.
| redundantly wrote:
| > I don't think people are cattle and I think that is a
| deliberate attempt to misrepresent my position.
|
| I'm not attempting to misrepresent you, that's just how
| you're coming across. You're effectively saying that
| people are either too lazy or not competent enough to use
| services that aren't packaged up and served directly to
| them. Hence the analogy.
|
| > something like Reddit will always exist, regardless of
| the centralized corporate ownership.
|
| Maybe, but that's not the point. You're claiming that
| decentralised services won't see wide spread adoption
| because it doesn't conform to how things work on Reddit.
| My point is it's narrow minded to have that mindset.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| > You're claiming that decentralised services won't see
| wide spread adoption because it doesn't conform to how
| things work on Reddit.
|
| That is explicitly not what I said. What I said was:
|
| > What I think is that people have become accustomed to
| having a wide array of information on a wide array of
| topics easily indexed and accessible. What I think is
| that people value that accessibility of information.
|
| A replacement doesn't have to work how Reddit works. It
| just has to provide some of the same value.
| redundantly wrote:
| > That is explicitly not what I said
|
| The following are your words, not mine, although the
| emphasis is:
|
| > > Federated services will _never_ become mainstream.
| This is just the reality that people need to come to
| accept. I find them heavily talked about in circles with
| my colleagues and in my profession but _the attraction of
| decentralized services just isn 't there for the vast
| majority of people._
|
| > > I'd take a wager that we'll see Digg 3.0/Reddit 2.0
| before we'll see widespread adoption of the Fediverse.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| Those two points are not contrary. The quote you pasted
| does not dispute my point at all. Your emphasis is my
| point that the fact that the service is decentralized
| does not allow it to make up for the fact that it does
| not meet the needs of the users.
|
| It does for some people -- some people value the fact
| that it's decentralized over other needs -- but my point
| is the vast majority of people don't care as long as the
| information they need is there and accessible. The fact
| that it's decentralized is, in itself, not enough.
|
| EDIT: And to be clear: I think the fact that it's
| decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other
| properties that users value just that the developers of
| Fediverse applications don't seem to realize that they
| need to do something more than make it decentralized.
| That's the entire essence of my post.
| redundantly wrote:
| > And to be clear: I think the fact that it's
| decentralized doesn't preclude it from having those other
| properties that users value
|
| And yet:
|
| > > Federated services will never become mainstream. This
| is just the reality that people need to come to accept
|
| > > Centralization works. It's convenient. It doesn't
| require a user guide. It's approachable for laypersons.
| This is just the reality
|
| > > Lemmy is an alternative to Reddit like water is an
| alternative to beer. Sure, they exist in the same kind of
| universe, but no sane person would tell you to switch
| from water to beer because they don't meet the same
| needs.
|
| And then there's this:
|
| > > I find Lemmy frustrating to use and it isn't just
| growing pains: it's the same reason I find Mastodon
| frustrating. Do I care if
| username@somecommunity.infosec.somecommunity matters? Do
| I care if I use lemmy.world or do I have to find some
| server? Which server?
|
| > > I see the value of the Fediverse. I see the intent. I
| understand it. It's not complex.
|
| Which one is it? Complex or not? Do you need a user
| guide? No? Which one?
|
| You're all over the place. Saying centralisation is
| required for mainstream adoption which means
| decentralisation isn't, but somehow decentralisation
| isn't the problem that the fediverse has?
|
| One thing that I haven't pointed out in all of this is
| that signing up and using reddit might have been easy for
| you, but that isn't the case for every body. I'd wager
| for most visitors to reddit, whether or not they have
| registered an account, they simply consume the content
| there like they would a Facebook wall. Many users don't
| understand the concept of subreddits or fine tuning their
| account to their interests. They aren't getting the same
| value out of it that you place so highly on it.
|
| Centralization does not necessarily make things user
| friendly. Nor does decentralisation make things less user
| friendly. You have implied both to be true and then
| contradicted yourself.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| I'm not all over the place. You're just exactly the
| frustrating personality type I'm talking about: one who
| is hyperfixated on the technology and the decentralized
| nature who can't see the forest for the trees and is more
| interested in arguing the minutia.
|
| I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass adopted
| Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my lifetime. I
| think theres a variety of reasons for this but the people
| involved in the development and advocacy of the products
| and their inability to listen to any feedback are the
| biggest one. They think they've got this _allllll_
| figured out and it's just humanity that needs to evolve
| to meet them.
|
| I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't
| see that happening, though.
| redundantly wrote:
| > You're just exactly the frustrating personality type
| I'm talking about: one who is hyperfixated on the
| technology...
|
| If anyone here has been hyper fixated on technology it's
| you. I haven't been heralding the Fediverse. I haven't
| been waxing poetic about decentralisation. I've only been
| responding to the things you've said about how the
| centralised nature of Reddit is why it's successful and
| that decentralisation will never successful, which is
| something you said.
|
| > > Federated services will never become mainstream.
|
| As for this:
|
| > I'm content in my belief that we won't see a mass
| adopted Fediverse technology replace Reddit in my
| lifetime. I think theres a variety of reasons for this
| but the people involved in the development and advocacy
| of the products and their inability to listen to any
| feedback are the biggest one. They think they've got this
| _allllll_ figured out and it's just humanity that needs
| to evolve to meet them.
|
| It's not like those products can't evolve. The developers
| and communities behind these products can, and most
| likely will, do things to help with adoption of the
| services they've created. This isn't like the book of
| Genesis. Just like how some deity didn't create the earth
| in six days and then rested it's not like new features
| won't be added or different federated offerings won't
| appear.
|
| > I'll come back here and apologise if I'm wrong. I don't
| see that happening, though.
|
| Nah, that's okay. It's just a chat on a web forum. I
| imagine we'll both forget about it in a few days.
| bamfly wrote:
| Works for email. There are only a few big hosts and some
| larger-but-not-huge number of mid-sized ones, sure, but they
| all play nicely with one another. Like if you could post on
| Twitter from your Facebook account.
|
| Of course, I doubt we could create email today, if it didn't
| already exist.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| Email works because despite it's decentralized nature, it's
| functionally transparent to the user and you aren't
| constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.
|
| The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not dissimilar
| from crypto: it's designers care more about the ideology
| and the concept of being in the fediverse than they do
| meeting an actual product need.
|
| In spite of a _dire_ gap in the market place and a
| substantial marketing opportunity to pick up market share,
| Lemmy and Mastodon remain largely unadopted by the masses
| and will likely remain in a similar market place as
| Diaspora*.
| bamfly wrote:
| > Email works because despite it's decentralized nature,
| it's functionally transparent to the user and you aren't
| constantly forced to acknowledge that nature.
|
| You _are_ forced to, every time you have to write the bit
| after the @ in an email address, though!
|
| > The issue with "Fediverse" technologies is not
| dissimilar from crypto: it's designers care more about
| the ideology and the concept of being in the fediverse
| than they do meeting an actual product need.
|
| I think the trouble is that they're still trying to be
| too centralized(!) and keep too much control over content
| on the side of the various federated servers. Email
| defers to the client far more than these systems do.
| Gmail's not going to cut off "federation" with
| @microsoft.com because some of its users are sending
| _solicited_ racist newsletters and MS refuses to ban
| them, for instance (if they become a spam farm and a huge
| proportion of Gmail 's users complain about it? Yeah,
| then, maybe). Fastmail probably won't ban you because
| you're _receiving_ racist newsletters. There aren 't
| content moderators, just mostly-automated responses to
| _user_ reports of abuse. The user is in control, and the
| servers don 't try to proactively police or curate
| content that users _want_ to read (they filter spam,
| sure).
|
| (I mean, there's the further problem that it's nearly
| impossible to create a new open protocol of any kind and
| get any notable adoption these days, but that's not the
| _fault_ of the federated model)
|
| [EDIT] To be clear, I'm not advocating for racist
| newsletters in the above, that was just an unambiguous
| example of the kind of thing that'll draw swift and harsh
| moderator action on a _lot_ of federated servers but that
| can (I assume--admittedly, I 've not tried) get passed
| around via email without problems--my point is that the
| issues with "drama" and network-churn and such in
| federated networks, that may disrupt the usage patterns
| of ordinary users, is connected to how much control the
| server operators have. More fundamentally, this is
| connected to making the activity of these communities
| public on the Web by default--which I think is largely a
| mistake, I think it's really weird that it's become
| common for groups of people chatting about _whatever_ to
| put everything they say on billboards in flashing lights
| all around the world.
| chongli wrote:
| _Centralization works. It 's convenient. It doesn't require a
| user guide. It's approachable for laypersons._
|
| It works until it doesn't: when the host of a centralized
| community decides to make enemies with its users. This is an
| old story for many people who went through the Digg to Reddit
| migration.
|
| Now people have had enough. Our communities are too important
| to leave in the hands of one company. It's time for all the
| people who create 100% of the value on Reddit to have control
| over their own community's future.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| > It works until it doesn't: when the host of a centralized
| community decides to make enemies with its users.
|
| And yet in spite of this very thing happening, Lemmy and
| Mastodon remain largely unadopted.
|
| Diaspora* existed during the Digg implosion and where did
| people flock to? No, not the decentralized Fediverse, but
| to another centralized service. Because it meets their
| needs. Their needs from a product _aren't_ that it be
| decentralized. Their needs are that it is easily
| accessible, that information is easily indexed and
| searchable, that interacting with users is obvious and
| transparent, etc.
|
| These are all needs that Fediverse products have not met
| well because they're too focused on their agenda and their
| ideology, not their product.
| goatlover wrote:
| Some people have had enough. People are still using Reddit
| despite the blackouts. We'll see how much mass migration
| there is. Even if Reddit goes the route of Digg, how do you
| know another centralized site won't take it's place?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm with you 100% on the goal here, what fediverse skeptics
| like me keep trying to point out is that it's not going to
| work if you first require every user to learn nerd stuff.
| Most people are part of multiple communities, some which
| overlap and some which do not. The whole process of
| choosing an instance in order to figure out the fediverse
| is broken, because it assumes people one-dimensional, and
| forces them into making a fundamentally meaningless choice
| as their first user experience.
|
| It's based on a metaphor of the body in a physical place,
| that doesn't really work online. As I mentioned in another
| comment, this is like offering to give someone a ticket to
| an exciting foreign city, but before they can get the
| ticket they have to choose where they're going to eat lunch
| when they arrive. This alienates people because _they have
| no context for choosing between instances_ so forcing this
| choice on them as a condition of signing up is good way to
| maximize your bounce rate.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > I wish people would focus on building services that meet
| peoples needs
|
| No what you are presenting is an argument for services that
| meet the needs of dumbest assumable users and centralization.
| It's the same unreflected argument as has been repeated over
| and over when it comes to Mastodon and it boils down to
| "everyone needs to be there or else it's a failure". Services
| like that obviously are fine too, but there is more than
| enough people that don't need or want that.
|
| It speaks for a certain narrow mindedness that everything
| needs to be Silicon Valley's next big thing that will someday
| rock the stock market.
|
| In reality Mastodon does not have the size of Twitter, and
| _you_ might find it too difficult to use. However not
| everyone is that way, and it has over the last months proven
| to be a good alternative for users. It 's potentially the
| same with Lemmy: It only needs to povide a cool alternative
| and enough users for meaningful interaction.
|
| _It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid. And
| it does not need to be designed explicitly for the
| layperson._ (not an excuse for a bad UI, but with new Reddit
| the bar is incredibly low there, and Lemmy seems fine)
|
| > I find Lemmy frustrating to use
|
| Well others don't, and that is fine. For me personally: not
| everyone needs to migrate to Lemmy (or another federated
| alternative), only the communities I care about. And the same
| can be true for other people as well.
| nullityrofl wrote:
| It's ironic that I posted "federated services are difficult
| to engage with because the people designing and advocating
| for them are more interested in ramming an ideology down
| your throat and condescending you than they are providing a
| service" and a bunch of people responded by ramming their
| ideology down my throat and condescending me.
|
| Yes, I acknowledge that not every service needs to be a
| mega service that everyone flocks to. Yes, I acknowledge
| that multiple products can exist than when combined replace
| a prior, larger service. Yes, I acknowledge that Lemmy,
| Mastodon, Diaspora or whatever else you like is great and
| fine for you and I'm happy for you and that's OK.
|
| No, I don't think any of these services will realistically
| replace Reddit and I think that if Reddit dies then Digg
| 3.0 will spring up in it's place.
|
| > It does not need the popularity of reddit to be valid.
|
| I never said it was invalid. This isn't an attack on the
| technology. It's OK. You can calm down. It's my opinion
| that it isn't a drop-in replacement for Reddit and unlikely
| to see widespread adoption or prevent another Reddit from
| appearing.
|
| It's like talking to Web3 zealots. I'm not attacking you, I
| promise.
|
| > And it does not need to be designed explicitly for the
| layperson.
|
| It does if it wants to be as useful as Reddit is today and
| Digg was before it or achieve the same popularity. You
| argue that we don't need a single service to be popular and
| that's OK but I live in reality.
|
| You're comparing apples and oranges. You acknowledge that
| Lemmy does not attempt to be everything Reddit is today.
| I'm suggesting that that leaves a gap and people are
| interested in that gap.
|
| People have become accustumed to having a single location
| to visit to obtain a depth of knowledge on a wide breadth
| of topics. I don't think, and I think you acknowledge, that
| Lemmy attempts to fill that need. And thus something like
| Reddit 2.0/Digg 3.0 will always exist.
| bradjohnson wrote:
| Personally, I think it's interesting to see federated
| services get put through the ringer as possible alternatives.
| Lately there's been a perfect storm of entitlement from
| corporations (i.e. Twitter and Reddit) over their userbase
| that is great to see funneled into a stress test for
| federated alternatives.
| yadingus wrote:
| It works for what?
|
| Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its
| current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and
| dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the
| mass collection of data.
|
| If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the
| majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want
| that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?
|
| If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make
| people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the
| same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as
| well?
| nullityrofl wrote:
| If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that
| Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very
| difficult angles.
|
| Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at
| this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity
| comes from interacting with others but it's also become a
| hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies,
| for trades, etc.
|
| If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year
| old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated
| summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine?
| /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy?
| /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know
| how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I
| need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good
| deal? /r/askcarsales.
|
| There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social
| media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Honest question: for the user, how does the federation work if
| your "subreddits" (sublemmies?) are scattered between 10
| different instances? On Mastodon it's quite a pain sometimes,
| if you open a link to someone else's instance, and then have to
| copy their link and paste on your instance to be able to follow
|
| I think this is probably way harder/more annoying on lemmy,
| since if I have 1 user on abc.xyz, and I also browse and want
| to comment/upvote on qwerty.cxz and asdf.rocks
| nemo44x wrote:
| New people will take over or create new subreddits as most users
| don't care. Same thing with Twitter - some people leave and new
| people get ore engagements and fill the gap.
|
| Truth is, 99% of the user base doesn't care and hates the mods
| anyhow.
| predictabl3 wrote:
| I'm starting to enjoy federation conversations here just as much
| as crypto conversations.
|
| I'm so sick of the smug ones, the people saying the protest is
| useless, the completely missing-the-point statement that most
| users don't care, and the near gleeful self abuse of people
| mocking others that don't want to keep using a proprietary
| platform being sold to china by a liar.
|
| I'm done with Reddit threads on HN. I recommend folks interested
| in federated networks move these conversations there and let the
| rest enjoy reddit as it turns into digg.
| quaintdev wrote:
| Reddit has become pretty popular in India and this new population
| is okay with new site and policy changes because they simply are
| not aware of what Reddit use to be. Reddit blackout has almost 0
| effect on Indian subreddits. Reddit still has numbers to show
| even if most subreddit are down.
|
| Just check r/India r/Mumbai r/Banglore r/Delhi r/Pune and other
| India subreddits and you will see.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| I'm sure that fact will really pump up demand for their IPO.
| bbor wrote:
| Is this sarcastic or am I missing some point? More users ==
| more money, and India is the biggest under-tapped single
| market in social media, if you consider it a "single market".
| I don't get why being popular in India would be a bad
| thing...
| kortilla wrote:
| Yeah, at a high level more users == more money, but not all
| users are created equal.
|
| Indian users cost the same as US users in operational load
| but are worth a fraction of the advertising revenue.
|
| As long as they are net positive it's good for reddit, but
| the fact that reddit was struggling to make money on the
| biggest margin users does not bode well.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Reddit sells ads, and ads that aren't going to US or UK
| users are priced at rock bottom rates. Ask anyone who owns
| a website that runs adsense.
| [deleted]
| berkle4455 wrote:
| Investors do not care about just DAUs (daily active users)
| anymore, they care just as much about ARPU (avg revenue per
| user)
|
| At Facebook, users from Asia Pacific region monetize at
| around ~1/15th of US&CA users. The costs to serve those
| users remains relatively fixed on a per-user basis, so
| expect those costs to inflate by 10-15x to earn the same
| revenue. Will Reddit drastically change their business
| model to appeal to Asia Pacific users and advertisers? It's
| possible but extremely unlikely and pivoting your business
| model months from IPO isn't a good plan.
|
| A flood of India users to a western-centric platform is how
| you kill that platform (see Quora).
| ddingus wrote:
| Quora got whooped! I shudder at how fast and intense the
| change was.
| quaintdev wrote:
| And now I cant see a single answer behind its login
| dialog. That's how platform dies.
| ddingus wrote:
| Yup. I loved Quora. Was a Top Writer every year.
|
| I look at my fun Quora keepsakes and sigh... brutal.
| jacooper wrote:
| Can you please clarify how indian users killed Quota? Is
| it because India ads weren't paying enough?
| bbor wrote:
| Thanks, well explained! I get that. Your last sentence
| definitely makes me sad, I guess we have a ways to go to
| meaningfully achieve the goals of the internet - perhaps
| LLM-enhanced translation auto-integrated into all the
| major browsers will help with that...
| quaintdev wrote:
| What happened to Quora happened to YouTube, Instagram,
| WhatsApp as well. They are not dying. I'm pretty sure
| they are earning good or they would have exit the market
| long ago.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| r/Bakchodi is the funniest subreddit even though I only get 2%
| of it
|
| Those dudes are legitimately insane
| dontparticipate wrote:
| Just at first glance, and maybe there's a better way to get this
| data (I guess not anymore with the API changes!), but if you just
| look at upvotes on popular posts it seems like nothing has
| changed in terms of how many people are engaged with the site. At
| a glance, I doubt the blackouts have had any impact on their DAU
| or concurrency. New subreddits will likely form to replace the
| permanently blacked out ones, but just like Twitter, all these
| addicts aren't going to leave, they'll just have a worse
| experience but carry on. After all, the good fight against the
| evil Reddit corporation... is taking place almost entirely on
| Reddit.
| bena wrote:
| All reddit has to do is remove the ability for subreddits to be
| private. Or put the ability to make subreddits private behind a
| paywall. Much like how Github treated private repos.
|
| End of the day, reddit is going to have to figure out how many
| _users_ are willing to boycott. Moderators are one thing. They
| are a minority. But if they remove the ability for /r/funny to
| be private, would users honor the protest?
|
| The subs that have ended their blackouts are going on like
| nothing happened.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| If reddit opens up private subs without their mods, users will
| lynch the place.
| Applejinx wrote:
| If Reddit opens up private subs without their mods, spammers
| and trolls will obliterate the subs for trivial profits or to
| teach the former mods a lesson, and there won't be anything
| left for users to trash.
| boolemancer wrote:
| Okay, so you take away the power from the mods, and expect them
| to still do the work to moderate the subreddits for free?
| bena wrote:
| A single power. And I don't think it's a power all mods have.
| If it is, it would only take one rogue mod to re-public the
| subreddit.
|
| And really, whether or not the mods continue to moderate _is_
| the thing being tested with such a move. Reddit did the API
| thing, the mods responded by escalating to this. Reddit can
| either blink and walk back some of their choices, wait for
| the mods to blink and reopen (of which, some have already),
| or reddit can escalate further and see if that makes the mods
| blink.
|
| I believe a non-zero number of mods will continue to
| moderate. I also believe there are more than enough people
| willing to moderate to replace any of those who refuse to
| return.
|
| Then you have weird situations. Because I'm willing to
| believe that some people believe it is extraordinarily
| difficult to moderate a subreddit and that they are uniquely
| gifted at it. Some of these people will believe that they
| _have_ to moderate the subreddit because they believe the
| community will go to shit without them. Others will believe
| that their replacements will cause the community go to shit
| and Tim Reddit himself will come begging them to rejoin the
| moderation team.
|
| And neither of these things are true. Moderating a forum is
| mostly drudgery and the only real skill it takes is having
| the time to do so. This is a battle I don't think the current
| mods can ultimately win.
| darknavi wrote:
| GitHub private repos are free now by the way.
| bena wrote:
| Which is why I used the past tense.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| major subreddits keeping reddit alive basically:
|
| r/politics
|
| r/worldnews
|
| r/movies
|
| r/tech
|
| r/television
|
| r/news
|
| r/technology
|
| r/gadgets
|
| r/sports
|
| minor ones i've noticed:
|
| r/indieheads
|
| r/boxing
|
| It's a pretty serious blackout, but it'd be even more serious if
| those went dark too (and stayed dark).
| elxr wrote:
| r/sports isn't as active as a lot of the major sports
| subreddits IMO. Any serious sports discussions would be on
| sport-specific subs.
|
| r/nba
|
| r/nfl
|
| r/formula1
|
| r/mma
|
| Those are some major ones still private.
|
| Quite disappointing that r/soccer decided to re-open though.
| Would've made a significant impact.
| monnok wrote:
| I can't figure out r/sports's moderation rules. Every now and
| then I will accidentally reply there because something
| bubbles up to my front page. I discovered 90% of my comments
| there get deleted without explanation.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| The "major" subreddits you listed are ranked #74, #76, #77,
| #4020, #946, #165, #875, #2324, and #1584 by posts per day. The
| claim that they are "keeping reddit alive basically" is rather
| generous.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| How can I see those stats?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| https://subredditstats.com/
|
| I found this
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Yeah that's where I took the stats from. I spot checked
| them a bit to see if that metric seemed like it was
| affected by the recent blackout, but it looked like it
| wasn't (maybe they lag by some number of days). You could
| take the #users instead which shouldn't be affected by
| the blackout, but I thought posts better reflected how
| much activity they were producing (the first couple
| listed were really low on users but much higher on
| posts), but really I think for any of the metrics you
| pick will make the "keeping reddit alive" claim look
| rather questionable.
| smbullet wrote:
| Subreddit posts per day is really not a great metric to track
| engagement. You probably want comments or votes per day.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Isn't the rule of thumb 1/9/99 where 1% post, 9% comment,
| 99% lurk?
|
| Or something like that.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| r/politics won't go dark because the mods are paid to spam
| posts
| joduplessis wrote:
| Interestingly Twitter post-Musk has been great for me. Reddit not
| so much these days (even before the "blackout").
| nofeelings wrote:
| [flagged]
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| I can't take the protesters seriously. Of course they're not a
| homogeneous group, but among the protesters, I'm seeing way too
| many pro-capitalists who are actually just middle class and who
| are protesting against exactly what a good capitalist would do.
| entropie wrote:
| The last 3 days I starred way to many times at the "this
| subreddit is private" page on reddit.
|
| Not because I actively were using reddit but because all my
| search queries (not all of them with "reddit") went to one or
| another reddit post with the information not available anymore.
|
| Even if reddit decides to comply, we have to change this for a
| better internet in the future.
|
| Go lemmy guys.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Lemmy could end in a worse situation: some hobby guy hosts his
| lemmy instance with w/e unique subs, one day he decides it's
| too much work and take it offline. Boom it's all gone and
| there's no recourse.
|
| Here at least there's a chance Reddit will unblock the subs if
| this goes on too long.
| bl4kers wrote:
| Users should consider who owns the server before investing
| time & energy on it. Having a nameless, headless Reddit
| employee control the fate of any/all communities is a far
| worse prospect
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Original article link is
| https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-blackout-date-end-...
| quaintdev wrote:
| [flagged]
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| This AMA happened 27 days ago...
| quaintdev wrote:
| wow completely missed that part. I opened discord after ages
| and this was first message I saw. I'll redact my comment.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| I suspect the set of power users that insisted on using Apollo
| overlaps quite a bit with the moderator population.
| trostaft wrote:
| Perhaps you should link to the actual article, as opposed to the
| reddit thread about the article...
|
| https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/reddit-blackout-date-end-...
| opello wrote:
| It seems there's an interesting lever presented in the article:
| comment about the support being provided to the platform that
| is so adversely affecting the users so that the advertisers are
| exposed more directly to the impact.
| tduan wrote:
| This might be an ignorant question but why can't Reddit "force"
| the blackouts the end? Is it because they risk losing a
| moderation team to manage the content? Because even if that's
| true, it seems far less consequential to replace the moderators
| than the potential of another competitor usurping their position.
| icapybara wrote:
| The main problem with the protest is that there's no viable
| Reddit replacement. Back during the Digg fiasco, it was easy for
| everyone to jump ship to Reddit.
| marklar423 wrote:
| I wondered about that myself - isn't a subreddit just ("just")
| a forum with 1) threaded comments like HN and 2) the ability to
| sort by upvotes? phpBB + a few addons might go a long way to
| replicating that, it just takes some effort.
|
| There's also the other aspect of combining multiple forums into
| one cohesive website, which mostly isn't solvable by old school
| forum software. For that we need a federation scheme or even
| just old fashioned webrings to start with.
| jacooper wrote:
| I'm sure all the people doing the protest because of third
| party apps want to go back to using phpBB on mobile....
| vkou wrote:
| This is the root of the problem.
|
| Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
|
| Small communities shouldn't migrate off it. (As they will lose
| discoverability.)
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >Large communities can't meaningfully migrate off it.
|
| Yes they can, Digg migrated to reddit, Facebook migrated to
| Instagram. If Reddit becomes insufferable for most of their
| users to use they will migrate. Never forget the internet 1%
| rule [1], just the right set of users have to migrate to kill
| the site.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
| vkou wrote:
| Reddit was a better alternative to Digg, which is why
| people migrated.
|
| What is a better alternative to Reddit from the point of
| view of a community mod? Self-hosting a phpBB forum isn't
| it, it's way too much work.
| dbbk wrote:
| You're not wrong, there isn't one
| MAGZine wrote:
| it's not enough to be marginally better. you need to be a
| LOT better to overcome network effects and activation
| energy.
|
| reddit became substantially better when digg ruined their
| product. actually, digg didn't work at all when they
| rolled out their new version, so it was (approximately)
| infinitely better.
| gs17 wrote:
| Some large communities have migrated by force previously. Not
| that it's any good, but communities.win (or whatever they go
| by now) does seem to have maintained its population of right-
| wing refugees, /r/drama seems to be keeping their own site
| afloat. /r/startrek set up their own Lemmy instance, so we'll
| see how that goes over time.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| They have already started removing mods of popular subs and
| giving the mod powers to less disruptive users.
| seydor wrote:
| Where did this happen? Link?
| idiotsecant wrote:
| It seems to me like this is turning into a subreddit migration in
| slow motion. A lot people still want to post content and a lot of
| people still want to read content, so what's happening is people
| are posting it to the less popular 'alternative' versions of the
| popular subreddits and those posts make the frontpage instead. It
| seems like there is a noticeable decline in quality but i'm still
| seeing quite a bit of posting. Not sure if it's having the
| intended impact or not. I think the missing thing here is a
| viable, popular alternative. Digg died because reddit existed. If
| there was a consensus on the next reddit I would think reddit
| should be much more worried.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Interesting enough Tumblr has had a big surge in users the last
| few days, they're pretty convinced it's mostly redditors. I
| don't know how big of a surge it is, and of course Tumblr is
| not Reddit to say the least, but people are definitely poking
| around. It's interesting!
| causi wrote:
| Yes, I've seen more than one subreddit who barely had enough
| users to keep going do the indefinite shutdown thing and it's
| just going to kill the community.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Yeah, it's an interesting experiment and democracy and or
| authoritarianism. Subreddit mods have made the decision to take
| the subs private. There seems to be some popular support but it
| isn't Universal. Those that don't care about the issue can
| recreate those subs and continue posting.
|
| It will be interesting to see how things play out over time.
|
| Edit: is interesting to note the knee jerk negative reaction to
| this comment. I don't think it contains anything controversial
| and is a simple statement of reality
| pcurve wrote:
| Yep, I'm seeing smaller subs being bubbled up on my front page.
| Maybe people will start creating their own subs.
|
| There is Saidit https://www.saidit.net/ but it's not really a
| viable alternative.
| maxsilver wrote:
| I'm not sure why those folks would bother leaving, Saidit is
| basically identical to what an unmoderated Reddit would look
| like.
| rblatz wrote:
| Also most people don't really care about the API/3rd party app
| thing. It doesn't impact them and it looks from the outside
| like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up over
| nothing.
|
| I've been on Reddit since the digg migration and I've never
| felt the need for an app, old.reddit.com and Adblock works
| perfectly fine on the phone. Better than Reddit's mobile site.
| bnralt wrote:
| Yeah, the biggest issue for me as a Reddit user is despotic
| mods. And frankly, this shut down is another good example of
| how problematic they are. There was important information
| these past few days I couldn't get to because mods locked it
| away behind this blackout. A handful of mods had polls, but
| for most subs the mods just decided they were going to lock
| away all the user created content, and did so without the
| community having a say. Which is ironic, because that's the
| same thing they're complaining about Reddit corporate doing.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Reddit official app and new website both suck, majority of my
| friends use reddit, but none of them use official clients -
| all third party apps or old.reddit.
| indymike wrote:
| > Also most people don't really care about the API/3rd party
| app thing. It doesn't impact them and it looks from the
| outside like a bunch of dorks with no lives getting worked up
| over nothing.
|
| This may be a case where certain people are more important
| than most people.
|
| > looks from the outside like a bunch of dorks
|
| It appears the "dorks" are the certain people who have been
| making Reddit work for most people.
| goostavos wrote:
| Are they? Despite everyone saying this, Reddit seems to be
| humming along. I log onto the front page and have something
| of the "normal" reddit experience. For instance, "heh. Look
| at that fish, that's crazy". I mindlessly scroll past all
| the "REDDIT IS BEING BAD" posts the same way I scroll past
| Youtube drama posts, or "How Elon is ruining Twitter" drama
| posts. I'm here to look at funny pictures.
|
| Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the tech
| circles complaining, the protest still seems to be "what
| protest?"
| bamfly wrote:
| > Maybe I'm in a reverse sub-bubble, but outside of the
| tech circles complaining, the protest still seems to be
| "what protest?"
|
| My wife noticed day-1 of the protests (I know because she
| asked me for the TL;DR of WTF is happening) and she
| doesn't move in tech circles, and the subs she likes
| (liked?) are all pop-culture stuff. Pretty sure she's
| just not been using reddit since then, as all of what she
| cared about is gone. Other non-tech friends of mine also
| noticed within 24 hours of the protests starting, with
| similar "well, damn, guess I'll find somewhere else to
| waste time" reactions.
|
| But, all of the people I know who use reddit use it only
| for a few subs, and hardly ever visit the site's front
| page except by accident. I don't know anyone who's like
| "I'll just go to the Reddit homepage and look for
| something interesting that it's decided to promote",
| though I'm sure such users exist (and may even be the
| majority, for all I know).
| goatlover wrote:
| You realize this is anecdotal and not statistical
| evidence of the larger population of Reddit users, right?
| What percentage are like your friends, versus how many
| continue to use Reddit, or will go right back when things
| return to normal, one way or another?
| bamfly wrote:
| > You realize this is anecdotal and not statistical
| evidence of the larger population of Reddit users, right?
|
| I mean, yeah, I thought I made that clear in my post. I
| see words to that effect, certainly.
|
| And I was responding to your anecdote. So. Did you ask
| yourself these questions before posting, or was that
| different somehow?
| roastedoolong wrote:
| for what it's worth, each of my top 5 subreddits (some
| with millions of subs) have all gone dark.
|
| maybe you're just really into meme/imgur post type stuff
| that doesn't have nearly the dedicated user base as
| other, more text-heavy subreddits?*
|
| * this isn't a read; the example you gave (a picture of a
| weird looking fish) seems like the kind of content I
| described
| danudey wrote:
| It doesn't affect them _directly_ , but the moderation tools
| a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps
| because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when
| those stop working then the job of moderating large and
| active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and
| frustrating, and far less efficient.
|
| Maybe this issue only affects 0.1% of users, but those 0.1%
| of users do a _lot_ for the site that depends on
| functionality that Reddit is unable or unwilling to provide.
|
| It also seems as though a lot of moderators of larger
| subreddits are starting to see how little their users
| understand and appreciate the amount of work that goes into
| moderating a subreddit. When those mod tools are gone and
| their jobs get harder, they're going to get shat on even more
| than they already do by those users, because of the issue
| that those users said was just "a bunch of dorks with no
| lives getting worked up over nothing".
|
| Curious to see how this all shakes out.
| fny wrote:
| Are these moderation tools any better on other platforms?
| reddit_refugee3 wrote:
| [dead]
| ForRealsies wrote:
| [dead]
| emodendroket wrote:
| Moderation is a maddening and thankless job but there's
| always someone else who wants the privilege.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| > It doesn't affect them directly, but the moderation tools
| a lot of subreddits need are built into third-party apps
| because Reddit refuses to build mod tools itself, and when
| those stop working then the job of moderating large and
| active subreddits will become vastly more cumbersome and
| frustrating, and far less efficient.
|
| I checked yesterday and some widely used mod bots are
| already down. https://www.reddit.com/user/Blank-Cheque took
| all their bots down 10 days ago until the third-party apps
| change is reverted.
|
| * AssistantBOT, AssistantBOT1 - This was broken by the
| Pushshift API cutoff. It's widely used for tracking sub
| usage statistics. The author is working on fixing it, but
| the last update was three weeks ago.
|
| * Flair_Helper (Blank-Cheque) - This makes removing posts
| easier, especially on mobile. I haven't used it in anger.
|
| * FloodgatesBot (Blank-Cheque) - This applies posting
| limits for users. There are a couple competitors, but I'm
| not sure how many are still running.
|
| * Quality_Vote (Blank-Cheque) - This is used to allow users
| to remove unpopular posts. It can save a lot of moderation
| work in the right kind of sub.
|
| * SafestBot (Blank-Cheque) - This is widely used by subs to
| ban spam and troll accounts. SaferBot, it's only
| alternative, was closed to additional subs some time ago.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| "...but the moderation tools a lot of subreddits need are
| built into third-party apps because Reddit refuses to build
| mod tools itself"
|
| Why should the users care? Less moderation and more open
| speech would drastically improve most subreddits. This
| seems like it's more and more just tantrum throwing from
| mods who almost feel embarrassed they've devoted thousands
| of hours of free work to a corporation that literally
| doesn't care about them at all.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Less moderation doesn't mean we turn into some Ayn Rand-
| ian bastion of free speech and justice and the american
| way. It means you see more onlyfans spam and ads for
| VPNs.
| cyrialize wrote:
| Moderators also ensure quality, by removing posts that
| don't follow rules.
|
| For example, /r/ExperiencedDevs is one of my favorite
| subreddits. They have rules around the types of questions
| you can ask. These rules are put into place to prevent
| the subreddit from becoming like /r/CSCareerQuestions, or
| to prevent an influx of memes.
|
| Without these tools or these moderators, I have a feeling
| some subreddits will become more generalist and possibly
| drop in quality.
|
| I go to /r/ExperiencedDevs (and other subreddits
| moderated in a similar fashion) for a very specific set
| of posts and expectations for questions. I don't really
| want to see memes, jokes, etc. in the subreddit, as I
| have other ones to go for that.
| molsongolden wrote:
| > Less moderation and more open speech would drastically
| improve most subreddits.
|
| This just isn't true. Subreddits without moderators get
| buried in spam (both thinly veiled self-promotion and
| outright unrelated spam link dumping).
|
| (I've both moderated a small subreddit and tried to
| participate in subreddits with absent moderators.)
| bnralt wrote:
| Every time I've participated in a small sub where the mod
| went AWOL it's been just fine. Often much better than
| your average Reddit sub.
|
| You can even see this with smaller active subs that only
| have one moderator. The sub doesn't fill up with spam
| when the moderator is sleeping.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| What tools do they actually need? It seems to me like
| Reddit mods mostly automatically ban people for
| participating in subs they don't like. Last time they went
| on strike en-masse they were upset that Reddit didn't give
| mods more ability to track and spy on users in an Orwellian
| fashion
|
| I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try
| and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically
| hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new
| parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on
| the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me,
| and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire
| site for "harassment" of the mods
|
| So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the
| little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a
| lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway
| identities for talking about diapers and talking about
| philosphy
| tyg13 wrote:
| It's sad to see comments like these. It just reminds me
| that people will so readily take the work of others for
| granted.
|
| The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly
| invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting
| deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a
| thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without
| them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they
| provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice
| the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad
| work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong,
| can be bad.
|
| But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods
| are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10
| years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my
| posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of
| times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to
| shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much
| higher.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| > I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe
| a handful of times.
|
| I thought this too until I went to Reveddit one day and
| WOW there was a lot of stuff silently removed without
| disappearing from my user history.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| I want to be charitable here, but honestly, I looked over
| the list of mod tools someone posted in a sibling
| comment.. and most of them are just tools to attempt to
| blacklist people for wrongthink
|
| I'm sure there are some small subs where the mods aren't
| huge jerks and benefit from usable tools to fight spam
| and deescalate flame wars, but I think we'll all be a
| hell of a lot better off with a bunch of unaffiliated or
| loosely-affiliated topical forums than we are with this
| current panopticon. The mods will be better off too: A
| guy moderating his own website will have better tools to
| combat spam and punish whatever he defines as trolls
| within his own kingdom.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Absolutely agree with you. My experience with Reddit
| moderators is that they are largely abusive, arrogant
| egomaniacs and I have absolutely zero sympathy for their
| hardship caused by lack of API access.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| This is pretty much like people who say that we could
| just get rid of the police because all they do is harass
| everyone all day anyway.
|
| Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic
| amount of work that goes into keeping the system well
| behaved. If you do your job right as few people as
| possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the
| maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who
| everyone thinks does nothing in the best case and enraged
| at when something breaks in the worst case.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| You must have misunderstood me but just to reiterate, I
| have no sympathy for the moderators of reddit whatsoever.
| brainfish wrote:
| This comment contains one of the most-repeated pieces of
| misinformation from the whole blackout: moderation tools.
| Reddit has stated repeatedly that moderation tools will be
| exempted from the API changes.
|
| "We will ensure existing utilities, especially moderation
| tools, have free access to our API."[1]
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/141oqn8/api_u
| pdate...
| jtode wrote:
| But the app developers are not developing the apps as
| moderation tools, they are operating them as income
| projects by providing features users want. The mod users
| of their apps are a tiny subset, and they are
| underwritten by all the regular users.
|
| There is a balance struck by any business when setting
| prices, and I would wager that every one of these app
| developers put a lot of thought into it based on Reddit's
| broken commitments. The mod userbase is not enough to
| support a single app, so this is just forked tongue
| doublespeak in the final analysis.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Many moderation tools relied on the Pushshift API; Reddit
| cut their access off last month. Pushshift will
| supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit.com/r/pushshif
| t/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but access must be
| approved by Reddit and is only open to mods with a
| Pushshift account; there are also additional usage
| restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether Pushshift
| or most services using it will ever be restored.
| Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI (Network
| Contagion Research Institute), which is based around
| selling the data to intelligence agencies
| (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for
| moderation tools isn't really part of their business
| model.
|
| Reddit's CEO has also publicly lied about discussions
| with Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloa
| pp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with
| developers is almost nonexistent.
|
| An additional factor is that the third-party app cutoff
| cost Reddit a lot of goodwill. Many mods reply heavily on
| third-party apps; they're much easier to use for
| moderation. Some subs such as r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns
| (393k users) have announced that they'll shut down
| because of this (https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnn
| nnnns/comments/144tn...). Some popular bot developers
| such as u/Blank-Cheque have already taken their bots
| down. My other comment
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists
| some of the affected bots.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Unfortunately it seems that most of the reddit users/subs
| participating in this "strike" aren't interested in the
| facts. I see /r/science says it is private due to
| accessibility changes and it links to a Verge article,
| but the Verge article actually says that accessibility
| apps are exempted.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Only after the outcry. And only non-commercial
| accessibility apps. Why are people not allowed to pay for
| accessibility tools?
| covercash wrote:
| And those devs are getting no guarantees from Reddit that
| they won't cut off API access at some point in the
| future.
| roastedoolong wrote:
| the whole point is Reddit _says_ that accessibility apps
| are exempt except in those cases where the app that
| offers accessibility does, you know, other things that
| people want their apps to do.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Ok thanks for the explanation. From what I can see the
| issue is also whether the app is commercial or not, so it
| makes sense for reddit to restrict commercial apps that
| make money off their content. As people are saying, the
| best solution is for reddit to just make their own
| app/website more accessible.
| throw16180339 wrote:
| Many of the facts aren't reported in the Verge article.
|
| Last month Reddit cut off the Pushshift API (https://www.
| reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...). It
| was widely used by moderation bots such as AssistantBOT.
| Pushshift will supposedly be restored (https://www.reddit
| .com/r/pushshift/comments/13w6j20/advancin...), but
| access must be approved by Reddit and is only open to
| mods with a Pushshift account; there are also additional
| usage restrictions. IMO it's an open question whether
| Pushshift or most of the services using it will ever be
| restored. Pushshift is now owned and managed by NCRI
| (Network Contagion Research Institute), which is based
| around selling the data to intelligence agencies
| (https://networkcontagion.us/technology/). Access for
| moderation tools isn't really part of their business
| model.
|
| Accessibility apps are exempted only if they're free and
| noncommercial; they also can't access NSFW content. Many
| popular third-party apps that blind users rely on (https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/Blind/comments/1447ibp/what_apps_me...
| ) are commercial and will either be shutting down or have
| an uncertain future. It's unclear how many apps will make
| the transition; they weren't given anywhere near enough
| notice.
|
| Reddit's CEO has publicly lied about discussions with
| Apollo's developer (https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/co
| mments/144f6xm/apollo_w...). Their credibility with
| developers is almost nonexistent. The Verge reporter may
| be taking their word for it, but few moderators and
| developers are.
|
| The changes they've already made have led to many popular
| bots being shut down.
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36343447) lists a
| few of them. u/SafestBot, one of the affected bots, is
| widely used to ban spam and troll accounts. It's a
| moderator at 342+ subreddits. If brigading is a serious
| problem in your sub, then your life has gotten a lot
| harder.
|
| The official mobile app is hot garbage and uniquely
| poorly suited to moderation. Third-party apps save much
| of the work and are much easier to use. Some subs such as
| r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns (393k users) have announced that
| they'll shut down because of this (https://www.reddit.com
| /r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/144tn...).
| comte7092 wrote:
| Users aren't leading the blackout, mods are.
|
| This is a fundamental issue with your analysis. Reddit mods
| are integral to the site's operations, and they aren't
| employees they can just order around.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the
| phone_
|
| old.reddit.com may not be long for this world. i.reddit.com
| and reddit.com/.compact were both removed earlier this year:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35283379
|
| (The irony now of that top comment, "99.5% of my usage is
| through the iOS client Apollo"...)
| labster wrote:
| Right now, 100% of my usage is old.reddit.com and 0% of my
| usage is on the new design. These numbers won't change if
| they remove old reddit -- I'll just stop using the site.
| okdood64 wrote:
| > I'll just stop using the site.
|
| I keep hearing this repeated by people who use the site.
| Honestly, no they won't. At least the vast majority of
| them. There's literally no viable replacement.
| emptyfile wrote:
| Yeah that's the whole reason why subs are shutting down.
| Because the mods care, even if their users don't.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Users like a good riot though
| riku_iki wrote:
| but users are main contributors of content. Should they be
| asked at least?
| throw16180339 wrote:
| I'm not sure about other subs, but we asked our users
| about continuing the blackout.
| riku_iki wrote:
| one of my favorite subs didn't ask
| emodendroket wrote:
| I mean I like Apollo but I'm not going to waste my time
| getting involved in aimless slacktivism if the overlords of
| Reddit have decided they no longer want to do something that
| makes no business sense. I'll just move on to their official
| app, I guess.
| weaksauce wrote:
| i used to think old reddit was great and all i needed on the
| ipad until someone convinced me to try apollo... it's simply
| 1000x better in all regard. stupidly fast and clean.
| blendergeek wrote:
| > old.reddit.com and Adblock works perfectly fine on the
| phone. Better than Reddit's mobile site.
|
| What if I told you that Reddit is going to do away with
| 'old.reddit.com' next?
| aniforprez wrote:
| In spez's AMA, he said "old reddit is not going anywhere"
|
| Years ago, when announcing the new website, he said "the
| API is not going anywhere"
|
| old reddit is 100% on the chopping block
| [deleted]
| rblatz wrote:
| Either I switch to the new interface and be grumpy about it
| for a few weeks until I get used to it, or I stop going on
| Reddit and spend less time mindlessly consuming content? Or
| maybe I spend more time on TikTok/Instagram short form
| video? I'm not really worried about the bad spez taking
| away my reddits.
| larperdoodle wrote:
| [flagged]
| globular-toast wrote:
| [flagged]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Agreed. I'd argue most don't even know what an API is.
| Eventually super moderators will end this standoff and reddit
| subreddits will be restored, the masses wont even care like
| they don't now.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| I also love old.reddit.com with RES, but I have no illusion
| that Reddit likes it too.
|
| It seems likely to me that the same factors that motivate
| Reddit to do away with high-quality, user-oriented third
| party frontends will also motivate it to do away with
| old.reddit.com and RSS.
| evertedsphere wrote:
| [dead]
| ndnxncncnfjdjd wrote:
| That's all well and good for now, but surely you can see that
| old.reddit.com is likely also on the chopping block?
| blahyawnblah wrote:
| Where did you see that?
| bbor wrote:
| Seems self-explanatory. They're fighting for
| profitability, prioritizing mass-appeal, prioritizing
| ads, and maintaining two UIs in an advertising business
| sounds like a huge hassle. I'm too lazy to edit the URL
| so I don't even know - does old.reddit.com even support
| the giant image ads?
| gingerrr wrote:
| I don't know if many people can answer this question, bc
| nearly all folks I've seen using old. also use adblock so
| we don't see them anyway :P
| bbor wrote:
| This whole Adblock thing is gonna come to a head with the
| modern "economic headwinds" I think. Like, how did people
| think it was gonna work out...? YouTube and Reddit would
| just keep going forever with some sizable percentage of
| their user base earning them 0 money?
|
| we either need to start paying for stuff instead of the
| bullshit invasive Display Ads model (half measure),
| accept the death of Adblock (I imagine I'll get HN hate
| mail for even suggesting such a thing), or
| nationalize/otherwise remove the profit motive from these
| companies. I don't see "the two main online forums for
| public discourse randomly decided to a) lurch towards
| far-right Russian propaganda and b) change everything in
| their push to get their VC investors some ridiculous
| return on investment, respectively" as an acceptable
| thing. Sadly my preferences aren't exactly big news, and
| I assume the reaction from society at large will continue
| to be "oh no! Anyway..."
| lozenge wrote:
| You could have written this comment about tape decks, CD
| ripping or Napster. In the end, what's technically
| possible always wins. As long as adblockers are
| technically feasible they will continue.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Napster didn't win though? It got crushed by giant media
| conglomerates. They were able to stifle easy piracy. With
| legal warfare, and actual decent products, they pretty
| effectively funneled people into legally consuming
| digital content, limiting piracy, and replaced physical
| ownership (CDs) with ephemeral subscriptions.
| lozenge wrote:
| Napster the company didn't win, but file sharing and
| distributed sharing is the reason Spotify doesn't cost
| $1,000/month and we are no longer buying tracks for $1 on
| the iTunes store.
| skydhash wrote:
| Because what most people wanted was listening to music,
| not owning music. And a lot of them are ok paying a fee
| periodically to do so. It could have been the same for
| movies, but siloes and prices are making this
| frustrating.
| upon_drumhead wrote:
| It does not
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| If they shut out third party apps from official APIs,
| that isn't game over. Those apps can still scrape HTML
| and while the new reddit frontend is modern and can
| easily combat this, old.reddit is an unmaintained static
| target.
|
| They presumably know this or if they don't, they soon
| will. To avoid allowing app devs to run around the API
| changes they have to either continue maintaining the
| front end or cut the dead weight. Given their decision
| making lately, I'm going for the latter.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Also, old reddit has to remain mostly unchanged for it to
| fulfill its purpose, which means marketing can't
| incessantly twiddle things with A/B tests and push crap
| like NFT avatars.
| ShellfishMeme wrote:
| I wouldn't call the user experience "perfectly fine" though.
| It's about as "perfectly fine" for exploring the content on a
| phone as pasta with ketchup is perfectly fine for eating. You
| won't starve but you also aren't really having a good time.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Strongly disagree. It's just a plain old HTML website
| pretty much the same as hacker news (no coincidence that
| it's built in the same era).
|
| Completely fine for reading purposes and mostly free of all
| the UX "optimizations" for ads and such.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| HN adjusts to a mobile viewport. old.reddit.com is
| literally reading a desktop site on a phone screen.
|
| It works, but it's not a good experience, nor is it on
| par with HN.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| HN is fine on desktop but I don't really enjoy it on
| mobile much. Tiny tap targets, font sizes and spacing
| seem a bit "off", etc, and so I use a third party client.
|
| Have similar feelings about old reddit on mobile.
|
| What it comes down to is that yeah they're better than
| new reddit, but that's not much of a bar to clear and if
| I'm going to be spending extended periods of time using a
| site/service the experience needs to be _good_ not just
| _passable_.
| nullindividual wrote:
| There are some good HN mobile clients. On iOS I use (and
| purchased) Octal [0]. I find this particular mobile
| experience far superior to the HN website.
|
| [0] https://github.com/dangwu/Octal
| dsir wrote:
| To echo what another commenter said, I feel like a lot of the
| suggested alternatives are missing the mark a bit in regards to
| understanding what Reddit actually is (a community of
| communities). It seems like a lot of the platforms that are
| popping up are more akin to being just a huge bucket full of
| posts with hashtags opposed to being a collection of
| communities. They are sort of missing out on capturing the
| community part.
|
| Shameless plug, but that's been a focus of ours with the
| platform that I've been building (sociables.com). We are trying
| to create an all in one stop for people to create communities,
| and not just posts.
|
| Here's an example of a community on the platform:
|
| https://sociables.com/community/Sports/board/trending
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by
| this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager
| to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be
| free of it.
|
| A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here
| thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of
| them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is
| that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to
| try to run a site like that.
| ShellfishMeme wrote:
| They would be perfectly monetizable if they wanted to. I'd
| happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I can keep
| using Apollo, because I use it for the better UX, not to skip
| ads. But clearly they would rather kill third party apps than
| take their money.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| > I'd happily pay for a Reddit premium subscription if I
| can keep using Apollo
|
| This is what I don't get. Isn't this the obvious compromise
| to make all parties happy? Third Party apps can only be
| used by Premium members. Moderation tools are explicitly
| exempted until their functionality is rolled into first-
| party tools. Reddit adds new tools to block scrapers and
| institutes API rate limits for things they recognize as
| LLMs/negative bots and instead offer an "enterprise" tier
| for those that is much more expensive. Something along
| those lines would likely meet the needs of everyone and
| wouldn't piss anyone off. Reddit users continue our doom
| scrolling on Relay and Apollo, Reddit monetizes previously-
| unmonetizable users.
| lmkg wrote:
| > It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by
| this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.
|
| The Reddit users that are bothered by this also include mods
| that use third-party tools for moderation activities. If
| _those_ users leave, or are no longer about to function, that
| has potential long-term consequences for Reddit.
| goatlover wrote:
| There's always more people willing to be mods, and mods
| from smaller subs wanting to step up. Reddit is a massive
| community.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| That seems doubtful. The knives are already out, with
| moderators lower down the list requesting to become the new
| top mod, so they can reopen popular subreddits. Eg. https:/
| /www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/149z2nd/requ...
| isykt wrote:
| > It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by
| this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it.
|
| Yes, this is exactly the same as the Netflix account sharing
| controversy. People who aren't generating the company any
| profit are shouting the loudest. I don't think there's much
| of a loss here.
|
| The era of free money was always going to end and now it's
| over.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The loss is that those people might not be generating
| content, but they do have eyeballs and those eyeballs
| aren't looking at the content generated by the monetizable
| people. That means they're also not looking at the ads
| Reddit wants to serve to users in exchange for payment from
| advertisers.
|
| You're right about the era of free (well... really, really
| cheap) money being over. I think we're going to see that
| social media as we know it (which has _only_ existed in the
| era of cheap money) isn't nearly as sustainable without a
| bunch of VCs willing to shovel money into a furnace in hope
| for unknown future returns. There's going to be a
| contraction.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Who else is making Netflix money? Their catalog is
| currently so small and bad that it makes no sense to keep
| an account per person. Proliferation of streaming services
| doesn't help - individually, none of them is worth paying
| full price per person or household.
| isykt wrote:
| Netflix grew 4.9% YoY in Q1. They have introduced an ad-
| supporter tier, so it's now advertisers that foot some of
| the bill for content in addition to subscribers and
| investors.
|
| To your point about paying full price --- it would be
| interesting to have a breakdown of the number of
| "evergreen subscribers" vs "fair weather subscribers,"
| but I'm not sure Netflix would be willing to share such a
| breakdown. This would tell us whether a majority of its
| subscribers think of the basic value of the service.
| organsnyder wrote:
| But those people are also generating a large amount of the
| content that is being used to monetize users.
| edgyquant wrote:
| People keep saying this, do you have any proof?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| That's a claim, but only time will tell to what degree it
| is accurate. Some people certainly want to continue
| continue creating content and we will see the degree to
| which they figure out alternative subreddits if the
| blackout continues
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I keep seeing people make this claim and frankly I don't
| buy it. While I think it's true that a minority of users
| produce a majority of the content, I don't think it's
| necessarily the people on third party apps. I think it's
| total speculation that there's a large overlap.
|
| My own speculation is that a majority of the content is
| produced by people using Reddit in a browser on a
| laptop/desktop machine. It's much faster and easier to
| produce content in this mode.
| isykt wrote:
| It's not clear there's anything "unique" about the set of
| users that both generate the content and will leave the
| site because of the API changes. From an investor
| standpoint, content is content and monetizeable users are
| monetizable users. Both are replaceable, and it's better
| to have monetizable users that generate content than non-
| monentizeable users who generate content.
| xen2xen1 wrote:
| I go to Reddit to look for information on specific
| things. People talking about Med interactions, app
| support, very specific things. I don't interact with
| Reddit because it's a cesspool, and very politically
| slanted. I'll probably go wherever real people talk about
| real stuff, and it's almost always reddit. I wonder what
| percentage are like me, who have no value in "community"?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Most mods (who oversee the generation of new content) use
| the API because third-party apps offer superior mod
| tools. Instead of thinking about "shutting down third
| party apps" think about it as "asking your volunteer
| labor to do the job on hard mode". You can see why those
| people might get pissed off.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Do you have a citation for the claim that most mods use
| third party apps?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Ironically, the only citations I recall are on reddit,
| and I believe from blacked out subreddits.
|
| And I should have added some cutoff there. It's mods of
| large enough subreddits.
|
| But why else would the mods be so up in arms?
| badwolf wrote:
| I've had a Reddit subscription for mulitple years, and spent
| more than I care to admit buying coins to guild/gift posts
| and comments. I also paid for Apollo.
|
| I deleted my account this week, being a monetizable person
| who is quite bothered.
| patrickmay wrote:
| I've paid for Apollo and I would pay at least a few dollars
| per month for my personal API access to keep Apollo working.
| Those of us who don't want to use the official app aren't
| unmonetizable, we just have good taste.
| ketchupdog wrote:
| I block ads, nuke cookies, and use old.reddit.com
| exclusively, but somehow I still manage to spend a lot of
| money on shit I don't need. Most of it was found on reddit.
| All of it got a google search that included "site:reddit.com"
| before buying. This anecdote is not unique. The fact that
| reddit gets $0 despite being part of my typical buyers
| journey is a failure of Steve Huffman, not the users.
| rchaud wrote:
| If Reddit automatically added product links to comments
| like Viglink did in the bad old days, you wouldn't be using
| it. Reddit's failure to capture affiliate revenue is
| precisely what prevented it from being gamed, thus making
| it a credible source of information.
| ketchupdog wrote:
| Reddit has been gamed for years and I'm still using it.
| greiskul wrote:
| I have literally paid for the Reddit app that I use. And I
| would not mind paying a recurring fee if it was reasonable.
| Users for third party apps are most likely to be the most
| addicted users of reddit. If investors can't tell that, they
| deserve to watch their investment fail.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| Actually I bought Reddit coins at some point (to give Awards)
| and I'm bothered by this. Hopefully Lemmy will be an
| alternative or maybe Reddit folks will change their mind.
| Obviously I'm okay with paying for services in principle but
| I think it requires that it's voluntary and affordable.
|
| That said, the Reddit Web Frontend is not exactly the best.
| I've used - and paid - for a native Reddit client actually
| (Stellar). The app will be sunsetted though.
| adeon wrote:
| I think even though there is no consensus on the next Reddit,
| this might be another inflection point in Reddit downhill. It
| might not die on short term but I think being super crappy to
| your userbase makes you more vulnerable to future competition.
| I'm thinking something like what Tiktok did to Instagram or
| Facebook.
|
| I am really hoping the next Reddit is not some megacorp effort.
| sixothree wrote:
| To support your observation, I've noticed posts getting many
| more upvotes than normal in the subreddits I subscribe to.
| bsder wrote:
| > If there was a consensus on the next reddit I would think
| reddit should be much more worried.
|
| I think Reddit should be very worried. Federation works fine
| for a "forum-like" replacement that doesn't need to be super
| timely.
|
| Yes, the federated replacement is currently half-baked. You're
| not going to pick up the unwashed masses this round.
|
| However, more than a few technical sub-Reddits that have simply
| _shut down_ and are not coming back. The technical users didn
| 't care much for Reddit to begin with and don't mind putting in
| some elbow grease to permanently kick Reddit to the curb.
| _Lots_ of technical people now suddenly know about Lemmy who
| didn 't have any clue before.
|
| I have no doubt that Reddit will win this round, but it's a
| Pyrrhic victory. A nice chunk of software development talent is
| now mobilized to build the thing to wipe them out.
|
| To be fair, I don't think the CEO is actually _wrong_. The AI
| companies are _absolutely_ free-riding on everybody and that
| needs to stop. However, the way it was done with the API was
| not kosher--I suspect had he just grandfathered everybody using
| the API prior to date <X>, everything would have been fine.
| mc32 wrote:
| I wonder if that will affect the management of the subs. Some
| mods had what we may call agendas but mods in alternate subs
| may have different agendas (obviously since one is protesting
| and the other not), but this could also affect the course of
| subs and could differ from what people were used to (hammer the
| nail that sticks out vs oil the squeaky wheel approaches)
| seydor wrote:
| The motion is very slow though. How do I even find alternative
| subreddits? Most subreddits do not allow cross-advertising
| anyway and reddit's search tool is total garbage.
|
| I don't think reddit needs to be replaced, but they need to
| change some things. All subreddits are replaceable, and so are
| mods so i don't see the point of this protest
| ghusto wrote:
| Yup. I unsubscribe from the blacked out subs (they free to go
| dark, but I'm equally free to leave when they do), and sign up
| to the new or less popular ones that are still working.
|
| I have no skin in the game, and couldn't care less either way
| what happens to Reddit company, the subs, their third party
| apps, or the moderators.
| marcod wrote:
| > Digg died because reddit existed.
|
| Sorry, but digg died because they told their community in
| unmistakable terms (aka v4) that they don't matter. Reddit
| happened to be there to take the refugees.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Just don't tell them that this place exists or we could have an
| eternal september situation on HN.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| HN is already in Eternal September for a while. 10 years ago
| HN was different.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| generic92034 wrote:
| "There is another theory which states that this has already
| happened." ;)
| AmVess wrote:
| That happened a long time ago.
| cubefox wrote:
| 2012 account, seems credible.
| [deleted]
| cactus2093 wrote:
| I agree with all of that, but honestly the more important
| factor is this is just not a very good cause to get all worked
| up about. Reddit is trying to grow into a profitable company,
| their business model is showing ads to users, they obviously
| can't just let millions of people use 3rd party apps for free.
|
| I think even casual users understand this perfectly well. They
| don't use 3rd party apps for browsing Facebook, Instagram,
| Twitter, or Tiktok (because those services also don't offer
| APIs). Why should Reddit be different?
| Ataraxic wrote:
| Reddit is different because it has been different. Not
| everything needs to conform prior social media models.
|
| I think the cause is totally fine. I think framing it as some
| social justice cause is incorrect though. People really liked
| a thing and now reddit is taking it away in the name of
| money. The most downvoted post of all time on reddit is an EA
| post responding to monetization concerns in a star wars game.
| Seems right in line to me.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I feel like this is somewhat of an indictment of Mastodon.
| Maybe its not a 1:1 replacements but I feel like they could be
| capitalizing on this moment and it feels like they're not in
| the conversation.
| blindflip wrote:
| One of the other places that has strong niche communities is
| discord. It seems like a good time for discord to release a
| product that could compete.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Ugh. Discord makes api-fee-reddit look positively wall-free
| by comparison.
| aluminussoma wrote:
| Because they respect your privacy and don't feel the need
| to plaster your comment in every search engine?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Requiring my phone number does not respect my privacy.
| Reddit users can create as many identities as they wish.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| oh wow are we now in the "finding information is bad
| actually" phase of the internet?
| ninth_ant wrote:
| Mastodon believes this and willfully denies search
| functionality. Tech built to search Mastodon
| (https://fedsearch.io/) was aggressively decried as
| violating privacy and such.
|
| So yes, there is certainly at least a vocal subset of
| people who believe that "finding information is bad
| actually" and deliberately building tech along those
| lines.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Can't stand discord, it's too noisy. Joined one server from a
| subreddit and the mod team @everyones all. The. Time.
| Phlarp wrote:
| It's insane because Discord has the usage stats to see that
| the first thing a majority of users do when joining a new
| server is to force mute group @ notifications.
|
| I honestly wonder why this is even a feature they support,
| but it should absolutely be defaulted to mute and/or have a
| checkbox for it in the new server join banner. They force
| collect phone numbers while highlighting the fact that they
| will spam the ever-loving fuck out of your notifications.
| rvba wrote:
| I think HN is experiencing a lot more traffic too
| bbor wrote:
| It's been very interesting, and part of that is my fault -
| been posting a lot here instead of reddit (when I should
| probably just post nowhere). The vote counts seem crazy high
| this week, even for typical stories.
|
| I will say that I haven't noticed a decline in quality of
| posts; not sure if that's due to a strong culture or strict
| moderation. I suppose most of the Reddit refugees only browse
| the HN homepage, so HN veterans still have an out sized
| impact on the New page, which in turn dictates what can reach
| the top.
| AmVess wrote:
| This is exactly what is happening. People simply go to other
| subs to read and post.
| riku_iki wrote:
| but lots of valuable information created by community from
| old subs gone.
| hedora wrote:
| I've posted this a few times, but there's a snapshot of reddit
| from 2017 that you can self host:
|
| https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
|
| Why not just do that? Sure, it's a lot of python, and probably
| full of security holes, but there are enough reddit users to
| fix that, and the risk that your reddit instance might be taken
| over by malicious people is lower than the risk that
| centralized reddit will (since it already has been...)
|
| Anyway, each time I link to it, I get crickets in response. Not
| sure why.
| slumberlust wrote:
| I would think people are hesitant to go down the exact same
| road as before. How will this address long-term scaling costs
| and concerns of the new-reddit repeating current-reddit's
| path?
| jtode wrote:
| Maybe because there's a fediverse.
| JustBreath wrote:
| Pretty sure the short version is there's a lot more to
| hosting Reddit than just standing up a server.
|
| It's a slow process that involves building up communities and
| trust to hit a critical mass.
|
| Pure speculation, but I think Reddit will continue to
| decline, it'll just be a while longer before everyone
| migrates from it.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > a viable, popular alternative
|
| Popular? No.
|
| Viable? Yes.
|
| Try https://zapad.nstr.no/ it's my instance.
|
| If even a handful of people would join I think that would be
| nice.
| silverbax88 wrote:
| Will you be adding the ability to create communities?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Yes.
| jtode wrote:
| Since you've got insight into operating, can you clarify for
| me: Does federation happen at the community level?
|
| So for instance, using reddit terminology, if I subscribe to
| r/gardening on your instance, do I get the same thing as
| everyone else gets in r/gardening on all the instances you
| federate with?
|
| I'm clear on federation in general but not how it works for
| link aggregation. I've been reddit-free for about a year now
| but I've been planning to check out Lemmy once the current
| wave dies down and I'm not contributing to load stress.
| 10xDev wrote:
| Why not just stop moderating and let the subs go to shit and
| naturally let people move? Why take away valuable information
| from everyone? Most of us don't care about your fight with
| Reddit.
| veave wrote:
| I hope the admins of reddit will start taking control of the
| closed subs and opening them up. The content of each one of those
| subs has been written by the users and it makes no sense that a
| handful of mods are taking the content and holding it hostage by
| keeping the subs private. If I were a contributor to one of those
| subs (for example by posting answers to programming questions) I
| would be fuming.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| ...so that the admins of reddit can exploit their content
| instead?
| seydor wrote:
| Isn't that the point of the website?
| veave wrote:
| Letting users create a database of knowledge with the premise
| that it will be available and then massively deleting (or
| hiding) that knowledge is abusive. The admins of reddit
| haven't done so (yet). The day they do it I will call them
| out for it, but by now, it's the mods.
| monnok wrote:
| I personally contend that the official Reddit app has
| already hidden that knowledge. And that it is abusive. As
| do many others. We are overwhelmed by the urgent imminence
| of deliberate enshitification. Waiting to be "surprised" is
| insanity at this point.
|
| I'm not having a fun time with this blackout, but Reddit
| will be effectively blacked out for me the moment
| old.reddit goes away. I might as well try changing my diet
| now, if I'm otherwise going to be forced to change it
| anyway once doing nothing different leads to diabetes in
| the near future.
|
| I don't own my contributions any more than the mods do. My
| contributions exist only in the context of moderated mass
| discussion, and in the context of mass audience
| participation. All broad changes to the context of this
| collaboration are abusive... and I'm throwing my lot in
| with the abuses of the mods doing blackout right now.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > The admins of reddit haven't done so (yet).
|
| Haven't they? Isn't making the API economically unfeasible
| to use limiting access?
|
| My personal plan is to delete all my posts and my account
| once Apollo goes down. I made most of that content using
| Apollo, so it seems fitting.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| So that everybody can exploit the content. When you post
| comments and threads on a public message board, you are
| giving it away for free with the expectation that it will be
| available for the whole world to see. It has been like this
| since the beginning. Since Usenet, phpBB and everything in
| between up until now.
|
| Should librarians be allowed to close public libraries and
| make them an exclusive club because they work there and have
| been organizing the shelves?
| generj wrote:
| Librarians are allowed to strike, closing down public
| libraries.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's a strike, fine. What about closing the library
| with all books inside and only allowing their friends in,
| like in my example? What about burning down the library?
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The active users voted to go private in many cases.
| OnlyLys wrote:
| This seems to be what I've observed as well.
|
| Across many subreddits, the announcements to participate in
| the blackout were highly upvoted (>90%), while announcements
| against participation were heavily downvoted.
|
| Examples:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/146xzgk/meta.
| ..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/145s613/rgames_and_t.
| ..
| Kiro wrote:
| That was only for the initial 48 hours blackout.
| seydor wrote:
| only a handful of subscribers voted in each of these polls.
| And we know that the most motivated people cared enough to
| vote, the vast majority of people do not care about this
|
| There were a lot of people protesting the protest in
| r/modCoord but they started banning them
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Polls I saw were very active for their groups. People who
| opposed going private has equal opportunity to vote. People
| who abstained abstained. More important votes are decided
| all the time by the people who cared enough to vote.
|
| r/modCoord has negative comments minutes to days old.
| Criticism is not banned evidently. How did the banned
| protest the protest? Are the protesting moderators allowed
| any moderation of their coordination channels in your mind?
| seydor wrote:
| > Are the protesting moderators allowed any moderation of
| their coordination channels in your mind
|
| No idea it is their channel
|
| The issue is, they should not be allowed to coordinate
| site-wide. The whole point of subreddits is to have
| separate competing communities, not to coordinate.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > The whole point of subreddits is to have separate
| competing communities, not to coordinate.
|
| Who said this? And what made their wishes law?
| seydor wrote:
| basic logic?
| dehrmann wrote:
| Or those users could go start a competing subreddit.
| somsak2 wrote:
| Anyone else tired of all of these reddit stories? There's like
| 2-3 a day at the top of HN with minimal new information, pretty
| annoying
| cmiles74 wrote:
| IMHO, Reddit's charging such a high price for API access that
| it's as good as unattainable is more of a last straw then
| anything else. Reddit has been clear that they view the data as
| their sole property, when you think it through, why be a
| moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't being paid?
|
| I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| Because mods there get paid by external actors to promote X
| content and delete Y.
|
| It's been known for ever, do prople think these guys just shit
| money? And the "sensitive" content deletes itself?
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't
| being paid?
|
| This is the sole, minuscule bit of power that most mods have in
| their lives. It's sad.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Not all value is monetary. Some moderate because they like
| having a functioning community to take part in. They don't mind
| that the company is for-profit because everyone is winning.
|
| With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.
| LordKeren wrote:
| I'll add my personal experience as a long-term lead mod of a
| subreddit for a specific video game. Broadly, I view subreddits
| are two camps:
|
| 1. Popcorn subreddits -- r/pics, r/funny , r/twitterScreenshots
|
| 2. hobby & employment related
|
| During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being
| very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an
| interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods
| were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did
| not accept any moderator applications from users that were the
| prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other
| mod teams.
|
| And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build
| moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had
| immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst
| for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current
| career.
|
| I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and
| formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never
| met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to
| learn more about video game production, go on studio tours,
| meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever
| will.
|
| The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were
| providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the
| game developer for free-- but for us, it was a mostly straight
| forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges.
| For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be
| making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any
| actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were
| insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and
| old.Reddit.
|
| I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does
| attract some of the worst internet users and many people have
| very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods
| --but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a
| genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.
| ansible wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience.
|
| I was a mod for a while with /r/AskEngineers. It was never
| really that big of a subreddit, slowing crossing over 50K
| subscribers during my time there. And while small, we got to
| deal with all the usual issues any subreddit sees. In our
| case, it was conspiracy theorists "just asking questions"
| about the WTC tower collapse, school students asking people
| to do their school assignments for them, and stuff like that.
|
| In my time moderating /r/aiclass, I also got the experience
| of interacting with someone with a genuine mental illness.
| :-/
|
| I didn't become a mod to win Internet points or for some kind
| of social status. I was just there to facilitate good
| conversation between engineers, so that we can help each
| other. I didn't mind the labor involved, and I just wanted to
| promote engineering as a discipline.
|
| There was just one active mod when I joined, and he started
| building up a good (if small) team. That continued through
| the years as people came and left, and we had a good crew
| when I resigned. I won't do it again anytime soon (maybe
| after I retire, who knows), but it was definitely worthwhile,
| and I hope I was able to make a difference for people.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| most moderators won't quit, they know if they do they'll be
| replaced, and most of them only do it because it's a power trip
| iterati wrote:
| I'm a Relay user on Android, and the creator of Relay has said
| he may need to charge $3/mo for the app (previously was a buy-
| once for $2). It's useful enough for me to pay that much, and
| Reddit has every incentive and right to charge for API access.
| I think they did the community a disservice with the tight
| timeline and how they communicated the change, but I can
| survive $3/mo to pay for a service that I have enjoyed for well
| over a decade now.
|
| I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools
| for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done.
| I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the
| dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than
| the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools
| that required the use of bots is something they should have
| sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own
| app is also very questionable, and their response was to only
| allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the
| API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings
| instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-
| time chat.
| bdowling wrote:
| > why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't
| being paid?
|
| They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down
| people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the
| rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they
| like and squashing what they don't like.
|
| It's the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or
| elected government positions.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And plenty of them are being paid, just not by reddit.
| 93po wrote:
| 100% this. A moderator of any large subreddit has almost
| guaranteed been offered money to "sell it". And if there's
| any product associated to the subreddit, they get a ton of
| offers to promote said products. I know there are mods out
| there that easily make full time incomes from side hustles
| only possible bc they're mods
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'd love to see some hard data on your claims because this
| seems cynical to the point of being inaccurate
|
| As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last
| things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The
| whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13
| years ago I thought it was the best place to build a
| community that I wanted to exist.
|
| I have no idea if that's true for the moderators for /pics or
| whatever massive sub-reddits are, but I do know that for a
| lot, and especially the long tail subs and the folks I see in
| the /modcoord sub and discord, moderators are people who are
| interested in maintaining a community because they are
| interested in the affinity.
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| How does one quantify that? Reddit moderators have a
| reputation that they themselves created. I'll tell you
| what, go ahead an post something (comment or topic) that
| goes against the prevailing group-think in any reddit sub,
| and you'll experience it for yourself. Record in a
| spreadsheet, and you'll have your hard data that supports
| reddit as cancer. As reddit moved away from free speech,
| and more towards totalitarian speech control, I honestly
| couldn't hope for a faster collapse or conflagration of
| those echo chambers.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I'm sorry but the scale that Reddit is at now and the
| number of subs that have large and thriving communities
| tells me that moderators aren't creating some hellscape
| preventing community from forming.
| WesternWind wrote:
| I mean that's a possible motivation for some folks, but not
| everyone.
|
| I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of
| responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist
| community), it's because I cared about the organization and
| the people in it, and getting things right.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I don't think many moderators will actually quit as long as the
| users are there, especially since reddit gave back some
| moderator API call access. Moderating is already a terrible,
| thankless job. The people who do it enjoy moderating because (I
| assume) they're 'in charge' of something big and important. I
| don't think reddit closing off third party access will be
| enough to convince most of these people to stop giving labor
| for free.
| Maxburn wrote:
| This is the thing I don't get, reddit is getting a heck of a
| free ride with all these mods. You'd think they would do
| everything within their power to enable them so why kick them
| in the nuts?
|
| Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay
| reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go
| ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
|
| There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and
| it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted
| forums if I need to.
| roastedoolong wrote:
| [dead]
| dehrmann wrote:
| > You'd think they would do everything within their power
| to enable them so why kick them in the nuts?
|
| They're probably tracking revenue and engagement metrics.
| This happens in a lot of places. Everyone knows there's
| important infrastructure that keeps things working, but new
| user-facing projects are always more exciting. Even with
| physical infrastructure, it's more exciting to build new
| roads than fix potholes.
| usefulcat wrote:
| Where you assume malice, I would assume a combination of
| garden variety greed and short sightedness. Sometimes
| people do dumb things, it's pretty common really, even for
| 'people in charge of big things'.
| seydor wrote:
| Moderators are more than guilty of abusing their powers.
| Reddit should remove powers from them instead of enabling.
| They can easily find replacements
| idiotsecant wrote:
| What you're saying here sounds to me like "I think the
| current moderators are bad, get rid of them all and get
| new ones who will be much better"
|
| I have some ...doubts about how well something like this
| would work in practice. Burning large systems down and
| starting over is generally not more efficient than
| tweaking the system you have.
| seydor wrote:
| Governments are burnt down every four years
| Ecstatify wrote:
| The people complaining about moderators are the very same
| people who don't read the rules and complain that the
| moderators are on a power trip. I moderate a small sub
| 15K and the amount of spam is insane. I can't imagine the
| amount of work involved in a 1M sub.
| LordKeren wrote:
| I'm a lead mod of a 1.5M+ sub and we maybe remove 1-2
| bits of spam per week. Usually the very few that do get
| through our filters are quickly reported by the users and
| are removed long before it gains traction
|
| I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird,
| but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
|
| 1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a
| blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter,
| github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up
| auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist
| so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
|
| 2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-
| url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out
| 90% of the spam we got
|
| Those are two suggestions that i would give to any
| subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh
| before you implement
|
| 1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets
| to a certain threshold of reports. 2. Enforce a minimum
| karma amount & age to post w/ automod 3. Enforce a
| minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
|
| To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit,
| our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours
| and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma
| the_snooze wrote:
| That's such an uncharitable view of Reddit moderation.
| Look at examples like /r/cfb and /r/collegebasketball for
| good hard-to-replace moderation. Game threads (and post-
| game discussions) are consistently formatted and on-
| topic. And the mods are able to invite coaches for AMAs
| with no drama.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Indeed. I'd happily pay Reddit directly for an API key if
| that let me run RIF in a "bring your own key" mode. They
| could split the profits between themselves and app dev. I'm
| surprised no one is proposing this. But I guess this comes
| down to people willing and able to pay to avoid adtech
| cancer being actually the most profitable cohort for the
| advertisers...
| tcrenshaw wrote:
| I would have happily paid reddit directly for an API key
| before this debacle. Now I'm not so sure.
|
| On the bright side, avoiding reddit this week has shown
| me just how much time I waste on the site.
| paulmd wrote:
| > I'm surprised no one is proposing this.
|
| this is explicitly blocked by TOS. You can notionally do
| it by taking a "RedditIsFun" APK and injecting your own
| API key and then sideloading, but they'll do app store
| takedowns for any third-party app that supports it
| natively (because it's a TOS violation).
| opello wrote:
| Presumably one of the app store platform's terms of
| service?
| z3c0 wrote:
| I don't even think it's behind the scenes. It seems plain
| as day that they're trying to recoup the cost of their
| shitty website redesign and even shittier app. Since
| everybody is using third-party apps (which use the API),
| they pulled the most tonedeaf, corporatist approach and
| targeted those third-party apps. Instead, they should have
| dome some soul-searching to realize that they burned a
| money pile to make garbage because they decided their
| primary users were advertisers.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| > why be a moderator for a for-profit company if you aren't
| being paid?
|
| The same reason you'd be a moderator for a non-profit, which is
| power.
| p_j_w wrote:
| Maybe they give a shit about the community?
| babypuncher wrote:
| [dead]
| pgwhalen wrote:
| Yeah I'd agree with that too. People who care about
| something often like to be in a position where they can
| impact the thing they care about. "Power" isn't a totally
| cynical way of describing it.
| 8note wrote:
| I did it to learn some new skills. That's how I got good
| at css, among some other things
|
| You also get empathy for anyone who does have to deal
| with arbitrary internet commenters and posters
| babypuncher wrote:
| So everyone who's ever run a forum is just a power hungre
| egomaniac?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| forum admins own their work, reddit mods are doing free
| work for venture capitalists... these are not the same
| pgwhalen wrote:
| As I mentioned in another reply, "power" doesn't
| necessarily mean someone is a sociopath, it just means they
| like that they can have an impact due to the control they
| have. In my experience with Reddit mods, usually that comes
| from a good place.
|
| I only take exception with the idea that mods are doing
| their jobs thanklessly.
| dbbk wrote:
| Moderators of forums have rarely been paid, this is nothing
| new.
| cantsingh wrote:
| The biggest issue is that it doesn't seem like these subreddits
| are doing anything beyond closing down.
|
| Point people to an alternative. Not just in the vague direction
| of The Lemmiverse or Squabbles or whatever; if your sub is going
| dark, you should have somewhere to receive all your refugees.
|
| Even better if the mods coordinate so that all subs are pointing
| to the same place(s).
|
| Even a shared Discord would have been a big step up imo.
|
| This protest was just gone about the wrong way.
| notShabu wrote:
| This is like the mirror opposite of how VCs burn money to create
| new behaviors. Eventually the protest (wasteful burning) creates
| new behaviors that shape the world into one's desired image.
| swayvil wrote:
| A tool that will automagically scrape a subreddit and convert it
| for transferral to mastodon or whatever.
|
| We could really use that right now.
| iameli wrote:
| The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion. Twitter is,
| charitably, a mess. Twitch started taking a full 50% of the
| revenue of their top creators, who are furious.
|
| What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all these
| platforms to go so user-hostile?
| [deleted]
| kart23 wrote:
| they're not profitable. twitch probably loses money, reddit
| definitely loses money.
|
| economy has changed to where money is harder to get, and
| investors are probably much more skeptical now. and in order to
| get profitable, they have to start some user-hostile practices.
| faangsticle wrote:
| The funny thing is that reddit could be rolling in cash if
| they hadn't decided to become a (very crappy) video and image
| host
| hiddencost wrote:
| Interest rates
| xmonkee wrote:
| no more free money
| dmitrygr wrote:
| The end of free money from the fed?
| ls612 wrote:
| Interest rates go up.
| masklinn wrote:
| VC money has dried out, platforms suddenly try to extract
| money, and they go at it way ham-fisted with little rhyme,
| reason, or respect for the user base.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Twitter is still working fine, even community notes are a huge
| welcome.
| rvba wrote:
| Reddit is driven by VPs who want to IPO and cash out.
|
| I dont understand who are the people who will be left holding
| the bag though - do those pension funds hire people who dont
| see that reddit will bleed out users ans probably revenue too.
|
| Twitter was bought by Musk who wants to appease Russia, China
| and to become next Trump.
|
| Twitch probably won the streaming wars and has no real
| competition.
| roastedoolong wrote:
| [flagged]
| LegitShady wrote:
| I disagree with a lot of your post.
|
| You're correct that the Reddit IPO will likely lead to
| traditional finance holding the bag, much of which will be
| large funds.
|
| Twitter was bought by musk, but your comments about his wants
| are fever dreams.
|
| Twitch is losing the streaming wars to Youtube.
| jesuspiece wrote:
| > What's going on?
|
| VC money is drying up and these companies need to turn a profit
| now finally
| ahahahahah wrote:
| > The biggest Reddit communities are in open rebellion
|
| No, the __mods__ of __some__ of the biggest Reddit communities
| are in rebellion. Of the top 20 subreddits by subscribers, only
| 6 are currently closed. For the most part, the users of those
| subreddits dgaf about this issue, and even if the mods hold
| these subreddits hostage forever, the users will just move on
| to some similar subreddit that will take its place. The only
| loss here will be in smaller subreddits where some mod takes
| their toys home and nobody cares enough to start up something
| similar, and in that case, it's honestly not a big loss to
| reddit.
| californical wrote:
| Idk,
|
| > it's honestly not a big loss to reddit.
|
| Even though there are some giant subreddits that will
| probably all return, those are the least interesting part of
| Reddit. I feel like even the people who just want to scroll
| memes and rage content on the big subreddits still get a lot
| of value out of a few smaller subreddits related to their
| hobbies.
|
| I feel like that's what made Reddit special compared to
| TikTok or others, was that you could join those niche areas
| that were specific to you. Reddit still has the same garbage
| as other internet sites, but you could also find the really
| interesting and insightful content related to your hobbies.
|
| And in many of my niches specifically, almost entirely the
| mods have resigned from those smaller communities. And since
| I'm not interested in the rage memes of the major subreddits,
| Reddit has nothing for me at this point.
|
| But even the people who do like that stuff, I would guess
| also have their own niche hobbies that they enjoy, and if
| that part of Reddit goes away then they might as well just be
| on TikTok or whatever. And then why would they stay on Reddit
| when it's so similar to those others?
|
| To phrase more elegantly: the big subreddits may have the
| bulk of content, and will probably still be around. But the
| long tail of tiny subreddits is what made it interesting, and
| it would take a gargantuan effort for Reddit to restore the
| community of all of those little subreddits that are
| individually only valuable to a few, but everyone has _some_
| tiny subreddits that are really important to them.
| ayemel wrote:
| Plenty of users are in rebellion too, you are glossing over
| the reality to fit your narrative.
| ddingus wrote:
| I logged out, plan on never logging back in.
|
| Already, life changes, new places, people, appear
| interesting. Won't be long and it will be just like before
| I used Reddit.
| [deleted]
| marklar423 wrote:
| I would add on - enshittification driven by money, as coined by
| Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-
| ai/#hey-guys
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's not a new trend, though. It's the bait-and-switch
| startup ecosystem has been built around for over a decade
| now.
|
| There may, however, be some underlying trend that's the
| reason why so many social media companies are pulling the
| bait-and-switch right now, simultaneously.
| dcchambers wrote:
| > What's going on? What's the bigger trend that's causing all
| these platforms to go so user-hostile?
|
| These companies need/want to start making money. Either due to
| investors wanting a return on their investment (Reddit IPO,
| Amazon buying Twitch), or poor decisions which have lead to
| lots of debt (Elon buying Twitter). Companies can't get
| free/cheap loans any more since interest rates are high.
|
| Many of these social media companies all followed the tried-
| and-true "embrace, extend, extinguish" methodology... Offer a
| free/cheap product until you gain the network effect that kills
| your competitors, then crank up the prices to turn a profit.
| monnok wrote:
| Inflation and rising interest rates sure seem like they can
| explain so much of the puzzle... especially timing.
|
| But Twitter is an especially interesting piece of that
| puzzle. It seems to be immolating itself in a deliberate
| enshitification, closely mirroring every other mega site -
| yet I doubt it can be related to debt in any way.
|
| I don't think we can just shrug and chalk it up to a poor
| decision by eccentric Elon, either. There are only a handful
| of mega sites. Some (Meta) have had bots between users for a
| long time. Some (TikTok) were born that way. The rest,
| including Twitter, seem hellbent on racing to get bots
| between us as fast as they can.
|
| I think this undermines the debt-urgency argument. I suspect
| it, instead, highlights a recent growth spurt in the market
| value for mega sites with bots between users. We're getting
| bots everywhere, not because time's up and bots were the best
| idea they had, but because bots are exploding in value. We
| might even look back and shake our heads because Elon so
| clearly _under_ paid for Twitter.
| [deleted]
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > What's the bigger trend that's causing all these platforms to
| go so user-hostile?
|
| The economy has changed and now they actually have to try to
| make money.
| seydor wrote:
| also social media saturation. With the coming AI personas and
| deepfakes next year, it will be impossible for humans to
| compete
| Exuma wrote:
| This is a very stupid question - but can someone explain what
| the "interest rates" and "no more free money" replies mean? Is
| it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant money
| supply from investors? Or is it something else
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Imagine you could have $1 now or x 1 year from now. How big
| would x have to be in order for you to prefer it?
|
| Well, if you were planning on buying a $1 savings bond at a
| 2% interest rate than x would have to be 1.02 or bigger. If
| the interest rate increased then x would need to increase as
| well. In other words, an increase in the interest rate is a
| decrease in the future value of money - it takes more future
| dollars to be worth the same amount of present dollars.
|
| When interest rates are low, companies prefer earning money
| in the future. They prefer growth. When interest rates are
| high then companies shift their preference to present
| dollars. What we are seeing is companies choosing to pursue
| money now rather than money in the future because of what
| interest rates are doing.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| Low interest rates make people do very high risk bets
| (stocks,startups,crypto).
|
| Increasing rates will make people more risk aware.
| iaw wrote:
| I'll try to be quick and simple:
|
| - The US government sets a base interest rate it will pay if
| you buy bonds from them
|
| - Bonds are basically loans
|
| - People with money want that money to make money so they buy
| bonds and invest in stocks/companies
|
| - When bonds aren't giving any money rich people put more
| into companies
|
| - When bonds are giving money rich people shift money into
| bonds, less money for companies
|
| This is a gross simplification but hopefully gives the idea.
| metabagel wrote:
| Actually, the Fed sets the Federal Funds Rate, which is the
| rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend their extra
| reserves to one another overnight. Increasing the Federal
| Funds Rate increases borrowing costs across the board,
| which subsequently will tend to decrease the money supply.
|
| I believe that U.S. bonds are priced at the market.
| Exuma wrote:
| Ahh, thank you. That helps a lot. I suppose it's
| interesting that the return from companies is even remotely
| comparable to the return from bonds. That's probably a dumb
| realization but I don't know much about this stuff.
| iaw wrote:
| Not dumb, this stuff isn't really taught unless you
| explicitly pursue it.
|
| One note: the return on some companies may be higher and
| others lower, the issue is that the _risk_ for money in
| companies is higher.
|
| Very simplistic example: the US government can offer you
| a flat 5%, a company investment offers 10% half the time,
| 0% the other half.
|
| One is a sure thing, one is a gamble. The more the
| 'gamble' the more risk and that is a driving factor in
| investments. People are willing to take huge risks if the
| payoff is very large (Look at Michael Burry and the big
| short)
| gregw134 wrote:
| You can roughly calculate yield from a stock investment.
| If a stock has a P/E ratio of 20 (i.e. the value of all
| stocks issued is 20x its annual earnings), divide 72/20
| to get a yield of 3.6%. If US government bonds offer 1%
| yield this stock looks like a deal, but when safer
| government bonds yield 4% this stock now looks
| unattractive.
|
| Of course this is a gross oversimplification: earnings
| can grow, stocks can pay dividends, companies can go
| bankrupt, and companies have to pay their own bondholders
| as well as stockholders. But hopefully it shows that a
| tradeoff between stocks and bonds does exist.
| mynameishere wrote:
| It's not all about rich people switching their portfolios
| around. When rates rise, operating expenses for companies
| go up, and so they pass that cost down. This is a bigger
| deal for companies perennially in debt than startups.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This is a good explanation, but the real, inflation-
| adjusted bond yield is still negative.
| buzzy_hacker wrote:
| Is it? The 12-month inflation rate for May 2023 was 4%
| and the federal funds rate is 5%.
| cragfar wrote:
| 3 month T-Bills are 5.2% (was .04%). 2 years are 4.7% (was
| .15%). Hypothetical future profit for companies that have
| been around for 10+ years is no longer good enough.
| Exuma wrote:
| I see, so reddit being around for quite some time, people
| are just going with high interest treasury bills to put
| their money. Thanks
| cragfar wrote:
| Yeah. Before investors had basically no other option. Now
| the baseline has moved from virtually 0% return to 5%.
| bbor wrote:
| > Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant
| money supply from investors?
|
| A lot of replies to say "yes" lol
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| > Is it because reddit isn't profitable so relies on constant
| money supply from investors? Or is it something else
|
| Roughly.. but more accurately even if they are profitable
| they are not profitable _enough_.
|
| Its not just that Reddit (Twitter, Twitch[0], etc) needs the
| money, the investors likely also have loans that need to be
| repaid sooner-than-later (or just other places with better
| returns). As such there is a large push for higher short term
| profit, to get higher short term share price, to "diversify"
| some of their Reddit stock.
|
| The reality is none of these people care about the long term
| of Reddit. They have effectively "pumped it", they now need a
| good way to quickly "dump it". I'm sure none of them have any
| explicit motivation to destroy Reddit's future cash flows in
| the process, but that long term health is definitely not
| their focus.
|
| [0] Twitch as an Amazon subsidiary doesn't exactly fit this
| model. However, the execs within Amazon do have Profit
| targets to meet for their orgs. This directly reflects in
| their bonuses, size of orgs, etc. So likely a similar enough
| analog.
| crystalmeph wrote:
| The Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States,
| has been raising interest rates very aggressively for the
| past year and a half to fight inflation. This has ended a
| very long-lived policy of near-zero interest rates which has
| been in place since 2009, the Great Financial Crisis.
|
| When you borrow money from the bank, i.e. to fund the
| operations of a money-losing site like Reddit, ultimately the
| interest rate you pay on that loan is affected by the
| interest rates set by the Federal Reserve.
|
| While interest rates were near zero, investors in money-
| losing companies like Reddit could justify just borrowing
| more money to keep the companies going, as the money was
| cheap.
|
| But now with higher interest rates, the investors in Reddit,
| and other money-losing ventures, can no longer afford to just
| borrow more money to make up for the money they lost last
| year, they actually have to show a return or at least cut the
| losses to a level that the investor will tolerate. That means
| monetizing everything they can.
| Exuma wrote:
| So this is more along the lines of what I was thinking,
| where borrowed money had higher interest, but many other
| replies in this thread make it seem like because treasury
| bills are better people are just investing in that instead.
|
| Is it both of these factors combined? Is it more one factor
| than the other?
| iaw wrote:
| Based on your comment I think you may be missing one
| aspect:
|
| The money you get lent at the bank _is_ the money people
| are investing.
|
| Both of the things you describe in this comment are two
| halves of a market. There's someone borrowing money and
| someone lending money. The borrowing becomes more
| expensive because the lender has better alternatives.
| Exuma wrote:
| Ahhh, do you know what's funny is after I wrote that
| comment I went to the bathroom and while peeing I
| basically had the intuition they were 2 halves of the
| same thing, but I couldn't even articulate it. I was
| going to come back and try to ask again and I saw this
| comment. Thanks!
|
| All this stuff I've tried to learn a few times and it's
| just so open ended, my mind is very more technically
| oriented and vague hand-waving statements on investopedia
| drives me crazy. Other people seem to understand it so
| easily but after the multiple attempts that I have made,
| I just have given up.
| iaw wrote:
| Read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel
|
| It's the best non-biased primer I've found on finance.
| Exuma wrote:
| Thanks! I just ordered it.
| superfrank wrote:
| Super simple EIL5:
|
| Rates are low: I can borrow money at 1% interest and my bank
| pays me 0.1% interest on any money I leave in my account. I'm
| getting basically no return on my money in the bank, so it
| makes sense to start a project that might make me money. If I
| have to borrow money, I only need to make a 1% return for it
| to be worth it.
|
| Rates are high: It now costs 7% to borrow money and my bank
| pays me 4% on any money I leave in my account. 4% is a decent
| return and if I borrow money I need need a project that
| returns >7% for it to be worth it. Leaving my money in the
| bank seems like a much better option now.
|
| How this applies to Reddit: VCs and investors are trying to
| figure out which projects are worth putting more money into,
| but the bar to make an investment worth it is much higher.
| Reddit (and many other companies) now need to show that
| giving them money is more profitable than leaving money in
| the bank (or other "safe" investments).
| thunderbird120 wrote:
| People are starting to come to terms with the new reality where
| tech companies actually need to have a viable business model
| which takes in more money than it expends. The return of
| nonzero interest rates means that the runway is no longer
| infinite, you can't just raise more money to cover costs
| forever, eventually you have to either take off or crash. This
| is revealing just how much of a nonsensical anomaly most of the
| 2010s were for many internet companies. COVID provided a brief
| return to this period but it couldn't last. The idea that large
| companies can be run at an operating loss indefinitely is going
| to be dying a slow painful death over the next few years along
| with any companies which can't make the transition to actually
| earning money, and that is the way it should be.
| ls612 wrote:
| The other major issue is that the ability to start a major
| reddit competitor has been regulated out of existence. Same
| with any other large platform. The EU especially (although
| the US has also done this to a lesser extent) has created
| regulations and laws which are near-impossible technically to
| fulfill, so anyone operating a new website is in violation of
| them if you look hard enough. And believe me for a new social
| media app with linking news/politics/etc stories as a major
| feature everyone in power will be incentivized to look as
| hard as possible.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| > The EU especially (although the US has also done this to
| a lesser extent) has created regulations and laws which are
| near-impossible technically to fulfill
|
| Which regulations specifically are you talking about and
| what makes it "near impossible technically to fulfill"
| them?
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Yep!
|
| Tech companies over hired for ~10 years wrt efficiency &
| sustainability, and few want to do layoffs necessary to get
| 'good' efficiency numbers, instead just close enough that
| they can maybe reach non-buzzy norms in a few years, and hope
| things change in the meanwhile to go back to setting money on
| fire.
|
| It's natural: market funded inefficient growth for years, and
| tech people want to feel like they are succeeding, which
| headcount is a power-tripping and physical metric for, even
| if wildly inaccurate. Cutting isn't easy either. Losing
| headcount makes folks want to quit, slows growth, and if as
| deep as needed for efficiency (which the 'standard' 10-20%
| cut isn't enough for), loses revenue... Which can cause a
| death spiral.
|
| We have been growing purely on revenue for awhile now, and we
| have to remind many of our customers that we need to get paid
| bc we aren't (currently) doing the VC thing. Many have been
| trained at this point to not think that way, it's bizarre.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > ...and that is the way it should be.
|
| I don't know, it's looking like most people prefer businesses
| that eschew profits.
|
| Yea my business-101 textbook says businesses should run a
| profit, but my sociology-101 textbook says we should do
| things that are good for people.
|
| Maybe Reddit (et al) should be recreated as non profits
| dedicated to community building... before Facebook becomes
| the sole source of internet social interaction.
| goatlover wrote:
| How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs? What makes you
| think doing things for the good of people is excluded by
| for profit businesses? They create all sorts of products
| and services that people want and need. Yes, there are
| abuses. Same with non profits. Because humans are in
| charge.
|
| The problem with doing things for the good of people in a
| general sense is that you still need to have a functioning
| economy where scare resources are allocated somehow.
| roastedoolong wrote:
| > How will non-profit Reddit pay its costs?
|
| hmm... if only there were... I don't know... some way to
| offer users to pay for a quality experience and subsidize
| that income with advertisements and reasonable API usage
| fees?
|
| no, that couldn't possibly work! I mean, look at
| Wikipedia...
|
| oh. right.
| dbbk wrote:
| That's literally what Reddit does now and it's not enough
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > What makes you think doing things for the good of
| people is excluded by for profit businesses?
|
| This entire thread is proof. The entire thread is
| platforms that people liked started to suck as soon as
| they decided to make a profit.
|
| Sure theoretically profitable businesses can be good for
| people, but I'm not holding my breath for an example.
|
| > The problem with doing things for the good of people in
| a general sense is that you still need to have a
| functioning economy where scare resources are allocated
| somehow.
|
| Scarce resources is a cute textbook term but very few
| things in society, especially on the internet, are
| scarce. Profits must come from somewhere, and that
| somewhere is your customers. So it's almost tautological
| that profits are bad for customers.
|
| Reddit was built on free content from unpaid users being
| moderated by unpaid mods for the benefit of the
| community. Reddit is discovering that they can't charge
| for a scarce resource they don't own. The scarcity wasn't
| internet bandwidth or servers or engineering efforts. The
| scarce resources were community contributions by users
| and mods.
| dbbk wrote:
| But they do have to make a profit or they will cease to
| exist. Money is not some fictional number.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Continuing to operate at a loss isn't a good option
| either though. Eventually they'd shut down and the
| community would lose all of Reddit.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Amen, I really hate that era because it has turned into a
| land grab by those who had access to that infinite money. It
| eroded the web and mobile by consolidating everything into a
| few platforms.
|
| I'm hopeful that if companies start making money, we will
| start seeing competition again.
|
| The web is barren, the web 3.0 went nowhere and social media
| is an outrage machine. I'm sure it could be better.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Twitch revenue was 2.8 Billion last year. In what way does
| prioritizing more revenue mean they will achieve a viable
| business model when they're already generating billions.
|
| Business types want you to think they're tidying up, but most
| are using this zeitgeist as an opportunity for greed and the
| chance to shift more power away from workers.
| thunderbird120 wrote:
| To state the obvious, total revenue does not tell you if a
| company is actually making money. If operating costs exceed
| revenue you lose money. It doesn't matter how much revenue
| you're making. Given the costs required to run twitch, they
| are likely still losing money, not making it. Losing money
| is not a viable business strategy.
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| I am aware that revenue is not profit, we are on HN after
| all.
|
| While it is possible to run a company at a loss with
| extremely high revenue, contextually, you're making
| excuses for a company that could easily keep running with
| 2.8 Billion dollars yearly.
|
| It's likely that after they extract more money from
| creators they will increase their spend more to maintain
| operating at a loss. At what point does it end?
| viknesh wrote:
| If your claim is "2.8 billion in revenue is enough to run
| twitch profitably", I'd love to see the numbers backing
| that up. What's the cost of serving videos, acquiring
| advertisers, etc.
|
| Otherwise it's just wild speculation.
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Revenue != profit
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| If you're making 2.8 billion in Revenue with no profit on
| a Twitch-like product, that's a you problem, not the
| creators problem. They already extract a ton of money
| from creators and generate revenue with ads. Twitch is
| spamming ads like it's TV in the 90's.
| [deleted]
| 0x_rs wrote:
| Discord also is in the process of asking 200 million users
| (monthly active as of 2023) to change their username, previous
| ones they will inevitably lose due to the uniqueness
| requirement, something nobody seems to have ever asked and
| might be unheard of on this scale. There's a few other examples
| of platforms going against their users too. It definitely seems
| to be an industry-wide movement, perhaps racing to be ahead of
| the changing economic climate with very poorly though out,
| short sighted steps, possibly to maximize revenue. (on paper,
| as advertised by some management before being approved and put
| into motion, but some corpos might still get away with it)
| paulmd wrote:
| discord is most likely well-aware of the criticism that it's
| an unsearchable black-hole and that people are nonetheless
| bashing it into being a docs/wiki system despite the poor
| product fit.
|
| when your customers start doing weird shit with your product,
| they're telling you what they want the product to be, and as
| a result discord is pivoting towards being a forum or at
| least having the option for communities to have public
| wikis/forums associated with them.
|
| this is probably only intensified now that reddit is
| teetering in the middle of their own pivot and leaving this
| opening for low-friction community building. like why not
| have a reddit replacement for the public content, built on
| top of the discord communities that already exist?
|
| but, reddit with non-unique usernames would kinda suck,
| wouldn't it? to make a global public forum work, you have to
| require that they're unique and migrate the existing
| usernames to the new schema somehow.
|
| You don't _have_ to use the new username, discord 's legacy
| functionality isn't forcing you, but if you don't you
| probably won't get access to disreddit features when it
| launches, because replying to paulmd#0069 on a reddit-clone
| would be an awful experience.
|
| but the reason the username change is happening "even though
| nobody asked for it" is very simple. nobody is asking for
| username changes, but lots of people are asking for discord
| to step into the gap that reddit is leaving, and provide more
| powerful public-facing tooling for non-ephemeral content
| that's searchable and discoverable. And unique usernames are
| kind of a mandatory part of that model.
|
| I haven't really used Lemmy/Mastodon much but it seems like
| an inherent disadvantage of that model too.
| weedgoku69@mastodon.social is not the same user as
| weedgoku69@masty.me and people will have to get used to the
| idea of looking at the _whole username_ rather than reddit 's
| unique usernames.
|
| It's also going to be tough when there's not a 1:1
| correspondence between "subreddits" and the discords
| underneath them. I guess your discord.gg URL is now your
| canonical subreddit URL... hope you boosted your server and
| squatted that custom invite URL a couple years ago, because
| it's your "domain name" now!
| WesternWind wrote:
| The username thing makes sense for discord, in that few
| people can remember the number that comes after it.
|
| I snagged a four letter username that was my username without
| the number so I'm happy about that.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Poor move. The major subreddits will just be replaced.
|
| The correct thing to do was to do a weekly blackout or similar.
| This would have affected the bottom line and hurt the experience
| of the website.
|
| Instead, you are asking people to change their routines
| permanently. They will adjust.
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