I’m glad to be totally off of Reddit now but I have to say, props to the mods doing this kind of stuff. It’s pretty hilarious
They're getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.
The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez's side was insane before I left for good.
It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.
Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.
What a weird thing to target with bots.
Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they've also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don't get lumped in with them.
So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.
I've talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn't affect them personally.
i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don't post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don't check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)
but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt's tos, so that's nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
At least one post was defending reddit in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that's for sure. If they have one bot, who's to say they don't have thousands?
I can't tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.
Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.
They're definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.
Is it ironic that ChatGPT is defending spez increasing API costs “to combat LLMs”?
Before I left I tried engaging with some of them, the only one to have a discussion was either a very fast typist or was doing a copy/paste. Their arguments weren't really consistent and only made sense independently, they claimed to have read transcripts of the Apollo dev interview with the Verge and various other sources but completely misrepresented or ignored basically every detail that made Reddit look bad. It did not feel like a genuine discussion with someone who actually believed their own arguments or was interested in anything other than muddying the waters in defense of Reddit management.
No doubt, but they've really ramped up lately. It's like all the manchildren from t_D suddenly saw their chance to be assholes again without consequence.
The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.
.. because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
Watch r/ conservative and r/ conspiracy become default subs lol
I don't think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that's already served by default on Reddit.
Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It's fucking trash.
It’s almost as if making changes that are blatantly hostile to the unpaid group of people who literally keep your site from devolving into a cesspool on a daily basis isn’t the best of ideas…
This is how the playbook for Fascism works.
I look at it this way: it sucks, but it's not surprising - it's expected. There's no reason for them to cater to the users, because that's not how these things work. The people who made this decision
(a) mostly care about money
(b) were obviously willing to lose the favor of Reddit's users for money
(c) have built a platform who's monetization model has become somewhat at odds with what made Reddit good in the first place
(d) are probably going to succeed in making money from Reddit
It's sad, it really sucks. But, there's nothing we can really do about it, apart from things like post memes mocking Spez or making subreddits go "dark".
Neither of those are long term solutions.
I'd rather we moved on and let it go, tbh. We could be doing a lot more
Almost like they're being paid to do it.
Exactly. Depending on what time you posted, you could get two totally different responses to a post.
Yup, before the 1st I was getting mass harassed by what were clearly new accounts for pointing out the responders were clearly copying/pasting from a script.
But once that was pointed out, only 12 year old accounts with little posting history showed up lol, which seemed bizarre.
I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as "I'm just not very active on reddit". My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?
I've heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.
I think this guy was just someone who's defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.
It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn't be so stupid and oblivious...but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It's now apparent that spez is that stupid.
I hope they don't bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. There's a lot of power tripping shitty mods, but a lot don't deserve half the grief they get. Some people tend to take out a lot of negativity on mods when they cannot see the human.
The griefing doesn't look good for Reddit either. Harassing your unpaid volunteers = excellent investment, probably, I guess. Maybe it does, controversy keeps people engaged.
It's very much inline with how wine makers pivoted during the US alcohol prohibition era by instead selling concentrated blocks of grape juice and a nice little pamphlet with a warning on how to avoid turning said grape juice into wine.
I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I'm glad to see the shenanigans continue.
Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there
I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.
I think Lemmy's biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don't understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.
But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.
I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had Gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.
But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.
Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don't yet fully understand how everything works.
I'm hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren't very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn't too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.
Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to "convert" them to point to your instance's version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.
Just some things I've noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!
One aspect I'd love (and is apparently in the works) is swapping instances while keeping your history. A migration tool of sorts. Would help.
Still the roughness is sorta endearing in its own way. But I don't think it'd be endearing to most people.
Lemmy.world just finished pushing significant stability and performance improvements to the Lemmy codebase and to their own server, and from what I've heard it's lead to significant improvements. I agree that Lemmy is unstable, but it's also beta software undergoing rapid improvement, and I'm optimistic on where it will be by the end of the year.
I feel like most of the problem would be physical hardware. Costly servers that would need to be able to meet Lemmy's growing demands.
I'm not sure how much optimization from the software side can be done to reduce resource requirements. There's certainly things that can be done to improve user experience though.
Though it's not like it matters to most of us if they do reverse course. I already deleted everything on my Reddit account. It's all gone permanently.
At this point even if the API changes are reversed I’m don’t with Reddit.
I'm liking Lemmy a lot. I rolled my own instance so performance is great. The only issue is delayed federation of new posts, but comments seem to go through instantly.
How long of a delay? Do you known if the delay is on your end, taking a while to load from every other instance, or from the other ones being slow to "tell" yours about new posts?
I think the delay is due to syncing historic backlog on the community. Not 100% sure though.
On my instance it says that some communities are fully synced so it looks like there is zero delay. So long as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml are working on their end.
I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.
I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.
I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.
On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn't want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.
But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there's few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there's enough content, it doesn't matter much who created it.
Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn't really have that (except for /r/iama).
To be fair, Mastodon is still growing and it's much easier to use now than a year ago. Reddit didn't uproot Digg overnight.
I personally have left for Mastodon and never looked back. Ivory is making it so easy and beautiful. But I’m not following sassy quipsters, c-tier celebrities and outrage farmers, so I’m not really anything that stayed on Twitter. But a lot of these “nexus posters” haven’t done the switch and/or had done it but returned to Twitter.
Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I'm grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.
No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.
I hope they can manage to tank reddit's IPO
This has exposed the incompatibility of a company wanting to make $$$$, when it relies on volunteers. Mods aren't eager to do unpaid work just so spez can get rich.
I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn't roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won't be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.
I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins
Admin was kicking mods that didn't approve. Absolutely forced to reopen.
The thing is, Reddit doesn't allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they'd kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don't care.
The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he's not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he's completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.
Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don't have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.
I'd love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what's stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?
r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It's just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then... don't replace them? Now there hasn't been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.
I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?
Maybe it's to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of "This is what happens when you cross the admins."
I guess it's possible, but what good would that do reddit? That's millions people who aren't going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren't using any ad blockers, so they'd be losing revenue..
I'm honestly not sure. Reddit's decision making here has been so stupid I'm just guessing their motivations.
I check the sub every few days to see if they have mods yet, we'll see what hapens. :p
Is Reddit going to tell itself it's being bad?
The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny
These are large subs.
Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀
I knew it was over when my feed was plastered with various subreddits for food delivery workers
I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.
/r/truerateme is a lot funnier than shittytattoos. A chance for basement-dwelling incels to rate pretty girls who wouldn't give them the time of day 5.5.
Right, I'm pretty positive r/funny was the largest sub to participate in the original protest.
I'm scared to open /r/OnlyFans now
Give it 3 months and it's all forgotten about. New users won't know the difference.
The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.
Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won't notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they're used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it's likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won't notice or care about. I'm just glad we've got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit
The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.
Now that's a name I haven't seen in ages!
While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).
On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub's only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn't very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you're an asshole for something you did.
And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn't followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that there's benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.
Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it's devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they'd always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.
I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It's easy enough that you don't need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets "eternal September".
You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.
Also a lot of the more high quality comments seem to be migrating.
Sorry, I'm mostly bringing over my low quality comments. Sorry guys.
I followed mostly games and tech related stuff and they mostly rolled over quick or didn't even participate. So figured it was a lost cause from the get go. When I was subbed there was not much difference in usual activity , since I did not sub to the main subs. In a lot of cases I actually had blocked them long ago.
On the plus side those communities have had good activity on lemmy without need for the reddit mods to bother migrating.
LOL... Who would buy into their IPO now? There's a HUGE risk of this going to zero.
I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.
It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.
And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who's in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.
It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.
Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they're an optional part of people's lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it's marginally more convenient than piracy.
Honestly, /r/all is pretty pitiful these days
I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It's astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it's not filtered by subjects you're actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.
I've noticed a change too and I've tried to keep that separate from my feelings about Reddit. It just doesn't seem all that entertaining or novel as it was a couple months back.
Perhaps when you piss off that tiny slice of your users that actually produces the content everyone else wants to see and the moderators who ensure they see that quality content, you're going to have problems.
It wasn't a perfect system for sure, but it was holding it together for quite a few years.
I’m really fuckin loving getting to watch this war being waged on Reddit from Lemmy. I was really worried that, on the first, all of the protests would peter and those of us pissed about it would be gone and things would just even out for the company. Love to see it still being fought, and more dirty than ever.
As much as I'd love to log into Reddit and see this go down, I'm happy just not using Reddit. How much longer do you think they'll hold out?
Do not underestimate average people's resilience to enshittification
I just saw someone on one of my fb groups saying she's heard a lot about reddit lately and wanting to make an account and asking how it works.
I tried to ward her off but the negative press just seems to be enticing new users.
My guess ist that if she still is on fb in 2023 she might actually love it on Reddit now and in the future...
That’s fine, they’re the people we don’t want over here. They’re part of Reddits problem.
Tell her one of the Lemmy apps is Reddit
It's Teddit.
You can train mice or pigeons to hit a button for reward, but the button has to dispense reward pretty much 100%. Once they're trained, you can dial down the reward - 50%, 25%...1% - and they'll keep mashing that button, doing work for free. Human buttons and rewards may be more complicated, but it's the same thing.
It's the mods leaving that are going to doom the site. The users will follow soon after
Define “doom.” Reddit will lose its power users, its trendiness, and just become another forum for recycled content like 9gag or limp along like Digg or MySpace for years, but I don’t see it shutting down.
Yeah, pretty much. The sad reality is that only the most outspoken will actually make a switch. The vast majority will simply accept it as the new norm, because they don’t care enough to bother with a new platform.
for now. switches like this don't happen one day to the next. reddit has broken a lot of trust with its core users and put things in motion that cannot be stopped, at least without extraordinary action that they're clearly unwilling of. these processes will take years to play out but they're happening.
same thing is going on with twitter. the easier mastodon becomes to use and the more twitter falls apart, the more the flow of users from one platform to the next will pick up the pace.
The most outspoken are also the ones generating the most content.
I fear this is true. 🤦
It doesn't matter, at this point. Lemmy is already a good-enough replacement for reddit, with better core principles, and it's just getting better.
Get some popcorn and watch the drama, and expect nothing.
It's okay to expect more drama though, right?
Second drama? I don’t know if they know about second drama.
I trust in spez to commit to even more enraging changes to Reddit. When it'll happen idk, but it most definitely will
You can always expect more drama.
I heard some people still use ...Twitter!
Truly insane
Yeah, for now people are still going to incidentally use reddit for human-written non-seo optimized text.
Heck, I needed it last night for help with my computer.
Things will climax once sync for reddit releases their Lemmy app in 2-4 weeks
The apps are going to be a game changer. If they can make it easier and intuitive to sign up, manage your accounts, find communities, and eventually group communities together and filter your feed, casual users will start flocking. It’s all about the UX and UI.
I hope to see the apps even accept donations and distribute part of it to the Lemmy devs and server hosts to help keep things sustainable.
As an Apollo user, switched to wefwef and suddenly its like Reddit 10 years ago. Lots of interesting and weird content with great UX.
That and hopefully each app will create their own federations. It will be a refreshing to see the developers become the leaders
For those waiting, definitely try out Memmy for iOS. Right now it is in Test Flight, but should be releasing any day now. The dev seems super passionate and the app has gotten exponentially better in just a couple weeks.
I’m really enjoying wefwef. It’s basically Apollo for lemmy
I’m keen to give it a go but the beta is full. Am keeping an eye out for the app store release! In the meantime Wefwef is excellent and I may end up sticking with it anyway (no harm in shopping around though!)
I've been switching between Memmy and Mlem. Both have their share of missing features right now, I'm usually sticking with one until I hit a need to switch.
Both are great, Memmy is the winner so far.
So far Connect for Lemmy feels close to sync. So far it's working great on Android.
A lot of us are looking forward to that day.
you're talking about the 0.1 of the 1/9/90 rule resisting the clearly telegraphed decay of the platform they poured 5-15 years into on average. they built that place, do not underestimate the lengths they will go to keep it up.
assuming one more round of further threats, my prediction is that about half the currently protesting communities will either switch to a new form of protest, stop, or be made an example of, by about the end of july. but for a proper "end" of the protests, spez would be lucky if it happened by the end of the summer, and their negative impact on the platform is already severe and permanent. i honestly don't know if the admins are stupid and/or out of touch enough to not notice the drop in content quality or are just bold enough to lie about it, but this spells the beginning of a long and inevitable process of people leaving to better sites as those who gave reddit its unique value stop contributing and giving lurkers a reason to stay.
reddit will never feel the same again, but it will feel about the best it ever will again around the end of the year, before the decay truly sets in. unless the admins choose that time for the next round of killing off old reddit, of course.
reddit will never feel the same again
It really doesn’t seem like the cool place it once was. They took the vibe away with these API changes.
lol without an app on my phone, I tried opening r/pics on my mobile browser to see the damage, only to be met with a "you must view NSFW communities in our app" page.
you can use old reddit but it's a pain and a half on mobile
Hopefully long enough for casual users to start looking for alternatives.
I hope this is true.
Its going to be a while. Most content creators especially comic artists, streamers and youtubers are still on reddit. Their fans are there, and its unlikely they'll budge until the comic artists post here too, or the mods of the youtube communities announce a migration.
I disagree. I know and follow a bunch of creators on social media and twitch, but even as a Reddit power user I knew so few specific users. Influencers may post links to their content but their Reddit account is hardly relevant.
Okay, hear me out:
I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you're going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don't agree.
Sure, it's nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that's not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn't be decided on the basis of 'can I win'; a much less restrictive--and very deeply fun--philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?' If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen'.
In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af...I am living for this.
Very refreshing take on it. The cynicism about whether the protests were 'worth it' because we didn't see massive results felt like it missed all the fun of giving the greedy corporation the collective finger.
If the only reason you'll fight is because you think you can win, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it's worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won't, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I'm in: let's go.
Right. I fight not because I believe I'll win, or even because I believe victory is "possible", but because it's more comfortable for me so to speak to be fighting than to quietly and passively support the ideology I disagree with. It is more "restful" to me to be fighting a fight I believe in than to be resting in a world I hate.
You. You are my people.
The problem is that the finger is still a form of engagement when you do it on the site you're protesting. The admins don't care as long as you're still driving clicks.
Legit and I agree.
However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing "I'm not touching you" in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren't melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it's happening, and that's enough.
Honest question, is there such a thing as bad engagement? Or is engagement like that saying about bad publicity?
NSFW content can’t be monetised and advertisers are having second thoughts about their willingness to advertise there (or so the lowering number of clicks on the advertisement page leads one to believe), so I guess there can be bad engagement.
I can handle a fun protest.
The protests remind me of the last night at bar on land that just got bought by developers and will soon be torn down. The battle is lost, you can do nothing and leave or you can get weird and write your farewells on the walls, steal the toilet seats, and otherwise vandalize the place on your way out and have one last laugh with your friends before you head your separate ways.
I love it. Especially that the mods of the default subs have the balls to do it
turns out it's not a good idea to piss off the unpaid people put in charge of front page subreddits
Meanwhile redditors on /r/piracy kicked their own mod for continuing the protest. I think their Lemmy migration to lemmy.dbzer0.com is a bit too effective and now only loyal redditors left at that sub.
On the flipside piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a lot better content and discussion than /r/piracy where it's mostly the same memes reposted every few weeks.
It says no posts when clock on that link. What am I doing wrong?
It's not really a link, it's the piracy community at lemmy.dbzer0.com instance.
Fidelity has been dropping the valuation of its stake in reddit, and that's only as of May 31st. We don't know yet how the value will respond to all this drama, but I suspect it will go down more.
The IPO might not fail, but they probably won't get what they wanted out of it.
Unfortunately this probably means that the platform will sell to people who expect to get use out of it for direct public influence of some kind (marketing/politics).
Sadly they’ll still get rich as shit if valuation drops a lot so there isn’t much incentive to treat the community better.
I invest in quite a few tech companies and I was considering investing in Reddit, but there's no way in hell I would now. I can't be the only potential investor they have alienated.
I'm happy that they're keeping it up, but I've already moved on to the point that even if Reddit were to completely go back on the API change, I wouldn't come back. Personally I've already moved the goal post to where Steve Huffman needs to go before I'd consider ever going back. Reddit is dead for all I care.
Listen there's a whole board at reddit that greenlit every decision he's made. He's not some mad scientist.
The way reddit has decided, as a company, to treat their users over the last 40 days or so, that's enough for me.
Imagine if in the MySpace days we all found out that using MySpace was generating ad revenue for Tom so he could build a torture chamber for puppies. That would have been awful enough that even 20 years later, (holy shit MySpace was 20 years ago) and over a decade after Tom had left the company, we would still feel weird about going there to hang out online, and a lot of us would feel disgust every time we were served an ad on the platform.
What I'm saying, is Steve Huffman kills puppies and even accessing reddit.com is basically condoning puppy torture. Wait, no. What I'm saying is reddit has created a blemish so hideous that I wouldn't, not even if I was like, really really drunk. Ya Digg?
Spez was a mod of the Jailbait sub so instead of puppies it was/is kids
I've been editing and deleting 10+ year old comments to deny them that sweet sweet LLM data. No way for me to go back, and I wouldn't anyway
You should check to see that your edits hold. There's been reports of users manually deleting posts and then showing back up a few days later.
They're in full damage control mode.
Agreed. It is funny to hear about, but they would have to roll back years of changes for me to even consider it at this point. Since there is no money in that for them it is pretty much a moot point.
It doesn't matter if huffman goes. This is the result of wanting to make $$$$$$. That won't ever change.
I agree.
Also when we’re all being fucked over no one has a right to say how we (in general) should be protesting. People get to show their anger in whatever way they want. It’s like people asking for civility so they don’t have to deal with uncomfortable messages. Um fuck no. NSFW all the way if that’s what one decides.
Thanks for agitating
The start of your comment reminded me of the exchange between Trevor Noah & Tomi Lauren where Trevor asks her, okay, so if this protest isn't good, and this kind isn't good, how should black people protest? How should they make their grievances known? And she just could not answer that question. Protests aren't comfortable--they're disruptive by nature. If protests don't challenge anything or make anyone uncomfortable, what are they even doing?
It's even healthier when you think about how this anger is being shown in a non-violent manner. If it helps people to express and work through their feelings about changes before deciding to accept those changes or to go elsewhere (setting aside the slim chance that anything actually changes which is rare in my personal experience), then I think it's perfectly fine and normal.
While i wholeheartedly agree that people should protest however the heck the want...
...I still don't get the rage this issue is causing. Don't get me wrong, I'm the guy who has a list of businesses I don't do any sort of business with because of their policies. But i feel like this could have been resolved with shutting down all subs and then everyone taking the summer off from computers. Instead everyone took 48hrs off and then had to get back to their addiction and ramp up their anger in the process.
The NSFW thing is awesome though.
well, some people don’t care, but others like me have been years there finding and joining communities, and for others who became admins and moderators, they spent a good chunk of their time to create and take care of communities over years for free. Now that has been taken from them, and even each step Reddit takes, enrages the content creators and curators even more, so they respond because they don’t want to give up, and now they may want revenge. So I totally support everything they’re doing, from filling it up with useless content to fill it up with NSFW content to avoid ads and so ruining Reddit cash flow. And I hope they keep going on for a while.
People on Reddit keep saying things are mostly back to normal, while tiny subs are hitting the front page of /r/all on the regular with like 2k votes.
Also, I've noticed a pretty significant increase in overt racism. Or rather, significant decrease in moderation of it. I shouldn't be surprised but it keeps catching me off-guard.
Eh, I’ll go against the grain and be honest. I still use it on my desktop at home. Zero mobile use. The user base and information there is still massive at the moment. Once that changes it’s in my rear view, but I won’t pretend like I don’t.
No point in protesting, we already have a better alternative.
Deliberately using an alternative is a form of protesting.
Deliberately using an alternative is a form of protesting.
And it can be, sure, but it's not always the case.
I'm not just using Lemmy until or if Reddit backtracks, I'm using Lemmy because I believe it's the superior platform in many ways and has more to offer.
I didn't make an account here in sign of protest, I made one because Lemmy was suggested to me and I'm liking it better than where I came from.
I'm also aware that many users on this platform would go back to Reddit if they backtracked on the API keys.
Feels like reading the frontline news from far away.
Keep fighting bastards, I don’t know what the end goal will lead too but i know it will be hands of us the victors.
For for how much heavy handed their initial reaction was, I’m surprised that Reddit doesn’t take more aggressive actions. Spez has the loudest voice on highest pole, yet so far he only managed to anger everyone.
Fuck Spez.
It can be easily concluded from his AMA that he is a fool. Big mouth with small brain.
And he was a mod for a very disgusting sub back when it was active.
Although I dislike him as much as anyone, I read that in the early days you could add users as mods without the need for users to accept.
He was supposedly posting on the sub as well. Plus you can remove yourself as a mod, especially if you're an admin.
Jailbait. There’s a bit more to the story though…mod invites were auto-approved at the time. But he seemingly embraced it, even if he didn’t directly acknowledge it.
"Seemingly"? He sent a physical Reddit trophy to the lead perv of that sub and bragged about it in different subs (along with other mods), and that doesn't even begin to touch on the barely-veiled alts he was known to use in that sub and elsewhere to circumvent rules, alter votes, and massage narratives. The guy's a festering moron with a mic.
source: OG Redditor who stood up to that clique back when.
I'm not sure they can. What can they do? I doubt they'll replace moderators with paid Reddit workers. The alternative is to replace them with other power hungry moderators who will bend a knee to the Reddit admins. That might work on some major subreddits but the PR of that might cause more damage.
I think the admins hoped it would have blown over by now. If it's still going on by September I bet they'll need to do something.
I just went and looked at r/videos and I gotta admit that the text-only descriptions of videos and enforcing swearing in every post title is pretty funny.
That's absolutely hilarious
Can’t wait for Reddit admins and Spez to realize they have failed.
Pretty sure they know, but “Refuse to acknowledge fucking up” is the strategy
Spez succeeded, regardless. His end goal was the IPO, consequences he damned. Rectal fissures were entirely acceptable. Now whether Spez is happy with his booty blasting, that’s another question entirely.
His end goal was to destroy 3rd party apps. He doesn't care if it takes all of reddit down in the process, they bruised his ego and he's lashing back with anything and everything he can. It's why he lied about the phone conversation which we found out for sure when the dev posted it in full. He's a toddler.
Spez will feel nothing but anger. I’m sure that he genuinely feels that nothing has been lost. The people that work for him probably feel uneasy that his ego has unnecessarily breathed life into another platform.
I would be pretty annoyed if I sat on the board because Lemmy and Kbin may have been just another Voat had they just come up with something reasonable. It blows my mind that they never floated serving ads through the API just to offset their alleged costs.
Spez is not that hard to figure out. If you connect the dots, he read in the press that ChatGPT used Reddit as a source to train their AI. He saw that as a huge source of value that was being GIVEN away and rushed to slam that door shut with closing the APIs. He wa so obsessed with getting this value that he misread the developers and accused them of being parasites and slandered them publicly.
I think he was also jealous of third party apps being profitable when Reddit wasn't. He viewed this as them stealing his money, and decided to go on a personal crusade against third party apps and their devs to punish them for their perceived treachery.
There's a bunch of transphobic and racist shit on the front page now, spez is probably loving it just like Elon
I thought it was just me seeing that?
The right wing is invading and a lot of posts are just what you said, transphobic, racist, woke-bashing, etc.
I'm not sure if it's just cause I have no account now, but if this is what they are pushing on new people then yikes. I knew the admins leaned right wing (ie forcing kotakuinaction to come back) but this is worse than I thought. I must have blocked a lot of it a while ago
TLDR: Subreddits are protesting against Reddit's API changes, and r/pics, a subreddit with over 30 million members, has marked itself as NSFW (not safe for work). This means that advertisements can no longer be displayed alongside posts in the subreddit. The protest started in June when thousands of subreddits participated in a blackout to protest Reddit's plans to charge for API access. The changes have resulted in third-party apps like Apollo shutting down. As part of the protest, r/pics initially only allowed images of comedian John Oliver to be shared and later amended its rules to allow media featuring Oliver, including erotic fan fiction. The subreddit's moderators posted an "open letter" reminding the community not to swear, as marking the community as NSFW would deprive Reddit of advertising revenue. Reddit has reportedly removed mods for marking their communities NSFW as a protest. Despite this, r/pics was officially marked NSFW on Monday. Other subreddits, such as r/videos and r/funny, are also protesting in their own ways.
Tobe clear - to charge extortionate prices for API access in a deliberate maneuver to kill 3rd party apps and drive users towards reddit’s native app.
App devs were all willing to work with reddit if they could negotiate reasonable fees, but reddit told them to pay up or get lost.
Good bot
The saddest part about this is…it didn’t have to be this way. Reddit’s greed turned something beautiful (or at least with some nice pieces) into a hellscape….
Good that the protest keeps going. Lemmy AND Squabbles are not a fraction of what Reddit was for all my interests and hobbies. Let's hope more and more people keep learning about the alternatives.
Keep poking, disrupting and agitating until you get any reaction. Catharsis is also important.
It's still going on?
I know that r/Python is closed, which is big sub. I ended up there after some search.
I'd never thought that the protest would lay this long. Not a step back!
Is reddits already public or what is going in with the IPO right now?
It was announced for the 2nd half of 2023, but no specific date yet.
Their captain/CEO is disintegrating it into dust. Reddit is worth as much as a couple of napkins, or whatever Elon will pay for it.
I can easily see Musk buying Reddit and degrading it into an even sorrier state
100 BILLIONMUSK BUCKS DOLLARS!!
In my experience, those with power will destroy themselves from spite rather than change their mind.
Burn baby burn. I have no illusions on how much we actually affected reddits bottom line but I can only hope that the power users from reddit will slowly leave the platform.
...I'm unironically considering taping myself unzipping and stroking my meat and posting it there with the title, "This was for you, spez."
Unfortunately r/videos is only allowing text based descriptions of videos at this time, so you'll have to describe it in excruciating detail.
(Srsly tho the illegal upload of Bee Movie was a thrilling read.)
text based descriptions
Like "I'm unzipping it right now.... oh yeah.... oh yeah HHHNNNGG LOOK AT HOW BIG IT IS, BI--"?
Alright, is there a plan B or did I really shouted at nothing.
They're still not allowing gore or porn on /r/PICS, FYI. I guess they don't want to end up like /r/interestingasfuck, which is still archived and has no moderators. (Reddit removed them all for "going against the community's wishes" and allowing NSFW content in a traditionally SFW subreddit.) It's better for them if they can still use their platform to protest, I guess.
/r/mushing I'm mod is still NSFW. I don't visit Reddit anymore now, but if they get sane, I'll flip the switch back. For noe no ad cents for Spaz, or whatever that dick's name is.
Any luck with RIF or a similar app for Lemmy? Someone(s) develop that tool and Reddit is toast
Connect
Wefwef
Jerboa
Those are the ones that come to mind
RiF fanatic here. Neither mirrors directly. But Jerboa wasn't bad. And I find I like Connect the best.
Yeah former RIF user here too, and so far Connect is the best I've found
I'm waiting for boost. Jerboa has been fine so far but I've used boost for almost a decade at this point, it's hard not to have all the quality of life that was built into that app.
Same goes for me and Sync. I'll buy the premium version again for Lemmy as soon as it's available
Lots of Lemmy apps already and more coming, but apps aren't going to turn the tide. Only content will do that. Until there are more subs here, the majority will remain hesitant to leave.
I'm not normally the kind of person that takes pleasure in seeing others fail. At least I try not to be.
I really want to see Steve Huffman fail though
Oooo I actually like the sound of videos being described in text form. Sometimes I find it hard to watch a video if I’m at work, or similar, and a good description is something I’d love to read!
Feel like that should be a….community? (Did I get that right, still so new here!)
It's almost like it is a bad idea to shit on customers and unpaid employees
What’s the point of making it nsfw?
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Most advertisers specifically ask for their ads not to be placed next to NSFW content.
"we don't want the tits in the content to detract from the tits in our ads"
On Monday, r/pics(opens in a new tab) — a massive community with over 30 million members — officially marked itself NSFW (not safe for work), meaning Reddit is no longer able to show advertisements alongside posts appearing in the subreddit.
Plus for any 3rd party apps that are scabbing for reddit, NSFW subs won't show up.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Can't advertise on NSFW subs
It’s explained in the article.
On Monday, r/pics(opens in a new tab) — a massive community with over 30 million members — officially marked itself NSFW (not safe for work), meaning Reddit is no longer able to show advertisements alongside posts appearing in the subreddit.
Basically, they’ve made it impossible to generate revenue from an extremely popular sub, while also potentially scaring advertisers away from reddit as a whole.
Advertisers don't like it, and they make up a big part of Reddit's income.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
I love their tone
(Trying out this accessibility-friendly gif posting, apologies if it doesn’t work)
You love to see it.
/r/mushing I’m mod in is still NSFW. I don’t visit Reddit anymore now, but if they get sane, I’ll flip the switch back. For noe no ad cents for Spaz, or whatever that dick’s name is.
Body
Select language
I've definitely arrived at a place in my online life where I do not need to be on some company's corporate advertising mill website.
I left, and I know I'm just one middle aged dude pining for the internet before the companies turned their roving eyes to it, but I have no interest in going back, regardless of what they do at this point. I offer this because maybe more people will start to think "do I really need to be a part of a community of millions, or even hundreds of millions? or maybe is it more healthy for me to find the right community online that is a bit more like a mid-sized city? We can share news across these little islands, so we don't all need to fit in a single corporate container."
Ah jeez
Can’t wait for Reddit admins and Spez to realize they have failed.
easy for reddit bosses to revert that
It's too late.
It's definitely too late. They've already shown their hand and willingness to abuse their users. I think it's more important now to use this momentum to move to a new platform. I'm hopeful that Lemmy is that new platform.
Even if suddenly their leadership had a change of heart, it doesn't change the fact that there's a perverse incentive for a company to abuse the users.
the r/hornijail would be busy as hack
Reddit is a sinking ship. Let it burn on the way down 🔥
I’m glad to be totally off of Reddit now but I have to say, props to the mods doing this kind of stuff. It’s pretty hilarious
They're getting no end of grief from bad/paid actors though.
The amount of whinging and bootlicking from people taking Spez's side was insane before I left for good.
It doesn’t seem organic. Protest posts would get 95% upvotes, then suddenly 12 hours later get slammed with bootlickers and downvotes.
Reddit felt really astroturfed for years now. Start mentioning Neill Druckman in any capacity and your post immediately got flooded with copy paste hate centered on TLoU2. It seemed organic at the time, but when the TV series came out it was very sus, as if somebody had forgotten to turn off their bot army.
What a weird thing to target with bots.
Transphobes came out of the woodwork for it. And not only were they annoying for the obvious reasons, but they've also poisoned the well for criticism. I loathed the plot, but I have to be careful with my criticism so I don't get lumped in with them.
So much this! TLoU2 was a major setback for me in many ways, but a normal discussion was impossible.
I've talked to a few that seemed organic, but those were basically people who wanted Reddit to get back to normal and not waste time on bullshit that didn't affect them personally.
i did check in a few communities that i was engaging with before, and honestly, it seemed organic, but it was always lurkers/semi-lurkers who don't post and only comment like once every two months. accounts for the delay as well, because they don't check reddit that often (before everything went to shit posts would usually be gathering views for a good 24 hours)
but reddit also started using chatgpt to prop itself up lately (which afaik is against chatgpt's tos, so that's nice for the future lawsuit if they wanna cash in), so idk. that does put a damper on their legitimacy.
Wasn’t it proven that majority of the positive spez posts are from bots or chatgpt or something?
At least one post was defending reddit in r/programming has been shown to be chatGPT, that's for sure. If they have one bot, who's to say they don't have thousands?
I can't tell you how many 1-2 year old accounts I saw with little to no post history that popped out of the woodwork to defend reddit/spez. It was crazy.
Same for spam/ shill accounts on iPhone/ Google play reviews.
They're definitely trying to plug the holes with bubble gum instead of fixing/ addressing the problem which is spez and the 3rd party app/api ban.
Is it ironic that ChatGPT is defending spez increasing API costs “to combat LLMs”?
Genuinely curious: how was that shown? How do you know for sure a post is generated by ChatGPT?
One of its answers in a thread was the classic "as a language model, I am not able to (...)"
That's a bit more straightforward than expected, thanks! 😅
Before I left I tried engaging with some of them, the only one to have a discussion was either a very fast typist or was doing a copy/paste. Their arguments weren't really consistent and only made sense independently, they claimed to have read transcripts of the Apollo dev interview with the Verge and various other sources but completely misrepresented or ignored basically every detail that made Reddit look bad. It did not feel like a genuine discussion with someone who actually believed their own arguments or was interested in anything other than muddying the waters in defense of Reddit management.
You just described Reddit in general
No doubt, but they've really ramped up lately. It's like all the manchildren from t_D suddenly saw their chance to be assholes again without consequence.
The un-moderated right wing shit has been very pronounced on Reddit the last few weeks.
.. because Glorious Leader is a far right wing turd.
Watch r/ conservative and r/ conspiracy become default subs lol
I don't think anyone would even notice next to the garbage that's already served by default on Reddit.
Going to the front page not logged in is like visiting YouTube outside of your account. It's fucking trash.
It’s almost as if making changes that are blatantly hostile to the unpaid group of people who literally keep your site from devolving into a cesspool on a daily basis isn’t the best of ideas…
This is how the playbook for Fascism works.
I look at it this way: it sucks, but it's not surprising - it's expected. There's no reason for them to cater to the users, because that's not how these things work. The people who made this decision
(a) mostly care about money
(b) were obviously willing to lose the favor of Reddit's users for money
(c) have built a platform who's monetization model has become somewhat at odds with what made Reddit good in the first place
(d) are probably going to succeed in making money from Reddit
It's sad, it really sucks. But, there's nothing we can really do about it, apart from things like post memes mocking Spez or making subreddits go "dark".
Neither of those are long term solutions.
I'd rather we moved on and let it go, tbh. We could be doing a lot more
Almost like they're being paid to do it.
Exactly. Depending on what time you posted, you could get two totally different responses to a post.
Yup, before the 1st I was getting mass harassed by what were clearly new accounts for pointing out the responders were clearly copying/pasting from a script.
But once that was pointed out, only 12 year old accounts with little posting history showed up lol, which seemed bizarre.
I had a guy try to justify the latter type of account as "I'm just not very active on reddit". My man, you made one post, commented on one other post a few weeks later, then complete radio silence for 9 years, just to pop up spreading anti-trans propaganda on post after post?
I've heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.
I think this guy was just someone who's defunct account had been hacked and used to troll. All of his comments from that day featured a ton of both sides arguments and misrepresented statistics, which to me looked like someone who was given talking points and tried to fix any conversation he could into conforming to them.
It was obviously propaganda, and I guess previously I would have thought someone who ran something ad large as reddit wouldn't be so stupid and oblivious...but here I am on lemmy a few months later, so who knows. It's now apparent that spez is that stupid.
I hope they don't bend to them. Reddit fully deserves this level of overt trolling at this point.
Literally nothing new. - A Reddit Mod. There's a lot of power tripping shitty mods, but a lot don't deserve half the grief they get. Some people tend to take out a lot of negativity on mods when they cannot see the human.
The griefing doesn't look good for Reddit either. Harassing your unpaid volunteers = excellent investment, probably, I guess. Maybe it does, controversy keeps people engaged.
It's very much inline with how wine makers pivoted during the US alcohol prohibition era by instead selling concentrated blocks of grape juice and a nice little pamphlet with a warning on how to avoid turning said grape juice into wine.
I honestly expected after the API changes rolled out that the backlash on Reddit would stop but I'm glad to see the shenanigans continue.
Same, as much as I hope lemmy succeeds, I simultaneously hope that the API changes get reversed. Good job to those fighting for this over there
I am afraid the two might be mutually exclusive. Lemmy is like old Reddit and still on early adopters. We get more and more newcomers only because Reddit is going downhill.
I think Lemmy's biggest challenges are server stability, increased complexity to use (most don't understand things like instances), and low awareness from others. I only learned about it a day or two ago. Signed up out of curiosity.
But if Lemmy gets even more popular then the various popular instances are going to be stressed. It looks unstable to newcomers who go back to Reddit.
I signed up for lemmy.world originally, constantly had Gateway errors. Lemm.ee seems more stable due to lower traffic.
But others may not be able to recognize that. Even if they did, might not want to create new accounts for several instances and go back to starting from 0.
Agreed. Also joined Lemmy a couple days ago and don't yet fully understand how everything works. I'm hoping that lemmy apps add features to make it easier for people who aren't very tech-savvy, like automatically assigning people to a general purpose instance (one that isn't too full preferably) unless they wish to choose a specific one.
Another thing is that I believe links to posts are somehow instance specific and you have to "convert" them to point to your instance's version of said post, or something like that, in order to see comments and interact. That seems clunky and should probably be made easier somehow, maybe apps could automatically convert links? Or maybe there is a way to make links instance-agnostic from the get go.
Just some things I've noticed in my time here. Very much enjoying the experience though!
One aspect I'd love (and is apparently in the works) is swapping instances while keeping your history. A migration tool of sorts. Would help.
Still the roughness is sorta endearing in its own way. But I don't think it'd be endearing to most people.
Lemmy.world just finished pushing significant stability and performance improvements to the Lemmy codebase and to their own server, and from what I've heard it's lead to significant improvements. I agree that Lemmy is unstable, but it's also beta software undergoing rapid improvement, and I'm optimistic on where it will be by the end of the year.
I feel like most of the problem would be physical hardware. Costly servers that would need to be able to meet Lemmy's growing demands.
I'm not sure how much optimization from the software side can be done to reduce resource requirements. There's certainly things that can be done to improve user experience though.
Though it's not like it matters to most of us if they do reverse course. I already deleted everything on my Reddit account. It's all gone permanently.
At this point even if the API changes are reversed I’m don’t with Reddit.
I'm liking Lemmy a lot. I rolled my own instance so performance is great. The only issue is delayed federation of new posts, but comments seem to go through instantly.
How long of a delay? Do you known if the delay is on your end, taking a while to load from every other instance, or from the other ones being slow to "tell" yours about new posts?
I think the delay is due to syncing historic backlog on the community. Not 100% sure though.
On my instance it says that some communities are fully synced so it looks like there is zero delay. So long as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml are working on their end.
I believe the failed Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus made spez and his yesmen cocky. I hope they underestimated how much more tech savvy the average redditor is - especially the nexus poster, who keep the community afloat.
I think they overestimated how much engagement the average reditter provides. Most people are consuming content, but not contributing any or posting comments or clicking ads or anything. 90% of engagement is driven by like 20% of users or some shit like that.
I suspect twitter is similar. But a difference between Reddit and twitter is how easily power users can migrate.
On twitter, you follow people. Power users were often cautious cause they didn't want to lose their followers and non power users wanted to be where the power users are.
But on Reddit, you follow communities. For power users, there's few direct followers to lose and for non power users, as long as there's enough content, it doesn't matter much who created it.
Another important difference is that reddit concepts map better onto lemmy than twitter onto mastodon. Additionally, one important aspect of twitter is the proximity to journalists, celebrities and politicians. Reddit doesn't really have that (except for /r/iama).
To be fair, Mastodon is still growing and it's much easier to use now than a year ago. Reddit didn't uproot Digg overnight.
I personally have left for Mastodon and never looked back. Ivory is making it so easy and beautiful. But I’m not following sassy quipsters, c-tier celebrities and outrage farmers, so I’m not really anything that stayed on Twitter. But a lot of these “nexus posters” haven’t done the switch and/or had done it but returned to Twitter.
Indeed, which of course communicates a fundamental misunderstanding about how people use Reddit vs. Twitter. On Twitter/Mastodon people primarily follow other users, so Twitter remains dominant due to the large number of celebrities, influencers, and politicians that use it. On Reddit/Lemmy, people follow communities, and as such as long as both are active a given community on Lemmy is just as good as a community on Reddit. This also of course impacts federation. With individual user federation discovery can be challenging and small instances will have relatively barren all feeds, but with community federation even instances with a few dozen users will federate with enough communities to fill the all feed. Reddit was also famous for the multitude of very nice features implemented by third party developers, all of which they just ejected, which means now those nice features will be available to Lemmy users. Apps are capable of abstracting and improving the user experience by suggesting instances to sign up to and presenting a unified feed of all of the instance feeds that the app has connected to, making everything feel far more connected. In a way I'm grateful to u/spez, his awfulness as a CEO pushed people here and made a lot of this possible.
No, I figured this would go on a lot longer than just the blackout. There has been a lot of built up resentment in the mod community that the admins never really addressed. Now that the admins ripped away most mod tools, a lot of mods are pissed.
I hope they can manage to tank reddit's IPO
This has exposed the incompatibility of a company wanting to make $$$$, when it relies on volunteers. Mods aren't eager to do unpaid work just so spez can get rich.
I wish more of the larger subs were still protesting and didn't roll over so easily. But regardless the site has taken a massive hit to its reputation and one can only hope that recovery won't be possible moving forward and it screws them out of their chance to go public.
I think most of the larger ones were forced to reopen by the admins
Admin was kicking mods that didn't approve. Absolutely forced to reopen.
The thing is, Reddit doesn't allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they'd kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don't care.
The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he's not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he's completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.
Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don't have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.
I'd love to volunteer as a scab. Problem is, what's stopping me from running any given subreddit in a way that destroys the community further, like arbitrarily removing posts or banning users while simultaneously allowing clear spam/bots/scams to persist?
r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It's just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then... don't replace them? Now there hasn't been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.
I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?
Maybe it's to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of "This is what happens when you cross the admins."
I guess it's possible, but what good would that do reddit? That's millions people who aren't going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren't using any ad blockers, so they'd be losing revenue..
I'm honestly not sure. Reddit's decision making here has been so stupid I'm just guessing their motivations.
I check the sub every few days to see if they have mods yet, we'll see what hapens. :p
Is Reddit going to tell itself it's being bad?
The article mentions r/pics, r/vids, and r/funny
These are large subs.
Don’t worry, doordash_drivers is now a recommended sub for everyone 💀
I knew it was over when my feed was plastered with various subreddits for food delivery workers
I was wondering why I saw some much of that and shittytattoos my final last few weeks.
/r/truerateme is a lot funnier than shittytattoos. A chance for basement-dwelling incels to rate pretty girls who wouldn't give them the time of day 5.5.
Right, I'm pretty positive r/funny was the largest sub to participate in the original protest.
I'm scared to open /r/OnlyFans now
Give it 3 months and it's all forgotten about. New users won't know the difference.
The difference is right here, all of us being here instead of there.
Part of me, and I think everyone else here, wants some level of vindication in the form of Reddit taking a hit. Likely most of the current users won't notice any big changes and most of it will be back to the content they're used to in a few months. But as someone else here pointed out it's likely Reddit will survive as Facebook has, shitty recycled content from other platforms and zero decent discussion. Which again, 90% of their current user base won't notice or care about. I'm just glad we've got a new place where the discussion seems to be a bit more on par with old Reddit
The weird thing is that my experience of Reddit probably didn’t resemble 95% of what was going on there, ever. I had my slice of subs and things I followed and that was great for me. Every so often I would view it logged out and it seemed like a different site, full of garbage viral shite. I assume it will continue to be that. Gallowboob or whatever will still post crap for eyeballs.
Now that's a name I haven't seen in ages!
While I can relate to wanting to see some sort of vindication for my position in this issue and to see Reddit punished for their choices, I do think it would be better if Reddit stuck around and attracted a lot of the lowest common denominator traffic. Average quality seemed to go down as popularity increased (though the extremes also got more extreme, so good stuff improved while the bad stuff did get worse and some ended up banned entirely).
On subs like AITA, there were so many replies that misunderstood very basic and fundamental stuff from the main post. Also plenty of replies that just made something up entirely and ran with it, frequently highly upvoted and spawning other replies agreeing completely and also running with the baseless assumptions. It got to the point a long time ago where I realized the judgements themselves were useless and the sub's only real value was for entertainment and seeing other perspectives, but it wasn't very useful for its stated purpose: determining if you're an asshole for something you did.
And the mods were so frustrating there, too. Shutting down active and interesting discussion because some arbitrary rule wasn't followed or because the topic itself attracted a lot of dipshits.
Anyways, what I'm trying to say is that there's benefits to having a more popular alternative. It means that lemmy has to continue competing to attract users but it mostly means that low effort users will end up just going to the more popular site until they have a reason to look for something else.
Completely agree. Back in the day I used to just scroll through /r/all and constantly stumble across cool stuff, now it's devoid of any decent content. Whenever I read any of those millions of aita posts they'd always be clear fiction, and then full of comments as if they were absolutely true. The general quality of content on that site is at absolute rock bottom.
I am glad Lemmy has a small barrier to entry. It's easy enough that you don't need any sort of technical knowledge to sign up and use but it requires a little more effort than most social media, which hopefully acts as something of a filter. Reddit now kind of reminds me of usenets "eternal September".
You’ll see the user experience difference. Janky ass Reddit will look lame compared to the cool Lemmy apps that are in development now.
Also a lot of the more high quality comments seem to be migrating.
Sorry, I'm mostly bringing over my low quality comments. Sorry guys.
Dang, Lemmy cancelled I guess. Pack it up everybody, @GamingChairModel@lemmy.world ruined it for everyone.
Me thinks you right. Hope stay good!
Long live the lemming motherland(s)
I followed mostly games and tech related stuff and they mostly rolled over quick or didn't even participate. So figured it was a lost cause from the get go. When I was subbed there was not much difference in usual activity , since I did not sub to the main subs. In a lot of cases I actually had blocked them long ago.
On the plus side those communities have had good activity on lemmy without need for the reddit mods to bother migrating.
LOL... Who would buy into their IPO now? There's a HUGE risk of this going to zero.
I think we’re going to see a figurehead change before the IPO if things continue this way. Spiz will “step down” (he’ll probably be bought out, which might be what he’s angling for at this point, talking about wanting to emulate Elon? The most obvious and egregious example of massively and publicly fucking up a social media site??) and the company will put out a statement of “changing course,” basically just muddying the waters about what’s actually happening (while most likely nothing will actually change), say that they’re going to try to fix this fiasco.
It would kill the protests. And that way they can either run out the clock and settle things down before the IPO, or they can put out some vague change that would figuratively make the API more accessible/affordable. But nothing would actually change in the latter scenario, they’d just make a lot of noise about being reasonable while not actually changing anything. Their value could inflate again, protests are quelled due to loss of momentum/loss of popularity, pizzle gets a golden parachute, the company goes public and banks, VCs roll in piles of money, etc. etc.
And the IPO itself is a bad sign no matter who's in charge. It means the company will be shareholder-driven, and so aiming for maximum profit (or just straight up not operating at a loss to start with). Line must always go up, so when things start to stagnate, or they reach saturation, more and more bold anti-consumer decisions will be made to extract higher profits. See Netflix and their crackdown on password-sharing.
It may not happen straight away, but it will eventually.
Perhaps my opinions are different from others but I feel like these websites are forgetting that they're an optional part of people's lives. There are plenty of things I can spend my time on besides reddit and YouTube, and Netflix is forgetting that it's marginally more convenient than piracy.
Honestly, /r/all is pretty pitiful these days
I logged out of my account at the start of all this, but occasionally I go back and check out reddit as an unlogged lurker. It's astonishing how low-quality the front page is when it's not filtered by subjects you're actually interested in. And good lord is new reddit ever a terrible user experience.
I've noticed a change too and I've tried to keep that separate from my feelings about Reddit. It just doesn't seem all that entertaining or novel as it was a couple months back.
Perhaps when you piss off that tiny slice of your users that actually produces the content everyone else wants to see and the moderators who ensure they see that quality content, you're going to have problems.
It wasn't a perfect system for sure, but it was holding it together for quite a few years.
So long as it hurts Reddit, all the better.
This whole API issue is a lost cause, so the only thing that can be done now is to make Reddit lose big.
Yep the fight for Reddit is lost. All we can do is make an example of them.
Just like Reddit made an example of Digg.
I’m really fuckin loving getting to watch this war being waged on Reddit from Lemmy. I was really worried that, on the first, all of the protests would peter and those of us pissed about it would be gone and things would just even out for the company. Love to see it still being fought, and more dirty than ever.
I'm just watching from here like 👀🍿
As much as I'd love to log into Reddit and see this go down, I'm happy just not using Reddit. How much longer do you think they'll hold out?
Do not underestimate average people's resilience to enshittification
I just saw someone on one of my fb groups saying she's heard a lot about reddit lately and wanting to make an account and asking how it works.
I tried to ward her off but the negative press just seems to be enticing new users.
My guess ist that if she still is on fb in 2023 she might actually love it on Reddit now and in the future...
That’s fine, they’re the people we don’t want over here. They’re part of Reddits problem.
Tell her one of the Lemmy apps is Reddit
It's Teddit.
You can train mice or pigeons to hit a button for reward, but the button has to dispense reward pretty much 100%. Once they're trained, you can dial down the reward - 50%, 25%...1% - and they'll keep mashing that button, doing work for free. Human buttons and rewards may be more complicated, but it's the same thing.
It's the mods leaving that are going to doom the site. The users will follow soon after
Define “doom.” Reddit will lose its power users, its trendiness, and just become another forum for recycled content like 9gag or limp along like Digg or MySpace for years, but I don’t see it shutting down.
Yeah, pretty much. The sad reality is that only the most outspoken will actually make a switch. The vast majority will simply accept it as the new norm, because they don’t care enough to bother with a new platform.
for now. switches like this don't happen one day to the next. reddit has broken a lot of trust with its core users and put things in motion that cannot be stopped, at least without extraordinary action that they're clearly unwilling of. these processes will take years to play out but they're happening.
same thing is going on with twitter. the easier mastodon becomes to use and the more twitter falls apart, the more the flow of users from one platform to the next will pick up the pace.
The most outspoken are also the ones generating the most content.
I fear this is true. 🤦
It doesn't matter, at this point. Lemmy is already a good-enough replacement for reddit, with better core principles, and it's just getting better.
Get some popcorn and watch the drama, and expect nothing.
It's okay to expect more drama though, right?
Second drama? I don’t know if they know about second drama.
I trust in spez to commit to even more enraging changes to Reddit. When it'll happen idk, but it most definitely will
You can always expect more drama.
I heard some people still use ...Twitter!
Truly insane
Yeah, for now people are still going to incidentally use reddit for human-written non-seo optimized text.
Heck, I needed it last night for help with my computer.
Things will climax once sync for reddit releases their Lemmy app in 2-4 weeks
The apps are going to be a game changer. If they can make it easier and intuitive to sign up, manage your accounts, find communities, and eventually group communities together and filter your feed, casual users will start flocking. It’s all about the UX and UI.
I hope to see the apps even accept donations and distribute part of it to the Lemmy devs and server hosts to help keep things sustainable.
As an Apollo user, switched to wefwef and suddenly its like Reddit 10 years ago. Lots of interesting and weird content with great UX.
That and hopefully each app will create their own federations. It will be a refreshing to see the developers become the leaders
For those waiting, definitely try out Memmy for iOS. Right now it is in Test Flight, but should be releasing any day now. The dev seems super passionate and the app has gotten exponentially better in just a couple weeks.
I’m really enjoying wefwef. It’s basically Apollo for lemmy
I’m keen to give it a go but the beta is full. Am keeping an eye out for the app store release! In the meantime Wefwef is excellent and I may end up sticking with it anyway (no harm in shopping around though!)
I've been switching between Memmy and Mlem. Both have their share of missing features right now, I'm usually sticking with one until I hit a need to switch.
Both are great, Memmy is the winner so far.
So far Connect for Lemmy feels close to sync. So far it's working great on Android.
A lot of us are looking forward to that day.
you're talking about the 0.1 of the 1/9/90 rule resisting the clearly telegraphed decay of the platform they poured 5-15 years into on average. they built that place, do not underestimate the lengths they will go to keep it up.
assuming one more round of further threats, my prediction is that about half the currently protesting communities will either switch to a new form of protest, stop, or be made an example of, by about the end of july. but for a proper "end" of the protests, spez would be lucky if it happened by the end of the summer, and their negative impact on the platform is already severe and permanent. i honestly don't know if the admins are stupid and/or out of touch enough to not notice the drop in content quality or are just bold enough to lie about it, but this spells the beginning of a long and inevitable process of people leaving to better sites as those who gave reddit its unique value stop contributing and giving lurkers a reason to stay.
reddit will never feel the same again, but it will feel about the best it ever will again around the end of the year, before the decay truly sets in. unless the admins choose that time for the next round of killing off old reddit, of course.
It really doesn’t seem like the cool place it once was. They took the vibe away with these API changes.
lol without an app on my phone, I tried opening r/pics on my mobile browser to see the damage, only to be met with a "you must view NSFW communities in our app" page.
you can use old reddit but it's a pain and a half on mobile
Hopefully long enough for casual users to start looking for alternatives.
I hope this is true.
Its going to be a while. Most content creators especially comic artists, streamers and youtubers are still on reddit. Their fans are there, and its unlikely they'll budge until the comic artists post here too, or the mods of the youtube communities announce a migration.
I disagree. I know and follow a bunch of creators on social media and twitch, but even as a Reddit power user I knew so few specific users. Influencers may post links to their content but their Reddit account is hardly relevant.
Okay, hear me out:
I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you're going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don't agree.
Sure, it's nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that's not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn't be decided on the basis of 'can I win'; a much less restrictive--and very deeply fun--philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?' If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen'.
In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af...I am living for this.
Very refreshing take on it. The cynicism about whether the protests were 'worth it' because we didn't see massive results felt like it missed all the fun of giving the greedy corporation the collective finger.
If the only reason you'll fight is because you think you can win, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Win or lose or both or nothing at all, you do it because it's worth fighting for. Sometimes this ends with Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges, but mostly, it won't, so if the best I can do right now is give some people a very, very bad day, well, I'm in: let's go.
Right. I fight not because I believe I'll win, or even because I believe victory is "possible", but because it's more comfortable for me so to speak to be fighting than to quietly and passively support the ideology I disagree with. It is more "restful" to me to be fighting a fight I believe in than to be resting in a world I hate.
You. You are my people.
The problem is that the finger is still a form of engagement when you do it on the site you're protesting. The admins don't care as long as you're still driving clicks.
Legit and I agree.
However, nothing in my experience with Reddit Admins has contradicted my impression that when they were five years old, you could give them a full screaming meltdown playing "I'm not touching you" in three minutes or less. Can I prove it if they aren't melting down regularly over some of this where I can see it? No. But I know it's happening, and that's enough.
Honest question, is there such a thing as bad engagement? Or is engagement like that saying about bad publicity?
NSFW content can’t be monetised and advertisers are having second thoughts about their willingness to advertise there (or so the lowering number of clicks on the advertisement page leads one to believe), so I guess there can be bad engagement.
I can handle a fun protest.
The protests remind me of the last night at bar on land that just got bought by developers and will soon be torn down. The battle is lost, you can do nothing and leave or you can get weird and write your farewells on the walls, steal the toilet seats, and otherwise vandalize the place on your way out and have one last laugh with your friends before you head your separate ways.
I love it. Especially that the mods of the default subs have the balls to do it
turns out it's not a good idea to piss off the unpaid people put in charge of front page subreddits
Meanwhile redditors on /r/piracy kicked their own mod for continuing the protest. I think their Lemmy migration to lemmy.dbzer0.com is a bit too effective and now only loyal redditors left at that sub.
On the flipside piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com has a lot better content and discussion than /r/piracy where it's mostly the same memes reposted every few weeks.
It says no posts when clock on that link. What am I doing wrong?
It's not really a link, it's the piracy community at lemmy.dbzer0.com instance.
Can’t wait for the Reddit IPO to fail
Fidelity has been dropping the valuation of its stake in reddit, and that's only as of May 31st. We don't know yet how the value will respond to all this drama, but I suspect it will go down more.
The IPO might not fail, but they probably won't get what they wanted out of it.
Unfortunately this probably means that the platform will sell to people who expect to get use out of it for direct public influence of some kind (marketing/politics).
Sadly they’ll still get rich as shit if valuation drops a lot so there isn’t much incentive to treat the community better.
I invest in quite a few tech companies and I was considering investing in Reddit, but there's no way in hell I would now. I can't be the only potential investor they have alienated.
I'm happy that they're keeping it up, but I've already moved on to the point that even if Reddit were to completely go back on the API change, I wouldn't come back. Personally I've already moved the goal post to where Steve Huffman needs to go before I'd consider ever going back. Reddit is dead for all I care.
Listen there's a whole board at reddit that greenlit every decision he's made. He's not some mad scientist.
The way reddit has decided, as a company, to treat their users over the last 40 days or so, that's enough for me.
Imagine if in the MySpace days we all found out that using MySpace was generating ad revenue for Tom so he could build a torture chamber for puppies. That would have been awful enough that even 20 years later, (holy shit MySpace was 20 years ago) and over a decade after Tom had left the company, we would still feel weird about going there to hang out online, and a lot of us would feel disgust every time we were served an ad on the platform.
What I'm saying, is Steve Huffman kills puppies and even accessing reddit.com is basically condoning puppy torture. Wait, no. What I'm saying is reddit has created a blemish so hideous that I wouldn't, not even if I was like, really really drunk. Ya Digg?
Spez was a mod of the Jailbait sub so instead of puppies it was/is kids
I've been editing and deleting 10+ year old comments to deny them that sweet sweet LLM data. No way for me to go back, and I wouldn't anyway
You should check to see that your edits hold. There's been reports of users manually deleting posts and then showing back up a few days later.
They're in full damage control mode.
Agreed. It is funny to hear about, but they would have to roll back years of changes for me to even consider it at this point. Since there is no money in that for them it is pretty much a moot point.
It doesn't matter if huffman goes. This is the result of wanting to make $$$$$$. That won't ever change.
I agree.
Also when we’re all being fucked over no one has a right to say how we (in general) should be protesting. People get to show their anger in whatever way they want. It’s like people asking for civility so they don’t have to deal with uncomfortable messages. Um fuck no. NSFW all the way if that’s what one decides.
Thanks for agitating
The start of your comment reminded me of the exchange between Trevor Noah & Tomi Lauren where Trevor asks her, okay, so if this protest isn't good, and this kind isn't good, how should black people protest? How should they make their grievances known? And she just could not answer that question. Protests aren't comfortable--they're disruptive by nature. If protests don't challenge anything or make anyone uncomfortable, what are they even doing?
It's even healthier when you think about how this anger is being shown in a non-violent manner. If it helps people to express and work through their feelings about changes before deciding to accept those changes or to go elsewhere (setting aside the slim chance that anything actually changes which is rare in my personal experience), then I think it's perfectly fine and normal.
While i wholeheartedly agree that people should protest however the heck the want...
...I still don't get the rage this issue is causing. Don't get me wrong, I'm the guy who has a list of businesses I don't do any sort of business with because of their policies. But i feel like this could have been resolved with shutting down all subs and then everyone taking the summer off from computers. Instead everyone took 48hrs off and then had to get back to their addiction and ramp up their anger in the process.
The NSFW thing is awesome though.
well, some people don’t care, but others like me have been years there finding and joining communities, and for others who became admins and moderators, they spent a good chunk of their time to create and take care of communities over years for free. Now that has been taken from them, and even each step Reddit takes, enrages the content creators and curators even more, so they respond because they don’t want to give up, and now they may want revenge. So I totally support everything they’re doing, from filling it up with useless content to fill it up with NSFW content to avoid ads and so ruining Reddit cash flow. And I hope they keep going on for a while.
Reddit is a lot less active now. Gotta love it
People on Reddit keep saying things are mostly back to normal, while tiny subs are hitting the front page of /r/all on the regular with like 2k votes.
Also, I've noticed a pretty significant increase in overt racism. Or rather, significant decrease in moderation of it. I shouldn't be surprised but it keeps catching me off-guard.
I haven't been back but do you have any data to back that up?
Not that I don't believe it, I just want some schadenfreude
It's so weird to see all the people still fighting on Reddit when I've already moved on
Most importantly I think the app devs have moved on. They'd have to do something particularly amazing to lure them back. That's the death knell.
Yes, I think the biggest mistake spez made was sending all the best devs on the platform directly to his biggest competitor.
I really dont see a point in fighting at this point. Reddit is dead for me.
The point is to trash the site so new users don't join, if they replace the number they lost they can say "hey look, we recovered in only 6 months"
Eh, I’ll go against the grain and be honest. I still use it on my desktop at home. Zero mobile use. The user base and information there is still massive at the moment. Once that changes it’s in my rear view, but I won’t pretend like I don’t.
No point in protesting, we already have a better alternative.
Deliberately using an alternative is a form of protesting.
And it can be, sure, but it's not always the case.
I'm not just using Lemmy until or if Reddit backtracks, I'm using Lemmy because I believe it's the superior platform in many ways and has more to offer. I didn't make an account here in sign of protest, I made one because Lemmy was suggested to me and I'm liking it better than where I came from.
I'm also aware that many users on this platform would go back to Reddit if they backtracked on the API keys.
Yeah, the best protest is a reduction in monthly active users.
Feels like reading the frontline news from far away. Keep fighting bastards, I don’t know what the end goal will lead too but i know it will be hands of us the victors.
For for how much heavy handed their initial reaction was, I’m surprised that Reddit doesn’t take more aggressive actions. Spez has the loudest voice on highest pole, yet so far he only managed to anger everyone.
Fuck Spez.
It can be easily concluded from his AMA that he is a fool. Big mouth with small brain.
And he was a mod for a very disgusting sub back when it was active.
Although I dislike him as much as anyone, I read that in the early days you could add users as mods without the need for users to accept.
He was supposedly posting on the sub as well. Plus you can remove yourself as a mod, especially if you're an admin.
What sub was that?
Jailbait. There’s a bit more to the story though…mod invites were auto-approved at the time. But he seemingly embraced it, even if he didn’t directly acknowledge it.
"Seemingly"? He sent a physical Reddit trophy to the lead perv of that sub and bragged about it in different subs (along with other mods), and that doesn't even begin to touch on the barely-veiled alts he was known to use in that sub and elsewhere to circumvent rules, alter votes, and massage narratives. The guy's a festering moron with a mic.
source: OG Redditor who stood up to that clique back when.
I'm not sure they can. What can they do? I doubt they'll replace moderators with paid Reddit workers. The alternative is to replace them with other power hungry moderators who will bend a knee to the Reddit admins. That might work on some major subreddits but the PR of that might cause more damage.
I think the admins hoped it would have blown over by now. If it's still going on by September I bet they'll need to do something.
I just went and looked at r/videos and I gotta admit that the text-only descriptions of videos and enforcing swearing in every post title is pretty funny.
That's absolutely hilarious
Can’t wait for Reddit admins and Spez to realize they have failed.
Pretty sure they know, but “Refuse to acknowledge fucking up” is the strategy
Spez succeeded, regardless. His end goal was the IPO, consequences he damned. Rectal fissures were entirely acceptable. Now whether Spez is happy with his booty blasting, that’s another question entirely.
His end goal was to destroy 3rd party apps. He doesn't care if it takes all of reddit down in the process, they bruised his ego and he's lashing back with anything and everything he can. It's why he lied about the phone conversation which we found out for sure when the dev posted it in full. He's a toddler.
Most recently Spez said the IPO is further away now than it was last year lmao
Booty blasting? Is that like putting cocaine up in there? Asking with regrets
Spez will feel nothing but anger. I’m sure that he genuinely feels that nothing has been lost. The people that work for him probably feel uneasy that his ego has unnecessarily breathed life into another platform.
I would be pretty annoyed if I sat on the board because Lemmy and Kbin may have been just another Voat had they just come up with something reasonable. It blows my mind that they never floated serving ads through the API just to offset their alleged costs.
Spez is not that hard to figure out. If you connect the dots, he read in the press that ChatGPT used Reddit as a source to train their AI. He saw that as a huge source of value that was being GIVEN away and rushed to slam that door shut with closing the APIs. He wa so obsessed with getting this value that he misread the developers and accused them of being parasites and slandered them publicly.
I think he was also jealous of third party apps being profitable when Reddit wasn't. He viewed this as them stealing his money, and decided to go on a personal crusade against third party apps and their devs to punish them for their perceived treachery.
There's a bunch of transphobic and racist shit on the front page now, spez is probably loving it just like Elon
I thought it was just me seeing that?
The right wing is invading and a lot of posts are just what you said, transphobic, racist, woke-bashing, etc.
I'm not sure if it's just cause I have no account now, but if this is what they are pushing on new people then yikes. I knew the admins leaned right wing (ie forcing kotakuinaction to come back) but this is worse than I thought. I must have blocked a lot of it a while ago
TLDR: Subreddits are protesting against Reddit's API changes, and r/pics, a subreddit with over 30 million members, has marked itself as NSFW (not safe for work). This means that advertisements can no longer be displayed alongside posts in the subreddit. The protest started in June when thousands of subreddits participated in a blackout to protest Reddit's plans to charge for API access. The changes have resulted in third-party apps like Apollo shutting down. As part of the protest, r/pics initially only allowed images of comedian John Oliver to be shared and later amended its rules to allow media featuring Oliver, including erotic fan fiction. The subreddit's moderators posted an "open letter" reminding the community not to swear, as marking the community as NSFW would deprive Reddit of advertising revenue. Reddit has reportedly removed mods for marking their communities NSFW as a protest. Despite this, r/pics was officially marked NSFW on Monday. Other subreddits, such as r/videos and r/funny, are also protesting in their own ways.
Tobe clear - to charge extortionate prices for API access in a deliberate maneuver to kill 3rd party apps and drive users towards reddit’s native app.
App devs were all willing to work with reddit if they could negotiate reasonable fees, but reddit told them to pay up or get lost.
Good bot
The saddest part about this is…it didn’t have to be this way. Reddit’s greed turned something beautiful (or at least with some nice pieces) into a hellscape….
Good that the protest keeps going. Lemmy AND Squabbles are not a fraction of what Reddit was for all my interests and hobbies. Let's hope more and more people keep learning about the alternatives.
Keep poking, disrupting and agitating until you get any reaction. Catharsis is also important.
It's still going on?
I know that r/Python is closed, which is big sub. I ended up there after some search.
I'd never thought that the protest would lay this long. Not a step back!
Is reddits already public or what is going in with the IPO right now?
It was announced for the 2nd half of 2023, but no specific date yet.
Their captain/CEO is disintegrating it into dust. Reddit is worth as much as a couple of napkins, or whatever Elon will pay for it.
I can easily see Musk buying Reddit and degrading it into an even sorrier state
100 BILLION
MUSK BUCKSDOLLARS!!In my experience, those with power will destroy themselves from spite rather than change their mind.
Burn baby burn. I have no illusions on how much we actually affected reddits bottom line but I can only hope that the power users from reddit will slowly leave the platform.
...I'm unironically considering taping myself unzipping and stroking my meat and posting it there with the title, "This was for you, spez."
Unfortunately r/videos is only allowing text based descriptions of videos at this time, so you'll have to describe it in excruciating detail.
(Srsly tho the illegal upload of Bee Movie was a thrilling read.)
Like "I'm unzipping it right now.... oh yeah.... oh yeah HHHNNNGG LOOK AT HOW BIG IT IS, BI--"? Alright, is there a plan B or did I really shouted at nothing.
They're still not allowing gore or porn on /r/PICS, FYI. I guess they don't want to end up like /r/interestingasfuck, which is still archived and has no moderators. (Reddit removed them all for "going against the community's wishes" and allowing NSFW content in a traditionally SFW subreddit.) It's better for them if they can still use their platform to protest, I guess.
My dick is only out for one beautiful soul. RIP Harambe.
Do post a link for my review if you ever do that. 🤤
/r/mushing I'm mod is still NSFW. I don't visit Reddit anymore now, but if they get sane, I'll flip the switch back. For noe no ad cents for Spaz, or whatever that dick's name is.
Any luck with RIF or a similar app for Lemmy? Someone(s) develop that tool and Reddit is toast
Those are the ones that come to mind
RiF fanatic here. Neither mirrors directly. But Jerboa wasn't bad. And I find I like Connect the best.
Yeah former RIF user here too, and so far Connect is the best I've found
Give Liftoff a try
Boost, Slide and Sync are all coming to Lemmy. Lots of other great apps, too, though - I've recently been using Thunder and Connect.
Here's a Lemmy Apps Directory with 27 apps for Lemmy.
I'm waiting for boost. Jerboa has been fine so far but I've used boost for almost a decade at this point, it's hard not to have all the quality of life that was built into that app.
Same goes for me and Sync. I'll buy the premium version again for Lemmy as soon as it's available
Lots of Lemmy apps already and more coming, but apps aren't going to turn the tide. Only content will do that. Until there are more subs here, the majority will remain hesitant to leave.
Lots: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
Jeroba is a good start instead of using a browser. It's probably gonna take a while to get it streamlined.
Check out Thunder! It's still a work in progress but it's my favorite so far.
I'm not normally the kind of person that takes pleasure in seeing others fail. At least I try not to be.
I really want to see Steve Huffman fail though
Oooo I actually like the sound of videos being described in text form. Sometimes I find it hard to watch a video if I’m at work, or similar, and a good description is something I’d love to read!
Feel like that should be a….community? (Did I get that right, still so new here!)
It's almost like it is a bad idea to shit on customers and unpaid employees
What’s the point of making it nsfw?
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Most advertisers specifically ask for their ads not to be placed next to NSFW content.
"we don't want the tits in the content to detract from the tits in our ads"
Plus for any 3rd party apps that are scabbing for reddit, NSFW subs won't show up.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Can't advertise on NSFW subs
It’s explained in the article.
Basically, they’ve made it impossible to generate revenue from an extremely popular sub, while also potentially scaring advertisers away from reddit as a whole.
Advertisers don't like it, and they make up a big part of Reddit's income.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
Reddit won’t put ads on nsfw subs. Hurts reddits public image. Or at least that’s my impression of it.
I love their tone
(Trying out this accessibility-friendly gif posting, apologies if it doesn’t work)
You love to see it.
/r/mushing I’m mod in is still NSFW. I don’t visit Reddit anymore now, but if they get sane, I’ll flip the switch back. For noe no ad cents for Spaz, or whatever that dick’s name is.
Body
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I've definitely arrived at a place in my online life where I do not need to be on some company's corporate advertising mill website.
I left, and I know I'm just one middle aged dude pining for the internet before the companies turned their roving eyes to it, but I have no interest in going back, regardless of what they do at this point. I offer this because maybe more people will start to think "do I really need to be a part of a community of millions, or even hundreds of millions? or maybe is it more healthy for me to find the right community online that is a bit more like a mid-sized city? We can share news across these little islands, so we don't all need to fit in a single corporate container."
Ah jeez
Can’t wait for Reddit admins and Spez to realize they have failed.
easy for reddit bosses to revert that
It's too late.
It's definitely too late. They've already shown their hand and willingness to abuse their users. I think it's more important now to use this momentum to move to a new platform. I'm hopeful that Lemmy is that new platform.
Even if suddenly their leadership had a change of heart, it doesn't change the fact that there's a perverse incentive for a company to abuse the users.
the r/hornijail would be busy as hack
Reddit is a sinking ship. Let it burn on the way down 🔥
💀💀💀💀💀