If nothing else, this proves that Reddit admins don't fundamentally understand the platform. They may understand the back-end, and how to interact with ad servers to monetize content, but they don't understand how to effectively moderate communities. it never occured to them that they would need to scrub all the NSFW content before removing the tag?
In some places, that may even be illegal. And the Reddit admins have no one but themselves to blame, because they're the one that removed the tag without due diligence.
I've given up all hope for Reddit as a platform now. Mods should give up, too, and resign en masse. The Admins may be able to assign a few dozen of the largest subs to those power mods who are already favored by the Royal Court, but If this is any indication they have no way to maintain all of Reddit without the unpaid volunteer community they are shitting on.
Is there a way to make this work on Android? I've downloaded the xpi and when I try to open it, it says I have no compatible apps. [Might make more sense when I've gotten some sleep, lol.]
One thing I will mention regarding this: Make sure when turning on the reddit redirect to also ping instances. The default one that the extension gave me was apparently unable to reach the site, but it worked after finding ones closer to me.
Spez also apparently called the mods "landed gentry" which is hilarious coming from a rich fuck behaving like a king towards some people who work for him for free!
I’m assuming just current reddit admins are going to take over or getting some certain moderators from subreddits (that aren’t even of high ranking) to take over and remove the higher rankings from power, which then they will be the ones reopening the subreddits.
It is similar to a coup but from the top, so it‘s more like "consolidating power" phase which dictatorships do go through. Dissenters get removed and replaced by willing servants until the platform is more spez and less "The People". Meanwhile he pretends like somehow the mods are the actual dictators or some shit to make all this palatable to those that still use Reddit, which in my cynical view they will eat up. Reddit is dead and done for anyone who values actual community over ads.
If reddit employees start engaging in actual content moderation, reddit will run up against the DMCA's safe harbor protections, which means reddit becomes responsible, as a company, for all the content on the site. Or, at least, in those subreddits.
Ain't no way the legal team is going to let an employee do the actual moderation work. But you're right, they'll find someone who will do it for the power.
The DMCA sets out several requirements for eligibility for the "safe harbor" provisions, but they basically boil down to "you can't be the entity that posts infringing material, and you need to remove infringing material when notified of the infringement" plus some legal stuff around having a designated agent to receive complaints, etc.
Having the moderators be Reddit themselves doesn't present a problem here. If Reddit themselves start actually uploading infringing material, then they'd have no protection against a complaint on that material, but that's it.
Consider Twitter, YouTube, etc. All of them do 1st party moderation of copyrighted material, and they haven't lost their protection there either.
It's crazy that some people in these enormous subs pretty much run moderation as a full time job for nothing. Like I totally understand hobbies or contributing to something for the greater good, even I contribute where I can in the open source arena! But to religiously undertake a role like this daily just for the title of MOD is insane to me....
I've stated this before and I'll state it again, the API/third party app controversy is just a small chapter in a much larger story: Enshitification. A lot of us sought alternatives because of the protest, but we ultimately leave permanently because of enshitification and the compromise that happens to actively make the user experience worse because it is more profitable.
It takes time for both the user experience changes to happen and for users to experience the frustration needed to try something better. And that's okay.
One thing is clear: Reddit's appeal was from how it used to operate, not where it is headed. And it'll end up in the enshitification graveyard just like the rest of them do. Eventually. The only question is, are you going to change platforms early? Or late?
I think this gets lost in the conversation a lot. The API change is a symptom of the larger problem of enshitification, which itself is worse for Reddit because 1) they haven't been able to make a profit thus far, 2) the IPO push, and 3) Tik Tok exists and is far more popular. What was a slow and gradual process of enshitification (killing AMAs, secret santa, NFT bullshit, etc) is now about to hit hyperspeed.
One data point that is really worth highlighting is the Apollo dev said he had a call with Reddit at the end of January and they told him they had no plans to make changes to the API in 2023 and likely for a few years beyond that, and if they made any changes it would be to incorporate more features. Then in April Reddit annouces API changes with pricing to come within 2 weeks. Then 6 weeks later Reddit reveals the pricing, 30 days before it goes into effect. So this wasn't some long term strategic plan. Something is happening in Reddit, there is some immediate pressure to make more money and quickly. This is almost a panic move, and I don't think the IPO can fully explain that. Another data point is the recent (and likely just the first) round of layoffs.
And it won't be the last big user-unfriendly change. The API is low hanging fruit, relative to the userbase. Reddit seems to be on a hard push to monitize in every way they can as quickly as possible. I'd expect a lot more changes that will annoy the userbase, and thanks to the blackouts the users are primed to recognize the further enshitification for what it is. Reddit would be smart to take a couple months of cooling off to lull users back into a sense of normalcy before implementing their next profit generating move, but nothing they've done so far strikes me as smart and strategic. I'd guess there will be further waves of Reddit refugees landing on Lemmy's shores seeking asylum in the next 12-18 months.
I don't think he will step down on his own. However, Reddit has a board and shareholders. If they feel he's a big enough threat to Reddit's value and future then he's out. The way forward is to put a spotlight on how unstable he is and how incompetently he has been running Reddit. He is a liability to Reddit, not an asset, and if this is made visible to the right people then there is a chance the situation may be salvaged.
Honestly I think the AMA showed that they are not backing down. Spez answered like 14 total questions on an AMA with 30k comments the last I checked. They don't seem to care, and I don't see there being a significant number of people actually leaving reddit either, the alternatives just don't fix the problems people are having with reddit. If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app?
I think u/spez came across as angry and defensive of the API plan. A poor way to make business decisions. There was/is an easy way out. They say the plan had unintended consequences (they really wanted to monetise LLMs) so they’ll delay implementation for three months. Quietly introduce a much lower tier for third party apps with time to implement. They may have left it too late though.
If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app
Personally, yep. It's not just about losing my favorite app or the features, it's when I tried the official app side by side with a couple others.
On clients, you see what you're subscribed to (and ads). When you get a message, it's because someone interacted with you.
The official app does away with all that - they constantly try to sneak popular subs into your feed. If you don't have any notifications, they'll give you several a day just suggesting stuff. They'll even give you random posts in the afternoon to try to get you onboard
Reddit was the closest compromise of healthy and content-rich social networks. Better to leave now, rather than like how I did with Facebook - 2 years after it last brought me any pleasure and during a moment of emotional distress
For me personally. I don't use a 3rd party app because it has "more" features. I use it because it has an option for me to use reddit in an almost barebone way possible.
It is like old.reddit converted into an mobile application. It is how I like to consume that type of content.
On my screen it is 10 posts, small thumbnail on the side and no noise.
If Reddit itself had an option for the mobile app that would give me the same experience than indeed we wouldn't be here (yet).
But the whole social media type feed style crap is just not how I want to consume that content.
Nope, I really don't think they are going to cave either. I get the feeling that they are trying to pump up the IPO and will be cashing out ASAP. That appears to be their goal right now. The end of every economic cycle has IPOs that you look back on and wonder what in the hell where people thinking and I think Reddit is going to be one this this cycle's.
Setting up an instance isn't too bad, but it involves so much technical know-how, that a significant push to people self hosting their own instances probably isn't going to work out. If you know what a VPS is, know how to SSH, know how to get an HTTPS certificate, chances are you can read the docs and figure out how to get an instance running.
That's not really the issue though, the main issue is having some form of cohesion of communities. Lemmy is federated, but it's never going to take off if all these different communities continue to stay small and fragmented. And those larger communities need to handle all those extra posts and users, meaning their single server needs the resources to handle that demand. It's the centralization problem all over again.
I run my own instance, and while it's not hard to federate, it's cumbersome (I have to add it... to the search bar?). I would have expected to be able to drop in the name of a Lemmy instance, fetch a list of the top communities, and add the ones I want. You can't do this though, you have to add each individual "sublemmy" entirely by hand.
Until that problem is solved, and until the Lemmy project finds some better clever way to organize similar interests across different instances (technology@lemmy1.whatever and technology@lemmy2.whatever need some kind of way to merge), I don't think it will be largely successful. We need a way of creating large, active communities, without so much friction between "what server is it on?" It needs to be seamless, so we can distribute the cost to operate across all our instances, so no single entity feels like they need to keep throwing money at their server provider.
The best way to support Lemmy is to start drafting those PRs to make it better and to get closer to that sort of system.
Mastodon during the twitter migration had a problem where folks were standing up instances, but new users were having trouble finding them, or overwhelmed with lots of "interest-based" instances. Most users don't care about a "furry" specific instance, or an instance focused on San Francisco Donut enthusiasts. They just want an instance.
Another problem is as time went on, some of those instances shut down abruptly and wiped out accounts for folks. Having a few centralized and supported instances at first will help solve that problem as well.
I have the technical know how, given a "GettingStarted.md" file to read to stand up an instance, but I'd rather put my time/energy into supporting an existing one. Dealing with the horde of people currently joining and about to join will require some coordination.
Yeah I agree. kbin at least is still a bit clunky, haven't messed with lemmy yet. Also have been having performance issues. Not sure if people will stick around if they have major issues. Personally I think there's potential to have a revolutionary level of change, but reddit -> lemmy/kbin is not the same as digg -> reddit. Reddit was better than digg anyway. I can't honestly say that kbin is better than reddit at the moment.
Kbin is very new, and built by one guy. No one should expect it to be in the state anything that's had a formal launch is in.
It's practically experimental at this point.
The federated content aggregation space is well behind the microblogging space. But the potential is massive. Hopefully projects like kbin and Lemmy get a good influx of contributors out of this.
But no, it's not ready to host a million users. Nothing here is. We don't have enough instances for that.
Lemmy seems more stable but feature lacking, I prefer the UI and features of kbin… but like you said, performance issues. A few times today I reverted to beehaw (lemmy) when kbin was down.
Federation is a strength… but also a weakness. Lemmy is amazing but seems to have a potential - almost a default path - that’ll lead to proliferation of instances and fragmentation of communities, exactly as you’re flagging. This will hardly be in the best interest of broad adoption.
Whether merging of communities across multiple instances is possible on the back-end or not (I have no clue myself), it’ll likely boil down to how the front-end apps do it. A smart, usable UI could “cross the streams” to a degree. Though, I have no idea what that would mean for moderation and even posting.
On one hand, Lemmy basically is not ready for the influx. On the other, is anyone ever really ready when shit goes down? Right now is the purest opportunity this platform is going to get.
It’s great to see this issue being raised now. The future of the platform will be determined by how quickly we can move to address some of these things. While there’s almost no time to prepare, there’s no earlier moment than now!
Completely agree that community fragmentation and discovery are the two biggest problems. I don’t expect those problems to be fixed by Monday.
We’ll get some new members, but I doubt we’ll see non-technical people joining in droves. But it could provide a solid enough user-base to create enough content and activity to sustain the space while it continues to improve.
Personally, I think a really good client app could soften the blow of the existing discovery and fragmentation issues. I see a future where an app like Apollo merges identically-named communities in the UI and the end-user doesn’t need to care about which instance the post is on. But codebase improvements could help facilitate that, I expect.
new user here- mlem has been a game changer for me. i work in tech but admittedly was a little overwhelmed by everything when i decided to wuit trddit. the developer of this app is doing a stellar job - excited to have a great experience with a fresh platform ❤️
The interpretation Spez is trying to get people to buy is based on Christian saying something along the lines of, "if you want Apollo to keep quiet."
It's important to note that, for developers, and especially people who work with APIs, it is extremely common to refer to "apps that make a lot of network calls or otherwise clog the server logs up" as "noisy." If some program or application is calling too many APIs, or makes a lot of log spam, it's "noisy."
The comment Christian made was during a part of the call where Reddit was trying to accuse Apollo of being "unoptimized" and making too many API calls. Reddit was calling Apollo noisy. They didn't use that term, of course, but being the long term developer he is, and speaking and thinking like a developer, Christian made an off the cuff statement about "if you want Apollo to go quiet. As in not noisy. As in making no API calls. As in shutting down.
This was originally misinterpreted, but Christian clarified his statement and Spez immediately understood the misunderstanding. We can hear this much in the recording.
Naturally, being the asshole he is, Spez is trying to "spin" this as trying to make the public believe, "Christian threatened us! He demanded money in exchange for being quiet, otherwise he would try to speak out publicly against us, ruin our reputation, and ruin our IPO! What fiend!"
Spez, I don't know why you're so worried about Christian dragging Reddit's name through the mud. You're doing a fine job of that yourself. Keep it up!
Yes, that's what it means. If you look under the names, you'll see "public" or "private." The way they are going offline is to make the subreddits private. The green ones are labeled private.
me too. had been a user since 2007, nuked everything and deleted! fuck em. RiF's fate is sealed and old.reddit.com is/will be next, no sense in sticking around for the inevitable. really loving kbin, it's been a very easy transition for me. once the smaller communities get moved over, it'll get even better. fwiw, i haven't subscribed to a default subreddit in years, utter trash content... so not missing anything anyway.
But seriously, I feel like it’s just folks who have been on Reddit for ages that really care about this, those of us who likely switched to an app like Apollo after the Reddit redesign. I can’t handle the ‘new’ look and feel, nor can I handle the official app.
I suspect folks who began using Reddit apres the redesign don’t know/don’t care and will continue on.
For how much influence bots have on reddit. I figured old accounts would have some value. Apparently a 13 year old account with 1k karma is only about $20. I'm sure for most people, unless they used a complete throwaway email, it's not worth it to sell and just delete to move on from Reddit
For the record, the article doesn’t mention anything about islam or Muslims, and the comments in the post neither, so the mods saw “homophobic attack” and went “better remove it because Islamophobia”
I’ve heard absolute loads of homophobic BS from Christians and especially anti-trans stuff lately, so fuck off with the singling out Islam bigotry. All religious people are capable of hate, as much as they claim to be above it all (at least the ones dumb enough to openly express hate).
Okay but give me one theocratic Christian country that openly kills people for being gay. We’re not going to abolish bigotry in the world without admitting that the Middle East and Islam is especially fucked up when it comes to LGBT rights
That’s not what a theocracy is. Plenty of politicians around the world use religion to gain support from the public. Some of the only surviving theocracies exist only in the Middle East.
Religion is a useful tool for Putin, but he isn’t subservient to any religious leader.
You moved the goal post out of the conversation. Good job on being uselessly correct, dumbass. All religions when in power do fucked up stuff but you’re hell bent on ignoring most of them.
yes but if you read the article linked in the reddit theread anouther comment mentioned this was in Berlin-Neukölln, which is predominantly muslim and known to have issues with (esp. young men/boys) radicals opposing queer people.
Yes, but if you read my message again, it’s responding to someone attempting to claim Islam is worse. It is not.
I seriously hope the US doesn’t have to go ALL the way down the road of fascism to prove to the world that Christians are just as bigoted and stupid. Just because our news refuses to label so many hate crimes and acts of violence as bigoted hate crimes does not absolve non-Islam religions.
I totally agree that christians (or any religion/religion-like structure) can be and in the case of Christianity often is just as bad.
it’s responding to someone claiming islam is worse that’s not how I read the comment. I read it as in this case it would make sense to assume the attackers were muslims. My response was intended to say that in this exact case that would probably be a reasonable assumption.
I want to make it clear that I do not think that it is generally significantly more likely for the islam faith to cause queerphobia than it would be for any other one. It is just that in this particular region (Berlin-Neukölln) and demographic (young men) that would be the most likely perputrators.
I agree with you that all religions are shit, but I think it’s important and we should be able to point out when a specific religion is fucking us up.
In Berlin there has been a lot of homophobic attacks coming from the muslim community, especially in that area where there are a lot of them.
Maybe you were unware of that, but I think its very very likely that the attackers were muslims.
That doesn’t mean that Christianity is better, nor any other religion, but do we really need to be pointing out the homophobia in the muslim religion and ALWAYS followed by and Christianity is also shitty? There are posts criticizing the homophobic and transphobic acts that Christians have been doing lately too.
You can single out both Islam and Christianity, as these are the main fundamentalist “big” religions with anti-LGBT+ actors. No other religion has mass haters towards LGBT+ crowd.
In India both Hindu and Sikh community’s have avid followers who’ve done homophobic attacks, they don’t get as much attention because of all the other violence they do such as against women
I am from India. There are incidents, but very uncommon, because LGBT people have existed as “kinnar/hijda” for centuries here. There are no active organisations or groups that hate LGBT people. It is not because of patriarchy against women. Both groups do not have to be oppressed and binded together everywhere in the world, just because Christianity and Islam dominated countries oppress both women and LGBT crowds.
I’ve had many long conversations with a gay Indian friend, his experiences really don’t match the rose tinted version of things you’re portraying.
And of course we don’t even need to go into the treatment of women everywhere but the middle class portions of the nose progressive cities, everyone is very well aware of the problems.
Homophobia is not a religion-only issue. There are many LGBT hate crimes happening all over the world and all the time. The world in its entirity has failed LGBT, and to single out Muslims or Christians is to ignore those issues happening in other places.
My reply was only for the above comment, not for the overall situation, since they were talking in the context of religion, where only one religion was supposed to be bad.
No religion for me, thanks. I have no questions for God that haven’t already been answered by science. But hey, I ain’t gonna wag my finger at someone for believing in this God or that. I just choose option D, none of the above.
Christians are obsessed with persecuting LGBT as well, but Islam is on a whole other level. People are still getting stoned to death for being LGBT in Muslim countries. This is supported by their laws. In any Christian majority country, they would be thrown in prison for murder for doing this, at the very least. In some Muslim countries, you would be thrown in prison for trying to stop the murder.
I’m not saying that Christians never commit acts of violence against LGBT, but Muslims do so a lot more in current times.
In my opinion, the world would be better off without all of the Abrahamic religions. Is being an Abrahamicphobe wrong?
You think if these MAGA animals aren’t salivating at the prospect of doing the same, you are sadly mistaken. I mean, we’re already at book burning for God’s sake. The wall keeping the feral Christians from enacting Christian sharia law is eroded every day. And now it’s spreading to other countries.
I do think they are salivating to do the same. They just aren’t in charge of any countries. Not all Muslims are bad either, but a good chunk of the worst ones seem to be in charge of some whole countries in an authoritarian way. That’s the difference.
I said that both are terrible for the world, and I hate them both equally. I have Islamic family, and I still hate it.
Also, idk why you had to downvote me. Just conversating here. Just sharing the fact that, in reality, LGBT are being killed by one group in particular. Hope you have a nice day ya crabapple.
Maybe the mods have been on the internet for more than a week and knows what happens in those sorts of comment sections and don’t want to sit at their computers all day dealing with that shit?
Do any of you people think before screaming injustice and reverse racism?
Nothing "went wrong" with it. It was simply never possible. Reddit controlled whether those 3rd party apps could function, and Reddit wanted those 3rd party apps to cease functioning.
PSA: If you’re not using uBlock Origin to block ads, please install it. Firefox - Chrome. Every other mainstream adblocker sells your data in some capacity, but uBlock Origin is open source.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it. The lead dev for uBlock Origins is hard line on ad blocking and privacy. He fundamentally believes in what they created. That’s the only person you want running something like that.
And they tell users to use Firefox, by the way, because uBlock on Chromium has been handicapped. If you want the full uBlock experience, Firefox is the one and only browser to use it on.
Edit: BTW if you ever want to cheer yourself up, take a look around the closed issues for uBlockOrigins on Git. Every now and again you come across some marketing company stooge stumbling in asking why some address is being blocked and asking for it to be whitelisted, only to get a hard no, then get flummoxed as if they don’t understand why. It’s beautiful.
Starting in June 2023 and Chrome 115, Google “may run experiments to turn off support for Manifest V2 extensions in all channels, including stable channel.” Also starting in June, the Chrome Web Store will stop accepting Manifest V2 extensions, and they’ll be hidden from view. In January 2024, Manifest V2 extensions will be removed from the store entirely.
Google says Manifest V3 is “one of the most significant shifts in the extensions platform since it launched a decade ago.” The company claims that the more limited platform is meant to bring “enhancements in security, privacy, and performance.” Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) dispute this description and say that if Google really cared about the security of the extension store, it could just police the store more actively using actual humans instead of limiting the capabilities of all extensions.
The big killer for ad block extensions comes from changes to the way network request modifications work. Google says that “rather than intercepting a request and modifying it procedurally, the extension asks Chrome to evaluate and modify requests on its behalf.” Chrome’s built-in solution forces ad blockers and privacy extensions to use the primitive solution of a raw list of blocked URLs rather than the dynamic filtering rules implemented by something like uBlock Origin. That list of URLs is limited to 30,000 entries, whereas a normal ad block extension can come with upward of 300,000 rules.
So it looks like most users aren’t seeing a handicap yet, but may start to see one in January if that block list size cap/updating the list is an issue.
It’s not just about it being open source, it’s about the mentality of the people running it.
It’s about both. Because, if it isn’t open source, there is no wayit is substantially more difficult to verify that the people running it aren’t lying.
The uBlock team has fought a constant war with advertisers and Chrome on our behalves. Mozilla has done it’s part as well. They deserve a lot of credit and respect for it. And support.
Spez here thinking that the content hosting is more important than content generation. Reddit's value to the community or advertisers is a result of the users, not Reddit Inc.
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