Don't talk shit. One does not hear of Abraxas by accident.
Jay Peters has been fantastic in his reporting on this, and generally stuck to observable facts. That Reddit is now being a bitch to him just further cements my impression of their leadership. They cannot even handle their own actions being described.
There's a case to be made on either end. The best thing would be for people to move to better pastures with dignity, but the malicious compliance and worse create headaches and embarrassment for spez that may pay off in the press, or at some other date. Mods getting banned for making their accounts porn accounts certainly know they're going out the door, but they'd prefer to be thrown out.
And ultimately, for the veteran redditors who are watching all this, they want to see the end with their own eyes.
I'm not online so I can stare at websites, and any website will do. I want discussions, people and content. A platform with five users, as you say, has relatively little value to me unless they're like my best friends.
Damn, ordinarily I'd follow this coverage at r/anime_titties
Letter from Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian to Digg Founder Kevin Rose, from Internet Archive of http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
Kevin,
It's been a while since you cleverly debuted digg on ScreenSavers on that "Slashdot Killers" segment.
Funded by Y Combinator, Steve Huffman and I started work on reddit in June 2005, which we launched a month later. A month after that, we learned about digg and realized this was going to be an interesting new space -- we had some catching up to do.
Remember those great days? It was long before Facebook was confusing people with awkward privacy settings, before Twitter existed, and even pre-dating the "social media" industry -- back when "social media gurus" were simply called "tools."
You built a remarkably popular website with an adoring fanbase most companies can only dream of. Diggnation was a brilliant decision and paved the way for Revision3, which doesn't get half of the press it deserves. In short: you were in the zone.
And we got lucky, frankly. We sold to Condé Nast in 2006, which stayed hands off, let the site keep growing, and even encouraged us to open source -- the site has grown to over 1/2 million unique visitors a day. And all of that is run by only 4 awesomesauce developers (edit: and one fantastic community manager!); I think the math comes out to 1 dev for every 2 million monthly uniques.
You chose to grow with venture capital and you've no doubt (I hope) taken some money off the table in your Series C round.
I say this because this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Those are your words from that aforementioned 2004 video segment.
Now what matters is how many followers & influence a user has and how many followers & influence they've got.
Where have we heard this before: Twitter? Facebook? GoogleBuzz?
Kevin, you absolutely deserve all the credit for starting the movement -- fascinating things happen when online communities can efficiently share content. Whales get silly names and we can expose the tragedies our fellow man endures faster than ever before.
It's a damned shame to see digg just re-implementing features from other websites.
But I've got a strong feeling it's not you making these decisions anymore; and to see your baby abused like this must be awful.
This really should've been called "an open letter to digg's VCs" (but what kind of linkbait would that be?) because they really ought to give the power back to the founder.
All the best,
Alexis
Editing their comments (which was a wave of fuck you spez pings) was a personal tantrum. As a human being, I could sort of get where it would seem mischievous and justified to go and throw it back at someone else. Awful judgment, huge breach of trust, but understandable from the POV of someone who just wants to be petty and immature for a moment. I can relate.
As part of a broad pattern though, he clearly has issues veiling his annoyance and contempt for his own users.
Opening RIF is, unfortunately, a muscle memory for me. For these next 7 days when it's still open, I'll probably be on there on occasion, although the subs I'm subscribed to anymore are either closed, or they're ModCoord & SaveThirdPartyApp. I've unfollowed subs that re-opened, and frankly, I was never subscribed to much beyond specific communities I liked to begin with. The "statistically insignificant" millions of users on Apollo, RIF, etc. (last I counted RIF had 5 million downloads on the app store to Reddit's 100 million -- that 5 percent so talked about is not a small number.) My post histories are deleted, all my accounts but one are deleted, I'm now just there to see the end, and see the drama with my own eyes (and part of that, for me, is that I don't wholly trust what I don't see myself, either.)
That the daily traffic is at "normal" levels, to me, is interesting, because we're not in a "normal" news cycle right now. With Trump indictments, the sub implosion, a new Marvel show, new Final Fantasy games, a potential Biden impeachment, and reddit's implosion as a news story itself, Reddit ought to be booming right now, not "normal". That there are incredible surges of people in subreddits participating in reddit drama should be a warning sign, the way a Fogo De Chao ought to be worried when two dozen PETA people sit down at each table.
Someone in jail for a two year stint that ends in December may be emerging to find the email they had for twenty years, which may be the key to most of their other accounts, is gone, which could be hugely impactful.
In my personal life, I do now have the unfortunate task of reminding people to log into dead relative's email accounts so they can preserve some shit they need, which kind of sucks.
Fuck spez.
This is honestly my favorite. All the concern trolls saying there are millions of people who would love to be mods now have the opportunity.
I call them "man on horse" simulators. I think open worlds have generally gotten a bit bigger than they need to be -- I remember feeling like FFXV was actually very empty, despite being massive, and while Skyrim is beloved, so much of current replay has been slogging through massive amounts of nothing. I tend to wish open world games were somewhat smaller but denser, with more variety instead of huge, empty terrains of sort of bad-feeling, filler quests between the good ones.
Oh, then why did CDPR apologize for it?
https://www.engadget.com/cyberpunk-2077-apology-video-roadmap-updates-2021-220043550.html
Shit I can't stand -- people fucking up, apologizing for it, and then later insisting they didn't fuck up. People plead guilty to shit in court then try to retcon it. People who write essays about their behavior and then later say they didn't do it. This shit here. They fucked up, they said they fucked up. The followup for this shit needs to be: Were you lying then or now?
I think that's why "enshittification" is so aggravating to me. We've seen time and time again that users revolt from sites that are cluttered, busy, and stuffed with ads in favor of things that are clean and text based (Digg 4 to Reddit, Myspace to Facebook) but somehow the same people proud of themselves for their clean interfaces end up trying to convince everyone that "actually spam is fine." Die a hero or live a villain, etc., but I can't for a moment believe anyone is proud of themselves when stuffing every square inch of a website with bullshit and trying to extract every penny. They know shit looks like shit because they, too, don't like sites that look like this.
We didn't vote for that shit over in DC, this is some nonsense they're doing in the states. DC doesn't even get a vote in the Congress or Senate, why punish the 700,000 people here not involved in politics?
Like "my elected officials cut the whole state off from porn" is entirely something voters IN THOSE STATES need to work out for themselves lmao
it appears we're all too engrossed in our personal lives.
I understand the sentiment, and when I was younger I probably would agree and I might agree again when I'm older. But right now, my personal life is the only one I have, and the world has organized itself in a way that all I can do is work to slow my losses.
I'm giving the fediverse a real shot, but it's a slow burn It's not "there" yet, there aren't a decade worth of conversations about my favorite topics. For some people, they have more immediate needs and desires that can't be satisfied here and if Reddit is all there is, it's where they'll go. But it's important to me that nobody forget that most people aren't in love with spez and the Reddit corporation, they love their communities, the way many people dislike Zuck but stay on Facebook because they love their friends. Platforms are code, they're also people, and our peers are not mindless sheep for wanting to be with people in spaces they enjoy. It's what's human.
For Fediverse to win, we have to provide more than just platforms, we have to have good people, good content, something to stay for. A reason to join beyond just Fuck Reddit.
I think I've seen enough now to conclude for-profit social media will always end looking like 90s AOL. But you know, I was on AIM until 2010, because despite all my contempt for AOL it wasn't about whether or not I loved Steve Case, it was about whether or not the people in my life could talk to me.
I just have one life. I have strong beliefs about many things, tech ethos especially, but I have only one life and I don't want to empty it wholly of the communities that enrich it to score points for FOSS.
Most recently Spez said the IPO is further away now than it was last year lmao
The contempt reddit's defenders have for reddit is a bit boggling. They seem to truly hate the site and the communities they want to be open, and they seem to truly hate the mods. Spez ought to be careful with friends like that, they are guaranteed to dislike whatever his next subreddit banning is
if you haven't even accessed anything in an account in several years, why have it?
Email is a bit different to me than like cloud storage, because so much gets tied there -- social media, banking, etc., that I don't like the idea of gambling with it unless I'm sure an account is a throwaway. People incarcerated, hospitalized or dead may not be able to regularly access their email, yet the information inside may be vital to them and their family.
Ghoulish, but as I mentioned earlier, now I have to remind people to be sure to log into their dead relative's email accounts to preserve information.
Maybe an actual FAQ would be good -- people during fractious times have a tendency to catastrophize and create misinformation.
Business, always business
Spez mistakes being cynical and greedy with "maturing," as is typical of the cynical and greedy.
Blackout curtains, melatonin, whatever you can to control your sleep and block out noise and light are a must. The ice cream man can be your enemy. Stock up on emergency 5 hour energies, I like to have soylent in reserve too because sometimes food and shit won't be available.
I won't lie, night shift strained many of my relationships. It took quite a bit from me. But it can give back too. Things like audiobooks and videogames replaced drinking at bars with friends. Have solo hobbies prepared.
There's a temptation to become diurnal on weekends that will work against you.
Also, you have to be firm about your schedule with people. They don't consider night shifts in their plans, so you want to make sure you let people know often what can or can't work with your sleep cycle.
There was a moment in the first Digg revolt where the digg admins were like we hear you, go ahead, post the AAC encryption key. We'll go into the future together. It hit like crack and we want to see it again, especially since spez and Alexis were cheering that shit on at the time
Reddit admins have been forced to show their ass to the public, and many people who previously had positive or neutral opinions of Steve Huffman & co. have now seen what a manipulative, dishonest group they are
There's a long tail here that will get spez in the ass later, and that's been the Verge, NYT, Forbes, and so many mainstream outlets that were previous incurious about spez having to talk to him and report on his AMA. He could very quickly end up characterized as a Musk-like buffoon if that's how people who need to make their money from ink start to see him, especially if he doesn't manage to find a new personality before he opens his mouth again. Like the average Redditor, spez doesn't think he's transparent when he's being smug or snarky, and that is particularly visible to journalists who have degrees in snark.
Careful now, that sort of open honesty is going to net you even more users who now have even higher expectations.
Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet
I assume the desired goal of the John Oliver thing is getting John Oliver's attention.
Yep -- I love that franchise for that reason! Instead of sprawling, they're just dense and full of life. I still got lost even after playing five of those games in the same neighborhood but like, I wish more people looked at that density vs sprawl
Honestly as an early user of Facebook, Reddit, etc., we shouldn't forget that when people first came to these services, they were the smaller, cleaner, more text-based alternatives to bigger corporate bullshit. Myspace was busy, bloated, Malware prone, Facebook was light and organized. Digg became super corporatized overnight, Reddit was clean and simple. Once early users are on that shit when it's good, their friends follow, and eventually communities form and it's very, very difficult if you care about a community to abandon it for an alternative. Websites aren't just "websites," they're people, and just like tech companies eventually always put profits over people, people put people over software. They'll put up with a lot of shit to stay on touch woth the people they loved.
How do we define edge case? Incarceration is a fact of life, and in the US we have somewhere around one in a hundred Americans jailed. It's not an insubstantial sum of people, and like military deployments, is something that should be accounted for when looking at scenarios where someone might be away from their computer for a sum of time.
They usually have two cities!
No need for sarcasm -- I was ASKING if there were other ways outside of up/downvotes, AI moderation, manual/human curation, or no moderation. Hence question mark.
I uninstalled RIF. For old time's sake I fell asleep last night browsing many year old threads on r/tolkienfans. Truly relaxing, ad, clutter free, just text, just reading. I hate the idea of a world without that.
I don't think there's an age cut off, I just think you got into the hobby when it was niche and your peers didn't. I'm an NES-generation video game player and I don't really know anyone my age who doesn't at least have a gamer in their household. On the other end, I don't know a single person who has a cable subscription.
Tw reddit link: flashback to the time spez started suspending people for saying fuck you spez
Tw reddit link: flashback to spez's apology for editing t_d posts
Sorry!!! Just thought it was interesting to go back to that day and time.
it appears we're all too engrossed in our personal lives.
I understand the sentiment, and when I was younger I probably would agree and I might agree again when I'm older. But right now, my personal life is the only one I have, and the world has organized itself in a way that all I can do is work to slow my losses.
I'm giving the fediverse a real shot, but it's a slow burn It's not "there" yet, there aren't a decade worth of conversations about my favorite topics. For some people, they have more immediate needs and desires that can't be satisfied here and if Reddit is all there is, it's where they'll go. But it's important to me that nobody forget that most people aren't in love with spez and the Reddit corporation, they love their communities, the way many people dislike Zuck but stay on Facebook because they love their friends. Platforms are code, they're also people, and our peers are not mindless sheep for wanting to be with people in spaces they enjoy. It's what's human.
For Fediverse to win, we have to provide more than just platforms, we have to have good people, good content, something to stay for. A reason to join beyond just Fuck Reddit.
I think I've seen enough now to conclude for-profit social media will always end looking like 90s AOL. But you know, I was on AIM until 2010, because despite all my contempt for AOL it wasn't about whether or not I loved Steve Case, it was about whether or not the people in my life could talk to me.
I just have one life. I have strong beliefs about many things, tech ethos especially, but I have only one life and I don't want to empty it wholly of the communities that enrich it to score points for FOSS.
Dated, but has anyone come up with a better way? Outside of having another human carefully curate your shit, or some kind of Zuckerbot doing it, you need some way to filter out bullshit or any community will be overwhelmed with spam and trolls
Tashlan@kbin.social to 
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 37 points –
Fuck u/spez