Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Well that kinda aged poorly.
To his credit, Ohanian hasn’t been involved with reddit for a while. He and u/spez sold the company years ago, then spez came back.
Fuck u/spez.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez.
Simultaneously looking like a 12 year old and crib death warmed over and we’re supposed to be impressed by this chud lol fuck him.
Everything does unfortunatelly… remember Google’s “do no harm” quote?
“Don’t be evil” was their actual quote. The fact that they removed it says a lot about their new direction.
Yeah, probably, forgot the exact quote 🤷.
Digg executives had to get a job /somewhere/
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Replaced RIF with Jerboa on my home screen; I can’t say I won’t miss it though, wish there was a “Lemmy is fun” already
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
I removed my reddit app of choice (Sync), and left the spot on my home screen empty. I probably tapped that spot instinctively 20 plus times today. It’s just muscle memory for what to pull up when I have some time to kill. The Fediverse seems like an estimated, but there is a shocking lack of cute animals here
Put Jerboa in that spot like I did and use that habit to your advantage!
That’s what I did!
Same here!
I’ve also done this. It makes it really easy to forget about Reddit, to some extent.
Honestly, all I need is something to occupy my eyes and fill that reflex that has me tapping an app on the tray of my home screen when I’m stressed or need a distraction.
This place isn’t the most efficient (yet) and there are many gaps from what I used to read back in my Reddit days but that place was beginning to be too toxic for me anyway.
The newness of this, and the energy here is much better for my mental health. I can see googling something +Reddit to read an opinion about a TV show or something but if they don’t allow unauthenticated browser access to the site, I won’t even be doing that anymore. And I’ll almost certainly be better off for it.
I switched it out for the PWA of my instance
I put mlem in the spot where Apollo (sob) used to be
Mlem is kind of ass. I’m working on an iOS app now for Lemmy and others. All of your posts and communities across all of your services and servers in one feed. I’m really excited about it.
Oooh. Make a sub or whatever they’re called so we can follow the progress? :)
I’ve become partial to animals eating food 🥺 where do I go for this content 😭
I’m not sure, but here’s a photo of my son’s blue parakeet eating to hold you over until you find it. (Also, let me know if you find such a community.)
Nom nom nom. (But if you find fruit bats or capybaras eating, let me know!)
Same, but for me it’s Apollo! I had to take it off my home screen. I am committed to the 48 hours and beyond, if necessary! And got everyone in my house to join in too! But damn it’s a hard habit to break!
Stick around the cute animals are growing by the day! Seriously on Saturday I could only find one community dedicated to animals. Today while browsing I found like EIGHT!
Same, I just kept instinctively looking for Boost throughout the day to scroll and then catching myself amd going “godamn it, you made accounts in other places a week ago for this! Just go there!”
I got better at it by the end of the day, by tomorrow hopefully I’ll hop here or tildes first instead of mindlessly trying to open reddit first.
So instead of removing RIF, I removed my entire phone homepage. D’oh.
The aww subreddit opened a Discord for the cute animal photos, but I had trouble navigating it and decided to just not go there. I’ll admit to never using Discord before and for some reason it wasn’t coming naturally.
And, yes, I know the username doesn’t match with that. Not instinctively understanding a technology made me feel old.
I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website’s core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I’m aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they’re going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg…
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I’ve learned anything it’s that Reddit’s admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that’s come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don’t see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted “free speech.” I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don’t like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn’t seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
IIRC it wasn’t within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.
Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.
There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it…
I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of “this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that’s great,” which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.
If there’s something I’ve learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it’s that they can’t be reasoned with. It’s like a cult where people are brainwashed.
I’ve also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there’s no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it’s most likely a bad-faith ploy but I’ll still take the gamble even though I’ve never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.
I don’t like eating any kind of shit
This is some terrific no context life advice.
At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don’t expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it’s becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I’ve commented loads on here that I haven’t felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it’s getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It’s become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I’m really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it’s more engaging. IDC if it doesn’t become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I’m 100% down.
Agreed, feels like a fresh start without some of the noise. Reddit will be bleeding users for a long while. A large number of power users have jumped ship and many of them technically apt. Lemmy will improve very quickly now. New UIs and features.
I’m excited.
Same man. I’m also trying to get out of my shell and contribute as well. I have thousands of reddit comments, but only a few posts in 12 years, mainly because I didn’t see the point. But here, where there are 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer users, what I have to say or post may genuinely interest somebody AND be seen by said person. If people don’t like it, that’s fine, at least it was there for them to see and not like!
Well your username certainly wins my everything for the day!
Thanks! My reddit name got shit on frequently, so I’m not sad to see people appreciating the new one!!
This is it. The algorithm amplifies the popular and in doing so mutes the rest.
Whether the algorithm is upvotes from the community times hotness or likes from the whole world times your social graph.
It is still inevitably muting more people than it is promoting.
People are worried today that there might not be a single place to find the one true forum, but in wanting that they are silencing the decentralized voices who can only get attention in a smaller group.
You can’t have a sensible discussion when everyone is in the same room.
Yeah I was super surprised to see just how many improvements hit the Jerboa Android app in just a couple days since I installed it. So many PRs lol
I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users’ mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.
I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The “darkening” of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover – the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.
I think the Digg v4 moment will be when/if Reddit bans porn. And if they’re gunning for an IPO, they’re going to do just that.
I miss pre-G4 TechTV so much
Thanks for the fond memory of TechTV. I also listened the heck out of the SecurityNow podcast.
Call for Help and The Screen Savers! Take me back 🥹
Those shows literally drove me to a career in software development.
I’ll never forget Leo telling a young kid about my age about a new programming language called Python. I like to think he shaped a fair number of future careers with that one call
undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this
Sure it will survive. And it’s certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn’t fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won’t know until long after the fact.
Even as a reddit addict I didn’t know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn’t even a mobile app user.
I don’t know if it will ever fall or fail, but I think the days of reddit being a place for the future of the internet to happen is over. People just plain don’t trust the site anymore.
Like why build fun tools for it? Why help moderate a community? Why do anything on reddit if the post quality is insanely low, bots are everywhere, and trolls have taken over.
Companies do this a lot. They sacrifice good will and community for money because it can’t easily be put down on a profit graph. So reddit seems fine to burn most of their genuine community to make a profit. And that’s fine, they’ll go elsewhere.
My hope is that somewhere like lemmy can stop the need to keep changing platforms.
If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we’ll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch. Long term that might still mean a transition.
Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn’t around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn’t know this stuff.
By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I’ve heard that before but I obviously had no problems.
It’s not intuitive to find communities on other servers. You have to be adamant that one exists it order to get it to come up in search after multiple attempts. Communities I’ve created on midwest.social still aren’t showing up in the search on lemmy.ml or sopuli.xyz and I would rather people find my community than create a new one by the same name on their server.
In its current state, and if it stays in this state, this is why it will not replace Reddit. It’s not just unintuitive, it’s about as hard as you can make it without purposefully making it hard. You can blindly grope in the dark slapping r/ in front of a topic. Here it’s a totally different story. And splintering the discussion does not a (viable) Reddit competitor make. If a first time user is expecting Reddit communities and gets the sub 1000 community counts Lemmy currently has they’re gonna drop it like a lead balloon.
That’s all okay with me because at the end of the day I personally don’t care. For me I’m happy with what community there is. What itches I have that Lemmy doesn’t scratch that Reddit did are replaceable with other content from other sites.
topic aggregation and finding communities faster is being worked on, as well as improvements to the cross-instance synchronization.
If there are multiple communities with the same name you should eventually be able to aggregate them together into one feed.
This influx of users will give the system a real test, as many users are lumping into a handful of large servers, rather than spreading out as there is no good way to find a local server with free capacity and a low ping.
Off-topic, but I’m glad you’re a Midwest llama who eats casseroles instead of hot dish!
Oh yeah. If nobody is already subscribed, that’s true.
I think it’s down to the communities page more than anything else. Don’t know if it’s a bug with Beehaw specifically or Lemmy in general not having the feature, but you can’t sort/filter the list of communities by number of subscribers or by instance.
Still a tonne better than Mastodon… My biggest complaint about Mastodon and the reason I barely use it is that if you look at all posts outside of your instance, you get riddled with bot spam. All I saw in the ‘All’ feed outside of my local instance were posts from a hentai reposting bot that regurgitated posts from various imageboards and anime porn subreddits. Some of the content it posted was problematic to say the least.
undefined> lemmyNSFW.com
My use case for Mastodon is quite different than yours. I only look at what I have subscribed to. It was the same way I used twitter. And in this case Mastodon works fine for me and it doesn’t even matter what instance I signed up on.
There’s already been noise on the ModCood subreddit about “What if this fails? What next?”
I don’t think protests like this alone are going to cut it. If they haven’t figured this out already, they need to realize that this doesn’t cut their ad revenue enough to make a difference. A coordinated campaign against Reddit advertisers would be a big blow. The disability issues alone should make advertisers pause.
OTOH, I do like Lemmy.
I’m surprised we haven’t seen power mods collectively band together to form their own Reddit clone.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before…
It was getting really bad.
Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.
onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit
Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.
Why?
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It directly falls afoul of Reddit’s rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.
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There’s an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with the untrue notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.
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In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them…
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It’s ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you’d otherwise have feel genuine, that’s if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.
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More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn’t agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so added an Automoderator filter so I’m effectively shadowbanned from using words like “OnlyFans” on a lot of subreddits. It’s awful when you have to get creative with words to get past draconian censors.
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Rather than destroying the patriarchy, it reinforces the notion of gender roles.
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I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
All those OnlyFans links and not a single photo of a fan!
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist the dad joke.)
"At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, "
lmao. Sounds familiar. I think you’re right that Reddit is going to survive, but I think this is a hard enough blow that it’s going to change the personality of the site. For one, the IPO dreams seem DOA currently, with the handling of this, the fairly toxic nature of some areas on the site, and drying up of VC in tech all seem to be bad news for any optimism for Reddit as a company. I imagine that this treatment is going to lead to migration of some communities, maybe smaller ones, leaving only the karma-farming, bot-ridden, main subs to be “the front page of the internet” anymore.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Reddit has a worse power-user problem than Digg. I mean at the very least Digg didn’t give its most active users the power to remove other people’s content. The difference is that Reddit already existed as a better alternative to Digg until it imploded, whereas until the recent API changes and blackout happened, there was no viable alternative to Reddit and a lack of people seeking an alternative.
I hope that Lemmy serves as an acceptable shelter if not home for users looking for the next good web aggregator/messageboard, despite its shortcomings and the growing pains.
Time will tell. My concern about Lemmy is that it’s non-profit and server hosting costs are great. It’s all well and good until you see some of the smaller instances shut down because they cannot afford to host.
It’s so frustrating. I deleted Apollo and don’t see myself downloading the garbage reddit app, so I really hope a new website can come out on top. I wish one of this community driven platforms followed suit of Wikipedia and allowed donations to pay for site costs but didn’t try to become profitable. These kind of community-run (aka free labor) pillars on the internet are bigger than just a dumb tech company
Fwiw, Tildes is non-profit and accepts donations. However they are gated by requiring an invite and are intentionally not growing quickly
It was really sad to go to my Reddit profile and see how long I’ve been using it.
To think that for over 13 years, I’ve been using Reddit daily and for MULTIPLE hours a day. It has probably caused untold amounts of impact on my growth as a person. Its like breaking up with a lifelong partner, what a strange feeling.
dude same. 13 years. Reddit has been a huge part of my life for a long time. I even lurked for a year or so before making an account. It feels like a break up in a weird way, but lets remember we’re breaking up because they’ve become a controlling abusive spouse and we deserve better :)
Now we’ve entered a polyamorous relationship (multiple Lemmy instances)
Honestly it’s all pretty confusing to me I’m getting better and better but I think its gonna take a couple weeks.
Honestly? I fucking love it.
Its SO fast (I have my own instance), and instead of subscribing to subreddits and one server, now I subscribe to communities and multiple instances.
The people are responsive.
Only problem is missing niche communities, and discoverability, but that will improve with time hopefully with something like multi-reddits.
See like I dont even know what you just said lol. I don’t know what an instance is or what a server means in this context, and i know what a community is kinda but no idea why they are called something.something//Lemmy.something.biz.kbin haha. and I dont know what multiple instances is.
I’ve got a lot to learn. But hey I managed to reply to this so im getting somewhere.
Okay, here’s how I explained it to my kid.
You’ve got the united states, that’s lemmy.
You’ve got states, which are instances. Servers are the roads inthem ,and the things that keep the roads working.
Communities are cities.
Kbin is Canada. Mastadon is France, where they do things weird, but they’re working on the same basic principles.
The fediverse is the UN.
It ain’t exactly right, but it ain’t exactly wrong :)
haha that gave me a good laugh :)
This has helped me more than anything else I think lol love it.
Think of lemmy as like an email (except everyone can see it). You have an email address “steakfries” and the domain you registered your email on “@lemmy.one” so if I want to email you I have to enter in @steakfries@lemmy.one
I can “email” you from any domain, be it Gmail, yahoo, my own server, etc and you can likewise respond.
Yeah that’s the problem I think, is that the majority of people aren’t familiar with how web technologies work and how all the communication happens.
Basic users can just signup on lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org forever and just treat it like their new Reddit home.
I’m probably only really a week into all this stuff and I feel like I have a solid layman’s grasp of it all. You’ll get there too :)
thanks! its getting easier by the hour. This https://browse.feddit.de/ is a great place to search for communities if you haven’t seen it yet.
I also have my own instance. But it feels so lonely being the only one on a sever haha. That being said, do you know if upvotes and downvotes are also federated? In fact, I’m using jerboa on beehaw and I don’t think I see any upvote / downvote metrics
beehaw disabled downvotes, but other instances haven’t. the sidebar said disabled downvotes encourages more active discussion, and prevents unpopular opinions from being silenced by a flood of downvotes. they want people to engage by saying “i disagree with you, here’s why” instead of passively downvoting and moving on.
you should be able to see you the upvotes on your comments though.
Fairly sure upvotes/downvotes on comments have been federated into my instance. I can’t see it on Lemmy’s webUI but it appears via the mlem app.
and like why is your name so long. it says @nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev that just seems ridiculous. why not just nii236
Says you:
I’m chatting to you from https://lemmy.jtmn.dev, and you’re chatting to me from https://lemmy.one, on a community on https://beehaw.org.
okay I’ve learned a bit because I’m pretty sure I understand that now. Like I said it’s gonna take a few weeks but I’ll get there. I’m pretty determined to leave reddit and have been for a long time just needed a push. I’m already making my way around my new “frontpage” alright. I do like how fast everything is and how comments and upvotes seem to be live.
I keep having to force myself to use Lemmy instead. I literally just caught myself on Reddit. Ugh
I solved that problem by deleting the app I used for Reddit. I mean, it’s going to stop working in about two weeks anyway, so might as well delete it now.
yeah i deleted Sync :( and just replaced the app with the Jerboa app for Lemmy. Now i open my phone and automatically click Lemmy and its working pretty well for me.
I made my reddit app not have access to data over wifi or the cell network, so when I open it, it opens and forever is “loading” until I realize my mistake.
I’ve had the best day. Most I’ve accomplished in a while IRL. And of corse exploring around this place.
That’s awesome!
13 year club here too. It sure seems like a lot of us long timers have been the first to move. I guess there’s a certain sense of ‘I’ve seen where this goes’ from experience with other sites in the past.
Also part of the 10+ year club (long time lurker). You’re right about that “familiar sense”, but for myself it comes with a forgotten sense of optimism.
Reddit’s been on the decline for years before the Vitoria incident or The Great Purge… but as long as I had my niche communities, baconreader, and old.reddit.com - I could “get by”… as Reddit became more and more aggressive in selling “me as the product”.
The federated and open source nature of Lemmy will solve the issue of “corporate presence”, but it will require us to “roll up our sleeves” - which I find refreshing.
No bots or astroturfing here yet though (or ChatGPT posts), so who knows, maybe Lemmy will spiral faster than expected
It’s really strange how civil and relaxed the discussions have been. Makes me wonder how much of Reddit is either children or bots stirring the pot constantly
I suspect the answer is that there’s probably a depressing number of authentic human adults who just are like that, and it creates a feedback loop/spiral where people are pushed into being more aggressive/vitriolic as a defense mechanism.
The real problem, I think, is the ease with which those individuals can hop between communities/be directed toward communities particularly sensitive to their brand of bile on social media sites. I know there’s a lot of talk out there about making on-boarding to Fediverse stuff easier, but realistically, being able to layer several barriers along the way (e.g. finding an instance to join, finding an instance to harass without getting either yourself banned or your entire instance defederated) will go a long way toward limiting the influx of bad actors.
Security through obscurity!
Though be careful, too obscure and you’ll get the most horrible people hanging around. I discovered this while Bitmessage community…
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “security through obscurity” so much as just the nature of a web that isn’t all in a few big baskets.
Besides, it’s a knife that cuts both ways: the barriers to fluid movement means the worst people are kinda just stuck festering in a handful of places and everyone eventually learns where they are. Like, the big basket-style web has been a boon for fascists and their ilk in large part because there’s lower barriers to entry and its possible to build a funnel from normal/mainstream boards to the more radicalized ones through intermediary communities.
But, when everyone knows, for instance, that something like Voat or Stormfront is where all the vitriolic racists are, there’s kinda an upper limit to how easily they can lure people in since eventually they’ve gotta drag you there or else you’ll probably slip away from the indoctrination, and that often means tipping their hands just a bit too soon to get past the “wait a moment, these guys are terrible people” filters.
only 12 years for me, but almost a decade of premium ends now
I’m getting my 13yr badge in November. Idk. I don’t think I’m deleting my account. I couldn’t even muster up the willpower to delete my Twitter account that I’ve had since 2009, that I’ve barely used for the last several years.
So to delete my reddit account, that I use everyday – except at least today and tomorrow; probably first time in several years, maybe even a decade – feels wrong.
My goal, however, is to reduce my activity on reddit over time. Give up my remaining mod positions. Start unsubscribing from subreddits little by little. Maybe just use it for researching work related thing. So far, Beehaw/Lemmy and Tildes and Mastodon have been holding my attention pretty well. We’ll see.
I can relate. I’m a sentimental digital hoarder, I guess. But I’ve beaten my impulses to get on reddit today at least!
This is how I feel, too. I’m leaving my posts and comments up; ironically, I used to habitually purge my profile every year or so because I was worried about IRL people finding me through my activity, but now, I’d prefer to just leave it. Even if I stop being active on Reddit, it’s currently one of the best ways to find answers to niche problems; I’d like to keep my stuff accessible for anyone looking for extremely specific answers. I’ve been fairly private on Reddit, though, so it feels less sentimental and more practical. (Twitter, on the other hand… I never use it, but everything on it is way too sentimental to nuke.)
Same here. been on reddit for around 12 years, of nearly constant daily use. it’s a weird feeling.
There are dozens of us!
Yeah, I’ve learned so much from people on that place.
I have typed the letter “o” for “old.reddit” about six or seven times today out of habit. Thanks to the Beehaw team for providing a space which is better than a simple substitute in many ways. I am simply incapable of operating any of the newer reddit interfaces, so once “old.” is history that will be it for me totally.
Caught myself googling “something something Reddit” today and realized this is gonna be harder than I thought. Really liking it here though and hopefully this gets the user base up to a point I can start googling “something something beehaw”
Ask chatgpt what Reddit things about something something. It has probably scraped everything on Reddit anyway.
Scraped, but rearranged into a perfectly readable word salad.
Yeah this is the main reason I won’t be giving up reddit 100% once the 3rd party apps go down. I definitely won’t be doom scrolling on my phone like I used to, but I 100% will still use reddit on my desktop as a research tool. There’s just nothing else like it for the amount of quality niche information atm.
If I’m forced to the official Reddit app, I’ll go from following 30+ subreddits to only 5 or 6. And even those, I’ll likely comment less on.
There are communities like /r/LEGO that I don’t know of a replacement for. (Maybe there could be a thread where people post the Reddit communities that they miss and people reply with alternatives. Someone could even keep a list to make it easy to search.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried the official app, but that strategy wouldn’t even help most likely. Every 3-5 posts that you see from your subscribed subs, they throw in a “recommended for you” nonsense post to try and drive your engagement. It’s infuriating
Made one for yah
Hero
Same, I’ve got an ad blocker and I won’t be using it for content. But reddit still has an amazing repertoire of knowledge.
I’ve had multiple times when I launched Boost (my third party app of choice - at least until it’s forced to shut down) out of force of habit.
Thankfully, I planned for this eventuality. I installed a “focus” app and set it to block Boost and the Reddit app for 2 days. (I’ve since also moved the apps away from their usual spot on my phone to prevent launches.)
I just uninstalled BaconReader a couple of days ago. I replaced its shortcut with Jerboa yesterday.
I logged into old a few times since to check for any orangereds, but it’s been long enough now that I never need to go back to check on anything.
As the other commenter said, this is also why I won’t give up reddit 100%
Ooooh man, I was searching up something earlier today and out of reflex I clicked a Reddit result. Felt icky once I realized where I ended up and went Back fast 😅.
It’ll be interesting to see if/how we’ll come to adapt to a more decentralized getup in time. I wonder how we might quickly search through all the public federated platforms at once? It’s gon’ get old fast to type
[x] site:beehaw.org OR site:lemmy.world OR [ad nauseum]. I think it’d be cool if decentralized platforms got popular enough that search engines would add something likesite:!social.lemmy.What’s interesting is that a bunch of subreddits have disappeared from my multis in Apollo, perhaps because they were dark for over a day? Not sure.
Just woke up and first thing I do was open Apollo (lol) and this is what I noticed.
Apollo shutting down completely is going to disrupt my life like crazy!
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
As far as i understand it’s not 90% of all Subs but 90% of all the Subs who announced to participate in the Blackdown. Many Subs, especially ones led by Reddit employees but also many NSFW subs are still public
I got the 90% from here: https://reddark.untone.uk/ - So this site is only listing the subreddits which declared their participation? In that case, I misunderstood the purpose of this site. I thought that this is a mostly complete subreddit list (granted, I have no idea how many subreddits exists on reddit… I’m not sure you can even get a list or scrape them effectively)
In march 2023 there were 3,125,000 subreddits. So the total % of subreddits going dark is very low. However I assume a lot of subreddits are very small. It would be interesting to see how many of the top 1,000 or 10,000 subreddits are in private mode right now. source for total amount of subreddits: https://backlinko.com/reddit-users
Thanks for the info and source. I should have figured. I edited my comment to reflect this, I think we see the long tail effect in action, and just goes to show that every subreddit and community should participate in the protest, no matter how small.
You can find the top 50 largest subreddits by amount of subscribers here: https://subredditstats.com/list/most-subscribers
Compare it to the list of https://reddark.untone.uk/ and you can see that not all the largest subreddits are listed, for example r/AskReddit.
It seems the subs that went private don’t show up on the stats anymore. /r/funny has more subscribers than /r/AskReddit, for example
I’ve been watching the forked version, and the total number of subreddits and darksubs have been increasing. My first thought was that there were a heap on new subs being created. I’m now not so sure what I’m looking at.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion subs. You have no idea how many posts they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments is mind-boggling
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
Yeah, this too. The same image/gif/vid get’s reposted on several different subs. Sometimes with the same title, sometimes with a different title, but it is the same content. They don’t wanna crosspost cuz it reveals that they post the same image to several subs, which decreases their chance of actually getting some subscribers.
Concerning the karma farmers and other spam bots: A lot of active redditors who reported them as soon as they cropped up aren’t on the platform at the moment. And some people might make use of ‘the troubles’ to set up new bots or for promotion. The last I’ve seen of those (before blackout) were people gifting karma/coordinate upvotes via subs somehow affiliated with Temu (some newish cheap shopping platform).
Yep, just look at what’s happening on lemmynsfw.com… number of communities is blowing up.
I can unserstand commenting, cuz… maybe it makes you hard and you just wanna like let that gal/guy know that, in the miniscule chance he/she reads that comment, doesn’t have an OF and is actually trying to hook up… and is the original content creator… hope never dies.
Remember that quote from Dumb and Dumer “so you’re telling me there’s a chance 😏”… it’s like that.
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about I could perform my own research into the subject.
Look at the posts from users that post there, mostly OF promotions, you’ll see like 20, 30 posts back to back in 10, 20 minute span.
OF is a huge business now, litelarly get sugar daddies from OF subscribers, not to mention the subscribers themselves, they bring a revenue as well. Most of them just want a quick buck, don’t wanna work, live with their parents at 25+ years… bsiaclly, just lazy AF individuals that make pocket money from that so they at least don’t bother their parents when they hang out with friends. a large portion even show their faces now, don’t even care, their friends and family know, it doesn’t seem to bother them.
I cam share some of those subs if you’d like, got an account for that on reddit 😁.
Reddit is the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” and some of the subreddits that are “firmly in control” by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.
People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.
Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will “always come back” so long as those communities remain intact.
Bots usually post to their own user page/subreddit to my knowledge.
Depends on the bot. There are many that go into subreddits and repost old popular posts. Sometimes in subreddits you wouldn’t think of. Like, for some reason the King Of The Hill subreddit had a really bad reposting bot infestation. I guess those wholesome and kind of niche but moderately active subs are chosen because people are less likely to dig into it, but if you check on the post history it becomes clear it’s an account with no comments that is just reposting content back into subs.
Is this a restriction on bot activity? I guess it would make sense for non-malicious bots using the API, but there’s nothing stopping writing a malicious bot just using the website scraping and automation to post anywhere. At least I never had to fill out a captcha, but there’s possible there are measure against these kind of bots as well.
Depends on the bot and its target subs. Some subreddits are set up to restrict posting below a certain karma line, so bots aimed at those will do stuff like posting to their own profile—to get around, say, a moderation tool that’ll auto-ban accounts that post in “free karma subreddits”—to build up the needed karma to post wherever. Those are the ones I assume @Kay_Angel is thinking of
But, a bot that’s aimed at a less restrictive community wouldn’t need to jump through the hoops so would work a lot more directly.
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
Well, the Denver Nuggets finally won their first ever NBA championship while the NBA subreddit was closed. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the sub reopens since - from what I understand - the decision to close that sub was not very popular with the users.
Was proud of the /r/nba mods for closing. Unlike the /r/games mods who wouldn’t even close it when the community wanted them to.
Honestly the subreddits for the 4 major sports as well as MMA are like the only reason I use reddit. If we can just find a solid alternative for those I’d be happy. The discord server, at least for r/NBA is pretty toxic.
Did you find your communities in Lemmy yet?
Yeah but some of the specific ones (like for 49ers) took me to a browser version of the website and I got stuck trying to login/create an account. Didn’t see the option to subscribe. Feels like a mess!
Copy paste the community@instance thing into the search bar on your home instance, then click on the result. You can subscribe there
Too bad r/DenverNuggets stayed public and created an r/nba refugee game thread
If 200,000 people would rather figure out how to make all their individual forum softwares work together in synchrony than put up with your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Dunno. I never installed it coz I never install any apps if I can help it, and I know how to use a web browser. But if a quarter of a million people would rather subject themselves to the complexities of distributed information networks and the politics of inter-instance blocking than use your bloody app, Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
It’s like the kids today don’t know what a web address is with their obsession with apps. They seem to prefer to download an executable than read a text document. If even them, a million zoomer kids who are normally obsessed with apps, if even they would rather entertain the idea of a communications commons not owned and controlled by oligarchs than use your app, then maybe you should have just used yer IPO money to buy Apollo?
Dunno. I’ve never installed either. Sounds sketchy. I distrust apps.
? why are you pinging me
Hey man, seem like a cool dude. Who wouldn’t want to ping you? Keep being awesome my dude
Okay you specifically have carte blanche to ping me to tell me how awesome I am. But please try to keep it to less than maybe 30 pings a month
@Gaywallet Replying in your mega-thread. KBin here is tagging you when I do that and I didn’t delete it.
Haven’t used Lemmy much, perhaps that behaviour is different?
I paid for the Apollo app when I used iOS, and I do not regret it in the slightest, because I’ve never been paid for any of the programming I’ve ever done. In fact, it’s all been done under the auspice of a student loan that I never earned a degree from. I’m happy to see someone get paid for their programming work and the fact that a multi-billion dollar company is trying to extort these programmers disgusts me to the highest level.
This made my day, as a person in your situation i can relate this…
I actually like the Reddit app (which apparently makes me the only one), but I’m not for Reddit fucking everyone over.
I think you may actually be the only one. whoa. I’ve never downloaded it so I wouldn’t know. But doesn’t it have ads? Because I hate ads so much and would never use an app that pushed them. Fuck ads honestly, I actually put in a good amount effort to make sure I see exactly 0 minutes of ads per day.
Yeah, my wife uses the official app and she complains about the ads. Constantly, certain subreddit posts show up in her feed as an ad.
I tried the official app and didn’t like it. It was too bloaty, comment chains felt annoying, navigation was annoying, lack of features was annoying.
I initially used Reddit Is Fun, then moved to Sync for some reason. Then moved to Boost after the Sync dev went MIA last year.
Each one of those was leagues above the official app.
Thats funny my wife had the official app for a while and deleted it when I showed her Sync, I didn’t even realize she wasn’t using Sync to browse reddit i just assumed she did and never asked. I used Sync for years and years. Alien Blue I think before that. I assumed reddits app probably looked something like they’re new browser site and I hated that thing. I only ever used old.reddit with RES. Now I’ll never go back there again if I don’t have a good reason too.
If you’re on Android and tech-handy you can remove the ads from the official app with Revanced Patcher.
yes i saw that yesterday and im really happy thats available for people who still want to be there without ads. For me though at this point im just done with reddit completely.
I used it for a good long while but what inevitably pushed me away were the absurd loading times and the ads. Things just took forever to load. Like, multiple minutes to watch a video, even more to load a subreddit. And there were ads every 5 posts.
Have you even tried the alternatives? This might just be a “not knowing any better” situation
@TheButtonJustSpins It’s like letting oligarchs monopolize the means of communication is a bad idea or something!? Who knew.
The mobile web interface sucks diarrhea geysers, so yeah, those of us who use our phones more than our, ahem, desktop terminals prefer an app that’s actually optimized for mobile.
@CeruleanRuin their website says right there on the nag popup. This website is deliberately user hostile, to drive you all onto the app where you can be efficiently transported towards the rotating knives.
I mostly just didn’t look at Reddit much to avoid the trap.
Reddit, maybe you have a pretty shitty app?
Oh, they know. They just don’t care.
