Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits | Hacker News Reader

Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

toot.cat

485 pointsdredmorbius331 comments

I don't have a lot of fondness for companies which offer a free product until it becomes entrenched, then take it away. I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy until everything else had been killed off, then they went hard on piracy.

That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here. Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value". It's also comical to hear moderators say that when the users of their subreddit could make the same claim trumping the moderator.

Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it. I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

Every subreddit is just a click away from moving, though. I see some doing it. But a lot of those subreddits enjoy the influx of users that reddit brings them (until they don't, of course).

I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value. I've seen willingness to pay a reasonable amount from most people.

Reddit brings the platform, users bring the community. If Reddit flexes their muscles to force users to their will, it's only natural for users to flex back.

What is a reasonable amount?

Much, much less than what they were asking for. The top reddit app was being faced with a yearly bill in the tens of millions of dollars, and comparison to other social media website APIs saw a price discrepancy of 20x iirc.

The other social media API is Imgur.

Pricing for Imgur is: $500 for 7.5m requests then $0.01 per request after that. Then $10,000 for 150m requests and $0.01 per request after that.

Reddit is at $0.24 per 1,000. Or $0.00024 per request.

Imgur is cheaper for 150m requests but Reddit is cheaper for 500m requests.

So really, what is a reasonable pricing?

Surely you see a difference between serving pictures and serving text.

APIs I am familiar with differ, primarily, on the size of the data and additional features (formats supported, timeliness, etc).

Is this a like with like comparison?

Is delivering an image of comparable cost to delivering text via an api?

I have zero experience in this area so could learn something.

It of. Usage wise it's a fair compassion. Both apps would get the same usage levels and type.

Both sites serve - image, video, and text(comments or posts).

Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.

Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.

Realistically, it's the best comparision there is.

> Imgur would almost certainly be cheaper to run due to the simpler nature of the site. Imgur would just need checking the overall site for content.

> Reddit would be checking each of the subreddits for content and aggerating it. Which would be more complex and more expensive to run.

Did you even take a second to look at Imgur before confidently saying something so incorrect? The homepage clearly references tags, with individual posts a la subreddits.

Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.

> Did you even take a second to look at Imgur before confidently saying something so incorrect? The homepage clearly references tags, with individual posts a la subreddits.

They have tags. Not subreddits. Tagging systems are completely different from how a subreddit works. In my experience a tagging system isn't that expensive to run. Comparing tags with sections seeems completely bonkers and very naive.

> Also, it's not like each subreddit is an individual database table or something. You're making it seem like aggregation is a substantial cost when it's just a different DB query.

In my experience, to make complex data like Reddit's highly available you need to do a whole bunch such as making subreddits separate buckets so to speak. The aggregation almost certainly has a substantial costs. This isn't some dinky MySQL database with few thousand posts. It seems absurd to compare a site with a single feed (Even if it has tags) vs a system that has a personalised feed.

I'm sure the team who build and maintain the feed mixer are happy to hear you could build it with just a database query. I'm sure they'll be reaching out so you can show them this database query.

It seems a lot of people want Imgur to be more expensive to operate therefore fair that it can be more expensive to use. While the reality seems to be the reverse.

Reddit asked ~2M$ per month. In his rant Apollo creator told that he‘ll be ok paying half of that. Can you imagine how much is he making on free Reddit APIs?

Can you imagine how much engagement the platform gets as a result of his work?

Just saying, it's never fair to try and say any one party in this arrangement is just leeching off another.

Reddit provides a platform, Users provide the community, and third-party app developers make interaction between the other two easier. Third-party apps aren't even able to engage with certain reddit content because the API never exposed it, but people still choose them; That says a lot about how they feel about the official app, and the real value that third-party devs provide.

What's crazy to me is that Reddit could have easily achieved their goals by just investing in developing a really good native app that people want to use, thereby monetizing them while also building goodwill! This whole thing could be achieved and make them look -better-. But they are making stupid short-term decisions to be able to IPO and they chose the stick over the carrot.

According to [1] in Q1 2023 Facebook had revenue of $48.85 from the average US/Canada user, and $9.62 per user worldwide.

Reddit, on the other hand, makes <$1 per user worldwide.

So, a reasonable price would be somewhere between $4 and $200 per year

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

An amount that doesn't mean immediate death to all third-party apps would be a good start.

I don't know what the right number is, but Reddit has made it abundantly clear with this move that they aren't interested in finding it.

Honestly, I doubt there is one anymore (for me at least). Any trust I had for their corporate leadership before has completely evaporated. If they were to lower the prices to a "reasonable" level now it would indicate that they either capitulated (but didn't get to do what they really wanted and probably will try again later) or they are just being manipulative and wanted to use this as a way to show "goodwill" by bringing the price down.

The concept of the fediverse these days has me hopeful for a time where we don't need to worry about these big dumb corporate interests holding our data and the control over it hostage. Any publicly owned (or private trying to go public) organization with a profit incentive is bound to make stupid, short-term decisions eventually, and this is just one of many of Reddit's forays into that arena. They will continue to get worse and worse, regardless of how effective the protesting is.

Reddit's revenue per user is utterly trash compared to every other social media site. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to want to close the gap.

> I never got the impression that the community is claiming that Reddit doesn't produce any value.

There are tons of statements all over the place on, "we produce all the value". There are statements in this very thread that Reddit brings little or nothing to the table.

Yes, somehow, despite apparently building little to nothing, everyone coalesced around Reddit and not some grander effort.

I can't explain Reddit or defend their actions, but the response looks more like a tantrum with petty people flexing what little power they have to feel important. The Api problem is just the excuse.

Some sub reddits voted on this, so we can't blame the moderators in all cases.

I disagree that someone gets to add my voice to a protest need on a vote.

I don’t really see the need for a video, if they say they need to apps to do moderation, IMO take their word for it.

I'm not saying you are wrong. But the point you are missing, in my opinion, is that the people using the API and third party apps are the power users. It's simple, you start using a site/tool/game so much, you learn the addon/plugins/whatever for it and start using it, tale as old as computing.

Doesn't matter if they're the super active users / contributors / moderators / nft or awards whale / ... They're all power users, the very few % that generate the value, either directly by paying or indirectly by making other users stay and come back.

But in three decades of the web (roughly), I don't know of any web platform that started a fight against its power users and ended up in a better position as a company afterward. Winning the battle ? Sure. But a better position ? Nope. Do you have a counter exemple ?

It feels like either reddit is massively screwing up, or they don't care as long as they can fake it until the IPO.

The only question right now, is simply how many % of their power users are caught in that fight and they risk losing. Everything else is just a side show.

PS: the craziest part being that the whole thing is so not necessary. If they had come up straight up "we need to end that", or "they need to give us X% of revenue" or whatever, and stop at that, it would have worked. The terrible communication, and pretending to want to find a deal while clearly not, and the CEO refusing to stop lying, is what caused the current situation.

Either spez is used as a tool to reach the IPO they dream of and they're all aware of it, or I have no idea why he is still at this place.

third party apps serve far fewer ads, or no ads, and offer functionality that neither the website nor the official app support.

life is better on Reddit with a 3rd party client.

Why should reddit have to freely support a third-party client that doesn't provide revenue for them?

The only reason is that the status quo is they have in the past freely supported these use cases, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable for commercial use API access to cost money.

I don't think they should - I'd be happy if they served ads over the API. I use a third party app because I prefer the interface, not purely because it's ad free although that is obviously a nice benefit.

I wouldn't personally pay for Reddit Premium so if ads are the only way to keep third party apps viable then so be it.

why haven't they served ads via the API then? no one is stopping them.

they haven't done so because they have chosen not to. they are still choosing not to.

this is a calculated move by reddit to extract the highest amount of money possible from 3rd party app developers, and the users of these apps are who is going to suffer. reddit waited until API use was counted on by some portion of its users before they pulled this lever. it's predatory.

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.

Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.

Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV

I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.

The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.

The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)

Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing.

They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.

> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

>> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

> Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.

> the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses

Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,

The whole world needs to slow down and take a breath.

It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.

It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.

That still seems high for what Reddit is. I would have expected them to have 50-100 employees at most.

Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access.

I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.

Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.

Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some?

The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users.

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information.

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.

I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

And ChatGPT will write all of this up https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/14fupdk/dock_... for you. Absolutely. I can see that happening. Even the opening of it which is just a recital of various standards, well compare to https://chat.openai.com/share/bbb32735-26c7-48c7-9293-a33020... this. It says "If your USB-C port supports DisplayPort Alt Mode or HDMI Alt Mode" we know it does not support HDMI alt mode because that's a paper only standard, there were never any implementations of it and the HDMI Forum this January killed it. ChatGPT didn't mention HBR2, HBR3, DSC, MST all of which are vital to understand the problem.

I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.

But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.

https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...

But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.

When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews

https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...

How many more you want?

My comment was mostly about the current trend. In just 4 years we went from GPT-2 to GPT-4, and the pace seems accelerating. Only a fool points to the limits of current technology to make claims about future technology, the less foolish look at trend lines. The even less foolish have causal models, but even in this case, ChatGPT’s user trendline is faster growing than Reddit’s. Though this tells you little about whether they’re substitutes.

OK let me be simple

It will always be garbage

This is a hype road. There's nothing. There never will be anything.

It's just automated plagiarism.

The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content which this method can't ever create.

>The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content

you should tell that to reddtors. I believe they complain quite a bit about reposts, the same questions being asked, bots, and more.

Some != all

Stochastic parrot: inherently no new content

Reddit: some new content.

I'm sure there's new content on Tumblr too, even if we'd veer the opposite way and say that "Tumblr has nothing", which is equally exaggeratory.

So, what's the line? How much noise are we welling to dig through to find "some new content"? I'd argue reddit has enough noise to at least bring the question up.

> migrate to another platform

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

A good few subs have already quite fluidly moved over to lemmy. Sure, you're not taking the archives with you, but if that's really what you're after, surely you can afford the price of "free" for wget.

Yet we won’t lose that history if Reddit loses its users and mods. New history will be found in the same place as old - surfaced via Google (discord excluded).

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for?

God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent.

It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

Too bad we can't (won't?) all just go back to Usenet.

>This neatly summarizes why anybody should care.

if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed).

You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.

> if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it.

Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple.

I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever.

What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you.

The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.

I don't think discord is a valid replacement. One of the best parts of reddit was the easily browsable/searchable Forum like threading. Where there are communities for a given theme, and threads branching off of that group. Discord is great for realtime chat, but a significant pain for async conversations. In general for information access I personally don't like to search through chats because the threading is too shallow, and conversations are had at the root, aka group level.

kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.

I'm happy it's happening. Putting ownership back in the community's hands is a huge win for the freedom and diversity of the internet.

I agree, but it's a lot more work, and each individual federated instance has a lot of control and data. It's definitely better, but you'd still need to migrate content if your instance owner goes ape.

Then host your own instance. That's actually more work, but worth it if you don't trust whomever is hosting your community. Should become fairly straightforward once you have parties taking care of the technical details (there probably are already some).

Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

> which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself?

This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server.

The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

I actually believe this is one of the reasons Reddit (and its alternatives) will never reach their peaks again. Too many want to take, not many want to give their valuable information.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

The one advantadge I can (not so) proudly say I've learned from years of digging through the mucks of the internet for various kinds of NSFW media. You don't get the info easily, no one wants to advertise it even if you wanted to. sometimes the info isn't even for free. You either spend a lot of time finding some truly backwater forums with nuggest of gold, or pay someone who's dug that deep to curate for you.

If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.

> Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet.

Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

You're right that discord is shit, but the web used to be filled with forums that did everything reddit does just as well, but simply were not as popular.

Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success.

Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing.

The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama.

Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

Agreed, people chose once again to centralize instead of diversfy, and as history has shown time and time again: we're paying for it right now.

At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.

Centralization removes a massive barrier though. We want content, and control over that content, distributed and preserved (usually), but we also want everything in one easy to access location. Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work. Subscribing to 100+ subreddits and hitting the refresh button on one website was easy and mostly worked pretty well. A single interface/client/login for everything is ideal. What we really need is a new usenet.

> We want content, and control over that content

in context of reddit, we clearly do not value that control at all. these last few weeks have shown how much control we truly have.

>Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work.

we solved that problem decades ago, though. I think even Reddit has RSS feed support (well, for now. I don't think it's native). I think leaving the centralizing to an underlying format is a better approach than expecting a benevelent dictator to always look into the best interests of the user while also seeking profits (or alternatively, an eccentric billionaire who cares not about profits).

Some inconvenience of signing up with an account is short term, and not exactly a huge barrier to begin with. I made 3 new accounts this week on various alternatives, barely took 10 minutes total.

> Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

Was it, though?

Sure, I'm not going to minimize the benefits of discoverability, avoiding the need for users to create yet another account, and taking the burden of infra maintenance off of someone who'd otherwise have to stand up a server to host phpBB or whatever.

But ultimately we don't strictly need these things. Isolated/fragmented web forums were doing just fine before Reddit came along. Maybe adding a little friction to the process of a first post to a new forum is a feature, not a bug.

> Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any time you hitch your community to someone else's platform, you incur the large risk that the platform owners will make changes that you don't like. It's not even "neglect and mismanagement": Reddit's owners have been doing what they believe increases the value of Reddit. Whether they're wrong or right about what changes accomplish that ultimately doesn't matter: those changes might not be what makes users and moderators happy, and users and moderators don't have much power to affect change. This protest/blackout may end up achieving the desired effect, but think of the time, energy, and effort wasted around all of it. Better to spend that time working on solutions that allow communities to own their slice of the platform, and have final say as to what happens with it.

> > Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

> Was it, though?

The great thing about Reddit is how it removes almost any friction from creating and joining new „forums“. The less friction or transaction cost you have the better. Without Reddit I’m not sure we’d have dedicated forums of people posting their grilled cheese sandwiches or Babylon 5 GIFs

Indeed.

Plus, I subscribe to about 30 subreddits, most of which pretty niche. Could I replace them with forums? Sure, and I do have fond memories from phpbb forums around the turn of the millenium, even moderating a few as a teen.

But then I'd have to check about 5-10 different forum sites daily, each with subforums for different specific topics. It adds friction.

It's much more convenient just opening reddit whenever I have a few minutes to scroll my feed and see what's up in my niche communities.

Reddit also gives the power to users to create niche communities. R/xbiking comes to mind, which is about a very specific bicycling subculture consisting of using vintage mountain bike frames from the 80s and 90s with a mix of modern and vintage parts to create cool all around bikes... Sort of. Anyways, to my knowledge this subculture did not exist anywhere before Reddit, and I can hardly see how it could have sprung up on bikeforums.net, for example. Petitioning the forums admins for a new subforum for a community that hardly existed would have been difficult, and the sort of posts R/xbiking sees would probably have been closed as offtopic in other subforums. Much easier to create and organically grow a new community on Reddit.

Personally, after being a bit reticent, I am now hopeful for fediverse based solutions (kbin and Lemmy notably) to replace this.

>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community

never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose.

And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website.

>God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.

I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.

I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial.

Building and running a software company is not free.

They should definitely be paid for that.

But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.

Revenue in 2017 was $50mm. So in the last six years, their headcount has grown 10x, and their revenue has grown 10x. Hmm…

But the site has not changed.

Are all those people sales? If no, then those workers seem like mostly a waste of money. If yes, and they're still not profitable, then turning the company into 90+% sales is not the path to profitability either.

Do you have any non-sales explanation for what those people are doing that actually contributes to revenue?

It's not like they opened more factories and need more workers.

Though maybe they look at increased revenue and use that as the reason to hire more people because growth good, in which case any complaints about lack of profitability should be derisively laughed at.

Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform.

Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending

"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."

At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.

> Reddit, of course, seems hell bent on making their UI worse and worse. I don't know what their play is or how they plan on getting paid for it.

As an outside observer of this and the rest of the more recent history of Reddit, I suspect there's a strong echo chamber inside the company (perhaps not coincidentally, given the product's penchant for producing them) where it's hard to disagree and get any traction. It would at least explain why decisions that are at least obviously controversial, if not obviously bad, continue to be made.

>I have to say, though, for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

This is why I don't complain too much about their crummy web interface. If anything the pop-up on mobile asking me to open it in the app is the most annoying thing about them, which I can't say about any other platform

Excellent take

See this on pushshift and apps that used it like the camas search tool:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35776848

and here's a comment excerpt from this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_dat...

> "You are removing a vital tool with absolutely no replacement ready, and that is absolutely unfair to those of us who are volunteering to moderate the content on your platform. Moderation tools, at this point, should be moving forward, but Reddit is about to throw the moderators *YEARS* backwards, while the scammers, spammers, and bots continue to find new and exciting ways to spam our subreddits- which the moderators take the heat for if we fail to adequately protect the sub."

So, why doesn't Reddit provide this functionality in-house? I think it's because it reduces or eliminates their ability to do things like shadowbanning / reducing visibility / amplifying etc. These tools would expose such activity, and that's part of the product they're selling - control of information.

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.

It's ironic because I've always regarded the API as an egalitarian tool against powertripping mods. Viewing deleted comments through Pushshift was the only way to know what mods were actually doing and how honest they were. Pushshift was also the only usable search engine and archive for the platform. With it gone the culture will be very different.

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api. In all of these discussions, I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

I guess, I can chime in, I know some people who are "power mods" if you will, and they have even shared screen. Things like better mod queue capabilities, you can also see moderator actions way better than whatever reddit provided (at least on old reddit). Things like keeping notes on users, which work throughout all of reddit, so if you go through their entire reddit post history, you can save notes to remind yourself about them for later, e.g. if you spot someone trolling and being blatantly bad, you can save such notes, if you spot them on your sub 3 years later, being an awful person, you know how to act. There's also templates for things like messaging, which uses the wiki feature to store some of the data.

Worse yet is Reddit Enhancement Suite and I forget what the other popular one is (Moderator Toolbox?) only properly work on desktop as browser plugins, if you're trying to do mod work on mobile good luck with their awful UI. I'm surprised reddit has not made part of their UI open source to allow people to enhance the mod tools from within reddits own UI. Reddits whole back-end was open source, until they decided to buy into every over hyped approach to modern web development, for whatever reason, instead of just gradually improving on their old and fully capable codebase. New reddit is a confusing mess, and half of the tools that work on old reddit do not on new reddit.

You can also see the types of subs someone posts in and get those kind of metrics and figure out if someone's a troll or hostile to your subreddit based on opposing communities they post a lot in, and then with one click find all their posts within said subs.

None of these things are OOTB on reddit, and a lot of them imho could have been added years ago.

Reddit won't open any source because that would make apparent how badly made their products are.

The site is really just a bunch of kluges barely held together with duct tape....

Reddit was previously open sourced.

I've contributed code to the project.

(OP, FYI.)

Reddit and its communities (comprised of users and mods) are in a symbiotic relationship.

Both have a claim on the total value of the company. Neither can survive without the other.

I thoroughly believe there are several win-win outcomes possible that address all parties' publicized concerns. I am not sure that there are technical good faith solutions being looked for right now though.

I wrote about this exact phenomenon yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36409577

This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

And in this case, the grievance is against all companies that give away "free service". I also wrote up the thread about GitLab doing what they're doing should never be called free. And I believe that an interpretation of FTC guidelines actually does call this behavior out as bad.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

First, that is certainly an interesting way to bring up the anti-mod wedge the pro-Reddit-admin side are trying to push. Divide and conquer, right?

Second, this has been and always will be about the inexorable enshittification of Reddit that the Reddit admins have been pushing. The UI has been getting worse for years, and they are killing off the alternatives one by one.

This is all in order to exert more control in order to cash out (IPO) and cash in (advertiser potential going forward). And it sucks for all users.

https://www.disruptiveconversations.com/2023/01/cory-doctoro...

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them."

- Cory Doctorow

Didn't Ms have a pretty lax stance on piracy in the last decade or so?

Letting you download images, windows just showing "not genuine" instead of refusing to start etc..

Or are you referring to the '80s?

>That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.

The question of who produces the value is subjective and largely meaningless. Reddit would have no value if nobody posted. But it would have no value if Reddit turned off the servers. Reddit would have no value if the power company shut off the electricity. It doesn't matter who "creates more value". All that matters is who has more control and leverage, and how much they are willing to exercise it.

This is a universal truth.

> Every voice I've heard is, "we do all the work", "we produce all the value".

Is it wrong to claim that, though?

Social media sites are a dime a dozen. Countless social media sites came and went. In each and every single example, moderation and community curating was key to success and the root cause of failure. Take for example Voat, which was a better Reddit than Reddit itself but made it it's point to have questionable moderation practices. How did that panned out?

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power, rather than showing the actual need for an api.

I'm sorry, what? No. Do you actually have any idea what's going on, at all?

All subreddits have been having polls to drive their decisions and make them at a community level. We are seeing mods enact community decisions to close the communication channel they created and maintain as a community. They are taking these stances in protest of a draconian measure made in bad faith by people who were reportedly caught lying their asses off repeatedly. Is this not outright hostile to communities?

There has been speculation that some of the popular subreddits such as /r/programming has been resorting to dumping AI-generated content to artificially generate Traffic to counter the protest. Suddenly Reddit admins have the right to intervene in subreddits when I'm the past they refused to do anything to counter hate speech and abuse.

This has everything to do with API policies, but Reddit's CEO has been repeatedly shooting himself in the foot in a really stupid and avoidable way, and in the process is being outright hostile to the community that generates the traffic he hopes to monetize.

> I think of how MS ... turned a blind eye toward piracy until

1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Yes, the original claim is wildly ahistorical. I seriously think that one of Microsoft's key innovations that made it successful was the idea that software should be paid for, not shared, and this should be enforced by law.

When I look for reddit alternatives... the ironic thing is that I can't find any that seem to me comparable and offer even as much API as reddit does currently! (If you know of some, happy to hear suggestions).

Reddit's current API is pretty kludgey and weird, honestly. But it's there.

Of course, it's the threat to remove/limit it that spurred the protest.

But if it's so vital and important and only a cruel walled garden dictator would take it away... why do none of the potential replacements/competitors offer comparable API either? Even after this controversy, none seem to have rolled it out?

It's true that few are providing concrete examples of why the API is important. I honestly think it's more a basic _feeling_ about taking what users and mods consider "their" content hosted by reddit -- and which reddit has historically acted as if it agreed and not tried to "walled garden" the content -- being turned into "walled garden" instead. Just an intuition about one of the last places that didn't try to prevent integrations and monopolize the content moving in that direction. And I'm totally sympathetic to that actually, and feel similarly. Reddit was one of the last places that was happy to let users write their own integrations, for whatever reasons, without gatekeeping. (Even if the API could be a mess to work with!)

I'm all in favor of big subreddits protesting. What I don't like is that very small, slow subreddits are also protesting when doing so is likely to be fatal. Each of these small communities barely came about in the first place, and subs that get ten posts and fifty comments a day aren't going to recover after being shut down for a month.

It would probably be at least a more meaningful protest if the moderators went on strike instead of privating their subreddits. But I don’t think many have the stomach for this.

If we are talking about "value" as Reddit the company sees it, moderators provide 99.9% of that.

Remember, their value as they see it (now that it's on an IPO trajectory) is in having a sanitized version of the reddit from 12 years ago or so. And it's far too large of a job for the admins (and has some legal landmines buried all over the place if they did attempt it).

Finding new mods who will do the work for free is possible, but substituting in the shills will cause too much bad press (and risks the same problems 1 year from now, 3 years, 5 years as the new mods figure out how they've been swindled).

If we're talking about the value as users see it, mod provide exactly 0.0% of it, and Reddit the company probably provides about -20% or so. It's always been in the discussions and comments, which are the only real content. More to the point it's only those comments that are made by the people who bristle at busybodies trying to herd them along into the worst sort of saccharinely polite discourse.

> I think of how MS and Adobe both turned a blind eye toward piracy

I remember this very, very differently than you do, apparently

> I haven't seen a single video detailing side by side how necessary the third party apps are. Just claims that everyone needs them and uses them.

"Third party apps" also includes bots, like for moderation, which I think is the main issue I've seen discussed besides the various manual mod tools of reddit apps themselves.

> Right now the mods seem to be flexing their muscle, showing that Reddit has allowed them too much power

That's a weird framing to me. I'd say it's the other way around: current events show that Reddit-the-community has allowed Reddit-the-company's small clique of execs too much power.

> Every subreddit is just a click away from moving

Are they?

I have not seen any of the moderators quit , nor any communities being able to migrate elsewhere.

The funny thing is that many communities created polls, which voted for indefinite shutdowns. Now moderators are having withdrawal symptoms and asking their community again, and they are voting again to shut it down. There are some very real neurotic effects there.

Reddit provides a unique space that is quirky enough for redditors. Moderators have ruined the communities since many years ago, but unfortunately there is no other place that values spontaneous order similar to reddit.

Reddit's /r/piracy has completely moved to https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy after Reddit de-modded the top mod.

And /r/piracy went to NSFW and now porn and john oliver. We're all in on Lemmy.

So, there's 1 for you.

"completely moved" when only 15K out of 1.1M users have moved is a bit of overstatement.

Even so, this is the remarkable exception(-ish) to the rule, and the subreddit still seems to be pretty active , in fact with a lot more comments than Lemmy

r/StarTrek and r/DaystromInstitute partially moved to startrek.website

>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.

Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.

But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.

Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).

>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.

That is not what Microsoft did at all.

The point of this post is that the contributors to this subreddit are one person. And has been for going on ten years.

The moderator team is one person. And has been or going on ten years.

Much of the readership is ... one person, who refers back to older posts to link elsewhere. (Though I'll admit that according to Reddit's stats, surprisingly more than that.)

That the subreddit had already been largely on hiatus for the past three years, because of preexisting frustrations with Reddit's leadership and direction. The subject of much of the front page of the subreddit.

Archive snapshot from this past February (there's been no change to content since then): <https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

That the moderator and contributor had long voiced concerns over precisely the issue of Reddit seizing control of subreddits, and a lack of any ongoing right over a subreddit, no matter how personal and how long it had been:

Quoting from "No, this subreddit is not fully dead yet, but ...":

<quote>

Years before "profile pages" became a thing, several people started what were effectively personal subreddits. /r/TalesByToxlab[1] is a classic instance, and also an exemplar of the conflicts arising. This is not my sub, and I'm not nominating it, to be ABSOLUTELY clear.

TBT was a personal space where one person shared their personal stories, some from real life, some fictional.

And I say "was", because /u/toxlab[2] died three years ago. A fact which large sites need to deal with.

(A ways back I'd computed that a site at the scale of Google+, with a nominal 3 billion profiles, saw on the order of 10k newly dead accounts every day. Reddit operates at about 1/10 that scale. Do the math.)

Should TBT be recycled back into the pool? It was never a "community site". What any modmail or logs, which might reveal personal messages and communications? I get these myself from time to time via several subs.

Reddit's stance has long been that subreddits are community, not personal, resources. For large and leading subs, this may well be appropriate. For small efforts, it almost certainly is not.

That concern is a chief one I've had with Reddit since beginning a few experiments of my own. I wrote on various aspects of Reddit which raise flags[3] five years ago. And this weighs heavily (though other factors contribute) in my decision to move my principle posting activity elsewhere[4], specifically to a blog whose features, content, and presentation are far more under my control.

I don't want my subs to become zombies or be allocated to others. When they're done, they should die, and be buried, their electrons recycled. And I suspect I'm not the only one.

</quote>

<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...>

Links:

1. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

2. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

3. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

4. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

This is no longer about arguably large and "community" subreddits which might arguably have some thin line of reasoning to legitimise Reddit's corporate claim to them, but small group and individual efforts, with private data and communications potentially being handed over to third parties. Issues I'd raised years ago, now proving to have been quite prescient concerns. One-person subreddits.

And in this case, that one person happens to be me.

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here

Reddit certainly maintains servers and the software, but for now the servers are basically a commodity, can be had from anywhere, and there's a lot of forum software that's not worse than Reddit's. In fact, one of the major complaints in the whole API mess is that the software Reddit provides is inadequate and they are pushing out those who are fixing the inadequacies. Most of the value of Reddit is in being the known meeting point. This is being famous for being famous. There's some merit in being that, but not an awful lot of it. It's like somebody owns a plot of land, which for some reasons becomes a popular hangout point. They keep it reasonably clean, mow grass and clean up leaves, that kind of things - but then one day they start claiming they own all the communities and the relationships that exist because people met there, and it's only by their merit that happened. Wouldn't you consider that claim a bit exaggerated, and while the land ownership is undisputed, the claim to own the communities is a bit far-reaching?

Completely agree with you, if reddit didn't provide anything useful it would be really easy to just leave it and go somewhere else.

Reddit has built a massive community of users that everyone takes for granted, it may be easy to replicate the site code, but it is far from what reddit means, building a community is a massive effort.

This remind me of this Jeff Atwood article where he talks about building a Stack Overflow clone: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

https://lemmy.ml OR https://lemmy.world and https://kbin.social and are quite nice. Been posting there myself and it is great.

Lemmy is having some stability issues across its instances because of this growth curve: https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/693866c7-8f65-4046-8781-58aee70...

Moving entire communities there is going to be challenging

The trick is to both (1) promote equivalent communitie to existing Reddits - let them know there are alternaives to being a serf -- and (2) start posting on there. Be the change you want to see!

The federated future for social is coming, albeit slowly in fits and starts. What is nice is that many of the communities on these two are shared because it is the fediverse.

EDIT: Downvoted why?

What about migrating historic data from Reddit ? Is that possible?

From a technical standpoint: Archive.org is archiving Reddit data. So someone just needs to write an importer for that data. I would have suggested reading from Reddit's APIs directly but they are shutting those down.

From a legal standpoint: I am unsure.

Do they archive nsfw too?

Edit: I checked, and Archive.org seems to be snapshotting once per quarter or less. Not a realistic strategy for any sub with even modest traffic.

Or legal?

I'm certain you got downvoted over the word 'serf'. I upvoted because my reaction to that framing is more positive, but it's not a framing I would use, myself, because I would expect to get some flak for it.

I think the communities would benefit from becoming smaller. I avoided any large subreddits because the noise ratio was awful. The smaller ones were much better.

I don't really think anybody expects that to happen. As long as a large enough number of people move, it can succeed.

But people don’t care. Homelab subreddit created a forum and after 5 days, the number of registered users on that forum is 18. Selfhosted subreddit did the same thing and activity on their forum is similarly low. If people on “selfhosted” subreddit don’t want to move to a selfhosted alternative, I don’t know if there is any hope for other communities.

These things tend to not work until all of a sudden they do.

The selfhosted community on Lemmy (https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted) is up to 12.5k subscribers and seems fairly active so it's possible there might be enough people who care this time for it to work.

I am unavailable to sign up on lemmy.world; the websocket connection closes and reconnects, no error, any ideas?

What browser/OS? Maybe try a different combination.

I am using Google Chrome on Mac, and it literally crashes when I click on the submit button, so I assumed the server crashes. Tried about 5 times across multiple days, and I have never been able to sign up.

It's tough to read as a lurker. The page keeps scrolling around and re-rendering. I think the "realtime" promise is pretty misguided.

It’s known and this “feature” will be removed in an update.

It seems to be down right now. It grew 50% from yesterday to today, so... well, growing pains.

edit: it's back up.

~~Doesn't support Safari.~~

edit: Nevermind Safari works. 1Blocker blocks comments with the "Block Comments" ruleset. Usually it is supposed to hide comments where they are not the primary focus. So some rule should probably be adapted for Lemmy instances to work.

edit2: Reported it to 1Blocker.

Which one? I use Lemmy.world from Safari successfully.

Feature, not a bug.

I'm trying really hard to like Lemmy, but whenever I'm reading through posts on "active", "hot", etc. it will initially load with the correct content. But then, I get about 10 seconds before the entire list frantically reflows and fills with brand new posts from all over the place. Extraordinarily annoying. I get that creating a new post is itself "activity" which is probably why it does that, I don't think posts of that nature meet the description of "hot".

Maybe I just need to be going by Top->Day

I look at the subscribed communities I am part of. I find that just looking at all communities a little overwhelming.

I used to primarily browse /r/all because I like to see when niche communities produce things exceptional enough to hit it (and I'd just filter subreddits I didn't want)

Especially now, there are a -lot- of new Lemmy communities popping up so I like to be able to see that kind of activity.

This has to be a bug, right? I experience the same thing and just wrote it off as broken, deciding to try again in a few days when they figure things out.

I believe hot is currently bugged, I use recent comments as sorting and I find that nice.

I just tried that. 2 of the top 6 posts that popped up had zero comments. Within a few seconds, brand new posts (with no engagement) starting filling in from the stop.

It seems like the content algorithm is fundamentally broken right now.

I think that just got fixed in the newest version, but it'll take a bit for instances to update.

They switched from using websockets with a constant feed of new posts, to just normal http.

The current sorting algo is sorta not great. An instance i'm on that forked, and then unforked recently is dealing with this right now. We had our own react frontend with really nice custom themes, but in order to federate we had to go back to the main codebase.

It's not great but it will hopefully improve. A lot of growing pains but overall its a really exciting time.

So long as it's a known thing, I trust it will improve. It's just unfortunate that it had to be this broken during Lemmy's most opportune moment to capture new users.

That, among other things, is creating a lot of friction for new users at the moment though.

Yeah, I've been urging patience to a few folks who seem frustrated by the change. IIRC its not a big team working on lemmy, and then you have many different teams deploying their instances, adding custom features, etc.

It's certainly improved a lot over time, but the reddit exodus wasn't really planned. I'm sure the lemmy devs are feeling the pressure.

Apparently they’re removing it.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1357

This is a bug, and should be fixed in the next version. It happens in Top Day too sometimes.

A simple trick is to browse page 0 instead of page 1, by editing the URL.

Funny enough, I just tried editing the url and the first post on the resultant page was https://lemmy.world/post/433283 (a post in the Fediverse community asking why they keep seeing new posts show up in all sorting types)

I will say that doing so on the "new comments" sorting type did still yield a good number of no-comment posts.

I also had trouble with Lemmy's UI and made a different frontend for myself. Here's some screenshots.

1. https://postimg.cc/PPRMGw7k

2. https://postimg.cc/mcNMrzmk

3. https://postimg.cc/7CVG4vLT

I was thinking of making it more widely available but didn't know if there'd be enough users to make it worthwhile and if interest in Lemmy would last.

I've been sorting by "new comments" -- which brings us squarely back to the "bump old threads" style phpbb forums. Which I suppose is okay.

I would sign up for lemmy but it requires an email

Did you manage to sign up for reddit without one?

Yes, this used to be a feature of Reddit, not sure if it still is.

It used to be a feature of the entire internet, really. Email based signups weren't common in the infancy.

Yeah, I remember. I was born in the eighties. In my opinion this should still be a feature of the internet, remembering your username and password should be enough for a lot of things. Protection against bots can be achieved in any number of ways and there already exists ways to use temporary emails so I don't really get why most places still require you to use an email.

Edit: I mean, I do get it, I just don't like it.

I feel you. Things were nice and easy back then, before the greater population came and made everything terrible and spammed the daylights out of everything.

spam/bots grew out of control. You need to do something to curtail that, and email verification seems to be the most seemless solution.

That said, I've had a burner email for as long as my personal email for this very reason. I even have 2 burner gmails. It's not exactly a huge invasive measure like a phone number (which I'd never give to a site that isn't trying to take payments. Hell, still haven't given Amazon my phone number).

I agree with you, just was an observation about how things changed.

You used to be able to do this, but e-mail has been required for some time.

Over on Lemmy, it is the instance operator's choice whether or not to require e-mail, but most instances currently do as a measure to mitigate bot signups.

At least on old reddit, you can click "next" when it asks you for your email to skip that step.

Yeah, unfortunately, it only works on old reddit. It's quite amusing to see how they treat old and new reddit as entirely different platforms.

My experience has been your account will quickly get shadowbanned if you don't provide email.

I've even used burner emails and have been shadowbanned. email-less account definitely wouldn't get traction.

This was also my experience when I tried to register a custom domain. The only thing that worked for me was using a Gmail account that I had used with other, older, accounts.

You can leave the field empty during signup.

Yes I have many reddit accounts without an associated email.

Yes, it still is last I checked you just have to dodge a (mild) dark pattern they added suggesting otherwise.

I am going to try and use lemmy, but it's tough giving up old content in Reddit.

I guess we can start posting old content.

What are the differences? Who runs these instances? Is there any moderation, or is it just the messy wild west?

An instance is a server. Server administrators set the policy for creating new user accounts and new communities. This is the equivalent of a Reddit admin.

Since it's part of the Fediverse, a user on one instance/server can subscribe to a community on any federated instance, and make posts/comments/etc. You don't need a separate account on every instance.

Communities are typically moderated by the user(s) who created them, much like moderators of a specific subreddit.

Can someone explain why all of these federated services are so left-wing? Don't these people have enough of the normie internet catering to them already?

Left leaning people are more open to new experiences and thus are often early technology adopters just like they are often early social practice early adopters.

Citation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

In Lemmy's case, it may be because the creators were banned from the left wing Reddit communities for genocide denial and promoting neonazi literature. It's a textbook case of horseshoe theory, and I won't go near that service with a 10 foot stick. By all accounts they seem to be awful people.

A really nice instance that might be interesting to people here is http://programming.dev

I think these instances that serve a "family" of topics has a great chance of shining within fediverse. I'm rooting for programming.dev to bring together the programming community.

OCR of the notice screenshot:

"We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don't want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.

Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation. Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust. Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here. If you are willing to reopen and maintain the community, please take steps to begin that process. Many communities have chosen to go restricted for a period of time before becoming fully open, to avoid a flood of traffic.

If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."

I hate to say it. From a PR move this is a well crafted email. I can support and relate to the argument. If the moderators are so crucial to the subreddit that they’re in charge of, their loss (and possible movement to another platform) will reflect that as community members also move on. That’s the real protest. Instead closing subs felt a lot like burning down your own house.

It's a basic "divide et impera" - the first thing you do to break a strike is trying to delegitimize the leadership's mandate.

Sure, the PR of people who never browsed reddit

If you read a bit deeper with the context of how reddit has operated:

>Subreddits belong to the community of users who come to them for support and conversation.

No, subreddits always belonged to mods, and users complaining about power modding has fallen on deaf ears.They never cared about moderator antics outside of a few specific instances across 15 years.

>Moderators are stewards of these spaces and in a position of trust.

This makes it sound like moderators are voted in, or hired. No, it's literally a factor of who has been a moderator the longest. Without admin intervention or the user deleting their account, the head mod of r/pics would be some 16YO inactive account. If they came back they can boot off everyone. Sure Admins would fix it, but why does a mod have that power if they are merely "stewards"?

their tools don't reflect their words.

>Redditors rely on these spaces for information, support, entertainment, and connection.

Yes, and taking away 3rd party apps definitely definitely helps that reliance. Making the mobile website an unusable ad to the app helps that reliance. I'm sure one day old reddit will be gone and RES will be non-functional and they will send a similar message.

>Our goal here is to ensure that existing mod teams establish a path forward to make sure your subreddit is available for the community that has made its home here.

And that comes to today's topic: is some small subreddit really worth threatening? I've heard other subs as small as 20 subs getting this message. There is no real "community", and I'm guessing such a move will simply make a small sub unmoderated, and then banned as part of the global rules. Why does Reddit care about such small guppies?

This is one of the most important points IMO that does not seem to be on people's minds. Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.

I am happy this API drama has run the gamut and is now tackling what has always been the true issue head-on: anonymous, first-come first-serve moderators of user communities. I have been on reddit for 15 years. These users have the loudest voice, have historically placed more importance on themselves than there actually is, and have an unhealthy amount of power over the content.

If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean. It's super frustrating to be banned or silenced from a sub because one of the mods didn't like what you said. Here I am, one of thousands of like-minded users wanting to participate in a sub about some topic, but my ability to do so is totally at the whim of this anonymous person who is just another user like me but doesn't have to answer to anyone.

We see time and time again that this power gets into the head of many moderators and they begin to exert personal control over the community. Mod drama on reddit is a taint. "But not all mods are like that." Yes they are, on long timescales. Generalization is useful. Many commenters, here included, miss the big picture. APIs/tools/UI will come and go. Reddit has a large cultural moat and that is a fact. Nitpicking details is petty.

In the context of an upcoming potential IPO, it makes sense for reddit to do the following:

Standardize the subreddits, the rules and terms of use, and consolidate control. Make the reddit experience predictable, not wildly variant at the whims of a handful of mods who control a vastly disproportionate amount of subreddits and content. Replacing mods with AI filters is a prime use case.

I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance. Every time I start typing a word on the subreddit search, like 5 different variations of a nsfw sub for that word come up. It's frankly gross. An idea floating around is to jettison the nsfw subs into a separate business that can compete with OF. This is a fine idea.

spez gets a lot of shit for what he says, but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them. I don't see any mods or supporters of this 'protest' posting with their name and face. Tells you all you need to know.

This whole situation has been a giant rugpull from under users' feet. Users shouldn't have to worry about Reddit's IPO. They signed on to a platform with expectations that there was some autonomy with administering individual forums. That they could use their third party client. This all makes sense if all you care about is money and ignore what reddit was for the past 15 years.

This isn't about just moderators. There are a lot of people that are moving on simply because of the implication of having to use Reddit's own app. It's not out of spite like you seem to be painting this as, it's because Reddit has historically made terrible software and have relied on the very same people that gives them most of their value to even make "their" content browsable.

And no, spez isn't the only person putting his name next to his arguments - the Apollo developer he defamed also was.

Yup, this has been building up for a while. So many asked for features never realized. So many adjustments to be made to address some of the very things the above poster is complaining about (power tripping mods, mods not controlling an entire sub because they created it) fell on deaf ears for over a decade. Removing the few key personnel who did work to actually help out the moderators.

They've been user hostile for a very very long time. This isn't just about 3rd party apps profiting. This is the culmination of ignoring the user until they want to profit off of them. Shocker they aren't seeing eye to eye this time, time 1000th.

>Just because you were the first person to think of making a subreddit about some topic doesn't mean you should perpetually have the power to unilaterally make decisions about the community, its users, and its content.

Then why did reddit make modding hierarchies based on who has been the moderator the longest? They've had a half dozen issues where this happened and provided no changes to help alleviate this supposed antipattern.

>If you've ever been on the wrong side of a power-trip by a moderator, you know what I mean.

yea. And I think we both know what happened. You appeal to admins and admins do nothing. I'm sure some people can retrieve admin messages that say something to the tune of "it's the mod's community they can do what they want. Make your own".

So yea, I find it hypocritical and manupulative when suddenly the admins care about "community and belonging". You didn't care until it bit you in the ass. Again. This isn't the first time and at this point it's their fault they didn't change the rules in time for this.

>I will also look forward to a clampdown on nsfw subreddits. Sexuality is kryptonite to the stock market. And good riddance.

I look to it forward to Tumblr 2.0 as well. No faster way to kill a site that relied on porn to drive traffic than to suddenly take it away. They want to ride that easy train until it becomes difficult, and then drop it and expect everything to go on as planned. I don't think it matters how you feel about porn here, this is just a nasty tactic.

>but at least he's putting his face and name next to his words and taking ownership of them.

He's going public and being paid some X million dollars. Mods aren't.

So... why have the feature of "Public, Restricted, Private" if you punish people for using a feature you all put in place? If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.

What all this seems like is a bad psy-op campaign to force people to do the settings the admins want, and make it "feel" its the moderators doing it. Similar how Twitter forces you to remove bad content rather than just auto-do it

This is leftpad all over again: the intersection of publicly accessible namespaces, control over those namespaces, and what people in charge of the namespace are allowed to do by the platform when their protest actions are seen as harmful by the platform.

There's a 3-way social contract between the platform (Reddit/npm), the nominal person in charge (mods/module authors) and the users. If the person in charge does something that is sufficiently disruptive to users', or platforms interests, the platform will step in. We can argue about where the line is, but beyond that point, platform intervention is inevitable.

Edit: Thought experiment: would it have been acceptable had the author of leftpad put up a poll for downloaders to vote before taking the module down in protest?

There's a huge difference between taking down an entertainment source and taking down software build pipelines across the world.

> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.

I can understand the sentiment, however users of Reddit employ private subreddits for a variety of reasons. Top of the list is in order to facilitate safe discussions, secure from prying eyes. For Reddit Inc it is a benefit, since it encourages moderator groups and communities to remain within the platform. e.g.

> r/ArmyofScience

> A private community for the comment moderators of /r/science to organize and discussion moderation of the subreddit.

If such private communities were forced open, it would require moderator groups, or those other private communities, to join the exodus to other platforms.

There are also some more personal collections on the site, without a doubt. Switching those to public would constitute a huge violation the trust which users have placed in Reddit and only further erode the company's image within communities that make their home on the site as well as with the public at large.

Lastly, there are over 3 million subreddits in existence [0], so even changing this manually would be a sizeable task.

[0] https://www.businessdit.com/how-many-subreddits-are-there/

People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.

If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.

> If they don't want private subs, then convert them to public and turn that feature off.

The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins). Would that make you happy?

> People are given power with the expectation that they wield that power responsibly. The purpose of the visibility feature is to allow moderators to create private communities, not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.

For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community. And we could institute rules as we see fit. If the system allowed it, we could do it.

That was obviously just propaganda and a blatant lie.

> If a cop shoots an unarmed suspect, they will get punished too. Would you defend the cop by saying “why give a cop a gun if you punish him for using it”? The cop is given a gun with the understanding that they only use it to shoot dangerous suspects; a cop that violates that expectation will have their gun taken away.

The fuck? Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board? Just wow.

> For a decade, reddit's message to mods was that this was our community.

I think that era died with Aaron Swartz, which is more than a decade past. In the past decade Reddit admins have been banning thriving communities for not toeing the party line.

Where were you when Reddit banned /r/the_donald and all the lesbian subs? Probably cheering them on for enforcing a political agenda you agree with? Then what made you think you would be spared from the admin's wrath when you turned against them?

It sounds like a typical case of “I can't believe the leopards would eat my face!”

> The fuck? [..] Just wow.

Stop it with the rhetorical pearl clutching. If you have something intelligent to say, make a rational, coherent, dispassionate argument. Nobody benefits from this type of emotional outburst. Imagine I would respond in kind, saying: “Omg! Wow! Wow! Wow! I canNOT belIEVE you would SAY something like this! What the fuck??? Wow! Geez! Golly!" This is just meaningless word vomit.

> Are you seriously comparing state sanctioned violence to a online glorified bulletin board?

Do you seriously not understand what an analogy is?

I've seen a lot of this reject-all-analogies behavior on the Internet lately. I've been interested to find an underlying cause beyond just more kids online lately.

on the contrary, I don't think borderline invoking Godwin's law is a reflection of maturity either. Sure, you can compare everything to nazis if you want, but in 99% of the cases people making such exaggerated comparisons to the worst tragedies are probably derailing into something frivolous.

Hence, the "law".

I'd argue, that with more polarized disussion and team politics, there's more cognitive disonance simply because people have strong beliefs about topics they are less informed (or disinformed) about. As analogies are great for highlighting discrepencies in belief they are more offensive (in that they cause negative feelings) to a person considering them.

A more noble alternative is that the level of internet discourse has become so much more refined these days that if you simplify a new position to an old analogy you're just retreading old "solved" ground rather than discussing the nuances that make this particular topic business as usual/the end of society. To be fair most people are anti shooting babies and pro killing harmful parasites but neither of those analogies are particuarly novel or useful in an abortion discussion unless it's the first time you've considered the topic.

No that was just moderators slowing getting high on their own powertrips. Sure, Reddit inc basically let them do what they wanted but the original intent was actually that mods are part of a community, not some sort of petty tyrants. I guess it is truly reddit's fault for letting a bunch of... very online (I'm trying to be kind) and very very often severely maladjusted group of people establish their little fiefdoms.

... Also, one of the least diverse group (racially, religiously, culturally, politically and pretty much everything else) of people you could think of having such a control over """the front page of the internet"" (lol) lead to it turning into an insanely boring and one of the cringiest places on the internet. Twitter is downright refreshing compared to the average subreddit, which is saying a lot

The sad part is that I won't see the results of that rebalance of power, since I've only ever used Reddit on third party apps lol.

>but the original intent was actually that mods are part of a community, not some sort of petty tyrants

No, it was always to "create your own community". Right down to the asinine mechanic where the Head mod is simply first come first serve. If Mod A makes a community, assigns Mod B to moderate it, and leaves for 5 years, B cannot override A when he comes back without intervention from Admins. On the contrary, A can kick out B despite doing nothing for 5 years.

They very much designed it for "petty tyrants" and the site should/would have built a much better system to kick out inactive mods if they cared about "being part of a community". But I think we both know that Reddit just cared about free labor (until news sites force their hand).

>The more reasonable solution would be to disallow moderators from changing the protection level after creating a sub (but allowing it by petitioning the admins).

historically speaking, some subs have gone private short term simply to control some crazy amounts of spam or harassment. And there's many more instances where subs went restricted for a while. So this isn't the only feature of privating communities.

>not to shut down thriving public communities as a form of protest.

No tools are ever designed for use in protest, so this is a circular argument. That's part of what a protest is.

Linus from Linus Tech Tips was recently talking about how people have telling him he should kill the forum which is just a cost sink and just fully embrace the subreddit for years and he has adamantly refused for exactly this reason. Your entire community survives at the whim of increasingly toddler-ish CEOs.

I mean, businesses depend on each other all the time. So depending and not depending both make sense. Different risks though.

We’ve come along way from running our own web rings and PHPBBs. The internet was our audience but then we put it in the hands of companies looking to profit off our niche communities and now we’re having a leopards ate our face moment.

My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move. Moderators got what they signed up for and once a community was created and they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest. In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation should have walked instead of sticking around to watch Rome burn.

I think Reddit are pretty much right in this whole thing.

> In the end, anyone unhappy with how Reddit handled the API situation

But they've completely mishandled it. A prime example of that was a AMA where ~10 questions got answered.

...except communities overwhelmingly supported protesting reddit's policies. You've bought into the provably wrong propaganda reddit is putting out about admins going rogue.

There were communities on Reddit that did a poll in Discord on whether or not they should go private. Given the where and who the audience was, what voices do you think were ‘overwhelming’ representative?

In the end it was a way for many moderators to hijack a community and transfer it to their next pet social space (Discord seems to be the current favorite).

It's not "hijacking" if it's the community they curated.

The ones I was in, asked what to do ON reddit, and I personally saw subreddits vote to go private.

It would depend on the subreddit. r/stoicism (aka r/bro-icism ;) ) seemed very unimpressed and self-involved, and didn't see how the concept of 'virtue' entered into it. r/datingoverfifty overwhelmingly sided with its mods, in part because that subreddit was so actively moderated that women over fifty could post there without getting harassed, and scam artists were quickly run off by the mods. As such, that subreddit had experienced moderation as a positive force and trusted its mods' opinions, and its mods were repeatedly in touch with the subreddit explaining what they wanted to do and why, and asking whether they had user support.

Looks like we saw different experiences, is all I'll say.

> The ones I was in, asked what to do ON reddit, and I personally saw subreddits vote to go private.

This has been my experience too.

I don't understand what you have to gain from lying about this interaction elsewhere. Why is the truth so impossible for you to bear? The community repeatedly asked (and STILL is asking) in Discord and Reddit for capable moderators to take over. No one has stepped up. It's fine. That's how communities work. You alone do not get to dictate what a group does. I wish you could communicate what your real deal is because it's not the "hijacking" of a community (which isn't even yours???). Perhaps stop trying to make this all about you. How sad.

Not sure why they went the discord route. That's not what some big subs did. For example, /r/nottheonion (definitely not niche) simply pinned a single post with three comments to simulate a poll. 88% (87.3k votes) supported continuing the blackout.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nottheonion/comments/148w58w/vote_s...

Admins going rogue?

Admins are employees of reddit.com. I think you're talking about moderators, who are the volunteer petty tyrants that have always been the worst thing about reddit, and they are the ones "going rogue".

Maybe some did but the support is vastly overblown. r/nba did a poll (never stickied it) and 8,000 people voted. 72% in favor of privating the subredddit. On a random Thursday afternoon it has 33,000 people online. And the polls were posted in r/modcoord.

It seems to me a lot of subs also said they were closing for 2 days, but never re-opened. I understand that logic, but because the subreddits have stayed close there is no way for that community to indicate if they support the ongoing protest. There's a big difference between voting 'yes' to closing for 48 hours vs permanently.

TBH, 25% voter turnover for an internet forum is pretty high. Remember that the most participated US elections (which have billions thrown into ad campaigns and is in constant news) top out at 70%.

Just upthread someone pointed out that after the Homelab subreddit set up a Lemmy instance, only 18 people joined it. I think this undermines the idea that Reddit communities care about this.

What we know is that people who spoke up about this care about it. People who voted in a handful of subreddit-run polls care. But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. They'll just ... remain silent, and wait for the storm to blow over. Which seems to be what the majority of Reddit users are doing.

Disclosure: I'm a 12+ year Reddit "power" user, and I don't care about the API changes. I didn't vote in any supposed polls on the changes. My perspective no doubt affects my understanding of this issue.

The Lemmy homelab community is up to 1.67k subscribers (https://lemmy.ml/c/homelab) so while people may not be joining a specific homelab instance, they are creating accounts somewhere and joining the community.

Having said that, it doesn't seem very active at the moment which isn't a good sign. Granted, I have no idea how active the subreddit is to compare.

Being unwilling to leave does not mean they won't stop using the platform.

The fact they didn't move while the platform was effectively shut down proves that the category bof service isn't even that important to them.

Just review how many people are saying they're better off having not been on Reddit and now have zero intent of returning.

I'm one....

>But obviously, people who don't use the API in any way are going to be neutral, not positive, about these changes, and so they have no reason to interact with polls or speak up in Reddit's favor. T

on the other hand, if you deleted your account and walked you also cannot interact in any polls, unless the polls are off site. So while people are saying "no one left", clearly there is SOME population reflected in how much people here and elsewhere are talking about it.

Disclosure: would be 10 year old power user. Deleted my account 3 years ago, but still inevitably had to lurk in reddit for some communities. I'm just enjoying the fire rising as I inevitably predicted since the 2015 blackout days. Not very happy about the changes given that I used a combination of RES (which at this rate I'll be surprised survives more than 2 years) and anonymous browsing on Infinity to check. The discourse tbh has only gotten more polarizing, even on non-political subs and I wanted a goo d excuse to make a hard stop to reddit. Thank you, Reddit.

BTW: infinity's stance here is to try what Apollo didn't do. Infinity will be paid-only, and if that doesn't stick, it's done. That's basically a kiss of death for how I used Infinity, but best of luck to the devs.

>only 18 people joined it.

I've unsuccessfully been trying to create a Lemmy account for the past three days. The signup button just spins. I've used many different combinations of usernames, email accounts, browsers, origin IPs, Lemmy instances, etc. Maybe God hates me, but more likely I'm not the only one.

That "overwhelming support" was likely brigaded by Discord as well as other subs, linked below.

Some people set up a Discord and were posting which subreddits had polls going on regarding staying dark or reopening, and their members spammed the polls with "overwhelming support" of staying dark, even though they weren't the actual users of said subreddits.

https://old.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/14ae739/this_...

https://preview.redd.it/qty5883w6h6b1.png?auto=webp&v=enable...

https://preview.redd.it/c7o7zce1tb6b1.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...

Sounds like a reddit issue. You can't control who votes on a reddit poll. All you need is a reddit account.

Maybe this is a long requested feature that reddit could have implemented... nah. Clearly it's the mods who are selfish.

>My unpopular opinion is Reddit is making the right move and likely their only move

the inevitable move, maybe. The only move (for profits), yes. But they are executing this absolutely horribly. Reddit has never been an overly formal site, and I guess that is built into the culture of the admins as well.

>they owed it to their communities to hand over the keys when they ‘quit’ in protest

Historically speaking, they never did. We have seen mods run a sub to the ground several times and the result was users jumping ship to a new community.

So while inevitable, it is inherently hypocritical for Reddit to suddenly care now as if they ever cared about users.

Communication is everything. Their "move" isn't even the main point of contention, it's the horrifically mismanaged communication from CEO to the public.

No reassurance, no de-escalation, no reasonable transparency of the decision making process. Just dictator moves, lack of communication in general except for a few emotion-driven jabs.

Here's a template the Reddit CEO can use to immediately put a stop to this chaos:

"Hi Reddit, this is the CEO. I admit it, I didn't handle this well. Some of our recent decisions have not been met well by our users. There are great points being made, and I've decided to take this into consideration. Let's start over."

Is anyone surprised at this point?

Look. This is always going to happen with user-generated content ("UGC") sites where the users who create the content don't own the platform. The owners will always reach a point of trying to extract as much value as possible from those users. Personal subreddits? Well they don't provide value (to the owners). We're long past the point of subsidizing users to grow Reddit. Now it's just value extraction.

And it happens to every UGC site and people are still somehow surprised. It's the most Lucy and the football thing I've ever seen.

This is why Wikipedia being owned by a foundation rather than a private venture-backed company is so important. Same for ICANN not being a for-profit company (remember how private equity tried to steal the .org registry [1]?).

[1]: https://gizmodo.com/private-equity-firm-trying-to-take-over-...

I think this title is a bit sensationalized. They're going after subreddits who have gone dark for the protest. That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of it. In my mind that would mean there is something they're doing specifically because they're individual personal subreddits. Like "You can't have a subreddit with one poster" kind of deal and banning them because they're not active enough or something.

In this case I understand it can be read as "Reddit aren't just going after big closed subs anymore" but the title, to me, doesn't make that obvious enough. I clicked it thinking "Oh no now people can't even have their own subs?!" when in reality it's just that one of the blackout holdouts is getting called on still holding out with the ~~new~~ not-new rule that they have stated they're going to start applying.

No, this is literally an individual personal subreddit.

I think we're talking about a distinction in a different spot. My distinction was that rather than "They're shutting down personal subreddits" this post was more "Reddit is even coming for mods who blackout their personal subreddits"

I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!

> That's different than "coming for individual personal subreddits" at least from my read of

no, there's a concept in reddit called a "personal subreddit". You know how you can click a user and it will show you the most recent comments? e.g. /u/chankstein38 would be your comment history.

Well, in 2017/8 or something, You can choose to convert this into your own subreddit. Complete with followers, votes, and user comments on "your sub". Never understood the idea given reddit's semi-anonymous nature, but I guess OnlyFans models benefited a lot from it.

This sub is literally the user's sub.

I do understand that they are talking about their own personal subreddits. I appreciate the clarification though!

So… are you not allowed to have private subreddits any more? Is this their official stance?

It wasn't private before, it was made private in protest. I think they are just automatically messaging mods of subreddits that were public before the protests and are now private.

My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Is there a social media platform people don't have a weird relationship with?

> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Alternative explanation: Users may not just roll over when the platforms they've invested countless hours into start abusing them.

Not sure how much choice the users have in whether reddit rolls them.

The choice they have is in whether they're around at all to be rolled.

They have the choice to not be users anymore.

Which seems like a bad option for Reddit, given that their only value proposition is that they have a lot of users.

this isn't really costing users anything, unless "time spent on Reddit" is considered a good.

How is Reddit abusing them? By charging $0.24 for 1000 API requests? By enforcing year old rules they created because mods power tripped and users complained?

I mean, maybe the outward hostility?

- https://gizmodo.com/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-moderators-land...

- https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/reddit-protest-blacko...

Or the absolutely abysmal and tonedeaf responses every chance they had?

- https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/9/23755640/reddit-api-change...

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/15/23762501/reddit-ceo-steve...

Or the easily disproven libel? https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/143sho8/admins_c...

That's been doubled and tripled down on? https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/09/reddit-ceo-doubles-down-on...

Or literally changing or removing user's posts and comments? https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fafpp/the_admin...

That all sounds abusive to me. If anything, the API price was the straw and focusing on it and ignoring literally everything that happened since is just being disingenuous.

Making apps effectively unusable after also making the mobile website effectively unusable is very bad behavior to your users.

Users don't care, they just want to keep browsing reddit.

Power-tripping mods are the ones trying to tank the subreddits.

The communities that actually ask the users for feedback on what they want tend to all be back to normal.

First, mods are the group of people who are most impacted by Reddit's proposed changes, so of course they're going to be more vocal about this than the average user.

Second, are you arguing that mods aren't also users?

Users do care. Reddit has been going through enshittification for years and this most recent change is the straw that broke the camels back. I don't know why there's so many Reddit shills on Hackernews pretending like it's just power-tripping moderators. It isn't. It's a huge subset of the Reddit community who've been using it for over a decade who are so sick of how bad it's gotten. It's obvious old.reddit is next; because Reddit was able to bust this protest, they do it again, and again.

Note that "private" has two meanings here.

Private, as in a personal subreddit that can be read by others but not posted to.

And private in the sense that the subreddit is not viewable to the world at large.

In this case, the subreddit was previously "private-as-in-personal", but not "private-as-in-not-viewable". Following the Reddit Strike, I'd taken it private-as-in-not-viewable.

As my Fediverse toot notes, I'd been very aware that Reddit could reclaim the subreddit according to its rules then in place. The pinned posts on the sub, for 2 and 3 years respectively as of this past February, discussed that amongst other concerns. The Wayback Machine shows those here:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20220224161047/https://old.reddi...>

One of those posts specifically addressed my preferences for how my subreddit should allowed to die and rest in ... ouch, typo, "piece". That post received an admin response saying that it would be a good candidate for just that.

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

(I'm OP in the event it's not obvious.)

> My overall take on this is people have a weird relationship with reddit.

Yeah, and most recently we're seeing mostly one side. Reddit needs mods. But mods need Reddit. And both need users. Take any one of those three things away and the whole thing doesn't really work.

Moderators of always-private subs, such as test or personal subs, have also received these messages.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/14faqrt/is_redd...

Same for always-NSFW.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14fjbtt/our_subre...

Based on comments I've seen, they didn't even try that hard - they're just automatically messaging mods of all private subreddits. People with subs that have been private for years are receiving messages.

great way to build confidence that reddit hears the users and promises features: use a horribly coded automated reply.

I have an old sub-reddit I haven't used in years back from when they allowed you to use a CNAME to point a sub-reddit and get a custom "front-page" where I would share links I found interesting.

I got the same modmail message, even though I barely have 20 subscribers to that sub-reddit and it has been private since they dropped CNAME for a sub-reddit support.

Seems like it. Maybe Reddit mods should just open their communities but just stop moderating..

The message seems to be that if they don't keep moderating exactly how they were before this api decision that they'll get the boot. Not the official message of course, they are saying one thing and then doing another at almost every step of this drama.

The official stand of Reddit is you are not even allowed to sit passively as a mod. Here is how rule 4 worded

"...This involves regularly monitoring and addressing content in ModQueue and ModMail and, if possible, actively engaging with your community via posts, comments, and voting."

Intentional sabotage is the only option left at this point.

This is an approach many are taking, and Reddit is still removing moderators for it.

The fact that Reddit is taking drastic action against users who aren't breaking any rules is a pretty strong sign that Reddit's leadership has gone off the deep end.

unmoderated communities quickly get deleted.

Some have have started moderating more actively, with a new rule that all posts have to be John Oliver

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jun/20/how-john-...

Clearly not otherwise that wouldn't be a feature. The issue is that there is no official stance. Any actual stance would be an admission of madness in the approach - "No taking your sub private to protest Reddit platform changes" wouldn't go down well even though that's what it is. They're trying again and again to keep things quiet, even though they keep running into the Streisand effect, something Reddit should be acutely familiar with already. There is also that saying that trying the same thing again and again and expecting a different result is insanity.

This all strikes me as Reddit and in particular their senior leadership being deeply scared. They know they probably missed the mark for IPO, they could have done it during phases of massive growth a number of years ago, or perhaps in the recently concluded tech IPO boom, but they didn't. They're now shit-scared that they are falling out of favour and losing the support of thought-leaders in the community. I'm sure user/revenue numbers are looking better than ever, but I'm also sure that the leading metrics are showing the valuable users abandoning ship and retention metrics starting to turn.

It's unfortunately unlikely to get better if they keep taking this reactionary approach, but doing anything else is a much harder move that requires strong leadership, and they've never been known for having strong leadership, except perhaps under Ellen.

I don't think that you could ever use a feature "in bad faith" from a service provider POV, and get away with it on a moral ground alone. Forget official stance, reddit is a host, if they don't like something, they'll make it go away, as it's their platform at the end of the day. And such is the state on every private platform. It's nice until the host wants it to be.

I'm guessing this is an automated message that was sent to all the subs that went from public to private in recent days. And there's no easy way for it to tell whether a given subreddit is "personal".

I havent received that message and have a personal sub

Seems like it; I have a personal subreddit the same as my username that I flip between private and restricted to post music videos I grab with an iOS shortcut (can't post video on private subs) and the same landed in that accounts inbox (2) days ago.

My other private subreddit for Wikipedia/github links has never flipped/flopped and it didn't get the same message.

Among other points, I'd raised the issue of distinguishing personal subreddits years ago in a post to which a Reddit admin responded directly and pledged that they'd honour my request in that regard:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230612102634/https://old.reddi...>

(OP, FYI)

Its pretty funny that Huffman did all this to try to juice IPO price by ~10% and probably will end up dropping IPO price by 40% vs if he had done nothing.

I wonder what shareholders think of his 'leadership'.

"I must do something. This is something. I will do it."

I wouldn't assume this would drop IPO price. If it winds up making reddit more profitable, that is.

I would estimate 10+% of reddit has deleted their accounts, but most importantly, that 10% skews significantly toward 'power user'. Quality of content is already dropping apparently.

Not all investors will recognize that nuance, but 'reddit in chaos' was national news.

> I would estimate 10+% of reddit has deleted their accounts

You'd be wrong.

I'd be surprised if it was 1%, even if we filter to daily active users.

Granted, 1% would still be a lot on this scale. So I'm not saying that as an insult.

OK, 10% of actually-active accounts. Reddit certainly has a huge number of zombie accounts - I think I have 3.

This is lame. The poster made a good point. If it’s not your platform, then you don’t own it.

so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.

this is a problem.

> this is a problem.

How so? Reddit pays for the infrastructure and software, why would anyone expect they own their own subreddit? Are people really expecting Reddit to operate at a loss? If you want to own it, pay for it.

The kind of unpleasant moderation jobs they expect people to do requires those people to feel some kind of ownership over the space they are creating.

If they want the job done a particular way, they need to pay for it.

To be fair, isn't that a two-way street? The argument of course is that mods are paying by creating content that Reddit can profit from, but the flip side is that those mods are similarly extracting value. (Many subreddits have an income incentive for the mods and/or users, such as the crypto ones or the NSFW ones that point to sites like Only Fans, etc)

I don’t know why people moderate reddits. I don’t think “paying by volunteering” is the right model. It seems more like a really weird F2P game or hobby.

If people are using the site to advertise stuff, they have an incentive to try and make the experience nice. But is that really the main source of mods? I imagine if I was moderating as a sort of work related thing I’d be more focused on just fulfilling the requirements of my employer (rather than maintaining the general community spirit of the site, if that makes sense).

They own the ad network running on those communities. They own the traffic. But why in the world are they interested in owning the community itself?

You are correct. Any content created on someone else's site isn't yours - Youtube, Facebook, HN, etc. Even Gmail. We are making a tradeoff for reach, access, performance, etc.

This just isn't true. The content is legally yours, Reddit only has a license to it so they can display it on their site. Just like a record label though, Reddit has economies of scale and can do more with your content than you can, creating a power imbalance.

Is that true? I don't know about the other services, but YouTube has this to say in their terms of service:

> You retain ownership rights in your Content.

https://www.youtube.com/t/terms

This is completely, utterly incorrect. From Reddit's own terms:

> You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content: ...

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement/

Yeah, the fundamental problem here is social medias ought to be a protocol, not a platform.

Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.

This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.

Reddit is the only platform that makes sense as a protocol.

The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.

Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.

Git isn't a particularly great example because it wasn't distributed to begin with, it was standalone.

Github et. al added the connectivity and social aspects layered on top of what is fundamentally a version control tool.

Torrenting or cryptocurrencies are better examples, where fundamentally they are social in nature and in the case of torrenting it's ridiculously easy to jump from provider to provider.

You are right! Crypto checks all the boxes. Wallets are like users. Mining is like ad network. Ledger is like content.

but it's resource intensive.

Noob Question: Given AI is reducing the cost of creating technology. Isn't making reddit access API based the antithesis of the direction where the future of online communities is?

The future I presume is: As computation gets less expensive, content creation and storage is democratized and managing that platform eventually becomes easier with AI tech this walled garden approach is bound to fall. Its just a matter of time yeah?

In other words this just seems short sighted on reddit's part.

Eh, you should never let computers (including AI) make decisions or manage. You can't blame it or hold it accountable. You can't appeal to it or ask it why it did what it did.

Confirmed: I'm Chris from Airwindows (small open source audio software dev) and am the sole mod for r/airwindows, which is a dead sub. People interact with me elsewhere, for a while I had a ITTT posting new plugin releases to the sub, then I stopped. I took the sub private largely because as the only user I wanted to endorse the striking Redditors taking much larger subreddits offline. There's no real impact to this.

I got this in mod-mail:

"Hi everyone,

We are aware that you have chosen to close your community at this time. Mods have a right to take a break from moderating, or decide that you don’t want to be a mod anymore. But active communities are relied upon by thousands or even millions of users, and we have a duty to keep these spaces active.

If this community remains private, we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place."

I responded with the following, and have heard nothing further:

"Understood. Note that airwindows is my intellectual property and I control the website and the youtube channel which is my primary mode of engaging with Airwindows users. As such, and since there are no legitimate users trying to re-open the subreddit, it's an interesting test case. I await whatever further information you care to share with me :)"

There was also another subreddit where I was the sole user, called r/homesoil (a Minecraft mod me and my brother made). I believe that had been taken private long before, and I haven't received mod mail over it. Looks like it's strictly punitive, directed toward anyone aligning with the striking redditors no matter how small they are.

I was asked by another redditor, "Do you have a TM on the name? Could you sue Reddit to take it down b/c they should not have a forum named with your trademark?"

I responded, "Oh no, I created the subreddit. Not only that, people are allowed to create fansites so the mere concept of a subreddit that's solely my business name without me associated with it, is not itself a problem. For instance, there's at least one Facebook group using the name that's not me, and nobody is confused.

The test case (which may never happen, fair warning as this is kinda telegraphing their exposure if it did) would be the use of such a subreddit to try and convince people I represented stuff I don't represent.

In other words, the activity I DON'T want to see is: kicking me off my own subreddit, installing some other person as a mod, who then uses that subreddit to imply I support Reddit's position and leadership.

And in the absence of really impressive pro bono representation, my counter would not be trying to sue Reddit over that, but exposing the situation in a Youtube video, most likely as an aside in a video that's otherwise intended for a product release that would see a lot of attention. For instance, I'm doing reverb effects where the tone quality is tailored to work similarly to Bricasti hardware reverbs, which cost over $4000. There will be people paying close attention to my efforts there, so a mention of the Reddit situation would get outsider attention that wouldn't go to a video solely about Reddit."

That's what I'm interested in watching for. Not so much if control of the subreddit with my company name is wrested from me (might be a Wikipedia-like situation, where that isn't necessarily an issue) but if they're looking to do that for the purpose of misrepresenting my positions and establishing an endorsement where one doesn't exist. Right now, my sub going private is a statement of how I feel about the situation. If that changes, it changes, but if it represents me it'll be private, and sitting on that subreddit name.

I have nothing useful to add here except to say that I use your audio plugins regularly and greatly appreciate the work you do! Your active, well-considered stance here is also admirable.

For those interested in HN's approach to moderating the Reddit-topic "tsunami" (and yes, it really is and has been), dang and I discuss this in part in another thread here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435312>

As usual, dang is reasoned, articulate, and fair. I have a better understanding of HN's policies and actions, even if I disagree in part on how this is being conducted.

I'm told (via email) that it was largely the flameware detector which adjusted this particular post's page ranking.

I have been using Reddit for like 13 years and I didn't know personal subreddits were even a thing...

Maybe the solution isn't a blackout, but a spam-out. Instead trying to go private indefinitely, the subreddits should just implement automatic moderation policies designed to suppress valuable content and pass through low-value content (that doesn't violate content policies). For instance: automatically kill any post that gets too many upvotes, allow certain tired and overdone memes but block any new memes. That would kill the value of the community to Reddit Inc. but be much harder for the admins to automatically detect and counter.

One of the ... more interesting ... suggestions I'd seen on the Fediverse responding to my thread there was to start creating ... and immediately setting private ... large numbers of subreddits.

A DoS / DDoS attack on finding human mods for those subs, after a fashion.

Sad to see Reddit news is still relevant, as it indicates the site still has users. With alternatives growing and the motivation for so many to leave, I'm not sure I have much sympathy for those who just won't leave at this point. They're basically just volunteering to prop up an organization that by all rights should die.

I've seen the same story play out time and time again. Alternatives never gain any meaningful traction to overtake what they are trying to replace. In the off chance they do gain traction, they will eventually become the very thing that they sought to replace because they need to monetize to pay for the infrastructure.

Tech is basically a giant pump and dump industry. Create an app, pump it up with free access, then try to cash out to investors or monetize...which inevitably kills the product.

The internet worked best pre-2010 where people ran small niche communities on their own because they enjoyed the hobby, not because they wanted to make money.

Of all the worlds problems, this is not a difficult problem.

Make a free alternative that handles massive load/scale and run it how you want.

How is this feature different from just posting to /u/myusername? Maybe this is just a cleanup of duplicate features?

The /u/myusername feature didn't exist ten years ago when I created /r/dredmorbius.

Having a specific subreddit affords the ability to:

- Curate the content presented. It's not everything I've ever posted to Reddit, it's a specific set of interests. Visiting via the "old" view shows those topics, visible at the Internet Archive presently: <https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredm...>

- Style the subreddit, as noted.

- Provides other subreddit-specific features including the Wiki (which I'd made heavy use of), moderation tools, and the like.

TL;DR: It's different in many ways.

Consider r/redditseppuku

I made and later closed a tiny sub before this whole kerfuffle. I haven't received any flack from Reddit yet.

I mod several subreddits, a mix of public and private.

Some have received the notice, some haven't, yet, as of last check.

Couldn't we have a Reddit alternative? (I also want a LinkedIn alternative)

https://lemmy.world and https://kbin.social are federated alternatives to reddit. Many of the same communities exist there and there is robust debate. I like the kbin UI better, but Lemmy seems to work better.

Trying to sign up for lemmy.world for a week without success. But happy on https://lemmy.one. It doesn't have downvotes, which for me is a big plus!

Is the problem with LinkedIn entirely the site design patterns? I think a lot of it is the insufferable nature of modern corporate career ladder climbing and self-promotion as a means of self-preservation and advancement in that space.

LinkedIn initially was very much a place where the ethos was something like this:

LinkedIn is a place for professionals to interact with other like minded professionals about the trials, tribulations and successes of work

Unfortunately, it morphed into what is basically a job hunting platform with social media behaviors as your gateway to getting a job, rather than just applying for a job.

This change is what leads to all the self promotion, the "always positive always on" hype posts, the corporate media campaigns etc. Not to mention every friend request got loaded with "is this random person trying to get me to recommend them for a job?" type thing.

The organic lets talk about work authentically with others in the profession type stuff is minimized and in some cases I think its gone completely.

To be honest, if it wasn't for the fact that it really is the only place to reach recruiters and hiring managers directly, I wouldn't be on LinkedIn anymore at all. It has otherwise lost all career value to me

read.cv is interesting: https://read.cv/explore

eli5?

Absolutely. Pay someone to spin it up.

You're on one, and the original code is available at http://arclanguage.org/install

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Seems to be the way of many companies.

https://communities.win has been around since reddit banned The_Donald. But it allows right wing views, so probably not what 95% of HN is interested in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com