Subreddit with almost 2M subs tries to migrate to custom platform

I don't know why anyone is surprised. The edgy subreddits (many of which were toxic cesspools) all warned everyone as they got banned, but people cheered as it happened. Finally the baddies were gone. It was never going to be limited to just them.

On another note, I do not understand why all these banned subreddits that try to migrate to their own site always try to create their own software. the_donald did it famously and created an absolute clusterfuck of a website (and community). There are so many options, there's open source old reddit, there's federating varieties like Lemmy and littr.me (a good choice if you want to run a single community), why reinvent the wheel? If you want to move to an environment like reddit where everyone can interact, but give community moderators full control over their communities, a federated architecture is the way to go, and there are a couple of solutions that work out of the box.

This reminds me of ChangeMyView aka ChangeAView aka...Ceasefire

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19591713

Essentially a reddit community about making compelling arguments in the hopes of changing someone's viewpoint. I never followed it closely, but from what I remember, the original moderators were worried that Reddit's moderation policies became too draconian whilst simultaneously selectively enforced it AND they made the community moderators bare the brunt of it. Reddit didn't do enough to combat brigading, nor offered a reasonable solution to the kinds of bans redditors were getting.

Eventually they decided to break off from the platform, but their community was too small and the rebranding hurt them in trying to maintain a userbase. They couldn't monetize it and it died.

The current version of the sub that remained on reddit is very ban happy with any semi-controversial viewpoint or anything within the realm of 'wrongthink' getting your thread locked. There's also virtually no mention of what happened. I think they were worried about losing the sub to a dedicated group of people who viewed it as a political indoctrination tool, allowing only a certain set of viewpoints... which ended up being true.

We see this repeatedly with communities on Reddit whose sole purpose is to mock other communities. It always turns into brigading and harassment. I’m surprised they lasted this long but maybe it’s just tall poppy syndrome.

The only thing I find really funny about this is that this “take something you disagree with and then advertise it” thing is basically the entire mechanism of how Twitter works so it’s interesting how it becomes far more centralised and organised on Reddit.

As we know most users on a subreddit do not create the content for each other. Its a tiny minority. Additionally, Reddit themselves, in the effort to identify and quarantine/ban bad behaviour labelled subreddits "communities". Previously users would subscribe to a bunch of subreddits as a kind of casual action, now the site itself is framing it as joining a community, as an identity. (Communities from outside can join reddit and create a subreddit, bringing their users but this is a different case and not what I'm talking about.)

Taken together the subreddits themselves can identify their own subscribers as forming a community. However the actual numbers are very low and the cohesiveness of the subreddit is illusory. Subreddits created from within reddit are not communities in actuality. They might have some dedicated people within it, but they won't be able to bring their community and the numbers they would like with them because the community doesn't actually exist.

After all the scandals that Reddit has had you have to wonder how dangerous an ipo would be. I don’t think it will happen but if someone gets far enough in discovery you gotta imagine there’s some wild shit to be found.

this certainly looks like a shitshow all the way down.

the 'cringetopia' subreddit seems dedicated to posting things beloved by basement dwelling 16 year old edgelords, so I can't say I'm surprised.

I've oft thought AskHistorians (and AskScience, together maybe) would be better as a separate website with more control over form, potential for better community building, and opportunity to fund research and such. In part just dissociating from Reddit seems like it would give it more credence and use as a resource.

Surprised anyone thinks Reddit is a good investment. It’s such a volatile thing on any reasonable timescale it’s fairly likely to go the way of digg

I wonder what does this mean (for them) from legal perspective.

Aren’t they now much more vulnerable as the content hosts? Besides of other reasons, Reddit has rules to manage their content to comply with rules (Laws as well as app stores and similar).

this doesn't surprise me at all. /r/superstonk is probably next. i've had countless reddit accounts banned in the last 2 years just for asking simple questions about Gamestop. What are hedge funds? hedge funds are fucked.