The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.
The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps.
What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money.
With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in.
There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators
I can't agree with this enough. The internet today is a cesspit, it needs a git reset hard back to the days when communities were based around forums. I made a lot of real life friends from the forums I frequented.
On the one hand I feel exactly like you do, on the other hand I observe that my teenage daughter is making real friends on discord and game servers, just like I did on usenet and forums. So maybe it's you/me getting older rather than (just) the internet changing.
Oh the good old days :(
As do I, but I suspect much of what I miss is simply just being young and free and all that comes with that.
The trajectory of discord might be: under-charge and bring in users to supply content; increase charge when users now depend on that content; fail & monetize their data and their attention; succeed & implode because users dont want their attention/data monetized.
This would be less of an issue if users had clear legal rights (perhaps IP rights) to their own data.
I'd have fewer problems with "commercial platforms" if they couldn't rent-seek on free labour, ie., if the created content could be easily "replatformed".
Perhaps that's the next phase of the privacy war: the right to replatform.
Every time you type you create value for the platform.
Moderators, users, etc. are people volunteering for each other -- not for discord. Discord is just a public park.
At some point probably they'll go full social-media-megacorp and start to believe they own all groups using the public park; all their leaflets, and posters, and boardgames. All their time and effort.
This is really the heart of the reddit blackout. Who own's what makes reddit valuable?
On any sane sense digital ownership rights: it's users. Reddit inc provides well-trimmed grass and a nice pond (ie., source code and servers).
I don't think I will read anything else this insightful today. Would I pay for this thread? Absolutely. Would I pay $19.99/month for HNPREMIUM where I could read "the full thread" of top content providers like mjburgess? Nope.
Well I can comment with authority on my motivations. I can expand your point further than you made it.
I am posting here because its free for you. I'm posting here to participate in an open forum, I am donating my time to the people here, in conversation -- not to HackerNews itself. Which has my loyalty only insofar as it is the "public space I want to visit".
So if you were to have paid anything for that thread, I wouldnt have started it.
And likewise I have never posted to any internet forum behind a paywall and I find the idea practically and morally suspicious. All the places worth going to are run by those with a passion for them -- it is that passion which they want to share.
Thanks for expanding. I think for me I get confused with getting a lot of value out of something that's free, user friendly and highly moderated (self moderated and actively) and wanting to show that I value that. Naively it would be that thing "money" in some way or another. But the gotcha is, it's lots of these little threads where a writer is going out of their way to shed insight on something and it clicks for me (aka great value). So I would have kinda liked to give post facto user driven "tips", but then imho micro transactions perverts incentives on a micro individual level. So you might still say all these things you said now (without any chance of getting "a coffe" or a couple of "bits") but you could also start to change your tone to make it stand out more, to provide "better content", so you spice up your takes and act more distinguishable to get tips. Or as in your case, stop posting all together. So I don't want micro transactions here even if I sometimes actuall would like to pay someone thanks somehow.
I get value out of clarifying my thoughts amongst people capable of refining them -- the membership fee is "something to say" and the reward is "something to read".
I'm quite capitalist myself, but for my own passions, an elite socialist -- that is, of course the value to me ought be non-financial; and likewise, to you.
A kind of "collective elite" is very intuitive for one's owns passions --- but it wont get you an economy.
But I dont wish to turn my thoughts into an economy. My words pay their own way.
This speaks very well to something that's been bugging me about these discussions. marginalia_nu posted a blog about community yesterday that got linked here and you're hitting on a topic related to that. When the value is in the community itself, not the location they happen to be gathering in, how should ownership and funding of that location work?
In reality, we've got several options. People have house parties. One or several members of the community volunteer property they already own and maintain for another purpose to be temporarily used as a gathering place. The web analogy would be if we all had our own private blogs that we ran on self-hosted servers and we moved from the comments section of one to another and had our discussions there. Classically, Usenet was basically this but without the web.
Commons exist. These would be something like a park. That can be funded via taxes, or if you're militantly anti-government, via some more voluntary form of communal funding, like an HOA or a non-profit that accepts donations. The web equivalent of the latter would be something like Wikipedia, which could easily host threaded discussions if they wanted to. It's arguably a problem that nothing like the former really exists. A lot of people in the past several years have been saying platforms like Twitter deserve to be treated as equivalent to government-provided commons, so why not just have them actually owned and funded by the government? Ironically, the US government does own and operate a classified Twitter clone called eChirp, but nobody from the web can access it unless they have a JWICS account, workstation access, a security clearance, and IC PKI identity.
When thought about this way, do private for-profit parks exist? I know amusement parks exist, but they are clearly different. The value there isn't in going to see the other park guests who you know and would gather with anyway. The park itself is the attraction, filled with entertaining rides, shows, and restaurants that play off of brand loyalty and nostalgia. It feel like places like Facebook and Reddit want to make the same or even money compared to Disney, but without putting in the century of work to build a brand and back-catalog of high-quality entertainment franchises. So they rely on users to generate content instead and it's at best a shitty, ephemeral attention grab that nobody will look back on in 2120 and cherish.
What many of us want are parks, public parks with funding models, not amusement parks with business models, let alone shitty copycats of amusement parks where all the rides suck, but we go anyway because our friends are there and we have no regular parks to hang out at.
The parent commenter you're replying to here is effectively proposing I should get paid to hang out with my friends. I don't want to get paid to hang out with my friends. As soon as that happens, they're not friends. They're customers and I just became a business. I don't want to be a business. I'm just trying to talk, not generate monetizable content.
Unfortunately, if you don’t want your data “monetized” through creepy tracking and annoying ads, and you’re also completely unwilling to pay, then you’re going to have a bad time.
Storage, compute, and bandwidth all cost money, and it has to come from somewhere.
You're wrong. Things can be publicly funded. They can be sponsored. Wikipedia does no creepy tracking and the only annoying ad is when Jimmy Wales is begging for money (even though they have the funds to run the company for 10 years without receiving another penny right now).
Your mindset of "everything costs money and so everyone is the internet's paypig" is broken and exemplifies the problem with the modern internet.
Yes, everything costs money, but honestly, not that much money. $20-$40 a month is enough to run your own kbin/lemmy/mastodon instance on a VPS with your own domain name and everything. If you have 300 regular users, getting them to throw $500 a year in support at your site is nothing.
Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that means money changes hands. That's capitalism. But in that system the site users are not being spammed with annoying ads and the only tracking being done is with the interest category itself and not on a per user basis including all of the other sites they've ever visited before visiting your site.
Just like forums used to do.
Sure, forums are outdated because the site navigation is clunky and user participation is difficult, but federated systems can bridge the gap between the forum based glory days and the modern interface without costing everyone so much money that it boggles the mind.
> Also, if you occupy a niche and run it well, you can make internet money the old fashioned way, by finding products that your niche users specifically want and organically selling to them without ad spamming them to death.
Yes, that's usually how it starts. It ends with invisible tracking pixels and flashing X10 ads everywhere. That or stealth ads disguised as content.
This isn't some hypothetical. We have 30 years of history now to tell us exactly how this plays out.
> Just like forums used to do.
That era was great while it lasted. But since the "adpocalypse", it's very very difficult for sites to make money without targeted ads and the requisite tracking. We lost a lot of high-quality sites like Dr Dobbs Journal in the adpocalypse, and all we have to replace them are SEO content farms and blogspam.
I know I'm working with the Good King hypothesis where things are great as long as a good king sits on the throne, and I also don't know many people who if they were running a federated server that was just scraping by were suddenly offered a boatload of cash to throw some ads in or to hock some shiny new toy for people wouldn't take it (even if they would be transparent about it the way Linus Sebastian does).
Despite that, I think ads will probably evolve to fit the new ecosystem, where two people like you and me are having a conversation and I will at an appropriate time and with a proper amount of discretion mention (shiny new toy) and that (I'm enjoying it) and then move on.
Annoying, blaring in your face spite ads and out of place porn ads will change, the new ads will be powered by AI personas that match their online spaces, have appropriate day night cycles and backstories, and will be practically indistinguishable from real live humans and they will occasionally gather together and talk excitedly with each other about (shiny new toy) or how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (awesome) and then us real human will stumble onto that conversation (without the parenthesis), leaving us to wonder if we should give them a try.
And if someone were to offer me thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue to host a site that seems hustling and bustling with activity that is appropriate for the space where sometimes people will be urged to get into flame wars about how (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' new birthday cake cereal recipe) is (Better than / not as good as) (Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs' Original recipe), thus preventing any conversation about (Plain old Oatmeal for breakfast) then who wouldn't take that?
I can’t exactly pinpoint what it is about this but I can’t help feeling that there’s a certain irony in you taking a screenshot of a perfectly readable, accessible post on here and posting that as (to my mind) a less readable less accessible, decontextualised piece of content - an image on an image sharing site.
Is it because people will genuinely engage with that content there?
Is it a “this is such good content I’ve captured it for posterity - look here’s the proof!” type of endorsement?
Or is it an attempt to archive the content into some sort of collective memory? Or an aide memoire for your own purposes?
Genuinely curious to understand your motivation, it’s not a criticism of what you’ve done, just something I feel I don’t understand.
You're right and sorry, It was just a online way of me enthusiastically pointing at a thing and trying to say: This is value, just a snippet of text on a pale yellow background, where no-one were actively trying to create this value. I can't really put my finger on what I'm trying to say though so i guess that is the root the confusion. :D Like, I don't get paid for this content so it doesn't have to make sense.
edit: also I use greenshot so it's too easy for me to screenshot and get an imgur-link. And yes, I'm a screenshoter, sending my colleagues images of text all the time. I'm lucky to be alive still.
Please don’t apologize, your approach is pretty normal - I probably send a dozen screenshots around per day and it’s always easiest to just show people what I’m referring to directly with an image.
Hacker News has pretty easily accessible URLs for every comment.
Just click on the timestamp next to the comment, like "12 hours ago".
Sending the actual HN url to a comment or thread, instead of a screenshot:
* Is accessible to people with limited vision who can't or can't as easily read a screeshot. Many people even without vision impairment find text much easier to consume than a photo of text. For instance, text in reasonable CSS will flow to fit your screensize, where a screenshot will not.
* For those interested, easily provides the context of where the comment/thread appeared and what's around it, hard to trace back from a screenshot to HN
* For the future archival purposes, is often more likely to still be good than a link to a third-party image hosting site
* In the rare case where it matters, is "self-authenticating", it points to HN itself, while an image can be modified or faked, although certainly in most cases there is no motivation for someone to do so, still it's nice to have it built in.
When it's an HN comment, or anything else with a URL, I think it should be nearly as easy to show people what you're refering to with a URL to it, as it is with a screenshot?
How is it creating value for the platform? I'm in about 30 Discord servers but they are all private with a small group of friends either playing a common game or connected through something else. I don't think any of them have moderators and I don't even know who the creator/admin is in most.
As I see it we're just leeching off Discord's infrastructure, in contrast to reddit (or HN) where each comment/post adds something to the platform in large.
Why would anyone pay money for random nonsense chat logs? Seems useless for the regular reasons data is sold and outright bad as training material for AI.
It's exactly the right data if you want to make a realistic-looking chatbot, e.g. in order to astroturf.
It also likely contains information about you and your friends like holiday plans, medical conditions etc that can be used to more effectively avertise towards you.
But most of all, you are a captive audience that Discord can sell in the future.
Network effect. More and more projects, creators, friends setup a discord which brings more and more people in.
These are moderated by whoever created them, and bringing more users (followers) is the creator’s work. But people depending on discord is what discord is after.
I fully expect a bait and switch on this platform once it has captured enough users.
And that would be easy, since all the info and knowledge is only accessible through discord. I use it too, but I believe many project make the mistake of only having interactions there. Discoverability will be low, the search insufficient. Basically not part of the web at all.
The difference was, back in the good old days, you were making friends with the people who owned and ran the platforms you were on. And they weren't (usually) slurping up all manner of data about you to sell off access to in one form or other.
That is not the case now.
On the other hand, from a parent's perspective, the "good old days" were an absolute nightmare, because nobody was particularly responsible for policing content your kids were being shown (except for, well, you). Whether or not you SHOULD be willing to offload that responsibility set aside as a matter for debate, you for the most part CAN assume that the volume of heinously inappropriate content being foisted upon your unwitting 15 year old is a bit more limited, at least on these big platform sites (aside from some of the more ephemeral content, where it's usually a matter of taking it down only AFTER the kids see it). But you can also usually rest a bit more easily knowing your 15 year old isn't uploading naked pictures of themselves to reddit like they may have been to a vbulletin or phpbb site in the days of yore (though, nothing stops them from going off the beaten path and doing so elsewhere unless you've got that firewall and/or actual monitoring going on).
I guess the point is, there are pros and cons. Personally I approach the kids on the Internet thing with some pretty hefty firewalling and monitoring and would really just love a return to the greater amount of decentralization (and for the love of god, search engines that just find what's out there, and report back based on terms, rather than curate "acceptable" and "promotion worthy" content...but this may be wishing for too much). But others may have different priorities.
> you for the most part CAN assume that the volume of heinously inappropriate content being foisted upon your unwitting 15 year old is a bit more limited, at least on these big platform sites
That very much depends on whether you agree with the curron popular opinion on what is appropriate for children.
Also, kids can just as easily find porn, gore, etc today as they could back when I was a kid. Hiding it on some platforms hardly matters.
Social media platforms and their "policing content" caused major cultural degradation.
For example the loose girls who 25 years ago would have maintained web galleries of honest, mostly well made naked pics of themselves now post Instagram reels where they use a strong light source from behind to display the silhouette of their pussy through a thin dress: no nudity, but far more perversion.
Honestly looking for information about hobbies is horrible nowadays.
It's all first and foremost subreddit, which has mostly memes and no info except maybe a sticky, THEN you find a discord link there, and finally all the knowledge is organized in google docs spreadsheet, that's in some random pinned post in some weirdly named channel.
I miss the days of the forum and wikis, it was vastly easier to search and lurk. and now you need a multiple accounts to even find that information.
What sort of hobbies are you talking about specifically? Not to doubt you, but I must have very different hobbies because I've never experienced something like this
Have you ever used an old school forum? Threaded posts, which can be pinned. So much easier to navigate than the stream of discord comments. I admit, I am 50 now so maybe I'm just old and don't understand discord...
you can sorta do that with discord, with either pinned messages in threads or just a thread that contains the intro posts and that's closed for further comments, so you can easily find what you look for
This is a big problem in the origami community. The forums have died and have been replaced with discord, it's become pretty inaccessible so I imagine it's the same for other niche hobbies.
I have been thinking about this too over the last couple of days. What would it take to replace Reddit?
In my opinion, the UI of social media has been deliberately designed to be a dopamine waterfall that discourages people to think or invest themselves in any one community. If you analyzed the top 1000 links on Reddit r/all at any given time, without checking it myself, I think you'd find that 950 of those links are memes, funny pictures, lousy opinions or some kind of a drama going on.
And back-end is a non-issue either. A phpBB forum hosted on a DigitalOcean $6 VPS can comfortably handle 100,000 community members. But perhaps the bigger issue is that people don't even want to participate in an actual community/forum, because for example - there are no downvote/upvote buttons in phpBB. There's also no instant image preview (gratification), and you actually have to click on a new thread to read it.
So, yes, cesspit is a good word for it. But more than that its people having become so comfortable with meaningless browsing, for many of them - Reddit being gone for a few days means they will browse more TikTok or whatever else people mindlessly scroll through.
I am really interested in this topic: hosting and managing forums. I don't want this technology and the kind of interaction between users to totally die so I want to learn to be semi-competent in it. Doing archaeology through old forums it's like treasure hunting, you find awesome posts and comments.
Anyone knows any forum about Forums? Or, better, about it's technical aspects? Or any blog, book, about forums? I would really appreciate any reference. I ask here because is the only community where I had found high quality blogs and off grid communities.
This summer I'll try to build and maintain one because I know a small community of max 2000 people who I know will be engaged in a positive and constructive interaction. I don't want to monetize anything, I think it would be very valuable for people. Maybe I am overconfident but at least I have to try. I think building a restful API is a better approach to detach it from UI, and also include latex syntax on the front end.
Also, do you know any forum like HN but being a real forum, with that I mean, that threads don't have a finite life?
You can probably find web forums to join based on the posters there. There's all sorts of advice on that forum to do with rules, server administration and guides.
I've been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about the decline of independent forums. And I think there's a lot to be said about the fundamental change in the legal environment today compared to the early 2000s.
Back then, sure, there was moderation, but there was also plenty of content that, while not egregious, by today's standard would certainly keep a small independent forum sysop up at night. Linking to pirated content, for instance, used to be generally a non-issue, and even if someone cared, the likelihood they were going to find it and bother targeting your forum was pretty slim. These days, that is very much not the case, with bots happy to scour the Internet for a rising number of possible content that could get your server targeted and pressured into oblivion by a pack of rabid attack lawyers.
I'm sort of hoping to see a move to the use of darknet services to alleviate some of that, perhaps with relays like tor2web or similar options for i2p that can make them clearnet accessible without the dread associated with running a server with user created content exposed to lawyers. That, or simple ephemerality of content (though say, IRC or similar protocols) seems to be the way around the reality of the legal environment brought on by web 2.0 (and beyond).
Forums declined because by 2010, they were competing against professionally maintained messageboards on social networks.
Behind almost every PhpBB/vBulletin messageboard of yore is a regular non-technical person who had to pay for a server, learn enough about databases, user authentication and backups to get started, and build and moderate a community.
Who was going to pick up that torch when you can start a subreddit or Discord or Telegram group with a couple of clicks.
That's the thing I'm looking forward to with the evolution of the "Fediverse" and other efforts toward federation/decentralization. The problem with traditional forums was that they were all little silos disconnected from one another; now those forums can talk to each other via ActivityPub or what have you, offering a nicer balance between "isolated but tight-knit community" v. "expansive but highly-impersonal masses".
I don't really think that "every community can interact with each other" is a pure benefit. This is exactly the sort of stuff that leads to "everything being about everything", along with general loud people occupying every space.
I still am very happy about "fediverse" stuff because it enables a simple-ish protocol and working mechanisms for various communities to interact. But I really think that, for example, mastodon.social is a net negative to fediverse stuff except for pure "get people to adopt" reasons.
Are there traditional forums/bulletin boards with Fediverse interop? The Fediverse platforms I'm aware of seem to all be focusing on cloning the existing UX of big walled-garden sites, which seems like a dubious approach. We know that forums/BB's can work quite well, so why not bring that UX back with "federation" (i.e. interacting with outside users and service instances) as a pure added feature?
It depends on the use case. Flat forums are vastly superior when it's about having a discussion (singular) rather than a bunch of splintered bits of information being shared.
It's worth remembering that Usenet had threading -- it's nothing new.
I would argue that a chronologically linear thread with no up- or down-voting can provide a level of focused and in-depth conversation and on-topic debate that is simply not possible with branching threads nor instant chats.
I still wonder if we're just reinventing the wheel when NNTP and FIDONet both solved this issue of connecting the disparate message bases nearly half a century ago.
I get building out to include more features, but it really feels like a lot of what's already been accomplished is just going unused.
Why is everyone proposing a fediverse style alternative over a Wikipedia style non-profit with governance? That way most users dont need to care about federation.
forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins.
"forums channeled the global usenet discussions onto private webpages, with private censorship rules in the hand of the maintainer, out of the common block lists of the reader. spam killed that unfortunately, and then university admins."
Spam keeps getting blamed for the death of Usenet, but spam filters worked fine then.
No, the real death of Usenet was the excitement over the web, and the ability of web forums to have integrated images, nice custom layouts per forum, links tightly integrated in to the browser platform, and not needing to install/configure/understand a Usenet client.
Even just the ease of registering and logging in to a web forum compared to installing, configuring, and learning how to use a Usenet client would win over most users.
Social media cites like Reddit do one better by requiring just a single login to get access to thousands of forums.
What killed USENET was the lack of moderation. And also spam.
Way in the early ages when nearly everyone was a professional or some sort of tech enthusiast, things were nice and pleasant.
But eventually the unwashed masses flooded in, and USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot. Gradually the best contributors decided they had better things to do, and wandered off elsewhere.
Moderation and spam filtering also sucked. Yeah, you could have kill files, but that had to be done by everyone independently. It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in.
"USENET had no way of dealing with some rude teen telling the lead C++ dev at Borland that he was an idiot."
We just used kill files, which let you ignore users and even let you filter through complex pattern matching. Web forums and social media still don't let you do the latter, despite such capability being available in Usenet news readers several decades ago.
"It didn't scale, and didn't prevent from plenty other people reacting to whatever jerk had wandered in."
Flame wars were a distraction, but they still happen in web forums and on social media, and depending on the community they may even be tolerated.
I can't count the number of times irrelevant tangents dominated the top voted comment threads on HN or on Reddit, and on Twitter the trolls have obviously been let back in. Reddit too used to be a safe space for them for most of its existence.
I know what you mean. Although Discord is, in my opinion, WAY better than IRC, I do miss the interactions and friends I made there. I miss forums as well, which is kind of funny because they still exist - not sure why I don't use them more?
Discord is more featureful than IRC, and prettier than IRC clients, but there are no local archives or logging, and its searching capabilities are atrocious in comparison to having local logs searchable with ordinary text-processing tools.
Not that it matters to most users, because they wouldn't know how to use such tools to begin with, and don't know what they're missing.
Discord is an information black hole, and I pity future generations who'll have virtually no access to the petabytes of history lost in dark data vaults like Discord.
Discord also has a godawful client that you can't (without breaking the EULA) substitute for another. And even then, the options are pretty limited.
Matrix seems to bring along the features of Discord with the freedom of IRC. But, as usual when freedom is concerned, it does come with a fair amount of responsibility, particularly in the form of setting up and running the server.
Interesting. Personally, I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations.
I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server. Also, sometimes the server would not let go of my disconnected nickname, so I would get one with one of more `_` appended to it.
Re-joining would not fetch the previous messages, and I would have anxiety that someone has replied to my message that I posted a few minutes prior, but I would never see...
I know that IRC bouncers exist, and I have even tried using `tmux` on a server to keep my irssi connection alive, but that is in no way user-friendly, even for a fairly technical person.
Last resort is to find the public channel logs somewhere, if they even exist.
At that point, I would just give up and use Discord.
"I find IRC incredible frustrating exactly because I can't easily see the history and continue conversations. I usually connect to IRC channels through a browser client or a desktop app, but all too often, my browser would lose the connection or my computer would go to sleep, disconnecting me from the server."
This far been a solved problem for 30 years. You just run an IRC bouncer on a host that's always up (like on a VPS) and have your IRC client connect to that. The bouncer will keep scrollback and logs for you.
Of course if you use Discord you don't need to bother to do any of that, so the convenience it offers is real, but it's not like if you're an IRC user you can't have persistent history.
On the other hand, with IRC you only log the channels you're in (unless you run your own IRC server), so you will miss out on history from other channels.
Every user needing a server to run a caching daemon 24/7 is not even within the bounds of "solved" for me. I acknowledge it "works", and have used it myself for years, but it's like saying "of course the local newspaper has archives! We all just hire our own PAs to buy and store a copy every day!"
It's a solved problem in the sense of how to change the oil in your car is a solved problem. You can learn how to do it and do it yourself with equipment that already exists. You don't need to design or build anything yourself, but use existing components.
Now, most people might not have any interest in learning how to change the oil in their cars, and don't want to bother even if they have the knowledge. They prefer to hire someone else to do it for them.
So it is with Discord, where you "pay" for the service by giving Discord your data and handing over control over your communities to them.
There used to be a great android app called Irssi-Connectbot (which was a slightly modified Connectbot app, which was an SSH client. You could set it up for automatic running of commands upon connection (ie, "screen -d -r"), and it featured the ability to use gestures to do some basic things to avoid typing out commands, like swipe left or right to move between windows.
It does appear to be discontinued at this point, but I do believe I've seen other ssh clients that do support the swipe at this point. I must confess though my use of IRC on the phone has always been relatively limited -- chatting in general on a phone is tiresome. Even SMS I do more in a browser these days on my desktop.
Classic forums aren't connected with each other, you need a new account for every forum you want to participate in, sometimes just to look at the content. On Reddit (or StackExchange) you can have one account to access "forums" for almost everything, call it low friction if you want.
Do they commonly allow arbitrary OpenID hosts? There was a brief golden period around I think 2014 where I'd see that logo on sites, but now they all seem to implement it behind the scenes, yet whitelist it to only Google, Facebook, and Apple. None of whom I would like to use to authenticate with most forums
I found the story of Hive (the social network) fascinating in that it was basically that idea of someone jumping in, learning the ropes, building a platform. And getting crushed under how much knowledge and effort, ultimately money, is needed to run a decent platform.
Their team was truely incompetent, but looking under the surface they were really a group of a few amateurs trying to do something, and it's only after the backlash that they realized a whole team of well experienced engineers is needed for anything touching user info.
I'd imagine trying to run a raw phpBB on the web today would be in the same vein ?
Also under GDPR IP address retention can fall under that in your logs depending on how you manage the info, same way analytics would need attention.
It should really be more simple, and I wish we'd have more people just building small sites here and there without having to care much about these details.
If you require logins you don't need to store the IP address for preventing abuse. The user gives you the identifier on login. The IP is a quite bad id anyways since it changes alot.
Yes, that feels simple enough, and would work for a small at home BBS.
It gets messy when you have a number of users and need to know why a specific user is sending you 150 requests per min for 3 hours: you'll insta ban that user, but still need to understand what happened. Did they get their login info leak and the whole internet is having a field day with it ? Is it an issue with your system and their browser is stuck in a weird loop ? Are you session management backend going bust and they're actually all different logged users ?
You'll only know if you have the IP, parts of the headers and some more debugging info, and activating the debug after the fact is often not good enough.
For regular forums, you need the IP address for helping to protect against SPAM and making sure banned users stay banned. Analytics can help see if you're having issues with the server, or if someone is putting unnecessary load (client-side analytics staying flat, but server-side rapidly increasing, or similar).
Or you can just rely on manually approving all of the new accounts. It's not like you need to cater to the bunch of new users that have an inmediate need to post _today_ and just cannot wait 1 week for a mod to approve their initial posts.
Collecting IP address will not reduce the need for manual moderation, nor even reduce bot spam...
(I do admin a topic-specialized technical web forum which has been running for over 20 years, which doesn't even need to ask for cookie consent.. but of course, has never been legally tested, so YMMV)
You have a problem user, named Aragorn. You ban him. Two months later, he makes a new account named Estel. How do you associate his new account with his old account, so you know not to approve it? I've done moderating of an phpBB forum and having the IP address and being able to see who else was posting from that IP address was helpful (because you can look at the writing style and decide they're doing ban evasion).
First, for at least this past decade, I have found it impossible that the same user will keep the same IP address for over two months. Storing the IP address _does not help at all_.
Second, the new user is subject to approval and all his messages are moderated until a couple of posts. If he starts posting decent material, why would you care he was banned 2 months ago -- are you really that punitative?
And if he just posts decent, insightful material for his 5 messages, gets approved and then descends back immediately into trolling, well, at least it's been a couple of months and then the couple of weeks he was under moderation of total silence, plus you have gained whatever contributions he made under moderation. I am yet to see a troll that will repeat this process (which requires insightful contributions in-between each iteration of trolling) for more than a year. That's way less moderating effort that it takes to handle new users at all...
IP is still a super valuable info, even as it changes every so often.
You'll see strangely repetitive user coming from different AWS's IP blocks. User showing constant sessions from 5 or 6 IP blocks that seem to belong to different countries. Or users having a pretty consitent IP but asks for help right after a new login happened on a different IP.
It can be replaced with other info, but it's still a simple and pretty powerful bit to know about your users.
I've heard about them when it was discovered they screwed their S3 permissions, but otherwise there was a small interview (way after the incidents) with the founder that covered a lot of what/why/how they were doing:
Some forums just got better, IMHO, just from maybe having richer contributions and distilled but still healthy communities with good moderation. Fewer drive-bys, less low quality content. I mean, I consider HN to be more forum than social media and a similar effect can be seen here - kind of a refuge due to relative obscurity and good moderation. That exists in other interest domains as well, with perhaps even more value from smaller and more focused participants.
But then, how can one argue for a git reset hard, if it seems that people are willingly preferring places where everyone is over the places where only someone is?
I have tried to at various points in the past. What usually happens is that spammers will come and post crap, and those will be 90-99% of all the posts.
I keep thinking back to the Arab Spring. Everyone thought Twitter could bring down dictators. Now users can’t even effectively pressure management. It should be easy for users to take over a platform and dictate terms, but the instant dopamine of infinite scroll can’t be resisted.
This is true of every system we live in and yet it very rarely happen because most people just want to get on with their lives and not think about it, or don’t have the means to pressure (jobs where you’re just a cog making barely enough to survive and can’t afford to lose any of the income for instance)
> Now users can’t even effectively pressure management.
Is that what's happening though? My impression is that it's a vocal minority and powermods that made the decision about blackout. Similar to a lot of political topics in real life. I was never asked about this. There's a Twitch channel now brigading every sub that raises the question if they should continue or not. Look at the vocal people in /r/soccer and most have never posted in the sub before.
Many subs did public polls to gauge their community’s opinion about what action they should take regarding the blackout.
Alongside this, considering how hard it is to get people to agree on what they need to take action against, I’d hardly think that over 8000 subreddits would go dark just because they have “powermods” that take the subreddit dark without regard for the community’s opinion (whether that be an poll before announcing, or backlash after announcing). People would’ve (and have in some subs), complained about the blackout if it really was a majority opinion that they shouldn’t participate.
How downvoted are the blackout announcement posts? What are the comments on them (albeit perhaps the mods delete negative comments)? Are there any highly upvoted threads against it?
I’d agree it’s a minority that want the blackout if we also accept the premise that the majority of people just don’t care. And in that case, if no one (or very few, since it’s the internet) is complaining, the mods should indeed do what they feel is right and wanted by many to help their circumstance.
The romanticism around "majority revolt" is flawed, almost every change, every revolt, every major action was not started, supported, or even desired by the "majority".
Majority rule is actually a very flawed and dangerous premise
What's going on now is the dekulakization of the internet. Oh you are a prosperous farmer/reddit moderator who thought you owned something, well here we are going to take it from you and put it under government/corporate ownership and sell all your grain/userbase off to pay for imports/ next quarters earnings and starve you to death/flood you with awful ads and propaganda.
It's going on with real farmers in the Netherlands and in a similar fashion with other assets people thought they owned just about everywhere as we convert to the own nothing economy.
Its not just for farmers in the Netherlands, it happening to everyone who thinks they own anything. In some countries we are back to government telling what we can grow or not grow on our own fields.
No one was ever deceived with promises of monetary compensation for their moderation work. Moreover, moderators in particular are a very small subset of the site's total users, so they have even less claim on data ownership. Comparing voluntary message board moderators with farmers starving to death sounds like satire.
+1. However, I hope the reddits and twitters of the world continue to exist, perhaps in diminished form, if for no other reason than to provide a place for users who prefer the "outrage porn," shallow memes, flame wars, etc, so that they're less likely to intrude on the smaller, healthier communities that are forming elsewhere.
>The first 10 years of the internet were volunteers creating for other volunteers. The next 10 was volunteers for 'users'. The last 10, for corporations.
And the next 10 years will remove the volunteers entirely. AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations. That seems inevitable at this point. We have already been on that path for a while with the spread of algorithmic feeds. First we removed the humans from the recommendations and editorial decisions. The next step is to remove them from the creation.
Maybe if we are lucky we will get some of those "corresponding Wikipedias" too. Reddit seems to have made their choice that they don't value communities, creators, volunteers, or anything like that. They just want to serve up the lowest common denominator content to show you between ads. Volunteers complaining is just unnecessary "noise". AI won't complain.
> AI will be the one creating the content for the corporations.
AI can't create anything without a corpus of human-created online content from which to learn. And if humans aren't posting the results of their research in archives, or their photos, or anything else created through offline travails then AI won't create anything new.
But in the end, it is about users who pay directly or indirectly (ads).
And they won't pay, if the content is not interesting.
So if AI creates interesting content and the users are happy to consume that, well fine for them.
But I think most people want actually more. Or at least, enough people want genuine human interactions, so AI taking over of the corporate "social media" will just create social networks that do care about that human touch.
"With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in."
This is a fantasy. All the money (and thus features and users) has been flowing in to ever more consolidated, corporate-controlled platforms for decades.
There's no serious alternative, as all the decentralized platforms lack the network effects of the big players.
If anything, the future is going to be ever more centralized and consolidated.
Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed.
But IRC persists. I still visit and post in a few web forums. Email is still a thing. The modern internet is a mess but open platforms aren't gone, if anything what's become more apparent is that centralized and consolidated platforms inevitably collapse on themselves.
"Meanwhile there is a corpse pile of proprietary social media companies, a bunch of dead platforms walking like tumblr, myspace, twitter. Meta is hemorrhaging cash, Discord's efforts to expand outside of the social media space failed."
For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place.
Meta squandered billions in the dead-in-the-water metaverse.
Discord is constantly growing and gaining new users.
This is far from a corporate apocalypse, and where are the serious alternatives? The vast majority of ordinary people are certainly not using them.
"For every dozen social media sites that die there's one behemoth to take their place."
Like Myspace did to Geocities. Like Facebook did to Myspace. Like TikTok did to Facebook. It's been a churn of platforms scaling too large, becoming too expensive to run, subsequently attempting to monetize users in a way that causes a flee that collapses the platform, with everyone running to the new hot thing thats burning through investor cash to promote unchecked growth. Sunrise sunset.
I don't see monetization efforts as what drives users away, but rather seeing a new, trendy alternative and the old sites seeming antiquated by comparison.
"It's where all the cool kids are" draws people in.
The extreme outrage amongst mainstream users over Reddit trying to earn a buck here is an anomaly.
In Reddit's case there is no trendy alternative to migrate over to, so all the users taking their ball and angrily stomping off will be back.
Meta are doing that dumb metaverse shit because they see their VR/AR ambitions as allowing them to build their own stable storefront monopoly. Discord also tried to get in on the storefront game, but bailed and are now in ??? mode, spamming users with begging notices for them to subscribe to their premium shit. Note the trend: established social media companies want to get the fuck out of social media.
If all that makes a social media network attractive is that it's new, that doesn't make for a very healthy ecosystem.
As for Reddit, I guess we'll see what happens. It's just a really big internet forum, the alternatives may not be trendy but neither is Reddit at this point. As you say, Discord is growing, maybe it's time for them to hold the bag and proceed to panic.
If you have a captive audience you can advertise to them. That's what all of this is about, and many companies have made billions with this strategy.
Whether the advertising is done by Geocities or MySpace or Facebook doesn't make any difference to the consumer, who's still the product these companies sell to their real customers: the advertisers.
Discord can make plenty of money selling ads too, and I would not be at all surprised to see ads in every Discord channel in the future, especially as (unlike Reddit) it doesn't have any third-party clients through which users can circumvent any ads Discord may want to show.
"Discord can make money selling ads too, and I would not be at all surprised to see ads in every Discord channel in the future, especially as (unlike Reddit) it doesn't have any third-party clients through which users can circumvent any ads Discord may want to show."
This sounds really uncool, like something that would make a trendy new social media platform flush with investment attractive!
Users with adblockers in the US was at 25% in 2019 with adoption steadily growing over the years, based on a quick google search at least. But even if it was 10% that wouldn't be a "small minority" and provides an explanation for recent efforts from platforms to force adblockers out.
There's also a fair number of people who might not install an adblocker but don't engage with advertising, click through rates are even lower than the number of people who have adblockers installed.
Online ads aren't sustainable, it's a grift prolonged by advertising fraud.
Reddit was already consolidated prior to this, the moderators in question and the subs that are shut down are run by the same handful of moderators that run the entire site. Something like 20 people are the top mods of 80+% of the subreddits.
It's naive to believe they are just volunteers either given how many of them are active for 20+ hours a day, and how moderation on some of the big subs are done in such a way that is effectively consensus making. Almost certainly some, if not most of the biggest power moderators on the site are run by multiple people, potentially other corporations or government agencies.
The old/wild internet is dead and buried, and it was before this blackout too. The API changes certainly aren't good, but let's not kid ourselves that Reddit's main moderators organizing the blackout are anything like volunteer mods of old.
The data created by people should be owned by people. They should have right to decide if it can be distributed free or with charge through APIs, archrivals etc. I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
The reason they assume they own our data is that when social media platforms became popular, they put these rights in their terms and got away with it, because most of us don't read the legal fine print. But now more and more are waking up to the fact that we got a bad deal. Take a look at Reddit's ToS for example (HN has a similar clause btw):
>By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.
By moving to self-hosting through protocols like IPFS or Arweave, and having social applications built on top, two problems can be solved at once.
1. Your data isn't locked in anymore. All your social media posts, images, etc can be shared with multiple platforms at the same time. If you quit one of them your data won't disappear because all you did is grant them access, it's still in your control. This completely eliminated the issue with moving apps and having to start anew each time.
2. You can be in control of all rights. You can grant the platforms non-exclusive licenses if you see a benefit in that, or you can restrict them from making money with your content without paying you royalties. It's all up to the user.
> I absolutely don't understand how Reddit, Twitter, Yelp etc think that they own the data and be the gatekeeper for the content they didn't create.
Suppose you are hosting a wordpress blog with a comments section. Some people leave occasional comments in your blog — god knows why. Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them? Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?
Suppose now you are hosting a bulletin board, where more people are posting their messages. Don't you own all that? After all, the texts are stored on your server. Can't you delete the board at any point, or run data analysis on the posts, or even send targeted messages to your users, etc.?
Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
> Some people may even start arguing with each other in the comments section. Their comments are stored on your server. Don't you own them?
Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it.
> Can't you delete them? Can't you disable the comments any time you wish?
That you can
> Now scale this mentally to reddit, etc. At which point do you start arguing that the service doesn't own the data that it stores?
Copyright law always applies, and the post are always the property of their writer. The site has a license to use them in a limited fashion. To try to do otherwise is likely a terrible idea.
I'd argue while it's fuzzy, there's a distinction between people coming to your blog because it's your blog and leaving a "This!" or a question, and people building their own community on your infrastructure.
Eg, you probably don't want to grant that AWS owns your entire website just because it's hosted on it, right? The main thing about your website is your work, AWS is merely the replaceable infrastructure to run it.
> each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster
This is why services usually make it a condition of being allowed to post in the first place that you grant them a worldwide perpetual irrevocable license to the content, via the EULA.
And you can see why: having to ask all the users for permission in the future is completely infeasible, so just ask once upfront for everything.
It’s not infeasible it’s just not in the near term economic interest of the server owner to help facilitate the commenter’s rights
This is one of the biggest STRUCTURAL issues with the legal structure of property - you are not incentivized for supporting a common good.
The technology to build an embeddable comment widget on top of a framework that would compensate commenters based on their inputs is trivial at this point.
Good luck funding such a project though because every source of capital wants infinite return. So unless you’re willing to volunteer your technical time or have your own money to spend nobody will create and grow services like that because the economic incentives aren’t aligned between people who want to invest and … society at large at this point
> Kinda no. As per copyright law, each comment is automatically copyrighted by the poster. If somebody slips up and pastes their novel in a comment, that doesn't grant you permission to print and sell it.
The way around this is to make users agree to some terms of use to assign rights when signing up, which is what Reddit did.
And while Reddit does have you agree to giving permission to almost anything, they'd be nuts to take that too far. If eg, Stephen King goofed and pasted his upcoming book into a comment mid-AMA, I don't think Reddit would fare well in court if they tried to argue the TOS gave them the right to do turn that into a book.
I had really high hopes for the internet, that it will bring knowledge and wisdom to every corner of the world, but instead it just decreased our attention span, made us more angry and now even the fun things are going to be ruined because some old VC demands their money back. Internet built on VC money is inherently unsustainable and I would never ever join a website that can't demonstrate its sustainability.
Ad networks fudged the numbers for many years, free just isn't as viable as thought.
I don't mind paying - either for a service or for server costs of hosting my own instance or whatever - and I certainly don't mind paying reddit specifically. However the price point, putting it on developers and not regular users so they thought users wouldn't be bothered (I guess they assumed apps like Apollo would pass it on to their users and appear to be the bad guy? It's the only way I can make any sense of how they did it) is pretty shitty.
But the worst part is killing off all these tools that mods require - that second order effect will likely kill Reddit.
The only other time I could see a company make a decision that would so clearly kill a product was the facebook algorithmic feed, though admittedly that did take 10 years.
"What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money."
I don't think this is correct.
In the excellent book _The Master Switch_, Tim Wu[1] describes:
"... a long "cycle" whereby open information systems become consolidated and closed over time, reopening only after disruptive innovation."
... and my reading of his book suggests to me that the "natural point", as you say, is consolidation and closure.
Youtube is always becoming TV.
My own opinion is that the media is the message and that certain communications media - namely, pure text - can't "become TV". The real difference between reddit and HN is that you can't display a picture - of any kind - on HN.
This is a disanalogus analysis, because the value of these platforms it the labour of their volunteers --- they *are* the commons.
"Natural power" includes the collective action of these volunteers -- seen here, eg., with reddit.
My point is that the drive to profit from this labour will make the platforms extremely sensitive to their demands -- in ways that do not occur when there's no need to profit.
You can say "let them eat cake" if you have your own cake supplier. When the cake runs out, all those labourers turn out to be required.
I think these are unique dynamics -- much closer to the fall of serfdom than the development of TV networks
There is certainly lots of drama going on, but I am unaware of anything remotely dramatic or open fight/strike like is happening on reddit between users and company (non profit foundation).
They count, but I don't think it is the same level as with reddit here and now.
The difference is likely the money involved. Wikipedias mission is to share knowledge, a goal shared by most of its participants and there are of course disagreements on the type of knowledge.
Redit the company wants to make money selling ads, reaching the highest "engagement" - which is not what the user wants.
So I also think, a non profit would be the best model also for reddit.
Volunteer doesn't equal volunteer though. Some are in it for the topic, some are in it for their own persona. Reddit was more attractive for some people because it wasn't as much focused on people and more around topics. That changed a bit and you cannot really draw a line too hard, but it is still the case to a large degree.
I doubt wikipedians are big on personalities either, although that demographic changed a lot too. It did have to change though because business was suddenly much more interested as well.
I can't agree more with you, unfortunately there's a real C check of our position and our history to do, us being technical people:
- we must stop assuming everyone is equal. Access to a computer, access to a smartphone, access to a stable internet connection, capability to read and use a mouse or a keyboard; our requirements are way too high to build an inclusive community. Not everyone is a white rich american english-speaking male
- we must stop assuming everyone is financially, socially, culturally at ease, and that everything is "just" a matter of individual will. The market always favors those who have more, in the pusuit of even more, and those who weren't so lucky must be supported.
Stop giving tools to companies. Stop using non-copyleft licenses. They're the number one reason Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter and countless others could be where they are today: leveraging the common goods without giving back at least as much. By design, a company maximizes the gap between what it takes and what it gives.
A simple analysis would defend the end of capitalism and the commons construction through a shared decision process, but it's still premature for HN
Before that happens they will try to lobby governments to "repair" their monopolies. EU is already trying hard to put major road blocks on open source AI, which is probably the biggest threat to most tech mega corps.
I feel one approach to a high quality internet, we can contact people we like the messages or posts of and invite them to contribute somewhere that is invite only to contribute.
it is amusing that people think Wikipedia is not a corporation, and is not subject to the same problems as reddit.
It is well documented that that Wikimedia CORPORATION that controls wikipedia has all kinds of the same problems, with the directors and management of that corporation at odds often with the users and the "mods" of wikipedia.
That is with out getting into the debate over the overt ideological capture of both the wiki and the corporation
No I dont think the wikipedia model is the one we should look at as an example
Reddit users and mods are not ´volunteers’. They’re consumers of a service.
If anything the ‘disguise of free money’ was only convincing consumers that internet platforms were a right and free to operate. Now the balance is shifting in the opposite way, operational profit.
It's a messageboard. The only people who need to think of users as "consumers" are Reddit execs hoping somebody will buy "reddit gold" or an NFT avatar. The mere fact that these e-trinkets are considered "products" should be indicative of how un-monetizable public messageboards are.
Nobody ever said internet platforms were free to operate. That's what the ads are for. Reddit is locking the doors because they had 10 years to build a competent ad product and failed.
It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one, he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes, but instead he decides to provoke and double down.
The leaked internal memo, which is obvious that would leak (after all it is a 2,000 person company) is a clear provocation:
> We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us.
> There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well.
> While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.
What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers and teams, trying to convince them to get back to work (or at least make it seem like those workers are likely to break rank), in order to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?
Because that is what they're doing here. Explicitly ignoring the "union reps", and driving a wedge between rank-and-file "workers", under a guise of caring for accessibility.
--
EDIT: and it's pretty clear to me this memo was meant to be leaked, and it was carefully written to address the subreddit moderators and users. It says, "meh, this is just a regular Tuesday nothingburger drama, it's pointless and will blow over - but hey, someone has a good point about accessibility, and we care and listen, so we're now actively working on it; we ain't talking with Apollo and RiF devs because they're being unreasonable drama queens, and for the love of $deity, don't be unreasonable like them; we're actually afraid some of you may rough up our employees - is that really who you want to be?".
> What is the term for when there's a worker strike and instead of engaging with organizers/union representatives, the company approaches some individual workers [...] to start an inner conflict between the workers and have the strike collapse on itself?
Standard operating procedure/business as usual.
Edit: If the company was interested in engaging with organisers/union reps, the strike would probably have been avoided in the first place.
If they bored people with "we listened" PR waffling while just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
But blatantly giving your unhappy users the finger is a great way to keep them angry and thus motivated. Steve Huffman has set millions of dollars of value on fire and damaged Reddit's brand for no apparent reason (except maybe a bizarre personal vendetta against certain third-party app developers). Strange times.
> just being more sneaky about user-hostile changes, they could have gotten away with anything. I mean, that's the playbook, isn't it?
Isn't that pretty much what Reddit was doing before spez came back as CEO, though? (Where being "sneaky" about user-hostile changes also included de-facto exempting the users they rely on most from them - their volunteer mods and, to some extent, their 'power' content contributors.) This screwup has all played out within a month or two - there were smaller controversies before, but nothing compares to this.
Yeah, that's what they were doing, and it was working well enough. Dark patterns are evil but quite effective.
My guess is that investors are banging on the door wanting their payout, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. Reddit Inc was probably a money furnace, like a dot-com of old. But it turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business.
Does it really have 2000 employees? I remember when they were owned by Conde Nast and had something like 5-10 people. I know they have a lot more users now, and have added features like image and photo hosting, but to go from that to 2000 employees is quite the blowup.
People started this blackout without any alternatives. Twitter users had Instagram, Facebook (even though that’s a worse shitshow and IG is owned by Meta), tiktok, Mastodon, and probably a couple others I’m forgetting. There’s nothing equivalent to reddit with half as much daily activity as even the worst Twitter-alternative, so they’d never catch on. People append “reddit” to google searches now, that’s how integral this site has become to the internet. The strikers should have waited a few days to a couple weeks before this strike instead of reacting immediately.
Every sub is pointing to their own discord server. That’s absolutely not an alternative and a chatroom will never replace a global forum.
The Denver Nuggets sub didn’t even shut down because they were so excited about their potential win. That’s literally the best time to show solidarity and they fucked that up because they cared more about posting 1 sentence meme or hype comments to a game thread.
I had to dig around to find a few names and I had 0 idea what those were when people were dropping them as seemingly viable alternatives. If you decentralize, you don’t get any users who are able to be monetized, and if you centralize it, you’ll end up with another reddit API situation in half a decade when people get greedy or stupid.
Yeah this is really impressive, this time around the discontent feels different. There from my point of view there was a decline for a long time for the usefulness of reddit for me. I thought it was only me getting older but now that I see this happening is that it isn't just me.
They have consistently worsened the conditions for quality contribution with their default interfaces. I didn't realize it until now how important it is until now, because of this protest. I've already left and if my little anecdote is anything to go by, other might feel the same and do the same as me.
> he could compromise a bit by at least expanding the deadline on the pricing changes
There are only so many days until bankruptcy. Investors are done funnelling in more and more to keep the lights on. While that would be reasonable under normal circumstances, in this panic situation there won't be a Reddit left by the time third-party developers are given reasonable time.
> It’s impressive how their CEO keeps shooting himself in the foot on this one
You don't negotiate with blackmailers, because this is what this is now, blackmail. If things continue like this I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods.
I give it 5 to 7 days until reddit the company forcefully removes these mods
The impact of this would be to make lots of subreddit unmoderated, leading to a huge amount of spam, adult content in sfw subreddit, cross-posting, etc. The impact would be to let everyone know just how much free work the mods do to keep Reddit tidy and valuable.
I don't think you're wrong (except maybe on the timescale) but I do think the strategy would shoot the CEO in the foot again.
Reddit has replaced mods before, they'll do it again. If they can't do it for hundreds of subs at once, that's fine - they'll start with the largest ones and go from there. Once it becomes clear that top mods will be removed if the subs don't reopen, the protest will largely crumble, if it doesn't do so before this becomes necessary.
The ones that are going to push for long-term blackouts don't control 80% of the site. Whatever share they do control will probably be redistributed to other powermods pretty quickly, I would guess.
Yeah it’s now “oh and maybe we’ll do ‘touch grass tuesdays’ in perpetuity”. That’s an incredibly unsympathetic message imo.
Get real. If anyone thinks a business is going to tolerate a clique of powermods choosing to randomly shut things down according to their own schedule… they’re gonna be disappointed.
Let alone I’ve seen some people thinking they can demand a hand in the corporate governance? Yeah fuck no powermods are not ever getting a seat on the board, lol, lmao. No company in the world would ever agree to that. Especially not after all of this.
Yeah, they’re gonna pry the mods off and reopen things, sooner or later. Unless something changes mods are going to leave things permanently closed after the 30th and walk away, and Reddit is absolutely not going to tolerate that. But there’s no reason to wait that long really.
The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.
It’s the lower-level jannies that will be the trouble, because they’re the ones doing the actual work, not the person claiming to mod 200 million subscribers worth of content. And at the end of the day you can find some people willing to click “delete” on spam while they’re scrolling. That’s plausible if they can get over the bump gracefully. And truth is there’s always people willing to do it for the prestige, even as pitiful as that is.
The Reddit play here is obviously to pry the powermods off, get the frontpage subs back open, and get moderation back to some kind of a semi functional level (automated or otherwise) until it blows over and organic moderation can resume. And that’s a reasonably achievable goal.
But the powermod squad needs to consider what their own exit strategy is too… nobody is going to let powermods randomly shut things down on an ongoing basis. If they’re disruptive then they put Reddit in a position of being forced to remove them, it is what it is, Reddit can’t operate with a cabal of a half dozen users able to shut down the front page at will either. If Reddit doesn’t have a fundamental belief in the powermods being good-faith players they are gone regardless of the consequences, because the alternative is unacceptable. They will deal with the consequences and move forward, most likely successfully.
People act like Spez is somehow out of line and they can just get him tossed out, like the board is going to sign off on letting a bunch of agitators disrupt operations on an ongoing and indefinite basis.
They can do that of course, but if they do so, I'm leaving.
Basically what I do on Reddit is to subscribe to the vision of a given group of mods. They're the ones I come to the site for, not Reddit the company.
Eg, r/AskHistorians is good because it's run with an iron fist by the mods. When I come there I come seeking precisely that -- a well curated content archive that contains all wheat and zero chaff.
If Reddit forces them off, and they create www.askhistorians.com, then I'm making a account there.
And that’s fine because the commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting.
People don’t get it, Reddit is fundamentally pivoting away from being a message board and pivoting towards being TikTok. In the TikTok model your comments and discussion are not the commercially viable product. The eyeballs are the product, comments are a flavor to show that other users engaged the content. You know how New Reddit doesn’t show you the comments very well? Think about that in this context - the comments are no longer what matters anymore.
And it’s ultimately not that hard to generate enough reasonably compelling content to keep people scrolling on those mindless frontpage subs. People will happily repost tumblr and TikTok just like they did a month ago. There will be a short term dip and in 6 months it’ll be completely back to normal.
People are fundamentally making a mistake here and thinking theres a scenario where the Reddit they knew 10 years ago will still exist in a year. It already has been dead for a couple years, and it is going to pivot even harder towards shallow content and mindless scrolling, user comments are not something they can commercialize.
It’s not that “Spez doesn’t get it!!!” it’s actually the users who don’t get it. Yeah they’re going to lose 10-20% of their users, they know. And they’re going to make 5x or 10x the revenue on the remaining 80%. Yes, it will be bland and suck for you, and it will make them a shitload of money. Not sure why this is so confusing for people - they don’t want you as the customer anymore. So long and good luck.
If users want to stay, customize their feed for whatever keeps their own eyeballs engaged, great. But Reddit can’t commercialize it unless it’s on a first party app or website. The mod stuff is fixable and they’ve said they’ll be flexible on that (not that it makes anyone happy), but average users will not be consuming Reddit on a 3rd party app in a year, period.
> It’s not that “Spez doesn’t get it!!!” it’s actually the users who don’t get it. Yeah they’re going to lose 10-20% of their users, they know. And they’re going to make 5x or 10x the revenue on the remaining 80%. Yes, it will be bland and suck for you, and it will make them a shitload of money. Not sure why this is so confusing for people - they don’t want you as the customer.
That's a good point but I don't see what about this would magically make profits rise 5x or 10x.
Like what's the value proposition here? TikTok and the like already exist. I don't see what Reddit has to offer especially since they've been very lazy offering their users anything.
> The rest is just the ex-partner making a scene after you dumped them. They’ll get tired of it eventually, if not you get the cops to clean it up and move on.
I mean, both parties can make a cold rational calculus.
Reddit can calculate they'd be better off pivoting to mindless scrolling, fair enough.
But the people unhappy with that can also calculate that they'd be better off making this process as unpleasant for Reddit as possible. Best case they win, and Reddit is forced to backtrack. Worst case, they still made a lot of noise and that likely decreases the chance of somebody else pivoting, and bolsters alternatives.
I think an unpleasant truth some ignore is that tantrums have a purpose -- they're extremely unpleasant to be on the end of, that's why they're a thing at all, because they often do have power.
> That's a good point but I don't see what about this would magically make profits rise 5x or 10x.
Because right now everyone is using third-party clients, or at least old.reddit, and that means they're not viewing the ads. Even worse, they might be (shudders) commenting instead of scrolling.
new.reddit and the native app are what your tiktok drip-feed looks like, and it's way easier to insert ads into that. In fact, it's actually exceptionally hard to insert ads into comment trees, whereas you can just throw the mcdonald's ad into the list of frontpage posts or whatever. So comments are being deprecated in favor of posts overall, because they're easier to monetize, and the new.reddit and native client are how you monetize them.
It's not a coincidence that comments/etc are de-emphasized in the new-reddit interface, they don't want you commenting, they want you scrolling, just like tiktok.
> Like what's the value proposition here? TikTok and the like already exist
Tiktok is at risk of being banned in a lot of places, and is at minimum going to come under a lot of regulatory scrutiny and oversight. Because it has the strong potential to be, instead of your "AI girlfriend", your "AI best-friend with ties to extremism" that slowly algorithmically radicalizes you in whatever ways feel best for you personally according to your own interest.
You're left-leaning? Fine here's some bernie videos and protesters getting beaten. Right leaning? OANN, and videos of protesters burning down a store. They can tune the engagement for each user, and push certain topics and stories while it not only feels organic, but is actually extremely engaging and compelling for each particular user. Just like Google controlling search means they control what surfaces in that medium. But Tiktok's not gonna blow it on adwords, that's way too powerful a propaganda tool.
Reddit wants to position themselves as the alternative if/when the hammer starts to come down for Tiktok. And yes, there's instagram and snapchat and other things I would think of first instead of Reddit... but Reddit would say that the comment-based site hasn't been commercially successful for them.
> I think an unpleasant truth some ignore is that tantrums have a purpose -- they're extremely unpleasant to be on the end of, that's why they're a thing at all, because they often do have power.
> commercial value of Reddit is not in r/AskHistorians, it’s in r/aww and r/earthporn and r/mildlyinteresting
That's incredibly short sighted but probably in line with how reddit execs view things. /r/aww and /r/earthporn are trivial to replicate on any other site, /r/AskHistorians is not. It's the small subs with loyal users that build an environment where the cookie-cutter content aggregators are profitable. Oh well, all for the IPO pump n dump.
As one of those users who doesn't get it, the it I don't get isn't that Reddit would rather be TikTok or that people who are just looking to mindlessly scroll generic content are easier to monetise, it's what Reddit's value proposition is as a TikTok alternative.
As you say it's not hard to generate reasonably compelling content. There's no shortage of cat picture or funny gif sources. So it's not that.
TikTok supposedly has a killer algorithm to spruce up that generic content. Facebook/Instagram has your friends. My understanding is that the niche subs are what Reddit brings to the table as an add-on to the generic but monetisable content. People come for the askhistorians post that their google search surfaced and then some of them stay and scroll cat pics for a while.
If they get rid of the niche sub users, why do the 80% not go to TikTok?
because of increasing pressure to ban tiktok and pull it from app stores/etc to keep China from building profiles/models targeting westerners en-masse.
Everyone wants to be set up to be the American Tiktok when the plug gets pulled on the chinese one. And the plug is already being pulled by a number of countries and states and organizations.
It's an interesting one though because obviously we have ad profiles in the west, but should an "adversary state" be allowed to collect and warehouse that data, knowing it's potentially a national security threat for personalized targeting of natsec security compromises/etc?
Should western companies be allowed to collect this data either? But they are the "good ones" and only use it for advertising (and letting the three-letter agencies buy it, of course). But what basis do you use to ban it? And is it really any safer to have it, when the chinese are pretty good at hacking these data warehouses, and the security is often incredibly sketchy? They got the plans to the F-35, the federal Office of Personnel Management database, the RSA key-secret database... if you store it, they'll ultimately get it eventually too.
What if instead of the classical "this user is a gambler and in financial trouble, have an agent call them" targeting you build a personal weight-model on what things trigger engagement for that specific user? What if they show you OANN until you're so enraged you go attack the capitol? What if they troll you on War Thunder forums until you leak classified documents? And you can potentially do that en-masse, use AI to generate a personalized "havoc profile" of what content they should surface at this exact point to make you the most socially disruptive at some key moment, or the things they most need an intel leak on, and the AI can use that profile to surface the content that most effectively winds you personally up.
I'd expect it's probably possible (not sure if it exists) to do engagement/stimulation (arousal) and sentiment analysis in realtime. So you can know that if they're usually scrolling X when they're upset, that you should push content Y to push their buttons most effectively. Like you can literally micro-target people at their weakest moments with the content that most effectively pushes their buttons to accomplish whatever goal.
Essentially - what if instead of "AI girlfriend" it was "AI best-friend with links to extremism", and he's gently radicalizing you a little bit every time you're scrolling on the shitter? That's the product for Tiktok.
And while most people are not going to get wound up to the extent of "attack the capitol/leak classified documents"... statistically like all advertising, it works, some people will stochastically be stimulated to action. And even at a more pedestrian level, it's very easy to ramp up polarization and internal tension, like Russia has been doing during elections/etc. But you can automate that shit at a scale and precision of targeting far beyond traditional 1:1-scale intelligence work.
Selling more diapers and kleenex is baby shit, Tiktok is the point of the spear on true infowars shit, where everyone can be probed for their personal hot-buttons and then press them automatically, en-masse while you're scrolling. And we just use that to sell more McDonald's. Using a nuke to kill a mosquito.
It's a weird time we live in, this stuff essentially parasitizes our cultural values of free speech and free information information exchange and turns it into an attack vector. That's been what advertising is all along (it's the art of convincing people to buy shit they don't need/make decisions they wouldn't have otherwise made) but we are starting to go past the "benign toxoplasmosis" to something that can be weaponized for political ends.
Anyway that's why the security apparatus is getting wound up about tiktok. You absolutely will not get a security clearance if you're anywhere near tiktok, you will not get tiktok anywhere near a government computer, and lately countries are just banning it outright because it's too dangerous.
And reddit sees that and says "hey, we can be Tiktok for westoids and fill that gap". There is competition of course - Snap and Insta are really in a better place to pivot to this. But Reddit has been pushing towards being a content-drip for a while, that's been the entire point of the "new-experience" and first-party app, and this is just them making the leap. And that means third-party clients have gotta go.
That's the information I was missing, thanks! I had heard some complaints about TikTok a while ago but wasn't aware that things had progressed to the point where it's going to get banned.
I could definitely see a slim chance of being new TikTok having higher expected value than continuing on as old Reddit if TikTok is removed from the picture.
> If Reddit forces them off, and they create www.askhistorians.com, then I'm making a account there.
And that's fine, but you're talking as if everyone is like you, with only 1 subreddit that they browse.
In reality (and reddit probably has the numbers to verify this), most people jump across maybe 10 or more different mods.
They're not going to go create 10 different accounts elsewhere.
I personally am not a big reddit user, and yet I have about 10 sunreddits that I subscribe to. Logging into reddit (old.reddit), I see all those posts after login.
This is also the reason why the federated system is broken by design: the type of users who use reddit don't want the friction of logging onto a dozen different instances to see all the posts related to ONE top.
I think what a lot of people are missing is that centralisation is what provides the value reddit has. Moderators (seriously, those people are a dime a dozen - in fact you can charge mods a fee and you still won't run out of mods wanting to sign up) are not the primary value in reddit. Posts are not the primary value in reddit.
Being the central place where all the people you want to hang out with are hanging out is the primary value of reddit.
> In reality (and reddit probably has the numbers to verify this), most people jump across maybe 10 or more different mods.
So do I. I expect there to form some viable alternative to Reddit eventually.
> This is also the reason why the federated system is broken by design: the type of users who use reddit don't want the friction of logging onto a dozen different instances to see all the posts related to ONE top.
Federation means separate servers talk to each other and can share content.
Eg, I'm on fosstodon.org, but I see posts from an user with an account at tech.lgbt. That's how federation works.
> I think what a lot of people are missing is that centralisation is what provides the value reddit has. Moderators (seriously, those people are a dime a dozen - in fact you can charge mods a fee and you still won't run out of mods wanting to sign up) are not the primary value in reddit. Posts are not the primary value in reddit.
But this centralization can be provided by anyone else. I don't care that it's provided by Reddit Inc. I come for the posts, where they happen to be hosted isn't very important.
I think it can also be provided in a federated manner. There's really no reason why Reddit couldn't be split into a myriad servers that then get aggregated into a giant feed for those who want it.
>> Moderators (seriously, those people are a dime a dozen - in fact you can charge mods a fee and you still won't run out of mods wanting to sign up) are not the primary value in reddit.
THis is a falsehood that keeps being repeated so instead of posting for the 100th time proving this to be false, I challenge you to cite your sources where you prove this is true, because most of the subreddits complian all the time about not being able to find mods.
>> Posts are not the primary value in reddit.
Quality Posts are the value...... Question do mods add that value, that QA...
if a gardening subreddit was flooded with porn would it be valuable to the people to visit that subreddit?
Importantly, the powerjannies aren't a monolithic bloc, and many of them are already vocally critical of the notion of an ongoing blackout. I'd expect that they know that if some of them get removed then other powermods will eagerly move in to claim their territories. There's not going to be some sort of class solidarity here - continuing the protests will be tantamount to resigning as a mod, you're just being dramatic about it.
>The 5 mods running an average of 18 top-100 subs each are not going to be as tough to replace as people think they are, the reality is at that scale you’re not managing anything operationally on a day to day level, you’re setting up a script.
Those mods are active 20+hours a day, there is no chance they are actual people.
They don't have the resources to take on that much moderation at scale. Maybe given two years and a big tech budget or six months and a big moderator budget.
Nah, GPT's output can be very valuable and insightful. But you don't get it with a low effort "please summarize the key points of the text below\n\n{paste some text here}".
I propose the rule to be what it is already: put some effort into your comment, make it add something instead of just taking space and attention. This works for human and GPT and human/GPT ensemble commentary. And the prescription for low-effort spam? Downvote and flag.
Most everyone seems to have missed the point, of the copy paste.
My goal was to show how trivial it would have been for the CEO to have typed that into chat gpt and avoided the injury of unforced errors. Sort of a modern “let me google that for you.”
I had this written out for the comment but at the time couldn’t make my explanation add more to the simple provision of “what you get when you try this using present tech” and a simple prompt and response.
Another way to look at it is that LLM queries and their responses serve almost like ultra niche links to the docs except their responses vary and may even be transient.
He needs to publish a hard hitting memo that chastises third party app developers for not creating more sustainable businesses. If Reddit cannot meet it’s revenue goals it will shut down, period.
Assuming you're serious, I'm curious why you think Reddit's CEO shouldn't be chastised under that same category. Selling ads next to user-generated content, rent seeking with demands of extortionate API fees to serve that content, relying on unpaid volunteers to operate the site, proudly shipping terrible first-party UX, all while providing zero additional value sure doesn’t sound like a sustainable business. But maybe it’s the `hard hitting memo` obstinacy of a CEO that seems the biggest feature here?
2) Building and maintaining an API is as rent seeking as building any kind of subscription service, I don’t see the issue.
3) Why would you pay a volunteer? They’re volunteering. In exchange they wield incredible power over the community, which is the real reason they volunteer.
4) The UX sucks, but there’s still old.reddit.com, so you have options.
5) What additional value can be provided? It’s a giant forum and people post comments, there’s not much more you need, that is the value.
Third party apps can just raise their fees and users will pay a couple more dollars. But it’s not about money, it’s about power. Reddit users are very entitled and care more about optics. They don’t want to surrender a fist full of dollars for a website they use everyday and probably are addicted to.
Charging for the API wouldn't be a problem if it was either cheap and short term notice, or expensive and long term notice. The biggest problem is that it is both extremely short term notice (a month) and expensive as hell. You don't do this in good faith if the goal is to provide a sustainable business; you do it if you want to kill the API, but have a fallback "despite our best efforts" angle to work in PR pieces.
Providing a per app, per user API key would be the most sustainable way of doing business with 3rd party app developers while keeping users that are willing to pay happy. Plenty of the users that use 3rd party apps already pay something to use them, so it's not out of the question that they would be willing to pay even more to keep using them. I know I would.
Yes, but all other social networks are GOOD at it and make a fuck ton of money. That’s the issue. Reddit has had plenty of chances to turn profitable, but they can’t seem to figure it out. Now they’ve run down the checklist and apparently “kill 3rd party apps” is their newest brilliant idea to make money.
Honestly I thought I was only exaggerating a bit.. I thought it was top 3. Crazy how far off it is from the top half. Not to say that’s any excuse for them failing to turn a profit for so long but damn I thought they had more users they could shovel ads onto.
It had just started to become profitable right before Elon bought it. Granted that’s like 1 or 2 profitable quarters out of dozens, but still counts I guess
Normally I'm defending tech company size, but in this case it does seem bizarre, given how bad their official apps are, and the mobile site, and the new reddit desktop site.
Those are the primary user interfaces for their platform, and they're bad. Enthusiast users in particular seem to overwhelmingly prefer third party apps and old reddit, and those third party apps seem to be made by small teams or even solo devs.
The strange irony there is they seem to be making the mobile site worse over time to drive people to the app, and if that's intentional they must be paying some developer to do it and some manager to tell them the game plan. Imagine being in one of those roles.
Given that they recently A/B tested an experiment which would just lock you out of the mobile website when logged in and force you to use the app instead[0], it's difficult to see it as anything but intentional.
Brian Lunduke back in 2019 when Reddit took $150 million from Tencent basically said that Reddit would be a company in trouble with in 5 years. His argument was that it shouldn't cost that much to run the place and as such they would have to start pleasing investors and not users.
The argument was that you can buy an obscene amount of storage and bandwidth for only a fraction of the money they were raising. It is even more true today. Look at the amount of storage and bandwidth archive.org uses and how little money they bring in. This is not a money issue in terms of running the site.
Reddit was clearly selling itself to VCs as the next Facebook while not bothering to understand the culture of the content, moderators, and audience on their site. From what headlines I've seen about Reddit's acquisitions and marketing spend I get the impression they were a money furnace that deluded themselves into thinking they were innovating.
Now that the money printer is out of paper, investors are banging on the door, and the people on the other side of that door are panicking. It turns out a bunch of nerds and aficionados piping text through your servers does not equate to a hundred-billion-dollar business, and trying to force the issue will only make things worse.
If they charged like $2/year/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable and no one would be that outraged.
Their expenses are still absurd given that, from my perspective they've literally done no improvement to the product in the last 5 years or more. Just maintain the API, have some staff to run the servers, pay a few admins to support the mods and feature freeze Reddit the site as much as possible.
It's way crazier that Reddit has 2k employees than that Twitter had 4k or whatever.
>> If they charged like $2/month/user for 3d party API access they'd be profitable
But then the leadership would only be wealthy and not famous.
It feels like the focus on ad sales by so many platforms is due to their executives' personal preference in having broad ranging social influence (by playing gateway to the masses) instead of a predictable revenue stream.
Several social media platforms, notably Facebook and Twitter, have (or had) marketing campaign teams that help their clients focus their marketing campaigns on particular segments of interest.
The belief that they could further wield influence may drive them to be less concerned about near term profitability.
I don't think it is the ads but the algorithmic feed that they manipulate for political ends, rather than making money. TikTok got big by making an algorithmic feed that did not push BS to its users I think.
It's not about actual profitability, it's about what you can convince an investor is the potential future profitability.
Merely by recording an actual profit, you have shown your hand to the investor, who can now estimate what your ceiling is. And it's never going to be as much as what it was when profits were merely hypothetical.
Exactly! If they announced that you will have to pay even $5 a month for 3rd party access - I think most people would be on board. They just choose the dumbest of all paths.
Tumblr went from selling for $1B in 2013 to $3M in 2019. The brand persists but as a business it's a dismal failure. If Reddit follows that arc it will be a dismal failure as well.
Ironically enough, tumblr is going trough some sort of "indie/lo-fi" renaissance now that Automattic bought them. I don't think they even want to go back to being an alternative to FB/Instagram/Twitter.
I think a different approach would work better at this point.
They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version.
The key in a negotiation is to have a crystal clear, realistic picture of the other party's constraints, motivations and ethical framework. In this case, it's clear Huffman has hard constraints around making Reddit profitable. He could easily do it by reducing headcount but that itself would defeat the purpose because it would devalue the IPO (who wants to buy a shrinking company?). He clearly has no moral or ethical compulsion here. So there isn't another option than to threaten what really matters to him: it has to be made real for Huffman that he's going to lose this if he doesn't budge. The only thing that will convince him is actually seeing users permanently leave.
If my favorites subreddits go to Discord, I'll simply not go there. Discord has nothing to do like a forum, it is almost impossible to search for valuable information, and is really hard to use when dozens and dozens of people are talking simultaneously.
I really don't get why so many people want their sub to go to Discord tbh.
same here, totally mystified. One of my favorite subreddits went over to Discord and apart from the UI/UX being horrific, it doesn't seem to replicate much of the Reddit experience. It's just a giant chat session with a few subtopics it's a cesspool of animated emojis etc.
I like Discord but I get that it's not for everybody. Jumping into a very active wide Discord community (with many channels) can be an incredibly jarring sensory assault, and if you don't have a narrower community (e.g. a private server for just your friend group, or honestly just a server with very few channels to keep track of) to figure out things, it can be very off-putting.
That said, the reason why so many people want to go to Discord is pretty hard to miss: out of all the alternatives, it's the one with critical mass now. Even if everyone is distributed across different servers (to be clear to those less familiar, a server is not a physical/virtual host) and cannot directly interact with one another, the network effects are readily apparent.
"They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community. Subreddits should start polls on where migrate to (discord, lemmy, mastodon, etc etc), and then start systematically cross posting anything posted to their subreddit to the new space, with comments turned off on the Reddit version."
That takes way more determination and organization than the vast majority of Reddit users are capable of. A couple day blackout is really just about what they can manage, and just about what most Reddit users will tolerate.
I would be absolutely shocked if this whole thing doesn't blow over in a couple of weeks, though I also wouldn't be surprised if Reddit's owners didn't compromise in some way either.
Interesting. But I'd say it still fits with the narrative. 5% is a good "we practice fiscal constraint" message. To get back to a reasonable cost basis, they need to lay off 50%, which would send a totally different message.
>They need to stay up but use their subreddits to publicly plan Reddit "exits" for each community.
I have to wonder if this would be allowed, in the past this has only been tried for subreddits that feared being banned in an imminent fashion. On the other hand, you have rules against mods purposefully destroying their own communities, and trying to force an off-site migration in a heavy-handed fashion (eg. stopping user contributions/participation) may be seen as running afoul of these rules.
Is there something counter-intuitive about reddit that makes it hard to monetize? That's the core issue. Reddit still makes barely $1/user/month while instagram makes $35. Cutting off the 3rd party apps is a cost-cutting move, not a revenue-generating move. Why haven't they managed to find more revenue?
I'm loath to say it but Huffman has had a decade to solve this and hasn't. Might be time for new leadership with new ideas.
Cutting off 3rd party apps isn't a cost cutting move. It has two clear benefits - firstly they can push users into the officially supported apps where ads can be shown in a more controlled fashion and metrics on those ads can be gathered. Second, it removes the ability for other companies to programmatically gather Reddit's data - this is important in the context of large language models where investors are convinced that the data sets to train the models will be valuable.
The reason reddit is hard to monetize is actually quite simple, they don't know much about their users so they can't do the high value targeting other companies do, and they have a site where it's very difficult to insert adverts in what looks like an organic way. It's easy to scroll past an advert on instagram and not realise it's an advert, it's visually consistent, on reddit it sticks out like a sore thumb so they get CPS rates of a 90s banner ad - because that's what they're selling.
I disagree with you, but especially the second part. Users advertise their interests by the subs they subscribe to, it would be very easy to target them. You could even go so far and let users up and downvote ads they think are relevant to them. The problem is more with the whole way reddit inc goes about how they interact with their users and power users. You shouldn't be openly hostile against your own users (except if you are the mods of askmen).
It really fascinates me that people think Reddit is hostile to their users, because when you really look at it, aren't reddit's users incredibly hostile to reddit management? Like really if you look at it from the outside you have this community that does this incredibly nasty things and then every time management steps in to try and correct it the community goes into uproar. I'm not saying the management have handled it well, but the userbase is a complete dumpster fire.
I'm not saying that at all - this API change has to do with business, nothing to do with personal feelings. But I just think it's interesting people criticise the leadership of reddit but look at what the users of reddit have been up to over the years - /r/jailbait, the harassment of Ellen Pao, the fappening, FatPeopleHate, the Boston bombing vigilantes, Pizzagate. Like yeah, sure, Reddit has been a total fuck up of a business proposition, but that really is partly because the site has harbored some really disgusting stuff over the years and it's only extremely recently that the company has even started to try to steer away from that stuff - and when they do large portions of the company react extremely badly.
Their ads in the iOS app are formatted exactly like normal reddit posts. I’ve tapped on them by accident quite a few times in the last week. I’m going to assume the New Reddit experience is largely the same, but I’m not about to turn off my adblocker on PC to test that.
The biggest problem with Reddit is that their only source of revenue basically demands you to create a completely new ad for ONLY that platform. For everything else you can just make an iframe, drop whatever malicious blinking crap you want, send it to the wild and let ad networks sell and resell space and sometimes drop your ad in it, pay pennies for clicks and even less pennies for each time it's been served.
They haven't tried to enter any ad ecosystem, haven't tried to monetize the massive amount of creativity or anything on the platform. Granted, it's really hard to say "Hey, we've shown your news article to 10 million people, pls pay us" when the news site itself is struggling to get any revenue from those millions of clicks. Not to mention the site might have a question reddit reeeeallly doesn't want to answer "So, was it in a neo-nazi subforum or a porn subforum?"
Yeah, there's just been nothing in ten years. An IPO at this point is nothing but a cash grab awaiting the death of the platform.
What's interesting about the "they should go programmatic" argument is that programmatic ads are increasingly less lucrative thanks to low-quality traffic and the perceived ineffectiveness of cookie-based retargeting. (Yes, please, show me a hundred banner ads for that pair of pants I literally just purchased!) Programmatic ads also tend to generate more profit for the middlemen who broker transactions than they do for the publishers who display ads; once all of the ad platforms involved in the transaction have taken their cut, there's not much left.
In response to this, some people have been driving a push back to traditional/contextual ads, similar to what Reddit is currently doing. So, in theory, if Reddit is selling Guaranteed High Quality ad space, and selling it to brands with whom they have a direct partnership,[2] and not getting skimmed off the top by middlemen, they should be raking in the advertising dollars. Right?
But they're clearly not! Or not nearly enough to be profitable.
The efforts against third-party apps are clearly an attempt to drive more ad impressions (because you can't drive impressions if users aren't in an environment where you can serve impressions), but I somehow doubt that that's gonna make a big difference, even if third-party-app-users all threw up their hands and migrated, without protest, to official channels.
[1] The real cash cow among programmatic ads is video advertising, since those placements are more valuable and fetch a higher price, but I also see that as a trap for Reddit—their decision to start natively hosting video seems pretty short-sighted for a company that's already not breaking even. If they wanted to go hard on video ads, they'd have to start prioritizing more video content, which means hosting more video content....
[2] Perhaps not for nothing that half the ads on Reddit these days are for that vaguely evangelistic "He Gets Us" campaign. The buyers clearly have money to throw around, but the relative lack of other ads mixed in has to say something about the (lack of) demand for Reddit's inventory.
There's no reason they couldn't do both, really. They could have spaces for traditional ads, and they could have those direct partnerships.
Direct partnerships might be nice in theory, but it will always require a separate decision and process from the company to partner with Reddit. Considering there are hundreds of different avenues people could be advertising on, I'm guessing Reddit is kind of low on the list.
Reddit has a ton of revenue - $500 million per year. Considering the work of actually running the site is done by volunteers, what is baffling is that they cannot be profitable with this amount of money.
There is profitability and then there is VC-profitability. One of them normal people can understand and the other is absurd IMHO.
VC forces you to staff up, spend like there is no tomorrow, and have a huge return or GTFO.
$500M a year should absolutely support a company like Reddit (even giving the API away for free) but that’s not a 10-100-1000x return so it’s essentially $0 to VCs.
When Reddit says they aren’t profitable they really mean they aren’t profitable /enough/ coupled with their high headcount.
Working at a small startup (or a side project) will show you what can be accomplished with 1-10 or <50 people who are all committed.
Perhaps but I would guess a much higher percentage of the Reddit userbase uses ad blockers than other social media platforms (e.g. Instagram, Snapchat where most - all? - users are using phones and thus it's much harder to install an adblocker).
I'm surprised reddit can't run with that amount of profit per user per month but more surprised by the Instagram number.
Surely spending there is overinflated? I know whales with bad impulse control are a thing but there's no way the average user there justifies $35 in ad spending.
Interesting perspective. But it does beg the obvious question: how effective are comment sections? How many casual redditors in this case actually read the comments and aren't just scrolling through titles?
Either way, the experiment is very cheap and honestly we're dreaming if these were the rates they paid. It's probably more like $2/hour to people in 2nd/3rd world countries.
For advertising your target isn't necessarily someone organically scrolling who happens upon it. It's definitely the people who are googling "best cordless drill reddit" or digging through the stickied megathread of a specific interest's sub. In those cases it would be very very hard to beat the effectiveness of a well-placed comment.
I'd just like to point out, that I run a side business selling vinyls/cassettes in a very niche genre. I looked into advertising on reddit, as there were two or three communities that I was already active in with collectors of this type of music.
I thought it'd be better to advertise than self promote. However, Reddit's ad management is a complete cluster. It is confusing, frustrating to set up, and difficult to analyze.
The reason I really wanted to advertise on Reddit rather than Facebook/Instagram is that Facebook's "profiles" of people aren't specific enough for what I am selling. But with Reddit, I literally just want to target anyone who is a member of or visits these specific subreddits.
For me, it is perfect targeted advertising without any invasive tracking of users!
But Reddit wouldn't let me. Those subreddits aren't on their very limited list of approved subreddits. Instead my only choice was to be able to target a really, really big subreddit (/r/Music) which 99.99% of the people there would have no interest in my product, or to use their profiles, which are not nearly as complete as Facebook's.
So, I gave up, and decided I wasn't getting my return on advertising on Reddit.
They haven't tried. Perhaps there's some things I don't see that they thought would work, but it really doesn't look like it.
It looks like they've been mostly user friendly. They were relatively late forcing users to the app, and the app doesn't seem as bad as competition (in terms of privacy, nagging, ect., not quality).
As far as I can tell they've resisted the use of a ton of user hostile forms of advertising. They don't allow software, so no malware. The ads don't intrude on the users. (although they have blended it with normal content, which isn't great).
Do they even sell data. At this point, it seems guarantied that they're selling some data, but they haven't been successful. Haven't heard much on them building detailed profiles on specific people.
Counter-intuitive? Perhaps not. But there are some obvious reasons why it is comparatively harder for Reddit to attract ad spend:
1. Instagram encourages business users to use the service for free. This gives a taste for the platform and reduces the friction in spending money later on. Reddit, on the other hand, discourages free business use.
2. Instagram generally gives the impression that it has real users, with real names and real photos attached. Reddit generally gives the impression of being a fantasy world with anonymous characters. While the latter may be attractive to certain niche products that fit into that fantasy, the average business operating in the real world feels more at home when it thinks it is marketing to real people.
What is Reddit’s plan? They seem to simultaneously hold two conflicting ideas:
1. Third party app users represent significant enough lost revenue to make it worth making the API prohibitively expensive for third party apps to run, forcing those users back to the official app.
2. Third party apps users are few enough that Reddit can afford to not compromise and lose those users just to kill off third party apps.
Are they expecting the third party app users will come crawling back to the official app? As far as I’m concerned the official app is borderline unusable compared to Apollo, for example, and I’d expect most users who have seen the light to find the official app completely intolerable.
Perhaps the presence of unofficial, basically un-monetized third party apps was flagged as a risk for their IPO by some investor types. Still, they could have found a better route to monetize those users than just killing off the apps altogether.
The plan is to turn Reddit into TikTok. The site is being pivoted away from being a social message board to being a scrolling content dripfeed. Get the eyes in the native app and get the ads going. That’s the value that’s being lost via third-party apps.
The only subs that really matter in this context are the frontpage top-100 subs, and it’s not like there’s any real intensive discussion over some cat pic or earthporn.
The hobby subs are fine and generally adds value, it’s not like they’re going to remove them, but it’s not where the site’s primary engagement is going to be in another year or two.
If they lose 25% of users and quadruple the revenue from the remaining users - that’s a massive win for them. And this is where the 90-9-1 rule works against you, because most users are going to stay, because they’re just scrolling cat pics anyway, and none of this really affects them. That’s the calculation. Most will stay, and they’ll make a lot more revenue per user that way.
And in the grand scheme of things… there will be enough content in a month or two to keep people busy. This too shall pass.
They'll come back. They'll all come back. If creating official communities for pedophiles to swap (legal) pictures isn't enough to get you to leave nothing will.
(there have been notable other controversies, but I thought I'd mention a "classic")
Since I only use reddit logged in and having the user preference set to the old UI, the most effective way for me to go cold turkey is to logout. Any twitch response to back to reddit presents the newer layout and I'm instantly compelled to close the browser tab again.
Can anyone explain how much pressure and where it comes from for the “raise revenue at all costs” pre-IPO. Is it common for other companies to shoot themselves in the foot by layoffs and policy changes that alienate users? Just feels like no one was smart enough to say “we can try and raise revenue by doing this, but we could lose everything” - maybe companies just constantly forget how defiant and fickle the internet can be.
It's purely a numbers game. If the amount of revenue you'll achieve from less users gives you a more positive multi year outlook financially then losing the users is "worth it", especially if those users fall into cohorts that are less financially valuable. Unfortunately that includes people who take part in blackouts as they correlate highly with people who e.g. run adblockers, use third party apps, etc.
Of course the managers/executives making/approving decisions like this know it's a dangerous game, but it's not dangerous for them because they know IBGYBG[0]
They have no "skin in the game"[1] meaning the incentives are all wrong, how do we expect them to behave any better?
There's going to be some inertia. You can recycle old content to mix with the "native advertising" spam that will fill the vacuum left by the people who used to "produce the majority of the content" - it's not a long-term solution, but if it keeps the user bleed in check until IPO, then the C-suite and the investors win; afterwards, the site can go to hell, it's not their problem anymore.
Someone who, like the GP says, uses third party clients and ad blockers, who is very technically knowledgable, who may even use Reddit's API directly themselves, or write tools/clients for Reddit.
Contributing to Reddit's content doesn't require any of that, and I'd wager the overwhelming majority of Reddit users don't do any of that but do contribute most of Reddit's content.
Just because you're a content creator doesn't mean you're a power user. The concepts are mostly orthogonal. Though if you're a mod you probably use some mod tools, which makes you a bit of a power user by definition. But mods are a tiny minority of Reddit users and don't contribute most of Reddit's content.
Agreed. The tools that moderators are losing definitely don't fit into the category I'm describing. Reddit failing to bring the tools up to par in the first party app is notably low hanging fruit and I'm equally confused as to why they wouldn't have pursued it.
They went from a few dozen people in 2015 to 400 in 2019 to 2000 today, and also started hosting images and videos in 2016-17. The result of all this is that they spend way more money than they did a decade ago and despite now making an estimated $600M/yr and 50M daily active users, they are apparently still losing money.
A company that's 15 years old, never turned a profit really or made much profit if it ever did, and is still losing money is not in a good place to IPO, which existing investors want to recoup some of their investment.
The product is the stock price, not "revenue" or "users". If this increase their stock valuation at IPO and destroy the company in a month time, they'll go for it. This is the free market at play, you are welcome.
Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right. Sadly. I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening. The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.
I assume the ipo will allow him to eventually join the (multi-millionaire?) billionaire class. One would assume he would fight tooth and nail to make this happen. Considering his past unethical behavior, I don’t see him playing nice to get what he wants.
> The average person enjoys the convenience of consolidation under one corporate overlord.
I think the average person likes
1) only logging in once (even using an FB or Google login more than once, sign up etc, is too much friction)
2) a consistent interface
3) while being able to jump to another "forum" easily, which internal links obviously do.
Solve those 3 things for decentralised forums (or whatever, seeing that Discord is touted as an alternative) and it breaks the hold of Reddit and FB etc.
I don't see anything confusing. Choose any instance and it will federate with others. For the minimal friction, choose the mainstream one, mastodon.social.
I'm glad that it works for you. The experience shared by many others, however, and that includes many commenters on HN, is different and would suggest that it is, indeed, confusing.
I checked, and my pre-Reddit Internet experience is still there. The networks are small, on-topic, you recognize people, (we're all 40 now), (all their user databases are on haveibeenpwned). These are all things "subreddit snobs" exalt about their lil' <100k user subreddits. I'm not seeing a super compelling reason not to go back to this mode of Internetting.
> Spez assumes he has more power than Reddit users. He is likely right.
There is a chance the protest wins. The interesting twist here is the moderators, which currently have unusual power. The sad part is that this power might go away down the line, as a result of this protest and irrespective of its outcome.
If the protest fails, there was nothing of value left to lose. Reddit has had ample opportunity to make things right in a way amenable to the people complaining. Instead, they've consistently signalled that they want to keep dumping the value that long time users see in the site down the drain. Personally, I have no interest in continuing as steward of the trash heap. Sad to mourn the loss of niche communities, but enough is enough.
> I wish people would just stop using that site and go back to web forums, but that is never happening.
I can tell you that a bunch of the technical Reddits have just shut down. I suspect that's going to put a big dent in things because site:reddit.com is going to be dead in Google. And that's the only thing holding people on Reddit.
Unfortunately, those technical sub-Reddits are almost always moving to Discord. :(
Once "site:discord.com" becomes a thing, Reddit is cooked.
On reddit you can get banned from a bunch of subs, just because you post in a sub that their mods don't like. It's apparently against the reddit's rules, but nobody seems to give a shit.
It'even easier to do that in the fediverse and it isn't against any rules.
So there will be problems with interoperability, because of this.
I dislike that I have to make an effort to entertain myself during downtimes, but this is an excellent exercise for a future where reddit execs might just have made the site unusable for me.
I also have to fight the urge of not opening it, but I don't think I plan on coming back at this point. This made me realize that I was addicted to doomscrolling and constant brainless checking on my favorite subreddits. I genuinely found myself more productive than ever since I uninstalled Apollo when blackout started.
I knew I spent too much time on Reddit prior to this but the amount of times I find myself reaching for my phone and trying to open Apollo without thought (I uninstalled Apollo already) is a lot more than what I expected.
I've left other social media sites without much problem before.
My main problem is when I google stuff, I still try to add "reddit" but now I'm not sure what the alternative is to increasing the signal to noise ratio for results.
Yes, adding Reddit to search queries was a good way to make search engines less awful. Yesterday I used the search engine cache of the Reddit results a lot.
it's sad because my fav places on reddit are all related to sports (american football, football, baseball, chess, esports) and i don't want to go do discord.
tildes might fill the niche i have, but it's still quite small.
I mod a few subs for a niche hobby -- there's probably a few tens of thousands of us in the US. The majority of us are not especially technically inclined, and the only other place where the community regularly gathers online is Facebook Groups, which many of us want nothing to do with anymore.
I long ago largely stopped using reddit outside of the subs I mod, except browsing the front page briefly, or getting an answer from an internet search.
Tbc, reddit as a platform means nothing to me, and I'll happily move to another site. But, for the time being, this is where the community is, and this is where we're able to share information, some of which is safety-critical. I see the time I spend trying to keep the subs I mod welcoming and mostly free from hostility as a way to give back to the community.
I'm in the process of setting up a Lemmy server and plan to host similar forums there, but I intend to continue using reddit for at least as long as it's a primary gathering place for our community.
Something I found dismaying was just how only a few of the subreddit communities I liked had any alternative platforms to go to: only the fountain pens community had a Discord server. And upon joining that server the day before the blackout, it was pretty clear just how much work had already gone into making that community feel immediately welcoming (looks like it took at least a year) and ready to handle huge influx of new users.
Given that Christian Sellig made his criticism of the API changes public only 11 days prior to the blackout and made his decision to close down Apollo only 3 days prior, most subreddits just wouldn't have the chance to get started elsewhere, regardless of whether it's Discord or Lemmy or whatever. Discord arguably requires among the least amount of technical savvy to use among the alternatives, but ensuring it doesn't become instant chaos is a nontrivial social problem. And certainly, 11 days to break the inertia of 100k+ users to move elsewhere is nontrivial as well.
Just wanted to point this out in case you really didn’t see it:
> I long ago stopped using Reddit [except for volunteering to moderate free content for the platform], [consuming the main page content], and [using content from the platform in internet searches].
That’s a lot of usage for someone that stopped using it.
Also:
> Reddit as a platform means nothing to me, [except that it is the home of a niche hobby and we have no alternatives, or aren’t willing to relocate as a community].
Reading these statements really makes it seem like you contribute, use and rely on Reddit infrastructure, technology and platform as a whole.
This whole model of social media in today's internet is unsustainable.
We will undoubtedly move towards a future internet with two main camps. The corporate social media where users have to either pay to play, or be locked into walled gardens without their consent, or sometimes even knowledge.
The other camp will be various decentralized platforms such as the fediverse and others.
We had a relatively quick (in historical terms) break from the user-driven internet after the early 2000s, but it's coming back in force. If you want freedom then it has to be user-driven, it can't be profit-driven.
Very gloomy title though. And the content is very niched.
I believe a majority of internet users will still use large corporate social media, simply because it's easier. We as developers have to understand that most users are not like us, they only want an accessible and simple experience when staying in touch with people and sharing their lives.
But the power users, the ones who made up the majority of internet users back in the 90s and early 2000s, they will perhaps stay on those platforms and have one foot in the decentralized camp, or be fully in the decentralized camp. Hopefully with time the number of power users increases with decentralized media becoming more accessible and people becoming more educated on how to use it.
But there will without a doubt always be a majority of users in the more accessible and better marketed alternatives.
IMHO, if 1-9-90 rule is true, then it depends on what this 1% of creators will do. If they'll stay on Reddit/any other centralized social media, then nothing will really change. But if creators will move to a different place, then lurkers might see that there are alternatives and maybe eventually they'll even move to them, if the content will be _better_ in their opinion.
"Creators" are not a single entity. There are tons of very creative people in the fediverse already.
There will be pockets of creativity all over the internet, maybe more in the centralized social media but the decentralized social media might be more attractive to creators who value and understand digital freedom.
I know that there are already on Fediverse, I'm there and I love this idea.
What I tried to say (but came out poorly), that Fediverse, even with big growth in last months, is still kinda small and most of those "creators" are still on centralized social media, so regular people are also mostly there.
it was clearly visible when Musk took over Twitter and mass migrations to Mastodon started. Some journalists and different public people moved there, so regular people also moved. But with time, some of the creators got bored and got back on Twitter, and outflow of ordinary people also was visible.
I can't imagine the decentralized camp ever growing significantly.
On r/RedditAlternatives people are discussing what sites to migrate to. The federated kbin and lemmy are getting significantly less attention than the centralized squabbles. [1]
Many redditors complain that sites being federated is actually a downside, as they don't understand it and even if they do they rather not explain it to their friends.
Oh I agree, if you read my other comment in this thread I already said that the vast majority of internet users will use centralized corporate social media.
But I'm hoping that with accessibility improvements the decentralized camp will grow, and it will forever remain a factor. Or as long as the internet as a backbone is free enough.
The Reddit IPO is shaping up to be the biggest pump and dump scam in recent history. The question is, how bad will the liquidity be when the sell side of the order book vastly exceeds the buy side.
Fidelity marked down its investment by 41% (you see similar numbers across tech), so I don't see the pump. What will make it interesting are the risk disclosures.
The vast majority of users are going to come back (if they ever left), because there's really nowhere else for them to go.
The news cycle is going to move to something else in a couple of weeks, and this whole fiasco is going to be just yet another obscure footnote in internet history.
While true, I think this has killed a lot of goodwill from moderators and power users who will just wait for a viable alternative then instantly jump ship
Alternatives that you just know are being worked on right now
I read the comments and many are in this vein: "Agreed, moderators with a power complex are the worst thing about this site. Don't even care about this API crap." Never realized mods were so disliked.
I thought the blackout sent a message+got coverage, but don't like subreddits extending it without consulting their users. I use reddit about 5-10 minutes/day so I don't care either way.
It's possible that the comments are legit, but it's interesting how many of the comments in the Moderator Coordination subreddit are from people who hate mods have have newish accounts. Considering Reddit has edited comments critical of the CEO in the past AND that reddit is known to use fake accounts to simulate engagement, I'm a bit skeptical (the fake account thing was how reddit got it's start, but they're still doing it in 2023 to populate non-English subs with shitty machine translations of popular English threads)
> it's interesting how many of the comments in the Moderator Coordination subreddit are from people who hate mods have have newish accounts.
Well, duh.
Would you complain about a mod with your main account? A contributing factor is that people with newish accounts have newish accounts because a powertripping mod banned their oldish account.
All-in-all, having newish accounts complain about mods makes their complaints more legitimate, not less.
People who hate mods tend to be people who value a more anonymous style of social media communication than persistent usernames and/or people have been censored so much before that they have been forced to make new accounts.
There are so many 'supermods' that control hundreds of subs, and so many that do abuse their power. Mods are definitely one of the worst things about that site.
Moderation on reddit is incredibly inconsistent and as bad as the users can be the mods are ALWAYS a jerkoffs. The vast majority of subs have a very "in your face" attitude to moderation, and it's clear these people really get off on the tiny bit of power they get.
Perhaps you never had an issue with them? If you really keep your nose clean there's a good chance you never encounter the mods, or rarely at least. HackerNews as always is tamer, but you still get some of those vibes.
I would also add that multiple groups are disproportionately represented. Ironically, police sympathizers are very powerful on the site. So as anti-police as reddit seems, I assure you, it's 10,000X worse. I've gotten disproportionate blowback by attacking doctors (during covid, but not about it)... this definitely happens on HN.
Reddit is incredibly biased and it's kinda gotten complicated now. It's not just a left leaning site.
Honestly, I'm enjoying it. Most of my smaller subs are active. A couple of the bigger ones I'm subbed to are active without moderation, and people are saying they enjoy it more.
What I'm not seeing are all the bad news headlines, political gotchas, and click bait that make me frustrated.
I've just realized I should have unsubbed to most of these places a long time ago.
It's what most of these conversations are missing. This isn't 'poor volunteers doing good for the community', it's 'powerhungry idealists with the time to waste shaping conversation.'
In the same post ostensibly meant to posture strength and solidarity they go out of their way to point out that there is a good chunk of people that simply cannot live without reddit dot com (in this case a subforum about stopping drinking and a subforum about the war in Ukraine).
These groups have not, can not, will not move away from Reddit. Not only is there no real long term plan in general, there isn’t even a bandaid short-term plan for vulnerable groups.
As far as I can tell the only “alternatives” on offer are slightly varied copies of the Reddit UI offered by a cornucopia of strangers, each fancying themself as the newer, better, more generous and thoughtful versions of the Reddit founders.
It’s a veritable chorus of virtue from a group of people that will read “violentacrez” and knowingly scoff at it even being mentioned, or will Google “violentacrez” for the first time and start writing a defense of their favorite website.
There's tons of alternatives, just not many that look like reddit clones. If you want funny meme go to tiktok, if you want to talk about news go on any of the news aggregators, if you want to talk about tech come to HN (as many have these last two days), if you want to socialize with people you know go to Facebook, if you want porn the Internet is full of it, art: deviantart, and so on.
I've been impressed with the fediverse, and I think I'm going there for good, but I agree it's not ready to replace reddit for the masses. There's real effort happening to build communities there. I'm hopeful.
Then you can get an LLM company to easily scrape Reddit for $5 instead of $100000. The main reason for this change is to monetize the usage, not the access.
This is reminding me of when all the Vine power creators banded together and tried to make demands or they would "stop creating" and all it resulted in was Twitter deleting them and their entire website.
Don't be surprised if Reddit starts taking some pretty drastic action here on the grounds that they're violating one of the site's oldest rules which is "don't break Reddit".
Not saying it's good or bad, but just that this is almost definitely not going to go the way these people think it will.
Honest question since I don't really know how reddit works: Why can't reddit just forcefully re-open the subs that have been taken private? Mods are using powers given to them by the platform and I don't get why they are not being stripped of (some of) those powers.
They could re-open it. But the last time we had a popular unmoderated subreddit, it became a mixture of porn, onlyfan models and Donald Trump / Jeffrey Epstein posts. Good OOTL if you want to give Reddit a click in these times: https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/gfo102/what_i...
In the end Reddit and Mods are co-dependent on each other. Mods use the platform provided by Reddit, but Reddit uses the voluntary work of mods to have a usable platform. Reddit could exchange all voluntary workers with paid mods, but I doubt something capital-intensive like that is what they planned for their pre-IPO strategy.
The king can always order the protestors killed, but he prefers not to because of the potentially destabilizing second-order effects. Similar with reddit -they can, and maybe they will at some point, but... will the new mods be similarly difficult, embarrassing them and compounding the problem? Will the new mods be less competent or have new and different ideological vendettas, causing other problems? etc. Easier to just wait for them to back down for now, particularly since reddit basically holds all the cards.
Taking an authoritarian approach might just cause even more noise for even longer. I think Huffman would like a war of attrition instead. Eventually mods will feel powerless because the execs won’t budge, and denying the community access to the subreddit will cause more problems than it appears to solve.
> Eventually mods will feel powerless because the execs won’t budge, and denying the community access to the subreddit will cause more problems than it appears to solve.
Frankly, the mods can just quit permanently. It’s an Internet forum, not life and death for them. There are so many other things that they could be doing with their time. Heck, I reckon it would be better for their mental and physical health in the long run if they quit doing internet janitor work and drop the perpetually online lifestyle - at least I believe that’s a requirement to effective moderate a fairly active subreddit.
They can be forcefully re-opened at any time. Based on the internal memo, they don't appear to be taking this seriously enough to warrant that kind of action.
Harm to the brand is hard to quantify. We can only assume they've done the calculus and decided freezing out 3rd party apps is worth the benefit. Knowing exactly what that benefit is, is conjecture. Best guess is that this is regarding the IPO which is expected in 2nd half of this year.
As a side note: the brand is clearly on their mind, as they've made exceptions for disability features. Banning Redreader would have caused quite a bit more uproar.
Very interesting comments in the thread, seems like a lot of people think Reddit can continue without the mods, new mods can be assigned, new subreddits can be created.
The one very weird thing that I am realising now is that , reddit feels really good due to blackout. I only get updates from my niche subs, no more rage, and I close the app after a few minutes. Its like i got back the old reddit inadvertently .
It's kinda dumb to go private as a protest, because visiting the home page as a lurker, there's no indication that anything is happening - just a different mix of subreddits hitting the default feed
But try searching the internet for any topic, seeing a good reddit page, clicking on it, and then realising - "oh wait, it's locked" - and then having to scramble to find a cached version of the page
This will be short lived since I see moderation tooling being pretty key in handling content at the scale Reddit does. The API changes will nuke those and not just the user apps. It is also important to know that third party applications have yet to be shut down completely, most say they will be closing shop end of this month. Reddit is still benefiting and riding some of the "quality" it had before the shutdowns (think bots, automods, etc). I expect that will soon go away since the subreddits that aren't protesting are most likely still using third party tools to make moderation less arduous. Anyone who is intenting to exploit this does not yet have the opportunity.
Reddit is claiming they will reconcile the current issues with their moderation tooling, but if the app is any reflection of their ability to provide quality software, I wouldn't hold my breath.
So much to say: The true death of Reddit will be a slow one. The protest is just the first wave of their complications.
Yeah, while I understand and appreciate this effort, Reddit is actually seems better without some of the giant default subs. It's more like it was 10 years ago. The site has hardly been a ghost town over the past couple of days. Smaller more obscure subs are hitting the front page, which is interesting, and to me it illustrates that if the large ones were to shut down entirely, there'd be no shortage of content and other mods/communities happy to take their place.
Actually many smaller subreddits don't want to hit the front page.
Reddit has different dynamics depending on where people are coming from. Small subreddits hitting the frontpage tends to be disruptive more than helpful by bringing in users that don't care about the local culture.
I didn't say all communities wanted to. I said it was interesting. Mainly my point is that it wouldn't be death for reddit if some of the largest subs went away entirely, along with the 'power mods' who control dozens of communities.
I have no doubt that mods of some of the smaller news subs, for instance, would be happy to start getting offers for tens of thousands of dollars to promote various articles.
I'm done with reddit anyway. After uninstalling Apollo and shredditing my account (not that I strongly believe in the effectiveness of shreddit, it was more of a gesture toward reddit), I realize that reddit is harmful for me. The bots that manipulate perception, on top of the user-hostile behavior, make me realize one would have to be a fool to continue to use reddit unless it changes drastically.
It does suck to no longer interact with smaller communities but at this point I have to prioritize my own well being first.
It's not the Redditors or the 3rd party app devs' fault that Reddit is perhaps the only "big" corp whose main app is so shi*y that people resort to other alternatives.
They had a lot of time to facilitate the mods and admins of subs, but they continued to deliver builds that didn't solve users' problems.
However, I feel for the people who have used the official apps for catching up to news, and they are missing out big-time. For example, where do I go now for unbiased football/soccer news?
I know you're not saying this, but just to point out how absurd this price point is:
> Reddit generated $350 million in 2021, primarily from its advertising business
> Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month
Are we really supposed to believe that Reddit is losing $500 * 400 million per year? Their total cost per user is probably something like $1/year. Twitch.tv which streams 1080p video prolly has costs of like $50/user/year. Insane pricing decision by Reddit.
From the data presented, in aggregate, >90% fall well within the free tier of usage (100 API calls per minute for OAuth logged in client). The majority of the remaining fall into a $1/month tier [1].
Certainly there are some outliers that exceed those ranges and unfortunately the majority of the spotlight seems to be on the smallest of the populace.
It is also worth noting that app developers can (and should) better optimize their apps to reduce calls to API (bundling, caching, etc) which will help to reduce the number of calls required overall to take that cost down. Many apps do this already.
OK, so if each user were to use their own API key, reddit would still have the same costs but nowhere near the revenue, which speaks to a pricing structure aimed at the status quo where the API key is per developer instead. What's the betting that if apps switch to allowing users to specify their own API key that reddit actually allows most users to do this? The '90%' number is meaningless: apps which use the reddit API (or any API with a free tier) have an extremely long tail of niche uses which effectively no-one cares about.
The comment about API optimization is inane, apps already try to do this and bump up against the problem that reddit's API is atrocious (try actually getting all the comments in a comment chain once they get collapsed! if you actually want to succeed, even on a chain with only ~100 comments, you're gonna need around 30 API calls. Most apps don't bother to try, and the 'more comments' button is invariably broken).
I'm not aware that reddit ever presented user level API keys as an option, they'd likely instead base it on Reddit premium tiers tied to the OAuth account. But again, that's not currently a viable option on the table and if users started enmass requesting API keys intended for developers, yes that would get throttled quickly because that's not what they're intended for.
>90% of users is not a meaningless number by any measure. I'd suggest that punishing the average users due to the power use of the outliers is a terrible value proposition.
Developers hold the ability to throttle and/or price based on that.
I am a developer that has built clients and tools around the reddit API. If most apps don't bother to optimize, then that's a choice they can make.
Because they have gone on public record with those numbers and as of yet, no one has refuted them.
Do you have an alternate source of user level data that breaks down average vs. outliers and that ratio that you feel is more accurate?
The free tier is 100 queries per minute for an OAuth logged in client per the public statement, and that number has also been stated by a few 3rd party app developers.
That is a lot for the average user, especially for a well optimized app.
The main issue here is that the number isn't relevant: it's per API key, not per user. So unless reddit starts handing out API keys to every user then it doesn't make the slightest difference to third party apps.
It is relevant. Developers have the ability to throttle and/or monetize users based on usage to pass on those costs to power user outliers, while not impacting the majority of their users that fall into that free tier.
The point is "user" as used in this post is not a single reddit account or a single individual. A "user" is an app which supports few or many users. I would say if you measure it the way most people would mean user, in fact 90% or more of users are impacted by this price increase, because while each individual user will fall well below the usage threshold, they will in aggregate quickly exceed it because it's all being attributed to the app they are using. On the free tier you could support maybe 10 average users before you wind up with a bad experience as their requests start to bounce off the limits (it's not that their average usage would hit the limits, but the spikes would quickly result in requests become very delayed)
That seems like a non-starter: The average person who wants a better smartphone experience is not going to jump through the hoops of registering their "own app" (which would be a lie) and then transcribing IDs/secrets into their phone.
Reddit could offer a premium membership that allows add-free and API access, and require the third-party apps to log in on behalf of the user. The fee might still turn a lot of people off (although the lack of ads would make it so much nicer), but it at least wouldn't be a technical hurdle. That model seems to work for YouTube.
Or they could just continue having their current premium model that doesn't involve the third-party apps they so despise. Reddit premium is a thing already, too bad both the official app and website sucks.
The app I use (joey) has a standout behaviour which is ideal for tablet and phone: long press on many inputs makes it do a pop out which vanishes when you let go. So you can see images full-size, expand headlines, even scroll comments, many ops work one handed.
As a skim mode view its unbeatable. Since the mainstream app does not do this, I will personally lose functionality I use significantly.
It is unbelievable that so many people's exchanges of opinions accumulated over the years have been blown away by a single strike like this.
It is true that there is a problem with Reddit's operating policy. But it is run by a private company. Actions to monetize sometimes happen.
It's not the attitude of a responsible modder to just blow up a subreddit that has thousands, maybe millions of users. Now that the 48-hour strike is over, we're making it a public reddit, at least for users to decide which platform to migrate to or to keep the status quo. And, in my opinion, no matter which platform you choose, a dependency on the platform operating company is unavoidable.
For those that don't want to cross the picket line to read:
On May 31, 2023, Reddit announced a policy change that will kill essentially every third-party Reddit app now operating, from Apollo to Reddit is Fun to Narwhal to BaconReader, leaving Reddit's official mobile app as the only usable option; an app widely regarded as poor quality, not handicap-accessible, and very difficult to use for moderation.
In response, nearly nine thousand subreddits with a combined reach of hundreds of millions of users have made their outrage clear: we blacked out huge portions of Reddit, making national news many, many times over. in the process. What we want is crystal clear.
Reddit has budged microscopically. The announcement that moderator access to the 'Pushshift' data-archiving tool would be restored was welcome. But our core concerns still aren't satisfied, and these concessions came prior to the blackout start date; Reddit has been silent since it began.
300+ subs have already announced that they are in it for the long haul, prepared to remain private or otherwise inaccessible indefinitely until Reddit provides an adequate solution. These include powerhouses like:
Such subreddits are the heart and soul of this effort, and we're deeply grateful for their support. Please stand with them if you can. If you need to take time to poll your users to see if they're on-board, do so - consensus is important. Others originally planned only 48 hours of shutdown, hoping that a brief demonstration of solidarity would be all that was necessary.
But more is needed for Reddit to act:
Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact” and that the company anticipates that many of the subreddits will come back online by Wednesday. “There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well,” the memo reads.
We recognize that not everyone is prepared to go down with the ship: for example, /r/StopDrinking represents a valuable resource for a communities in need, and the urgency of getting the news of the ongoing war out to /r/Ukraine obviously outweighs any of these concerns. For such communities, we are strongly encouraging a new kind of participation: a weekly gesture of support on "Touch-Grass-Tuesdays”. The exact nature of that participation- a weekly one-day blackout, an Automod-posted sticky announcement, a changed subreddit rule to encourage participation themed around the protest- we leave to your discretion.
To verify your community's participation indefinitely, until a satisfactory compromise is offered by Reddit, respond to this post with the name of your subreddit, followed by 'Indefinite'. To verify your community's Tuesdays, respond to this post with the name of your subreddit, followed by 'Solidarity'.
----
The community's list of demands:
API technical issues
Accessibility for blind people
Parity in access to NSFW content
API technical issues
Allowing third-party apps to run their own ads would be critical (given this is how most are funded vs subscriptions). Reddit could just make an ad SDK and do a rev split.
Bringing the API pricing down to the point ads/subscriptions could realistically cover the costs.
Reddit gives the apps time to make whatever adjustments are necessary
Rate limits would need to be per user+appkey, not just per key.
Commitment to adding features to the API; image uploads/chat/notifications.
Accessibility for blind people
Lack of communication. The official app is not accessible for blind people, these are not new issues and blind and visually impaired users have relied on third-party apps for years. Why were disabled communities not contacted to gauge the impact of these API changes?
You say you've offered exemptions for "non-commercial" and "accessibility apps." Despite r/blind's best efforts, you have not stated how they are selected. r/blind compiled a list of apps that meet users' access needs.
You ask for what you consider to be a fair price for access to your API, yet you expect developers to provide accessible alternatives to your apps for free. You seem to be putting people into a position of doing what you can't do while providing value to your company by keeping users on the platform and addressing a PR issue. Will you be paying the developers of third-party apps that serve as your stopgap?
Parity in access to NSFW content
There have been attempts by devs to talk about the NSFW removal and how third-party apps are willing to hook into whatever "guardrails" (Reddit's term) are needed to verify users' age/identity. Reddit is clearly not afraid of NSFW on their platform, since they just recently added NSFW upload support to their desktop site. Third-party apps want an opportunity to keep access to NSFW support (see https://redd.it/13evueo).
Please also note that not all NSFW content is just pornography. There are many times that people seeking help or sharing stories about abuse or medical conditions must also mark their posts NSFW. However, even if this were strictly about porn, Reddit shouldn't take a stance that it's OK for them but not any other apps, especially when demanding exorbitant fees from these 3rd part devs.
Only instability introduced so far was by the subs going private. For some communities that are already notoriously unstable, this is not a particularly good look and makes me reconsider things.
Why not delete the accounts and the subreddits as a protest? It would do much more damage and it would be much worse if the reddit admins decided to restore the deleted subreddits.
Should have just been honest from the beginning, something like "we are no longer able to support the API for free" you can't have your cake and eat it too!
They can, it would result in an even bigger backlash. They probably just go for the "it will pass, they'll come back" approach instead of going full on against the people. They would also need to find moderators for those subs, which is not that easy, those people are often very committed.
Yep - They can replace the mods and reopen the subs any time they want. Since the majority of the site is working again this morning there doesn't seem to be much point.
Reddit's diehards are a weird bunch, this kind of drama usually passes within a week or so.
> We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.
Maybe they should have shipped better apps and mod tools so they wouldn't be in this mess.
No offense to the commentators in this post but do y'all just lay down and take everything that comes at you without a hint of objection? Yeah I get that it's a silly website but it's one that some people have been on for 10+ years.
Yeah, I agree. What do you think we can do to remove these whiny mods and open up these subreddits to get reddit back to the site I enjoy. Are you suggesting that we organize against them in some way?
The whiny mods are not moderators - they're curators, and they don't do thing to help me enjoy my Reddit experience. They make it worse by being biased and censoring opinions they personally don't like. They have an unreasonable amount of control over the narrative and diversity of the opinions expressed.
If they were actually moderating they wouldn't invent vague rules to ban whatever they want and the moderator action logs would be public.
The funniest thing that I saw was someone posting a long diatribe on one of these threads basically saying "don't do this, Reddit is the only free speech the internet has left!!!"
And totally missing the point that protesting IS free speech! And it isn't like this is really against REDDIT THE IDEA it's against the stance they are taking with these specific things.
I think it will eventually, for some users at least (already has for me) morph into "against reddit itself" but - I'm still for the idea of a link aggregator. I think it's a great idea.
It's 80:20 isn't it, the big subs are the draw, so they probably only need to force those to open to get traffic back. They can probably afford to pay for mods on those subs, as for the smaller subs, they probably don't care.
But if the 30 small subs I frequent all go elsewhere, my eyeball time on Reddit is going to go down significantly. Each of those 30 subs might be a tiny slice of my overall use, but together they make up the vast majority of my time on the site.
i find my self mentioning this in several of the reddit threads on here because i think it is an important if only historic fact that reddit was not just founded by aaron swartz (i hope you know who that was) _and_ huffman! let that sink in. that's a sad irony and refutes the notion huffman doesn't know what reddit is about.
also even if reddit will just continue as if nothing happened - which i believe it will - it will still have changed. it officially lost its spirit and the engagement of many people who made and make reddit interesting. left will be the people who don't care.
I agree. The bigger mods should try and pick a community and slowly migrate there. That's the hardest part of fostering a new community and the mods have some leverage to help sheapard that.
But I imagine for many mods the goal isn't to truly leave reddit. So there in lies the grind. I've been done for years and want to really make a jump, but I don't think many mods want that end result.
They bought a 3p app called Alien Blue way back in the day... and proceeded to do virtually nothing beneficial with it. So I don't think they understand the value of proper UX for power users.
Moreover, that's part of the problem: they aren't inflating user numbers, they want to inflate revenue stream. And for whatever reason it was easier to try and force everyone into the app than to try and get ad streams setup in 3p apps. so that's why the cards are falling this way.
Reddit already has an official Android and IOS app, but it has conflicting internal goals that 3rd party clients do not have to prioritize.
Purchasing another 3rd party app won't fix this, and would still necessitate the changes they are taking now (monetizing the API) resulting in the same backlash from the community.
They have stated their goals to close the gap between their official app and the 3rd party apps, but conflicts will always exist which will limit what they are willing to do. Putting some of that financial burden on 3rd parties helps even that playing field to some extent.
Yes, I think most of us (Reddit users) understand that Reddit needs to make money. But you cannot rollout a critical pivot like that one lying and destroying people that has help you grow and thinking your users are stupid.
That's were I put the limit with Twitter, and it's were I'm putting it with Reddit too.
They certainly can (and probably should) charge for the api. The problems we see now are the communications surrounding it, the price and the timeline.
They certainly can and its their right, but it's clear that they are working in bad faith and want to just close all 3rd party access. Their API costs are orders of magnitude more than any business out there.
It really depends what the stats look like. If people hop to other subreddits, it'll fail. If traffic is down more than 50% for a week or two, the board will remove Spez.
1. I don't get the protests.. at this point Reddit should just die for the attempt, just leave ship.
2. At the same time not getting the execs. Are they not seeing the damage done right now? Why not give in, appease protesters, and go more to a boiling frog approach? (IPO money grab desire must be very real?)
3. Because of 2, it is 1 anyway.
I mean two things will happen...either Reddit dies quickly, or more likely it dies a slow Sarlacc enshittification death. What will not happen is that it gives just in and everything will be back to normal, too much destroyed already.
Protest against your governments, not capitalists (except by just leaving)!
Real life? There are so many conversations here, and elsewhere, that seem to imply people must have access to something like Reddit. But why? I mean spend your time doing what you want, but I stopped looking at Reddit regularly a long time ago and my life is much better for it.
Reddit's moderators are holding people hostage. This just shows how the small group of powerhungry mods acts. I hope reddit finds a solution that serves its users who provide the content.
I'm the creator and mod of a sub with 25K users. A post was made by one of the users asking whether we should participate in the balckout. I didn't notice a single comment that said no. Apparently it's tough to get human beings to agree on anything.
A lot of those mods held polls in their communities and among their peers before going dark. I don't think the large subreddits are getting unilaterally shut down.
it's always like that -- reddit users always like drama so i did not expect they would vote otherwise. i think the whole idea is bad though
Reddit has much bigger problems to solve. First and foremost, that users have no recourse from moderation abuses, and this is killing the community more than the API changes.
The users that provide the content are pissed too. A significant portion of them will see the third party app they use die. I don't want to use their official app, and would be willing to pay a fair rate to do so, but their API prices are way beyond a fair rate.
Social media, especially a platform like reddit, has a special relationship with users. They aren't customers. You need the people who post, comment, and moderate or the platform dies.
Maybe finding a subreddits that fits with your interests and try not to argue and start fights while breaking the rules the mods set. Thats kind of the whole point of micro communities...
The problem is that among the kind of people who are willing to be Reddit mods, insane authoritarians are hugely over-represented. Sure, I can find some small subreddits where sane people are mods. That does not mean that I cannot express my loathing of the typical big subreddit mod.
You might be mistaking the causality here. You are implying that typical big subreddit has authoritarian mods, but it might the opposite - subreddits grow larger and stay popular because of strict moderation.
Organizing the continued blackout on Reddit is a bad look. I know it's not their aim, but it seems like "users should be prevented from using reddit, but us mods are exempt."
That said, short of preemptively having coordinated something, I don't know where else they'd organize. Particularly as I'm unaware of any real "leaders" to this movement.
That said, short of preemptively having coordinated something, I don't know where else they'd organize.
Then instead of saying how bad of a look it is, perhaps lament that there isn't a better alternative to organize. A place where reddit both absolutely knows what is going on (after all, they can look at their own subs), the public can see what is going on, and where all the mods would know to go.
Seriously. This complaint is about as fruitless as complaining that a poor person isn't paying for the 12 pack of toilet paper when they only have money for the 4 pack while now knowing how they are supposed to afford the cheaper-per-roll 12 pack.
>Then instead of saying how bad of a look it is, perhaps lament that there isn't a better alternative to organize
That's what the part you quoted is doing. It still looks bad, it's like organizing a boycott of Walmart and seeing the boycott leaders leaving Walmart with supplies to make placards. Maybe it was their only real option, but it looks terrible.
Yea, definitely more of a mod revolt than a user revolt
I feel like a lot of users have had it up to here with mod abuse too, maybe smaller subreddits with less automation would be preferable to mega reddits with bots that auto-ban you for being new to the community
> definitely more of a mod revolt than a user revolt
As a user I completely disagree.
As a user, I want to use a UI that works for me. I don't want to use a mobile website that prevents me from reading comments and forces me to use an app.
As a user, I want a service that releases quality of life fixes, not a service that says the fixes are coming for years but instead decides to release half-baked features every 6 months chasing some other feature in some other flash-in-the-pan social media service.
As a user, I want adware, low quality comments, and rule breaking comments removed from my subreddits. If the mods are upset at reddit because the mods can't effectively maintain those subreddits, then I'm upset at reddit too.
As a user, I want open APIs so I can log into different services to see better stats on my own account.
As a user, I want to see notifications that let me know when someone replied to me, not random junk notifications that I get automatically opted into.
As a user, I want to be able to edit my comments while I'm writing them and not have them unrecoverably and randomly delete mid-edit.
This wasn't just some mod revolt, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I spent 9 years being part of a community fixing other's code and linking to my own code as examples that others can draw from. I deleted my 9-year old account 2 days ago: https://i.imgur.com/m54CBan.png
Polls were held in many subreddits; if a subreddit is the community - which it is - then the will of the participants is the will of the community and those who communicate it.
I think that such polls tend to vastly over-represent the small subsets of those communities who care enough about the issue to vote. Voting is very rare in subreddits so I imagine that probably most users of those subreddits did not even realize that the votes were happening. And knowing how authoritarian Reddit mods usually are, I doubt very much that for the most part they would not have done whatever they wanted to do even if the votes had gone against them. The voting is just a fig leaf.
If lurkers don't exist, the community doesn't exist. It's well established that internet forums and communities consist of >=90% of users not contributing -- but consuming[1]. A small portion produce where as an overwhelming portion consume.
To say lurkers shouldnt exist is extremely reductive and callous.
I am well aware that the overwhelming majority does not contribute but consume. Communities need participation, if you are not participating you are not giving back, you are leeching. If everyone is leeching, there is no community. Consumers are not entitled to the content of the producers. Producers both consume and produce.
> To say lurkers shouldnt exist is extremely reductive and callous.
I didn't claim that they shouldn't exist, I claimed that they are not the core of the community since they do not produce or otherwise interact with anyone else.
If a tree fell in the forest and nobody heard it, did it make a sound?
You're right that you didn't say that should not exist, but you did say
> they might as well not even exist
I guess that's technically different. But you're being extremely hostile to the make up of a community. Can only active participants be allowed to claim they are part of a community? That seems very insensitive. Im a lurker, but I feel that I am a part of many online communities. But maybe... "You don't contribute, you don't matter."
In reality lurkers (or leechers as you say) play a big role. First of all they represent the community count -- they show a realistic interest in a topic/view. They also participate in other ways like up and down (validation) voting of topics/interests, report off topic/offensive content, etc. And they play a very significant role by supporting revenue for web forums -- their eyeballs and clicks do count too.
Just because lurkers aren't visible, doesn't make them any less important to the community.
> If a tree fell in the forest and nobody heard it, did it make a sound?
Yah, because 90% of the people in the forest heard it; they just didn't make a post about it.
The commons built in the 90s was turned into a playground in the 2000s and is now a oil well being mined by megacorps.
What, I hope, interest rates are doing is shifting the balance of power to its natural point: the commons is owned by the volunteers. Megacorp's ability to profit from this was a disguise created by free money.
With any luck twitter/reddit/facebook/et al. will disappear in favour of their "corresponding wikipedias" --- which is the model, I think, all the "platform creators" thought they were participating in.
There needs to be new alliances between volunteer-platform-creators and volunteer-content-creators