Technology

Lemmy only has a day or two of the blackout to grab users from reddit, I really hoped someone would prepare servers for the participating subreddits or something like that. It seems like a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain some traction.

Here's hoping it goes well, it seems like lemmy's golden moment to grow.

I don’t think it’s been clearly voiced enough, but there are thousands of sub moderation bots that do things like automatically flag hate speech for mod review that will all just stop working. Some of the larger, older subs have entire ecosystems of content tagging and linking that will break. An example is putting the name of a tv show in braces [TNGS01E13] and getting a link to that episode’s wiki as a comment reply. It dramatically improves the Reddit experience, but isn’t worth the outrageous cost to keep going.

Overnight, Reddit would turn into a (more) poorly moderated nightmare.

Problem for reddit is, the people contributing through posts or comments are the ones most likely take offence to the new API pricing, and losing those people will be exponentially more hurtful for reddit than losing your average redditor. The proportion of people commenting, posting and upvoting is incredibly small compared to the total user number

My first reply here, and that's why I've gone ahead and branched out into different directions before things go dark. I missed out on Digg, but at the time I had gone from Usenet to various boards, and when some of them began to get quieter or stale looked around and found Reddit, soon after the Digg migration. I don't know if it's Lemmy or some other that will/can take up the need for a collective aggregate service, but this has potential and I like the distributed idea. With improved UI for the novice it could turn into the next Reddit without some of the baggage (and probably its own issues).

If what they're saying is true, that might happen anyway. A lot of moderation is done using third party bots that use the API. Without those, it all has to be done manually and no one has time for that. Even then a lot of the manual moderation is done using third party tools (again, impacted by the API change).

Reddit's about to pull an implosion that'll make Twitter and Digg look like blips. I got the heck out of there and now I'm just sitting back with my popcorn and tea watching it all burn down.

I agree with this. Pretty sure Reddit has already done their share of research on the possible backlash and figured it was still profitable. I highly doubt they'd change their mind now.

My experience here has been great, tbh. Much less toxicity than on Reddit. I'm missing a few subs I frequented there and the app needs some work, but at least there's no big corporation telling me what to do.

My pipe dream is, instead of a black out, all the users come together and spam NSFW content on all the major subs to hopefully piss off their advertisers. Collaboration on that scale will probably never happen though.

This is the third time Ive written this out because Jerboa keeps crashing so Im using the web interface instead!

Hopefully, I'll remember the salient points I made and maybe be even more succinct!

and the original founders would have never allowed Reddit to get to this point.

Unfortunately, at least one of the original founders has allowed, quite possibly even driven this policy. Steve Huffman is still very much at the helm and what he has exposed of himself in interviews, he doesn't sound like a very nice person (re: post apocalypse, he sees himself being on top and having slaves)

It's great that subs and users are organising to fight this but maybe Reddit should be allowed to carry out this change and metaphorically shoot itself in the face? This is just the latest in a long horrifying series of policies that the admins have pushed through, actions they have failed to take, or when they finally did, it was long after the horse had bolted.

Remember the jailbait (and worse) subs that they allowed for so long (and were rumoured to have participated in) and when they finally did something after Anderson Cooper shone a light under that dark, seedy rock, they picked their sacrificial lamb and blamed it all on him? Remember the secret santa parallel site someone set up that Reddit then forcibly absorbed and let wilt? Remember how they dealt with Victoria who arranged all the celebrity IAMA's? Remember how they brought in Ellen Pao (with her own set of issues) to deal with horrific amount of far right and misogynist subs that were actively calling for peoples and groups deaths, and then threw her under the bus once they got what they needed? Remember how they were banning people and deleting posts when it was revealed that 5 mod accounts were basically controlling the top 100 subs? Remember how they appointed to the admins a person who was found to be grooming teens and was supportive of their father who was convicted of serious sexual assault of a child?

The list is never-ending....

The sad fact of the matter is that centralised social medias one driving factor is money. They acquire that via data points collection from engagement. They dont care what kind of engagement as long as theres plenty of it and hateful content drives engagement.

There is no sense of community among the admins and execs of Reddit. It is entirely from the users.

The original founders allowed this to happen, if they didn't drive this. Many similar times previously, and undoubtedly, many more times to come.

Maybe Reddit, just like every other centralised, corporate owned social media sites time is over?

I just dont believe its something worth fighting for, despite how commendable the actions of all those subs is.

The blackouts won't work, I think. Unless "working" means "some community manager will lie through his teeth to justify what the product managers decided, while not being even fully informed on the consequences of the decision." With potentially spez coming out of the blue and saying his stupid shit, while pretending to be part of the community. "AS SNOOS WE STAND UNITED!"

Meh I hope reddit dies. Greedy dbag MBA tools

The blackouts may encourage users to go elsewhere, and going elsewhere may help move the needle on this issue. But, the only thing that's going to stop reddit from going down the path it's on is stopping the IPO. Let's face it, any short-term victories will eventually be overcome by shareholder interests.

Plus, protestors leaving the site might actually help reddit at this point. Redditors are notoriously cantankerous and difficult to advertise to. But, it's becoming less so as mainstream users flock in. As protestors leave the site, the userbase becomes increasingly saturated with apathetic users who are willing to put up with more.

And let's be honest. Reddit has a lot of users who feel entitled to entertainment enough to get angry, but addicted enough to put up with it. Look at just about any fandom

@argv_minus_one Oh yeah, I remember when they promised that CSS support was coming... 7 years ago. As for redirecting people to the Fediverse, some of the apps like RedReader are openly considering it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/13ylk42/update_3_reddit_effectively_kills_off_third_party/

"Right now I'm considering the possibility of modifying the app to connect to a Reddit alternative such as Lemmy or Mastodon. There would be something very satisfying about some of the bigger Reddit apps driving their userbase to alternative sites too, and if this helped one of those platforms gain traction then that would be a step in the right direction."

Personally I think it wouldn't be a bad idea if some of these app creators hosted their own Fediverse instance and sent all their users to it.

For now admins can already add custom themes to their Lemmy instances. Its described in the docs.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature's delight.

• MA

I'm still a bit sad about Reddit's seemingly approaching ending. I never cared about Twitter so moving to Mastodon was a snap, but Reddit has had loads of amazing content posted and I've enjoyed it for 15+ years. I love the Fediverse, and Lemmy is great, but it may take some time before these platforms and communities can replace Reddit for me.

Agreed. Previously these blackouts made a difference like against SOPA and non-reddit things, but they fully knew that this would cause backlash and deemed it still worth it. Maybe not this huge of backlash, but they know they're "too big to fail" at this point, people are comfortable.

I full expect this is going to go into effect. I'm hoping in this next month we can build Lemmy up to a decent enough successor so that if people do decide to look elsewhere we can provide them a landing space.

Apollo's dev said 1.5million people use his app. Let's say just 10% decide to stick to their guns and say "I'm leaving Reddit", that's still 150 thousand people who are looking for new communities. That's a ton of people we could bring here.

So I'm evangelizing for people to spin up more instances. Yes, they may be quiet now, but if we take this opportunity where Reddit showed their hand early, we could provide a hell of a landing place come July 1 for a huge chunk of Reddit. It's not going to match them in size right away, but we take this as a moment to start growing.

So start that instance, plug it everywhere, create that niche community. We don't know who may drop by in a few weeks.

Thanks for coming to my motivational speech.

It won't change a damn thing about Reddit, but a lot of people will be checking new places for memes.