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Comment by lazystar | Hacker News Reader

There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored over the course of their tantrum. I've commented more in the past few days than i have in the past few months, because it's obvious the mods have completely lost perspective of the average user experience.

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Lurkers are pure consumers, free-riders. They produce nothing. They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.

People like to say that users who post content care about lurkers because they want to be seen/heard. No. People who post content care about commenters (and up/downvoters at the bare minimum) who interact with them in meaningful ways, not lurkers. Lurkers are the cosmic neutrinos of social media: they pass through without leaving a trace.

Reddit wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want millions of hours of unpaid labour from mods, posters, and commenters. And they want to control these people as if they were employees (by dictating what tools they're allowed/not allowed to use). This will not turn out well!

> They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.

yes, and fund service running. Looks like important part of the ecosystem.

Only for a centralized, corporate-owned system like Reddit. A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style. This changes the incentive structure: making the administrators accountable to the most invested people (power users).

> A volunteer-owned fediverse system can monetize via donations, Patreon-style

does it exist and works on scale, or it is like communism where everyone will be happy, but it is never achievable and sustainable just because most of the people want money, power and free stuff.

Matrix has 20+ million users, and is federated.

ok, then reddit problem is solved. Or not because they solve different problem and need very different infra?..

There are social network UIs written for Matrix the same way ActivityPub is used for Lemmy and Mastodon and Flickr-clones. I expect these to multiply as the protocol gains more features too. Recent Matrix enhancements are about modeling content relationships, seemingly to this end.

And yes, the entire foundation structure of the platform and protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point. ActivityPub and Matrix protocol are similar in this regard. And yes the AP impls are seeing huge explosions in growth in the last 3 weeks.

Riku, I can't reply to you because this site is a joke, but I don't think I want to anyway, you don't seem to get the point, across the board. Not everything is about profit for bleep's sake. Also, I'll sign up for s month of reddit premium if you can find 3 subs that voted to re-open. Or literally any single person besides you and spez that think every single app dev is scamming, and nearly every single mod.

And no reddits infra is not a most, lmao. Their site crashes daily and runs on AWS, and every single bit of value is derived from the people you accuse of spamming - you know the ones that keep voting to keep the homepage looking like a wasteland of porn and AITA posts. You're completely out of touch.

> protocol are quite different, that's kinda the point

I am not familiar with all those projects, but my understanding is that reddit's moats are:

- infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search and recommendation on top of them

- they have bootstrapped content volume and communities

- they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries

how far mentioned projects from that state?

> infra which can serve significant traffic over petabytes of content with search

Search? Reddit search is so bad it’s practically a meme. They only added the ability to search within comments (y’know, like 90% of the site) _this year_.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/11dgwzy/whats_up_wi...

> they have bootstrapped content volume and communities

Do you mean when the founders (including current CEO) posted as a bunch of fake users to create the illusion that it was popular?

https://venturebeat.com/social/reddit-fake-users/

> they have monetization in place which pays for all infra and salaries

How is possible if Reddit has never been profitable/reached breakeven?

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762868/reddit-ceo-steve...

I don't see you refuted anything, they still have infra for lots of data with search and recommendation, bootstrapped content and communities and generate good chunk of revenue, and reaching this point will take good amount of effort for rivals.

> They are valuable only to Reddit for their potential to be monetized.

Why are you dismissing this? I don’t understand all of these comments talking about Reddit as if it was 100% free to operate and the only important users are the commenters

Reddit at its core is a utility. A "dumb pipe" operator whose main role is to keep the servers running and pay the bandwidth bills. Yet like so many (internet-based) utilities, they have delusions of grandeur, born out of a sense of entitlement to the incredible value produced by their users.

Why did they hire 2000 people? Nothing they have done in the last decade has provided new value to users. If they had simply accepted their role as a utility instead of chasing the mega-growth tech fantasy then they would be a (modestly) profitable company with 200 employees at most.

“But Reddit needs to make money” /s https://mastodon.social/@robotdeathsquad/110543755195398954

Except even just viewing a post leaves a trace, whether a the service chooses to display view counts or not. The webhost knows how much traffic they're getting, and those numbers help them set rates for advertisers.

None of that matters one bit to the average Reddit poster: the person who creates a text post without any links. If any value is captured from that lurker, it all goes straight to Reddit.

Lurkers can participate with upvotes and downvotes. You don't even have to join a subreddit to participate in this way.

Lurkers (who did click join, but never posted) are included in the subreddit user-counts advertised on the protest subreddit. If they count as users there, they count as users here.

I dunno, post on /r/games explaining why there were NOT going to black out is still sitting at 0 upvotes (a in "there is more downvotes than upvotes", with comments asking them to sitting on nice few k's of upvotes which would indicate that even people that never comment downvoted it and want the blackout.

The few lurkers coming out of woodwork asking people to allow for enshittification to continue is by definition vocal minority

Polls and vote counts can no longer be used to measure subreddit sentiment on this issue. That window closed once the first blackout began, which thrust low-information members into a situation where it looks like the subreddit suddenly shut down. The majority of redditors have no idea where their subreddits disappeared to, why, or when they will be back. Therefore, they can't participate in any votes.

All sentiment measurements going forward will skew towards Very Online users following the drama closely, which GP is arguing will ignore a silent majority of the subreddit's actual MAU.

> which GP is arguing will ignore a silent majority of the subreddit's actual MAU.

...while also claiming they're clairvoyant and know about what silent majority wants.

Also arguably silent majority doesn't matter here because they are not the ones that *produce* any content to watch in the first place.

The whole point of blackouts is for them to put pressure on Reddit, whether actively (complaining) or passively (not giving traffic)

Lurkers should also realize that their experience is shaped by mods decisions. For the better or for the worst, that's a good question, I guess we will soon find out. But given what FB groups look like, I have my own opinion.

Also, lurkers would have nothing to lurk around if it weren't for heavier posters, many of whom use third party apps to paper over the various papercuts of posting with the official site/client.

What do you think it would cost to buy a non insignificant amount Reddit accounts from power users to own their comments and remove them from Reddit? And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Should be cheap, right? With the value of Reddit users being so low?

If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.

> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns?

Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.

There are no material repercussions for bad faith DMCA takedowns, as the evidence has shown [1]. The legal burden still falls on Reddit to triage and action them. With that said, you would want to own the Reddit accounts as IP in an LLC that holds no financial assets to shield you from any liability (not legal advice, we're just having fun talking hypotheticals). You'd own the copyright to the content, let Reddit try to argue in court the requests were bad faith. You didn't agree to the terms when the account changed hands, and you're now the owner.

You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Reddit admins could automate the reposting of old content from years ago, complete with comments, and I think most doomscrolling lurkers would never notice.

Karma-point-harvesting bots do this already! Even comments -- one bot user reposts a popular post, and other bot users repost the top comments from the last time it was posted.

Should you rather care about the lurkers that provide no value to the community, or to the users that actually post something and make reddit reddit? For me the answer is clear. The first party app/website is terrible, riddled with annoying UX and dark patterns. Also, I still want 18+ content on Reddit!

I mean that is how everything in life works.

Most people lurk politically and are just pulled along by people who care.

If they vote, they’re not lurkers. Even thumbs up-ing is useful engagement.

Voting could either mean you spent 10 hours researching or you picked the name that you recognize the most.

And the people who care are working to make sure you recognize the right names.

> There's a silent majority - "lurkers" - that the mods have completely ignored

What is there for the mods to ignore, when the lurkers are - as you said - silent?

This is just an anecdote, but I just went on my city's sub this morning to see how they were handling this. Apparently the (singular) mod did the initial blackout, then put up a poll on whether it should continue, the sub voted not to, and he is now holding another poll this weekend on the same topic and everyone seems to think it's because he didn't get the outcome he wanted the first time.

I think all the people posting stuff like "reddit is DYING" are in for a rude awakening because the overwhelming majority of users do not give a single shit. They wanna see memes that confirm their biases and maybe see what is going on in their city/locality, and they can't do that if all their subs are blacked out.

That's just honestly sub with a shitty mod, but there is certainly an argument to be made for better tools, sub blackout should not be something so easily implemented by single mod out of whole group.

But I've seen both subs that asked mods, mods that unilaterally decided to blackout, and subs where users pleaded for blackout while power-hungry mods decided not to (presumable coz they were afraid reddit takes their playground from them)

If that really is how it went the mod made a stupid mistake.

If I were a power tripping mod, I would either just inform the sub about the subreddit taking part in the blackout. From the up and downvotes you can then already gauge the sentiment of the subreddit towards this issue and if the downvotes go south, you can always delete the post and do it anyway.

But then you can't go and ask the sub about continuing the blackout. But as a power tripping mod I can't keep the subreddit private as then I would miss out on my power trip.

So eventually I would open it up again, make a poll about continuing and as the sub will deny that I could keep it open and keep on power tripping while at the same time claiming that I only follow the sub's democratic decision.

As an example of why I lurk the majority of the time, the mods in /r/seattle have been perma-banning anyone who posts to /r/seattlewa - the mods have created a situation where each comment has a risk of tripping some unknown drama landmine. I don't want to have to make a new account and re-subscribe to all the subs I'm in if I ever trip one of these mines.

I identify as a lurker although I've made occasional posts and comments. I don't see how the mods are the problem here. Third part apps go, I go. It's that simple.

Why would lurker opinions greatly differ from poster opinions?

When the mods said their blackout would be for 2 days, the silent majority rolled their eyes, but did not voice their opinions. Over the years we've all learned that folks who disagree with a mod's opinion will most likely get banned from the subreddit, so since the mods promised the subreddits would be back after 2 days, it wasn't worth arguing about. When the mods refused to bring the subreddits back after that time was up, they broke their promise - they've lost all the trust that the various communities had with them.

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