Ask HN: What was the outcome of Reddit blackout?
I couldn't find any info but what was the end result of the blackouts?
Did reddit agree or compromise, or did the movement run out of steam? Just curious if anyone knows..
Did reddit agree or compromise, or did the movement run out of steam? Just curious if anyone knows..
Here's a fun thing to look at, https://subredditstats.com/ for any major subreddit, e.g.:
https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews
https://subredditstats.com/r/explainlikeimfive
https://subredditstats.com/r/videos
All of the most popular subreddits show a steady decline from 2019 to present, with a sharp drop in July 2023. Once this happens to a platform, it's rare for the platform to ever get those users back at scale. It's safe money that Reddit will now be a zombie platform, a la Slashdot -- still up and running with some users, but with flat or declining activity forever.
It shows different stats because the API changed. DAU is likely higher than ever.
Don't mistake "bad for people like us" with "bad for business" — Duolingo appears to be doing fantastically well as a corporation despite having deliberately made themselves into something I found painful to use and therefore stopped using. Facebook is rolling in money despite being your example of bad. Tabloid newspapers sell very well.
Then again, TikTok seems more popular by the day across most groups of people I interact with - technical and non-technical millennials and boomers all use it very extensively in my group of friends and acquaintances.
It also passes the sniff test. Pick any of the largest subreddits from the list and look at its front page. r/funny, with 54m "readers", has multiple posts on its front page right now with less than a dozen comments. r/news has more activity on its posts, but still far, far less than 2019.
It's not like there's a thriving community on Reddit that makes subredditstats' numbers look wildly wrong.
r/anime does a weekly ranking of show discussion threads based on activity.
Fall 2022, week 2: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...
Fall 2023, week 3: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9...
In 2022, The top show has 21,000 votes and 4,000 comments. 2 others have more than 1,000 comments, 4 have more than 4,000 votes, and 13 have more than 300 comments, including the 16th most popular show.
In 2023, the top show has 4,231 votes and 700 comments. 1 other show have more than 4,000 votes, 1 has more than 1,000 comments, and 8 are above 300 comments.
Reddit killed off almost every third party app and had half of the site shut down for a few days, but still came out ahead with a site that’s still very active and with the bonus of pruning unpaid mods who would’ve been likely to disrupt the site again.
Reddit’s only realistic time to IPO was mid-pandemic.
7 years clean, I'm never going back.
I mainly read Hacker News more than I used to and started reading Ask a Manager[0] regularly.
A big benefit of both is that they aren't "bottomless" like Reddit so I won't waste too much time on them.
AAM fulfills my desire to learn about others' lived experiences, but the relatively narrow topic range means it becomes uninteresting if I read the archives for too long.
One big place I’ve found Reddit helpful in recent years is a niche community about a chronic illness I have. Initially for collecting more information and insights than I can get in a 15 minute doctor appointment, then a sense of community and realizing I’m not alone, and then over time by giving me a chance to pay it forward by sharing information with others. Last few weeks I’ve realized ChatGPT can be helpful for the first one. The second I’ve started to shy away from because I’ve realized I don’t want the condition to be a core part of my identity, and the third there might be better ways to achieve (likely offline).
Think you’ve inspired me to get off of it for a while. Thanks!
But your question isn’t atypical, which is weird when you think about it in comparison to any other addiction. If an alcoholic said they stopped drinking, asking what drug they replaced booze with would be a weird and possibly insensitive question.
That being said your interpretation is much more charitable, although I also don't currently feel like I have a great answer to that variant.
I've definitely made an effort to get out of the house more often, and I've been better at getting my less interesting house projects done.
I have a few hobbies I want to explore further (especially music stuff) but that's on hold while I job search after making the decision to move on from contract work. (Hobbies tend to consist of "learn a new thing" and my brain will always gravitate towards learning a new thing over stressful work like job searching.)
For many, it seems like religion fills an important void in their life. When they imagine me without a religion, they see me having that hole. But I never felt an absence in the first place. I didn't adopt a religion the same way most people don't, say, adopt a giraffe. I never woke up with "the pain of giraffe-less-ness", so never decided to get a giraffe.
It would be great if there was an easier way to share subscriptions.
BPS Space, Simone Giertz, Stuff Made Here, DIY Perks, Aaed Musa, This does not compute, rctestflight, Tom Stanton, lftkryo, upir, Nerdtronic, Design Prototype Test
And then just stuff I like - Adrian's Digital Basement, Cathode Ray Dude, Retro Recipes, Tim Traveller, Dave's Garage
https://www.youtube.com/@BPSspace
https://www.youtube.com/@simonegiertz
https://www.youtube.com/@StuffMadeHere
https://www.youtube.com/@DIYPerks
https://www.youtube.com/@aaedmusa
https://www.youtube.com/@ThisDoesNotCompute
https://www.youtube.com/@rctestflight
https://www.youtube.com/@TomStantonEngineering
https://www.youtube.com/@lftkryo
https://www.youtube.com/@upir_upir
https://www.youtube.com/@Nerdtronic
https://www.youtube.com/@DesignPrototypeTest
https://www.youtube.com/@adriansdigitalbasement
https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude
https://www.youtube.com/@RetroRecipes
ZackFreedman is another good marker, although he can be a bit goofy.
If you like mechanical things in general, both SouthMainAuto and HVACRVIDEOS are fantastic.
What a blast from the past! Thanks for sharing.
Peetube would be something very different which, to my surprise, doesn’t exist.
Mindfully heading to reddit (relying on various subreddits as a resource for product reviews or technical support) is even more varied: gaming sites instead of r/games, googling for product reviews instead of heading to a niche subreddit, etc. I'll also visit reddit if it's a promising google result, but resist the old habit to add "site:reddit".
Honestly once you break the (to me addictive) loop of opening reddit/lemmy you're not missing out on much. Whenever I get a reddit search result it redirects to my selfhosted libreddit instance (connect through tailscale). Public libreddit instances are basically always broken, but a single user one which is just used for the occasional search result works perfectly fine.
Yeah it has an addictive dark side. Also most of the user comments went to shit years ago. But overall a net win for me.
Last week I clicked some link leading to reddit, I was surprised I am still logged in.
Serious question, because I’m not sure I understand. Hope it doesn’t come off as antagonistic. I too wonder if the negative things Reddit does to me outweigh the positive, but never considered it was unique to Reddit rather than being true about all anonymous online communities.
Hacker News has much less content and less content diversity. I very rarely go beyond the first page of HN, and only like a quarter of the posts at most are something that I'm interested in enough to actually spend time looking at.
The velocity of HN is also much lower than Reddit. If I check the front page again an hour from now it'll be mostly the same set of posts.
It also helps that comment sections here are smaller and that HN doesn't have pictures or other easily-bingeable content.
HN is also less likely to get me worked up over nothing. Partially because the comment section is more mature, partially because the community doesn't regularly discuss topics that get me worked up.
Edit: Another thing that came to mind: If I do accidentally visit HN too often, seeing nothing new on the front page make me realize I'm checking it too often and helps me realize I need to focus better or seek out something more productive to do.
Instead, if you go on Subreddit Stats and read the text with the big red font, you'll see the explanation why the API changes have made such a difference:
> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like Lemmy.
My assumption is the maintainer just hasn't edited their scraper at all, and it's now running into lots of rate limiting and missing most new comments and posts. The fact that subscriber growth has remained constant supports that thesis.
So only down by two thirds, so they still have to double down if they want to outcompete X.
> Heads up! This data is likely out of date or inaccurate now that Reddit has decided to kill the open ecosystem that existed around Reddit. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing
Platforms are heavily Pareto skewed.[1]. The top 5% of reddit users are the primary (posters, mods) and secondary (commenters) content creators who are responsible for 95% of the life on reddit.
The protest was led by this top 5%, and I presume they're also the main group that atrophied. The scale of damage is therefore underreported in simple usage statistics.
[1] I just coined the term, and I'm proud of it. Now shatter my dreams, and tell how it has already been around for decades.
> Etsy seems dominated by stores that sell nothing with a few that do rather well. It's severely Pareto skewed.
This is a relatively rare use of language, so you might deserve co-invention credit.
I'll take it !
Please. There are many subs, which lack mods and need to throw bodies at mod queues.
If it helps, I’ve seen Reddit outreach programs to mods, and they used to respect the opinions of certain mods and subs.
Spez recently joined a mod team.
It’s enlightening, one of those “everyone should do this” kind of experiences.
Reddit modding in particular is not just modding, but also community outreach and management, typically for text.
It's wrong for all subs I checked. For example: https://subredditstats.com/r/thethickofit
Just 3 comments for Nov 22, 8 for Nov 23. But how does that square with the existence of this thread from Nob 22 with 84 comments? https://old.reddit.com/r/thethickofit/comments/181d68u/ben_s...
And there's a bunch of other threads too! It's not just "a little bit wrong" it's completely wrong. That site seems about on the ball as a dead seal.
I doubt that's the case, but just as there are sites that analyse an Amazon product's reviews to judge real vs. fake, it's not impossible that a Reddit comment counting serving could do the same.
How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...
And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?
Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?
But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.
> The insults in the show are often colorful and inventive, but they can be quite explicit. Due to their explicit nature, I won't provide a verbatim quote here
You can ask it to not filter profanity, but it seems I need to do it every other message. In general ChatGPT is about as useful as a marzipan dildo here.
I'm willing to bet that exactly 0% of the content of that sub is LLM generated, and the same for most of those smaller subs. Who even cares about these tiny subs? Certainly not Reddit.
Even if this was true (which I seriously doubt), how can you prove that, and what makes you think the subredditstats website cited above would be able to tell the difference?
The operator freely admits his/her stats probably underestimate real traffic due to the expense of collecting data, and they make no claim to having software to detect real commentors from fake. Meanwhile the real internal reddit stats available to mods show numbers that are both much higher and much closer to the live traffic we can see for ourselves as readers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425415
You should probably also point out the big red text on the subredditstats pages. I didn't see it when I posted the links, since I'm colorblind and hues of red are entirely invisible to me. Also I have trouble counting past the number of fingers on my hands, so I didn't notice that the numbers were a bit off. If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
> If I had noticed that, I still would've needed one of the very clever people here to explain the significance.
I don't know if that's sarcastic or serious or if that's some dig at me? What an odd comment.
I also suspect that smaller subs are a more useful measure than these huge subs, because I'd expect them to die off much quicker than the huge ones with a lot of inertia.
That said, I understand it can be annoying having 16 people tell you you're wrong all in slightly different ways. It's the price of posting on the internet I'm afraid. But it was (and still is!) the top post on this thread, even though it's not just factually wrong, but spectacularly factually wrong – which is fine, everyone is wrong sometimes – but people do have the tendency to point that out. As long as it's not a pedantic point I don't think that's wrong even if there's a comment already, if you think you can make that point better.
The data is useless as an absolute measure of activity, sure, as described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425501. The message at the top of the main subredditstats page says, "...the data collector is not robust, and so the numbers should only be used as a general guide." You can read that. Let's assume I can read that, too.
But it does track as a representative sample of trends. Picking something less noisy than a niche sub, we can ask whether there have been recent newsworthy events that might show up as spikes in this data. And, there is: look again at the posts/day and comments/day graphs on https://subredditstats.com/r/worldnews, and you see clear spikes in activity right around October 7 -- well after Reddit's API changes would have affected subredditstats.
If the data collector has only been able to pick up, say, approximately 20% of the site's activity for each subreddit, then trends are still trends as long as the data collection hasn't changed in a radically new way. And, sure, that could be the case after Reddit's API changes, but as I pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38425150 (and as supported in another user's reply using an entirely different source of data), the API changes don't line up precisely with the change in user activity, and Reddit is clearly, observably, less active now in all of its large subs.
Now, for my part, I assumed this would all be pretty obvious stuff. I'm not doing a terribly deep analysis here; I'd expect anyone else to see the same things at a glance. But a few people seem to think that because the numbers aren't a perfect match, the entire point just collapses and clearly Reddit is now busier than ever, and those people are completely missing the point. Using a 12,000-subscriber sub with the noisiest possible data to try to disprove sitewide trends is even more wrong, and then smugly saying, "everyone is wrong sometimes", is not just condescending, but frankly embarrassing.
The diametrically opposing argument here is that Reddit is perfectly healthy and the API changes and blackout protest had no significant impact on the site, and that checks notes 12,000 subscribers in r/thethickofit are sufficient evidence for this. And, like, okay, if that's your argument, cool, carry on, just come out and say so.
These stats claim the sub has had 10-20 comments per day in just the past month, so maybe 300-600 tops.
In reality it's had 1200+ comments just in the past week alone and probably closer to 5000 for the month. And you can see the activity with your own eyes in every thread, so I definitely trust reddit's own stats more.
Sounds like Reddit itself has recovered in terms of raw numbers, but I (and others) have noticed yet another downtick in quality. Lot more bots (AI craze doesn't help. And despite the API narrative being used to counter them, they probably suferent the least), comments seem to be as hostile as early pandemic. But these are hard to measure objectively.
It could just be that the longer you're on there, the worse the quality appears to get to you as newcomers come. People always start to feel that way after being there some time. But then again people have been complaining about the quality of reddit going down literally almost as long as reddit has existed.
I think a much more effective strategy would be a user-led LLM "spamming" campaign.
Package up a lightweight, easy to use LLM for Windows users and let them turn their accounts into noise. Purposely generate overly-argumentative, blatantly wrong prose on every subject and in every subreddit.
Reddit would hate that. Just a hundred users engaging in it could probably tank the quality of the whole site.
Because of those things Prank spammers usually don’t last long. Usually a small gang of people will try something like that and you can quickly ban them. They might try to come back on new accounts but eventually tire of it and find another way to keep themselves busy. The mod queue feature is quite efficient so we can ban reported junk much faster than they can post.
I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it would be more difficult than you might think. If you try to automated completely it would cost you an awful lot in fees (Open AI’s server bills are “eye-watering“ and if you go past the free limit they start passing that cost onto you), and the admin’s would probably be able to identify the accounts doing it and ban them site wide.
Also hugely immoral.
If you don't like Reddit and decide to not use it: fine, your choice, obviously.
But completely fucking over a platform because you don't like it? That's an entirely different thing. Who are you exactly to decide how Reddit runs it site?
This is just a DDoS attack, but in a slightly different form.
Reddit and its userbase have always been on the activist spectrum (SOPA, PIPA, CEO changes, API changes, etc.) And before it, Digg was much the same. Given the fact that they'll brigade r/Place with automation tools and protests, I'm surprised it hasn't happened in the form of a broader protest.
Put aside peer pressure for a moment, couldn't you create your community on Lemmy to make sure that you are always in control of your social media presence?
Yeah not sure how it works over there with new platforms and everything but that won’t just fly here.
I do browse the fediverse and am somewhat ambivalent so far. It's definitely at a crossroad point where the next 2-3 years will determine whether it's the next Blender, or the next Gimp. And my biggest fears is that usability won't be prioritized in order to ensure that it won't be the next GIMP. There's a lot of core UX to rework to make it more intuitive.
Particularly the nsfw loss hits hard for those interested in niche communities. We've lost tumblr, never had any of the Meta (FB, Instagram) views, Reddit is holding on on threads, Pornhub went down in flames following their outright incompetence, and Twitter has gotten a hellscape from EM's hopeless attempts to keep the spammers away (and his other antics).
I suspect this is the bigger issue to be honest. I certainly stopped because of this. Not that I begrudge people having OF or advertising that, but please, for fuck's sake, stay on-topic, and don't spam the fuck out of things with content barely related to the sub's topic.
I also really hate the shift in language to be more personal; e.g. "would you like to [..]" / "I would like YOU to [..]" and stuff like that. It's just creepy and manipulative. Sell your pr0n pics, fine, but don't pretend we have some sort of personal relationship, because we don't.
Also imgur's NSFW purge probably didn't help.
Particularly where "weird" fetishes are involved, the rates for custom content can be pretty exorbitant, but still a drop in the bucket for the clientele.
I wonder where those posters went to though. Lemmynsfw is nice but very sparse.
Ps OnlyFans spam was killing it for longer already
I just hope the fediverse or any other alternative is preparing itself for that next big drama. Because I feel it's a matter of when at this point, not if.
The question is, does the Fediverse want this level of responsibility? Moderating ordinary content is hard enough, moderating porn is worse because of all the legal liability: various countries have extremely strict laws regarding access of minors (e.g. Germany), there are various definitions of CSAM (again, Germany being very strict by banning not just anime "minors" aka lolicon but also textual erotica of such), then there is the issue with "revenge porn" and getting that deleted across the Fediverse...
But at the same time, I doubt all instances will clamp down and ban it. It brings a lot of traffic and I'm sure many moderators have strong free speech vallues and will defend it under that banner. It's extra work but some will take it up. There will most definitely be NSFW-dedicated instances in the worst case.
fight the power!
The downfall of Digg led directly to reddit and the death of Mr. Schwartz began reddits long path into slow enshitification.
That's not to say that Reddit has a great, glorious future. But by any quantifiable metrics, Reddit "won."
They shut off API access to their data around the very same time. Is that a coincidence?
Saying that as someone been dedicating full-time since September to a project to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy [0], the truth is that there is simply no alternative yet for all the niche communities that are established there.
About a month ago, I posted here [1] about my project to try to make it easier to sign up and automatically discover/subscribe the Lemmy communities [2], but I wasn't expecting to have such a long tail of communities that need to be mapped out. The ~150 users that signed up to alien.top led to a discovery of about 6000 different subreddits.
I was doing the work of curation and creating alternative communities by hand, but I realized that was going to be an endless task. This is why I started working on a crowdsourced solution [3], which I launched last Friday
[0]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/fediverser
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38007028
That's just not the reality. I'm surprised and pleased to see that big subreddits suffered a significant decline, but I notice the number of subscribers continues to grow. Also, after the the dust settled, Lemmy activity really took a downturn. Small communities just can't survive the migration en masse. Whenever I need to look up something I still eventually need to check reddit, and most communities seem alive and healthy... The truth is, major subreddits are not what keeps reddit alive.
I have seen next to no engagement change in subreddits where the mods didn’t make it very difficult or impossible to engage (i.e either stayed neutral, or made notional changes and few posts). In fact growth as if been seen at normal rates, as if nothing happened.
The average person didn't care about what the mods wanted.
This is untrue from my pov. I see no change at all, /r/all is useless garbage memes. My custom page is mostly high signal. And the occasional tech search yields good results.
My preferred way of viewing reddit content when I am not using the old reddit desktop version with RES is usually on "redditp.com". Reddit is not great mind you, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's a welcome break from the ultra-repetitive and deeply psychologically manipulative ad laced feeds that TikTok and Instagram have. Redditp.com is a video and picture scroller that is also customizable by modifying the site URL, so content from specific subreddits can be viewed on it by scrolling rather than by expanding each individual post.
They really need a UI that allows subreddit titles to be selectable on it. They also need to reign in moderators that strictly control subreddits to enrich themselves and shut out others mind you...
The desktop experience on Reddit needs to be protected at all costs, everybody is trying to turn Social Media into dictatorial Cable TV with Commercials (where you have no control over what you see) everywhere now.
One of my former favorites (the one I made an account for!) went from a very good and healthy moderation to a weird form of 'If we have to go into the thread more than once we have a short fuse for harsh enforcement of rules, nonpopular threads can still be cool though'.
It will be very interesting to see what happens next year; historically election cycles tend to make SNR worse and people just break.
It’s kind of a relief. I think I was too “lazy” to stop on my own because Apollo was so comfortable to use.
I assume it's dopamine addiction playing out in the extreme.
I'm also finding that just "getting old" means the more books I read, shows I've seen, etc, the more I find myself saying "oh I've seen this kind of thing before". True, non-dopamine-based novelty is harder and harder to come by.
I think they're separate problems, though I'm going to make a huge leap and say that I think the writing problem is actually in part a function of the dopamine problem. Writers are both influenced more by "short media", and required to cater for audiences who enjoy/are addicted to it, even if the product is long-form.
Same and mainly because Kagi let's me rewrite the url to a private libreddit instance. Otherwise I'd have downranked it.
Nowadays I'm mostly on Tildes and here, neither of which has the endless inflow of content that Reddit did, it's actually possible to read "everything" on both and then go do something else.
Ultimately I think if anything had any impact on Reddit's traffic it would have been the killing of the defacto mobile apps. The lesson any future founders should take is to kill off third party apps sooner rather than later if you ever want to do so, before user growth on those platforms becomes an issue.
By comparison, the official Reddit app feels somewhat slower, even on my relatively new Android 12 phone from 2021, having a very noticeable lag when scrolling through articles and comments. For video and photo posts, there's no way of browsing the comments without clicking on the thumbnail and having it auto-play the videos every time, meaning I need to react fast to pause the video (there is practically no way of stopping this). And it doesn't support Android 7 anymore, meaning the only way to access it from my 2018 phone is via the browser.
It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
Naturally, this leads pretty much any technical project to be doomed from inception.
Reddit as a site was never optimal to begin with and it only became worse when they decided to homeroll their own image/video hosting. But the biggest consequence of surrendering to ads turns base Reddit into feel like its 20 years older than it is.
>It baffles me why Reddit would want to cut support for 3rd party apps when they were a key component in the Reddit ecosystem.
money and control, the root of most evils in the world.
I tried last week ( after a few months off Reddit) to install the Reddit app, and it’s appallingly bad. It’s so confusing that I’m not quite sure what sub I’m reading, what’s user generated, and what’s an ad ( I was never a prolific poster, commenter, mod or anything - just reading is difficult now )
So independently of the politics, I’ve tried to come back to the platform, but I can’t, because the new product is vastly inferior to the old one.
I'm unable to tell apart ads properly either quickly on reddit, and given the it's the same user action to collapse a comment and to click an ad that looks like a comment, I've misclicked on ads many, many times. It doesn't help that they place them at the top of the comments section and seem to be deliberately designed to look like gif comments.
As an advertiser I would not be particularly chuffed. I can say with confidence that my accidental ad click rate on reddit is 100%.
Fixed that for you ;)
https://github.com/ichitaso/ApolloPatcher/releases/latest
https://github.com/EthanArbuckle/Apollo-CustomApiCredentials
Edit: oh never mind, I've been digging into the links but it looks like it's iOS - only. So that explains why I've never come across it before.
In my experience, based on reading complaints about the app, is that many use it for 5 minutes on the default settings and claim it is the worst app ever made.
It's just bizarre to me that they didn't try to buy one of these apps to replace their own. That would've been a net win. It seems instead, as throughout their history, that their leadership is constantly trying to destroy it.
If they had external investors they'd be being hit with shareholder lawsuits constantly.
- Narwhal 2: https://narwhal.app/
Of course, you pay the API costs. But this is pro work, countless UX details thoughtfully made.
- Winston: https://winston.cafe/
- Winston on GitHub: https://github.com/lo-cafe/winston
In TestFlight Beta, OK on iPhone but awkward on iPad unless full screen; layout is jumbled mess in stage manager windows.
As for other websites, Lemmy and other federated aggregators have gained a bit of a foothold.
Yeah, I can see the average quality has been going down. Also I've felt less enthusiastic about contributing. I just won't bother submitting articles, writing a more insightful comment, etc
Lately, they only deserve bottom of the barrel engagement
I truly believe Reddit themselves are using the bots to fake participation.
This was noticeable immediately after the blackout, with all of the “I’m sorry I’m not allowed to generate offensive content” comments .. which I’m sure they only learned to filter away.
In one of the craft based subs I moderate (5m subs - reasonably sized one), it's not so much the quality of posts has dropped, it's that the quantity has dropped, and dropped significantly. This seems to directly translate to garbage posts getting a lot more visibility and sticking around for a lot longer. The good quality posts are still there, but proportionally the garbage is much more visible now.
This is enough of a problem that subscribers have been complaining about it. Not much can be done until (and only if) the number of actual contributors begins to rise again.
On the other hand, I also run a tiny local city sub (maybe 20k ppl) - the number of posts has been steadily growing. I can't work that one out.
Mine's gone from 1-1.5k to 2-400 posts a day.
reddit wants to jump on to the low-effort click-drawing content bandwagon - whilst good for their numbers in short term I think low term it's not going to be great. I know for my sub, the discord community has now taken off and is probably more vibrant than the sub currently is.
Local subs growing despite power users vacating kind of lines up with this too — casual users seem more likely to treat Reddit like one of the bigger platforms like Facebook, seeking out subreddits that are more broadly appealing or based around locality rather than interest-based subreddits.
Post quality also declined after the 2017 redesign. The old design had a sidebar where subreddits kept a FAQ and wiki. Today, the same questions get asked again and again on many subreddits. Mods can't lock those posts and direct the author to the FAQ, because most users can't even see the FAQ. Mods who try to ensure a firm hand regularly get excoriated by the community, even by regulars on the sub, as "gatekeepers".
Communities are defined by the content contributors first and for most. That's something Reddit forgot.
Reddit started with a little bit of modding to clean up the mess which is always needed (how it works on HN). Then every year it seemed to grow and grow, mods were now self-annoited editors of their own pet magazines. A hundred plus mods were added to major subs, where in some 50% of comments can get removed in major threads. r/science has many many threads where 75% of comments were removed, almost entirely as they didn't fit some idea of what should be discussed, what was acceptable.
That's a big difference from RTFM culture on forums.
You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs. Niche hobby subs, on the other hand, often don't see the level of moderation they actually need in order to retain knowledgeable contributors. People with a certain level of proficiency in a hobby will bail if the discussion is predominantly newbie questions or repetitive arguments.
I actually don't like locking posts either; the concept is fine, but in execution it felt more like a band-aid for when a moderator was tired of moderating, often because of 1-2 specific chains of comment and everything else was perfectly civil. Rotten apple ruins the barrel, and the feeling of mod laziness means they throw out the apples and the barrel instead of pruning the fruit.
>You write about developments on major subs, but those are just that, the major subs.
which is what proportionately most people will experience. moderating 100 people and 10m people are different problem spaces, similar to sorting 100 items and 10m items. They need different solutions and approaches to perform them optimally even if the end result is the same.
I personally wrote a userscript to wipe every post comment I've ever made, and have limited my usage to a few particular subs that I still lurk (/r/LocalLLaMA in particular) just bc Lemmy still doesn't seem to have a comparable level of activity.
Speaking of which I'm still trying to sort out the situation involving which instances federate with which, and where to actually set up a primary account, and what the interop situation with different Fediverse platforms is even like in general for that matter.
Those that replaced it with Lemmy, and those that took it as a moment to kick a habit.
I think the latter is the larger group.
Sure, foldables exist, but they're still out of a typical user's price range and are more fragile than either of the things they're replacing. And while personally I more just lost track of it because my last couple of devices have been carrier-locked initially, custom ROMs have gotten to be substantially more of a pain in the ass to daily-drive. Not only has Google opted to mostly let the core applications rot in favor of ones that depend on the Google Play libs, but SafetyNet is now being used for everything from DRM to anti-cheat. (Not that I should be picking up a Fate: G/O habit anyway, but still.)
I do have hope for things in this space to get interesting again -- I think the full potential of GKIs is more of a long-term bet, and I think the landscape for Android on larger screens is a lot better this time around -- but I'm also just as interested in any way I can get my old devices running Linux at this point instead. (I am aware of PostmarketOS, but my OP7T doesn't have a port yet, and mainlining a device is as daunting a research dive as it is fascinating.)
To more directly answer your question though, you might want to check Lemdroid (lemdro.id) if you haven't already.
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
Nearly half the active users have disappeared again since the peak.
I entirely quit it myself, and when I do end up driving bythe more niche subreddits from typical search results, I find that it feels way more dead.
The official mobile app is also really persistent about pushing content it thinks you might like which has the unintended consequence of generalizing those niche subreddits to the degree that they lose that niche focus. For example, if every /r/movies user gets /r/criterion pushed to them, the content of /r/criterion will slowly transform to match the tastes of the /r/movie users.
Power vacuums filling up always lead to lower quality governance, but it seems that reddit did not have to be governed that well after all.
Many subreddits have outright collapsed and will almost certainly never return.
But the subreddits that stayed seem to hit the frontpage and attract new followers... All the Redditors looking for new hangout spots. Post quality has declined as a result, but the subs who stayed have seemingly absorbed the traffic.
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Lemmy.world usage spiked dramatically, as has Mastodon.world. I think these alternative open source communities show lots of promise, though many decisions at Lemmy seem naiive right now.
The adults seem aware of the Lemmy problems however so I remain hopeful. If your community is text based, Lemmy is likely a good fit.
Picture based communities have a NSFW / trolling problem that is still an open question. If trolls can post CSAM to threaten the moderators / admins, what are Lemmy admins supposed to do about that?
DeFederation (and temporary DeFederation) are okay tools for this problem... But better tools need to be built into Lemmy. Random server #244 doesn't necessarily deserve to be defederated if just 20 or so trolls are posting CSAM and threatening Admins. Nominally, a tool that more selectively bans users (or new users only) instead of cutting off the whole server would be ideal.
The answer is, obviously, "patches welcome." But this stuff is a bit janky.
The other big problem is that the Fediverse is a collection of software that doesn't quite talk to each other - ActivityPub is a bit underspecified in practice, and you're gonna have to test combinations of actual running code. We've been having a bizarre time just trying to talk to Kbin reliably, i.e. software intended to do the same Reddit-alike job as Lemmy. We almost have two-way Mastodon story and comment flow working, except when the Mastodon has authorized_fetch switched on. Etc etc etc, the problems are a string of little glitches.
OTOH, it basically works well enough to sustain discussion, both local and federated. So everything else is fussing, really.
* https://awful.systems/ official refuge of SneerClub and TechTakes
Yeah.
I'm optimistic on this front. Bugs are one of those things that "everyone agrees upon", although you're right in that the Lemmy development environment hasn't taken off or expanded as much as it probably should have. Still, bugs will be fixed because its low-hanging fruit. Everyone gets bothered, someone will get bothered enough and then a patch will be submitted.
The advancements from 0.17 to 0.18.0 to 0.18.5 have grossly improved Lemmy in substantial ways. There's enough bug-progress that I'm happy. There's plenty more bugs, but progress is largely all that I care about.
--------
The deeper concern of mine, and I alluded to this earlier with my "Naive" comment, is that Lemmy is very ideological right now. Ex: There was a week or two where people were against Lemmy Search Engines, worried that they'd track us. (Thankfully, someone made search-lemmy.com and life is better now).
But now we're running into a "Privacy / anti-tracking" problem, directly in relation to this new-user / trolling issue. The most direct solution to the trolling problem is to have a way to track new-users and their early posts to see if they're a bot, troll, or otherwise a fake malicious account. Reddit does this through its Karma system.
But Lemmy is fundamentally against Karma-tracking at the moment, meaning an _actual_ solution to this "trolls just create a new account from an unmoderated server" cannot rely upon karma (right now). I'm hoping that the politics shift enough that we can start talking about Karma-tracking (or other simple statistics that grossly diminish trolling behavior), but its going to be a while before everyone gets convinced IMO.
---------
I think the "Adults in the room" know about the problem. But there's also the need for the underlying community to believe in the problem and have an ideological shift to successfully keep the community in unison.
Or to get more specific: I know the Beehaw.org server wants to join everyone else in the federation. And we all know why they aren't doing so, and everyone respects everyone else's opinions and situation. Until this trolling problem is... addressable (not necessarily solved, but "addressed", so that we have tools to deal with it), it will be best for some instances to just remain de-federated (especially from open-registration servers who are prone to these coordinated trolling-assaults).
Blocking obnoxious individuals from your server helps keep them from crapping up the home versions of the groups.
Our only worry about the software is that it's run by weird tankies. But if they become intolerable we're pretty sure there will be enough people to maintain a fork. Probably with our admin as a main guy, lol. Nobody actually wants that to happen, to be clear.
much easier said than done. That's the one big issue on surges of traffic driven through controversy, you get "Witches":
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]
Most people by nature are apathetic, so the ones who do get riled up and change more often than not tend to be the highly opinionated ones. This could make for excellent power users who will provide tons of content, or venom that turns the entire community sour.
It sounds like Lemmy has handled this much better than Voat, but identifying the "witches" without disupting the "libertarians" is quite the subtle but ambitious endeavor. I think the key is simply transparency: be ready to show that an active but disruptive user has been nothing but combatative to the community, and explain why certain servers can't be federated as of now. Some will twist the words, but overall a good policy should feel like common sense (even if it takes a lot of designing to properly establish).
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
The overall plan seems to be: major centers of relative openness (sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world), a few hybrid locations, and finally well curated gardens (ex: Beehaw.org).
The different groups will federate, or de-federate, with each other as they see fit. You're right in that the more libertarian-leaning instances (ex: sh.itjust.works) are experimenting with lack of controls... but even they see various instances as toxic and are willing to ban them wholesale.
I don't think anyone is going with the extreme-libertarian Reddit style "everyone is welcome" anymore. There's too many shitty communities out there who are attracted by that.
The overall "Most are welcome" signposts are good enough for now.
They are most vulnerable, but I see it as the natural pressures of the network effect. Unless you are some sort of status symbol, you can't reject 99.9% of visitors and expect to grow your community. So being lax in the beginning is necessary to growth. But being lax is exactly what ne'er do wells will take advanadge of, so it's a careful balance between growth and community fostering.
I say this mostly to assert that early users are the most valuable and usually the most opinionated ones, so those politics you speak of can be hard to balance. Don't want to end up too much like a dictator, but you also can't be a pushover either.
Mastodon has proven that these moderation issues can be solved. The question is if the Lemmy devs (and community) can politically agree that Mastodon-like moderation tools are a good idea to prioritize. That's where I'm worried.
I guess its not a big deal because there's bigger fish to fry right now, so to speak. (Plenty of simpler bugs that everyone agrees upon). But eventually, the fundamental user-tracking / karma-system / vs defederation / design of anti-trolling tools becomes political and ideologically based. What happens to the community then?
Hard for me to say. I hope that the overall community accepts the problem and agrees its a problem worth fixing (even at a slight tracking / anti-anonymity features getting pushed to Lemmy-core). If not, maybe the problem can be solved with bots (aka: IRC) that helps track Karma-like scores and whatnot across servers and helps auto-moderate content that enters a particular server or even community/sublemmy.
I think I can "imagine" solutions to these problems. But what I can't foresee is what the community will deem an acceptable solution or not.
-------------------
Mastodon is a very good model though and has led the way by showing what kind of tools are needed to curate a community. I see that Lemmy kinda-sorta wants go to about things a different way though.
Lemmy isn't a "fork" of Reddit, as much as it was just a Fediverse thing that existed and happened to become popular in-and-around the Reddit blackout.
The Fediverse-model is good. Mastodon is good, but a poor-fit for people looking for things like Reddit. I think what Lemmy is, and what the Lemmy-users want Lemmy to become, remain an open-question.
Some of these problems also apply to kbin.social. I expect different "Reddit-like Fediverse replacements" to spring up, implement competing solutions, fork, die out, etc. etc. over time. This is the nature of all things open source.
The only way to figure things out is to write code and try it out. Its not like anyone really knows what they're doing here, its a lot of guess-and-check and experimentation. And that's fine.
I think we've more or less recognized that communities built around volunteer moderators have needs that Reddit has failed at (and likely will fail again in the future). Building alternative solutions is an open question in general.
Lemmy for now, remains the forerunner. But I can imagine Kbin.social taking over if they make the right decisions (or if Lemmy developers "pulls a Reddit" and forces another migration).
I think the Lemmy.world instance has very good administrators who have made good decisions thus far.
But as for "who to follow", that's a bit more ambiguous. Its not necessarily important to follow people you agree with... its sometimes more important to follow people you disagree with.
Lemmy.ml IIRC is the Lemmy developer's instance and is therefore important, even if their posting styles do not match what I like to see. I also consider Beehaw.org important, they rub me as snowflakey but I think I respect what they're trying to do (even if I don't necessarily agree with it). sh.itjust.works errs on the other side politically.
The other fun thing about federation is that when you ban an idiot coming in from another server, you never have to see them again and they can post their last word out there in the ghost version of the thread that you never have to think about.
Implementation details do matter however. I could see something like Kbin.social winning out as PHP-developers could be more popular / available than Rust developers, for example.
Hard for me to look into the future. Weird decisions ripple out over time. People are definitely "onto something here". So I'm trying to keep an open mind to the different possibilities.
Many subreddit moderators protested in various ways and were removed and replaced.
Reddit never agreed or compromised and for the most part the movement seems to have run out of steam.
Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?
I use electricity every day. Is electricity relevant in most contexts for me? Nope. I drive a car every day. Is the type of car I drive relevant in any way? Nope.
Facebook is no longer the trendsetter but it still influences the daily lives of millions of people and will probably, once again, have a major impact on who the United States next president is. Facebook is highly relevant.
Facebook is a cancer to our society. Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.
> Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.
Ah, you're just unaware of Facebook's DAU/MAU trends. They're not hard to find.
This is because Google is assigning more weight to user-generated content, since the rise of AI-generated content, and I believe traffic will keep growing.
Personally I have essentially not used reddit since June outside of following links there from searches. It was the thing that got me to make an HN account after being a passive reader for like 7 years.
It's an entirely different medium that serves an entirely different purpose. Reddit is a message board. Discord is chat. A highly-active Discord is impossible to keep up with, whereas a highly active subreddit is still very useable. You can post a question on reddit, go to work, come home many hours later, and read the answers, and it's easy no matter how much traffic the sub gets. On Discord, if it's very active, you could find yourself scouring through hundreds of messages to see if someone replied to you and didn't use the Reply feature.
oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming.
1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y...
2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material.
It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.
Look at HN - simple hierarchical discussion forums with a negligible barrier to entry and no grating artificial limitations, and we quite rightly love it.
In short, I still use Reddit, but there's nothing ideological about that choice.
Without an alternative to reddit, using the reddit app remains the way to stay informed & engaged in various niche reddit communities.
I still use reddit the same today as I have been for the last 10+ years (chrome + RES). /r/all is as bad as it's ever been, however my subbed feed hasn't changed much.
HN is a highly skewed techy community. And I imagine many are reddit vagrants as well. I see it less as "giving the right answer" and more "asking a biased audience". It's the opposite of asking people on reddit what they think of the blackout; many who stayed and never used 3rd party apps probably didn't care or even argue it was an abuse of mod power.
And of course, Reddit isn't just one website. Some places may have barely changed. Others are indeed irreparably changed. Others still are literally shut down. The question is highly sensitive to how you browse, and what you browse.
- tech topics I browse on HN for. 90+% of what I'd see on places like r/technology I'd see here with tons of discussion
- more political or otherwise touchy topics I replaced with tildes.net. And honestly I am the much better off for it. It is a lot quieter than Reddit, but there are very few times where I feel such topics devolve into the polarized turf wars you know r/politics to be.
- Don't browse it as much, but for memes/humor stuff Lemmy and KBin work well enough. still very much growing and I hope they can become more general purpose replacements, but for now non-meme stuff is a trickle unless it's that 1-2 posts that blow up (usually political stuff or more reddit drama... not what I go there for)
- lastly, a lot of gaming stuff I migrated to discord for. Definitely the worst experience when on large servers and it feels even noisier than Twitter. But the small community for niche genres or specific games are surprisingly cozy. It's a real mixed bag.
So I'd say it's 90% replaced. But I can also admit there are some few communities I reluctantly go back to that keep me from fully disconnecting to reddit (though, note that I deleted my account way back in February. I fully lurk):
- gamedev communities are a huge one. The best alternative to that is Twitter and... no, I still can't do Twitter/X/Whatever Musk fancies that day of the week. Never liked it before, and I'd rather deal with Reddit's madness than try to learn it in 2023 at its worst. maybe I'll try Bluesky one day, but I'm personally rooting for Mastodon (haven't checked it out myself, though).
- in a similar vein, I still find it easier to skim for industry news on r/games and related subs than to scour the net. This is definitely laziness on my end so I can't pretend to be immune from the path of least resistance. I can alleviate half of this with a proper RSS feed (never used one, but I am very curious about setting one up), but research into this really made me remember how many sites I used to discuss on removed their forums or comment sections. Or in some cases, the comments make reddit look like a bastion of nuance in comparison.
well, one day. I'm still searching in the meantime.
I personally tried to build an alternative back then [1] (open source [2]), but the problem even Reddit is facing now is acquiring more users and keeping high quality content.
Last time I checked Lemmy, it wasn't doing good either - but these might just be personal Interpretations of the current situation.
I didn't participate in the blackout. I felt the mods were wrong to take that approach.
I did go to bat for blind mods. They need better mod tools than they have.
That comment is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36232441
Hopefully Reddit does figure out how to both foster attractive communities and make enough money.
I run a bunch of Reddits. One has 20k members and says "top 5 percent" and many have a few hundred and say "top 50 percent." There's a lot more to Reddit than the very big Reddits.
I think the relatively small number of very big Reddits get too much press. That's not all there is to Reddit and I hope they defy the expectations of people already pronouncing them "dead."
I'm not blind. I have no idea if it's gotten harder for blind mods.
Sorry.
It’s difficult enough getting 8 developers on the exact same page when writing code, now imagine trying to moderate to a ruleset with a much greater degree of ambiguity.
I think reddit is a wonderful idea that needs different leadership, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for reddit to die and something new and preferably harder to buy out takes its place.
If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.
Reddit’s decision changed it previous equation with mods, and redefined the limits of power.
Reddit, since inception, had never made specific hire fire decisions for mods, especially for purely monetary reasons.
This makes it less volunteer moderation, and purely unpaid labor.
NB: I would add return on investment to your cabinet of villains.
If people don't want to be unpaid mods, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that.
Do we need to address some things? Sure. But I have long advocated for the right of people to engage in unpaid labor or low paid labor if they choose to.
It's exactly how Founders of startups create the company that makes them millionaires. Saying no one is allowed to without first being rich creates a permanent social divide.
Would I like for there to be a means to get paid for moderating on reddit? Maybe. I certainly could use more money.
Do I want the burdens that typically accompany a paid day job? No. I'm handicapped and that's a disaster waiting to happen.
A lot of this was not intentional. And it's generally not as simple as people like to pretend it is for the sake of argument.
> If people don't want to be unpaid XXX, they don't have to be. No one forced them into that
Insert blogger/writer/mod for xxx.
Maybe it would help, if this contradiction is clarified.
"I can choose to work for free on some things if I wish." does not contradict "Other folks are in the wrong to expect and demand that I work for free."
Reddit’s writers and content producers, i.e. users, are still unpaid. They’re just also being used to train LLMs aimed at reducing the number of independent bloggers and writers.
I guess. They have very different histories and it's not like programmers are strangers to doing "free work" (i.e. the entire open source community until the Github era). the narrative would be flipped 30 years ago. I'm not quite sure how that is relevant.
>If the only way people will "allow" a valuable service to live is as their bitch, the entire internet is welcome to go die in a fire while we dream up some new answer for the future of this world.
sure. pay your labor. I don't think we disagree.
But the issue isn't that reddit doesn't make millions. It's that it's obsessed with spending 10's of millions in hopes of making hundreds of millions off of content provided via free labor. I just want to browse some news and discuss with people. HN doesn't cost millions in server costs and performs that perfectly for me.
If I had a nice cozy forum I wouldn't mind a subscription to it. I paid my 10 bux to SA back in the day and I donated to Tildes for a few years. But I do agree many would rather let the internet burn than pay for a site directly.
And beyond that, how fast do they expect to grow after this many years? Be happy with a good thing! Their growth rate was very impressive!
You can speculate as to why they hired so many people: pandemic tech hiring FOMO, looking more attractive to investors, empire building, not being willing to settle for a paltry 10-figure valuation and so trying to build out to hit 11-figures. But they don't need that many people and they could easily become profitable by doing a big layoff (just as money software companies could). At this point it's not a question of survival or existence for them, nor of IPO readiness, so much as it is IPO optimization.
I don't know the details. I didn't follow it that closely. I don't care that much.
I've read that the business decision that sparked the blackout had something to do with trying to make money. They're a business, not a charity.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. People want endless amounts of free shit. The people who don't want reddit unless it's both free and takes their orders are people I don't personally sympathize with.
I don't really expect to argue this further. I've already argued it way more than I really care to.
Most people have no idea what's behind reddit, facebook, youtube. They just see a free shiny thing and start using it. Then one day the free shiny thing has a gross ad on it, and one day it has another one, and before they know it, it's unusable.
At the same time, people are so fixated with "X killer [no, not the twitter thing]" that they can't see the small victories when a site with 1000 people grows to 10k people. 10x growth is insane but it can be swept away if all they see is a 0.02% drop in reddit traffic to achieve that.
So much better to celebrate the growths than to chant at the downfalls. downfalls are good popcorn drama, especially these days, but doesn't really solve the problem.
Zero of the top 25 posts of the last twelve months are younger than five months. Two of the top 50 posts are younger than five months.
Comments (using subredditstats from a sister comment) have gone from around 70k per day to around 12k per day.
I remember during the blackout that there was an extra push (by reddit paid mods) of pushing content to AskReddit (or maybe they made up a similar sub) and were noticeably creating topics there
That said, on second glance there is something weirdly fucky here. This post [0] from a day ago has 4.2k upvotes- and yet, it does not appear in the spot it should in the top of year [1]. Tf?
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/185g0tf/whats_th...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/top/?sort=top&t=year&coun...
May a bit more: there were a few news stories about it, so it wasn't totally silent; but I kinda doubt the people it was meant to impact were at all distressed.
The impact was massive attention to alternatives. Tons of traffic testing on said alternatives. Tons of press to activity pub, etc etc.
It’s just like Mastodon. Every exodus was big for mastodon and activity pub. It gained traffic, interest, devs and users. Did it kill twitter? Of course not, but only fools thought it was likely to.
Killing some massive social network is near impossible. But dismissing the twitter or Reddit drama as being irrelevant because they didn’t die is missing a lot of interesting development in the FOSS ecosystem imo.
I think it's surprising because the collapse of sites like Digg and Myspace in the past, but the internet is a bigger/much different place now.
My prediction was the site is going to lose a lot of its niche communities and deep content will be diminished and the site will hollow out over time. It definitely seems like that's what is happening.
https://www.similarweb.com/app/google-play/com.reddit.frontp...
https://www.similarweb.com/app/app-store/1064216828/statisti...
But you need a paid account to access stats older than 28 days, and this needs the 6-month view (or even longer, ideally).
Anyone here subscribe to Similarweb, and can answer for us? Or know of freely available historical app ranking stats?
Fallout 4 very loosely covers this, but doesn't dive at all into the social implications, since the concept wasn't the endgoal.
The subreddit I moderate (100k subs) saw no lasting impact on traffic. We participated in the blackout for 2 or 3 days and then carried on as normal.
To be fair, it is a sub for a TV show, so the traffic is very seasonal. The blackout happened in the off-season, and now that the show is back we have a lot of traffic again.
lemmy is more popular than voat.co (shut down in 2020) but still far from a reddit alternative.
(I deleted my 12-year-old account and all of the posts/comments I made with it, and I use the site much less than I used to.)
those were some innocent times
But after they started doing stupid stuff I also moved to Lemmy, and haven’t looked back.
The only thing that genuinely scares companies whose primary business model is ads is content that is not considered "brand safe". Posting such content, particularly on subreddits where it doesn't belong, would have been a far more effective strategy IMO. Filling the frontpage with porn, slurs, racist memes, made up slanderous stories about the most common Reddit advertisers and other such junk would have forced Reddit's hand.
Reddit has spent a lot of time cultivating a community that would not accept that, even ironically. Any attempt at using "racist memes" to fight the admins would get shutdown by the powermods real quick.
Then again Reddit is doing all it can to make the site as UX hostile as possible so I guess their network effects are powerful
reddit was the place for a lot of communities (and for the most part still is) but there's a lot of places on the internet you can get generic mass-market content, that might be what drives reddit's bottom line but it's not what makes it special. The masses will go to the next popular platform, people interested in specific communities will stay as long as reddit doesn't piss them off. The beauty of reddit is that you can be interested in one or two niche communities, but you soak up the rest of the ecosystem along the way. If the masses go somewhere else and the niche communities are pushed away, there's not much left.
Also to clarify, I don't mean niche as in small, I just mean specific hobbies or interests etc, that's what reddit was good at - not needing to go to some forum to be able to talk about your thing. And by masses I mean whoever is participating in r/pics or r/funny or r/tifu or whatever else.
I also think many reddit users moved to HN which resulted in some quality going down as they bring the old reddit culture with them, but I’m betting that won’t last.
I think it’s still early to tell. Reddit still has lots of traction and even if it’s becoming less attractive, the alternative is not quite there yet.
Previously these would get instantly downvoted and greyed out as not adding to the discussion nor showing curiosity. Now they remain, because a lot more HN users are Reddit refugees who think this type of comment is normal/good.
Traffic has since died down heavily (I'm down to 40 subscribers from a peak of 120 during the HN launch), but it still motivates me knowing there's at least a desire for something similar (and hopefully better).
Three of the biggest issues was there was an off-by-one error in the payment amount selector (which imo is unacceptable for anything paid), the subscription cancellation button didn't work, and the mobile view (which made up ~60% of the user agent requests) was broken (especially when logged out). I fixed those and started rolling out regular updates as well: https://non.io/#updates
Launched a bunch of new features since, but really what I'm waiting on before promoting and trying to get things off the ground is the iOS app. Overall it's been wild ride, but the thing I'm most proud about is the $119 I've paid out to users. It's a tiny amount in the grand scheme of things, but it proved the platform worked and that the distribution of funds worked.
Anecdotally scanning the main comments in the all subreddits, I don’t see any change in number of comments anyways. Honestly without quantitative data on comment quality or comment numbers, I’d be skeptical of bias by anyone willing their pet desired outcome from api changes into existence.
In terms of outcomes, Reddit appears to have made their mobile website less user-hostile. Dismissing the "download app" modal still has to be done, but after that the experience is OK. Funnily enough, there are not that many ads on the official site, because Reddit seemingly doesn't have many advertisers to begin with.
In that case, the moderators never re-opened and were replaced by scabs by the admins. But the sub remained fully dead. The userbase had moved to a discord server, which is well run and has plenty of users in the 50+ age bracket not normally associated with the platform.
I haven't posted much there (at all) in awhile so I'm guilty as anyone but am not sure why. I think a chicken-and-egg thing?
My sense is the quality of posts on smaller subreddits I frequent declined perceptibly but not dramatically after the blackout. In a lot of the subreddits it seems like the diversity of topics went down and the posts got a little more superficial or something.
I personally started frequenting old-fashioned forums more often again for certain topics.
Some things are hard to beat the subreddits though, and I've noticed they have slowly started returning to their prior quality (in a qualitative, not value sense). It seems like a lot of them that attempted to migrate to other places (lemmy, kbin, etc) never quite reproduced the subreddits, although I've been surprised at the staying power of some.
It really depends on the person. Even on reddit, the number of posts and top level comments I made can be counted on my hands. I don't really "make content", I respond to others' conversation that result from it. But that's not what a new site needs in order to get off the ground.
The site as a whole feels a bit less active - i.e. not as active as it used to be.
The soul is dead, the body is alive
I started using tildes.net which is invite only interesting community.
let me know, you got it.
Gotta say though.... if you make a fresh instagram or tiktok account that same material will be suggested to you while you are in the wide suggestion phase. Kids love taking pics at the beach, which is just one of many reasons not to start a UGC website.
The biggest problem from the blackout and API drama isn't that some clients had to shut down. It's that, as a new user or a user that only uses the platform a little, it's much harder to discover good content organically now that most subreddits are NSFW or not on the /r/all feed. Even as someone who used reddit way more than any human ever should, I find the site a lot harder to use because I have to expend a lot more effort manually curating my subreddits when previously I could exhaust my personal feed and then just switch to /r/all - and I don't think I could ever discover some niche or zany community I didn't know about beforehand since I'd have to know to look for it to find it.
Since I doubt I'm alone in this, I think it's the beginning of the end for Reddit. It'll be a lot harder for new communities to form, existing small/medium/focused communities will struggle to gain members, and new users will probably think the site is empty and leave.
I signed up for the $60/yr. Ad-free version and Reddits still great IMO.
I get it if that's your goal but it's not for me.
The next result is that I noticed I became less argumentative in real life and tend to keep my opinions to myself more, all in all much appreciated by those I love. And my mental health is better.
The next result is that in going back occasionally to scroll through reddit it seems MUCH more obvious to me that almost every post is designed to incite anger, controversy or judgment. It didnt feel nearly that obvious before.
And there are some clear indications that bots are running rampant. Especially r/AITA (Am I The Asshole) where EVERY post is now almost exactly the same length, written about some situation that is quite stupid or rage inducing that its hard to believe that anyone would bother to respond. But they do. Im guessing they have an intern pounding away at ChatGPT for 10 minutes to create the next 100 AITA's
Lastly, Ive migrated to tildes.com, and much smaller community where I was/am startled to see that people can communicate politely even when they disagree and rage baiting does not exist. Its not nearly as busy as reddit was and the topics are far more limited but the quality is miles above the poor posts that now permeate reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/1853x6g/whats_your_...
Seven months ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/solotravel/comments/12iwccx/unpopul...
One year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TravelNoPics/comments/vbcvu6/whats_...
Two years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/travel/comments/p71gax/whats_your_m...
The end result: if you want to karma farm or make a hot topic, just search for something that was posted 6+ months ago.
Definitely worse before the API changes, feels like there's less content now. I don't have to scroll very far to find niche subreddits anymore, which is a plus I suppose.
There were only one or two occasions since then where I clicked on a reddit link when the context/topic was very compelling. Happy to report I did not feel the urge to browse away and bury myself in other reddit links and subreddits.
On desktop I have a uMatrix/uBO rule that blocks the domain completely. So inadvertent clicks before seeing the domain also get trapped.
They’ve shown they run the subs, make hire/fire decisions and have the power to supersede community manager calls.
This makes mods look more like labour, not volunteers.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
Those daily hours I used to spend on Reddit are now practically non-existent.
That has turned the flavor of that sub into a simulacrum of Nextdoor.
Recently fought for my alt account and a subreddit that was an automated, arguably better of another popular subreddit with basically the same content but without as much editorialization. Had to appeal like 10 times, and a few days after that, the account got re-banned on a faux "ban evasion" charge. Sigh.
It’s really only lacking the size of Reddit for me, there isn’t a ton of activity in niche subs, but they’re growing.
For another categories, they're still small and having struggles gaining traction to have enough users and posts to be lively. But I think it's just a matter of time if Lemmy continues polishing its features and community discoveries.
I uninstalled the app and only check the website when I'm looking for something specific now.
That's been the only outcome.
we berated everyone that tried to bring that drama into our subreddits, it’s literally just a forum
the mods acknowledged that they have worse tools and that’s still true
Personally, I have moved to Lemmy, and I use Tildes, too.
Digg, Reddit, and more have proven: a truly public discussion board will be taken over by business behavior unless it is strictly prohibited and enforced.
A decent number of people saw the writing on the wall that they didn't own the spaces that they socialized in, and sought something more distributed, with the Fediverse. It's a step in the right direction, but the extant focus on re-posting and updoots/downdoots still retains a lot of bullshit from social media that'll carry over just fine in terms of social behavior.
Reddit burned me out on any sort of website that has scoring or other perverse incentives to mess up the intent of whatever community. Groups who are earnest and savvy will host forum software and not social media software. Though one socializes on a forum, the way that you do so and the mechanics available separate them and allow you to focus on the topicality instead of how many updoots one gets. That design decision prevents gaming the forum, and in doing so gets rid of 'fake' engagement. For instance, why do we allow up and down votes without corresponding messages/reasons? I care much less about the metrics of group sentiment and would rather see why they feel a certain way.
Take a moment to actually read a Reddit thread, or a Youtube comments page, or any other generally accessible place to chat. Most of it is trash, a lot of it repeats itself, a lot of bots, misinformation, the works.
The media itself is fake. The things that get posted on places are meant to be posted places. It's all a fake social game. At least StumbleUpon, in its early hey day, exposed me to new and fun places on the Web. That atmosphere is dead in modern social media.
Bird's eye view, not much has changed. But Reddit has removed their awards system and Premium doesn't seem to have value. The bot problem hasn't gotten any better; rate-limiting just means they need more accounts. I visit there sometimes out of old habit, but I don't find anything fun anymore.
Lemmy has potential but I feel it's basically the same norms we saw on Reddit, depending on the instance.
Sure I'm on HN and it might barely qualify as social media, but I don't exactly fit in here. This is sort of a "last earnest effort" to participate somewhere on the Internet that isn't my own self-hosted services that use open or federated protocols.
Not to over complicate the comment system here but I wish one could just tag a comment as "humor" and one could then choose to just not show them if one did not care to see such things.
I see plenty of jokes on HN but they are usually part of a comment that would be made anyway. Joke-only comments also aren't that rare and when they're clever and specific to the context are usually pretty well received.
Discourse on the internet in general is becoming less open and candid as people self-censor out of fear of retribution, ostracization, and/or cancellation. Expect more people to withdraw into exclusive, closed communities and cliques where frank, quality discussion can actually be had, away from the preying eyes of the censorious authoritarians and moderator types, as well as the vapid Tweet-length, Reddit-style shitposting that the masses bring with them.
Prepare to enter a new informational dark age, far from the original ethos of the early Internet hackers and engineers who sought to democratize and maximize open access to information for all. Now information can be dangerous - it can be false, misleading, misinformative, and therefore its dissemination should be strictly controlled and moderated to prevent people from getting "the wrong idea." Moreover whatever you say online is more likely to be used against you, and so it is preferable to practice a policy of reticence and silence than speak at all.
I think, in general, people got exhausted at just shouting out to everyone. Over the past two years I've significantly drawn back my 'public' social media on favor of having more focused discussions with smaller groups of people. No one benefited (apart from advertisers) from me sharing my every waking thought and opinion to the world.
It difficult to draw much from the "early" internet to now. There's orders of magnitude more people online, with more types of people. Internet access is significantly more abundant abundant - previously you needed to "log in" to the internet. Now pretty much everyone is permantantly online by at least on device they carry on themself
But just to comment on the idea that some comments here are "low quality, like Reddit", I'd like to note that your preferred form of comment isn't necessarily "high-quality". Not in the way you probably mean. Almost all HN comments are low-quality. They're made by the inexperienced, usually sharing opinions rather than facts, with no evidence, often arguing over something banal or subjective, with an aim to correct rather than educate.
There's just not that many experts out there. When there are, and they do comment, they often get downvoted by the ignorant. Instead most people share comments which are more like opinions dusted with a little information they read once and probably don't remember completely accurately. Often comments and conversations get downvoted or flagged purely because someone doesn't like their opinion or disagrees, regardless of whether they might be right or have a genuine argument.
The big difference between Reddit and HN is a HN user believes they are superior. Intellectually, morally, behaviorally, or just in the company they keep. You keep seeing this comment all the time, "Reddit is low-quality, HN is high-quality". But it's not. "Quality" can have many different dimensions and each of those be subjectively preferred based on the person. HN encourages people to share thoughts even if they have no idea what they're talking about. And discussions often devolve into the ignorant arguing over nonsense. It's like a sewing circle for nerds who believe that believing you are smart or right is more important than actually being right. That argument for its own sake is better than making a light-hearted joke. HN is where levity goes to die, and the intellectually insecure reign.
First, you caught my attention by dropping a powerful and memorable term (eternal september). Second, you followed up with an entirely accurate indictment of the problems with this site.
However, you lost your way a little bit at the end. Is it really that hard to recognize that Reddit-tier comments are uniquely low quality content? For at least a decade, that whole site has been overrun by angry people posting comments that not only do not contribute to any sort of intelligent discussion, but actually deter more thoughtful and reasonable people from even bothering to try to contribute. How is this at all controversial for you?
Reddit was useful because it kept those people contained within the reddit.com domain. Now, I fear they are loose on the Internet and we may see many sites/apps/federations quickly deteriorate into uselessness.
Racism or discrimination is never acceptable (unless against white people)