How to Actually Break Reddit | Hacker News Reader

How to Actually Break Reddit

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15 pointsprakhar89721 comments

While there’s no easy solution, I think it’s inaccurate to say that everyone will simply return to Reddit after the controversy blows over.

The people complaining loudest are users and moderators who use third-party apps because they find Reddit website and first party app to be completely unusable.

Reddit won’t disappear overnight, but it will enter a steep decline in quality as we saw with Facebook and Twitter, and the minority of users who leave permanently are likely the ones who contributed the most value to the site.

One thing that isn't being discussed much is the bubble of shame that has been building up around Reddit.

For years, Redditors have been accused of being homophobic, misogynistic, incels, pedantic, predatory, etc because the Reddit administration kept tolerating edgelord 4Chan-style communities until the stink hit the mainstream media.

See TikTok's "Average Redditor" account/meme.

So every good poster still on Reddit has either been pushing against that stereotype or ok with it. For 14 years I was willing to stand up for Reddit as a fountain of information but that shame bubble has been hovering over me for at least ten.

There's a new reason to be ashamed of using Reddit. If post a single comment after the blackout I will be a corporate bootlicker who is willing to tolerate good contributors being libeled in pursuit of a slightly higher IPO.

So I'm out. The shame bubble burst when they took indefensible actions against the community.

A huge chunk of the best contributors will be similarly affected.

When I first started browsing reddit many years ago, I remember the comments and user contributed information to be of decent quality. Now there are many topics with page after page of irreverent half-assed humor. I am not really sure where the blame lies for this (mods, user culture, bots, etc...) but the quality of content on the site dropped dramatically over the years to where most of it is just garbage or noise. I really don't think that can ever be fixed.

I mean, we knew about the eternal September of Reddit. That was just part of the experience.

The oldtimers would drift slightly more and more out of sync with all of the newbies, the newbies would gradually become the oldtimers, that's just the way it goes.

Circle of internet life, you know?

They're probably looking at this attack as ripping off the bandaid. No need to have generated so much ill will, but the owners of Reddit, (not the users) have decided they want to go forcefully in a certain direction and they do not care who they have to trample to go that way.

To that I say, "Godspeed, and go die in a fire", but whatever. I'm enjoying the comedown from my Reddit addiction. I find myself reaching for my phone when I'm bored and realizing I deleted the app and have no instant dopamine buttons available.

Change is good, and if you can't change with it then change in another way, right?

Agreed. It's not going to get better. You can't force changes on users who generate and manage all the content on your site.

Reddit’s problem, assuming they actually want the site to continue to be a functional forum (and I think this is a big assumption, I think they view it as a huge LLM training set to sell now) is that they’ve depended on volunteer moderation. If the free moderators leave, they’ll either need to pay moderators (very expensive, would likely put them further in the red) or they watch the content go down the toilet, which is also bad for their IPO dreams. Having taken a blowtorch to moderator/power users’ trust, I think they’re in an inevitable death spiral at this point, it’s just a question of how fast.

The Reddit situation reminds me a lot of the China situation:

"A major player, having built a near dominant position in the global flow chain, starts misbehaving. The entire world tries to de-risk by finding or bootstrapping alternatives."

A decade ago probably nobody thinks there is any chance China-derisking is doable, but from today's vantage point it is becoming more and more likely.

In the same way, there appears no easy alternative to Reddit right now, but never say never. Having planted the seed of distrust, an exodus from Reddit can happen anytime the critical mass is achieved.

I've thought about this in the past. If we model each user as a perfectly rational agent, the user will migrate once the perceived subjective value of the new platform is higher than the one from Reddit.

Since the network effect (the author calls it "feedback loop") itself adds value, you need to offer value that more than compensates the network effect, through: user interface, features, a better community (the Reddit community is disingenuous, petty, and worse - stupid), so goes on.

However at the moment at most those sites have a better community to offer. (It's rather surprising to post in Beehaw or Kbin, and see that users there are... rational people???). The interface however still sucks major balls, and the features are actually worse than in Reddit.

Good news for everyone though: Reddit will only become worse and worse after the IPO. Before it, too, but specially after the IPO.

>So, these “alternative” companies need to adopt protocols instead of building their own private garden. Unity is the only way they can fight against a giant like Reddit.

That is THE idea behind the Lemmyverse. (And the Fediverse as a whole). Its underlying protocol is even used by alternatives not in the Lemmyverse, like Kbin.

I think these attempted migrations would fare better if there was some kind of site that listed social media platforms by their number of users.

Whole point of federation is to eliminate the need for centralized platforms, which will never not self-destruct like Reddit is currently doing.

If you realize that one casino is ruining your life and go looking for a different casino, you've failed to grasp the problem.

They are ignoring the elephant in the room: Discord.

Discord only competes with Reddit partially, as much as going outside does. It isn't really suitable for the sort of forum-like discussion that Reddit has [or used to have - things are getting pretty nasty there.]

I agree, yet I have seen entire communities move to Discord before all this protest even started.

They won't last in Discord. Too messy, to sync for anything that Reddit used to be good for.

They'll be either in some random alt or back to Reddit.

Hmmm, wouldn't it make more sense for one of the major apps that's going to shut down (ie Apollo, etc) instead duplicate all posts through it to the same er... "subreddit" in a chosen Reddit alternative?

That should get enough of the Community moved over reasonably quickly, so it has a chance of working.

This guy's solution is basically a copypaste of a description of Lemmy, but change the word "instance" to "company". I wonder if he's even watched a What Is The Fediverse video.

I was gonna say, kept going on about adopting protocols:

> So, these “alternative” companies need to adopt protocols instead of building their own private garden. Unity is the only way they can fight against a giant like Reddit.

Yet apparently hasn't even googled "Lemmy", "ActivityPub" or "Federation".

So which is your favorite techbro innovation, the illegal hotel chain, the illegal taxi company, the fake money for criminals or the plagiarism machine?

I'm not following? What do any of those have to do with what I said?

> The average user will try reddit alternatives, realize there is no one active on RedditCopy143.com and then wait for the subreddits to open up again.

As an average reddit user, i can confirm this. I am not going to try alternatives. I actually support reddit in charging money for api access from those who wish to train ai models. Cant blame reddit for wanting money in return for their bandwidth, infrastructure and salaries paid so people can cannibalise content.

What i hope is that open source developers will follow suit and abandon github or close their code all together, particularly since there’s no indication that open source licensing will be honoured.

If ai folks have the audacity to claim our work is free to use by their models then i am sorry but you will either have to pay for it or make it yourself.

> I actually support reddit in charging money for api acces

Everyone does. The issue isn’t that they plan to charge but rather that they announced unreasonable rates so high that it’ll kill everything in sight in the 3rd party ecosystem. So high that it’s hard not to conclude that this is precisely the intent

The ai stuff is a red herring to justify above. The type and volume of access needed is different (firehose vs logged in user). They could distinguish if they wanted to and accommodate the one or the other.

By conflating the two they get to play the victim (ai stealing our data) while killing the competitor apps

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