How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history | Hacker News Reader

How Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history

theverge.com

18 pointssusanthenerd22 comments

It didn't. It only forced many of its more important users off of Reddit. It is likely on the same path as Digg before it.

I’d like to thank Reddit for finally giving my back the time I needed in my day to get back to reading books…

What Reddit makes and what Reddit sells are both made by unpaid users of the platform. If a company that is this beholden to the goodwill of its users can manage to piss off such a significant chunk of its users and still survive, then I worry about the how much we can influence larger companies through protest. Y’know, these companies that are taking over an increasing proportion of our lives

And gave me the impetus to finally delete my 17-year-old account. Thanks, reddit!

Same. Daily user since the beginning. Haven't been back since.

I haven’t logged into Reddit since they killed the api. 14 years I think, moderated subreddit and massively contributed.

I have much more time.

Yup. Avoided the site for a few days. Saw the company's response. Then saw them forcibly re-opening communities. Deleted my account.

Reddit believes that they make the communities, when in reality the communities make Reddit what it is.

Thanks to Reddit, I now use the Reddit mobile site instead of Apollo. It sucks in comparison.

Don't do that to yourself... Use teddit or old.reddit.com at least.

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36540779

HN's criteria for a dupe is there being "significant discussion", a threshold that's left vague, but in practice seems to be ~20+ comments on a post. Repeat submissions for stories falling below the threshold are permitted.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10794767>

As the link you give here has only 5 comments, it doesn't meet that threshold, and this post wouldn't be considered a dupe.

Pyrrhic victory at best.

Articles like this keep pushing the narrative that “users are angry” but I don’t see that anger in the local subreddit i visit the most (500+k subscribers, several thousands daily visitors)

The past two weeks have been largely normal.

I don’t think this narrative is truthful. Most likely is going to be a very vocal minority.

Not sure they can be called “landed gentry” but surely I’ve seen some shady behaviours (like silencing political opinions not liked by the mods).

Something like 1% of users contribute almost all of reddit's content. In other words, reddit's only value is a very vocal minority. And at least some of us left.

on major meme subreddits, news subs, yes.

on social / relationship / alt lifestyle discussion subs, hobby discussion subs, product review/discussion subs, etc. the balance is a lot more even.

the power users submitting all the posts to /r/mildlysupercringeinfuriatingontwitter will pack up their toys and leave but the people using subreddits to discuss their niche outdoor hobby, their home reno DIY project, their alt sexuality, etc. will just keep on chatting away.

would not mind at all if every sub with more than 1 mil subscribers just got wiped and had to be replaced with new ones (maybe go to read-only / archive for the google searchability). like a forest fire to clear up front page real estate for new growth.

I imagine any large social media site is doomed to be overrun by AI generated content imminently, so it probably won't matter much either way. We needed to drop massively social media as a society, anyway. And it's not like we were going to do that without being forced. So I guess one point AI in a round-about way.

If the bots pass the Turing test, does it really matter if they aren't human? Even if they are subliminally recommending hot singles in your area.

I downloaded 17,000+ of my reddit comments before deleting, so I can fine tune Orca into a digital ghost version of me. It will haunt the corporate ad bots that live in what remains of the old web. Or more likely I will not do that.

What if I offered this to you as a cloud service, for a couple of bucks a month?

I don't visit Reddit often, but some tv/book fandom subs I check up on look deteriorated.

Part of this may be Discord sucking away some users though, as I see Discord links in the sidebars.

"Chat" subs (which I dont frequent myself) seem like they would be particularly vulnerable... But maybe not shrug.

The distribution is all but certainly nearly identical, though the individual contributors likely differ.

Power-law distributions are extraordinarily prevalent in virtually all media, with a tiny fraction of contributors having an exceptionally outsized contribution.

I call bs on that.

Agree. People who don't care that a porn pathway is being cutoff are instead more worried that they couldn't access subreddits to learn and share information. Not everyone uses the API to gather exclusively NFSW data. In contrast, those who are concerned and who do use the API for this purpose have and remain quite vocal. There's also a subgroup interested in privacy out of principle, however they are a small minority of the "angry users."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com