Some people have trouble letting go I guess. First of all, after all that has happened why any developer would choose to continue doing business with Reddit is beyond me. Reddit has demonstrated they will shaft you on a moment's notice (ok a month's notice), go back on their word, lie about developers for PR points, etc. Reddit is not a good business partner.
Second, who is this even for? What percentage of Relay users are going to pay for a limited version of Reddit with usage limits? The only reason Reddit is making these deals with Relay and Narwhal is because Reddit thinks they won't succeed in staying alive. Reddit thinks the vast majority of Relay/Narwhal users will decide its too expensive to use these apps to get a worse experience, so will end up on the official app. Reddit gets to hold these up as examples of reasonable developers who were willing to work with Reddit, unlike those crying babies that are closing their apps. And if Reddit is wrong, and Relay/Narwhal stay profitable and active, then we're just back to point 1 - Reddit will just turn the screws on the API pricing until they get crushed.
This just feels like an abusive relationship. Dave just needs to accept reality - Reddit TPA's are dead (and Reddit as a whole isn't long for this world either). I've used Relay for years, very disappointed in the developer. I'm still deleting July 1.
Exactly this. Relay was a great app and I will miss it and Reddit. I would love for Dbrady to start fresh with Relay for Lemmy but I imagine that is quite a bit of work and maybe he just doesn't feel up to it. I wish him the best no matter what happens!
Thanks for this well-written roundup of what's going on. I think you've hit the nail on the head. I just hope the dev doesn't rack up debt in the time the app is free...
But maybe Reddit is okay with a few 3rd party apps surviving if it means they can charge such a ridiculous premium on API requests. Perhaps they didn't think any dev would be crazy enough to take them up on their offer. But at that point, they're raking in so much money that they might not care those users are on a 3rd party app.
That’s a fair point. If Relay and co hang on to a few thousand users and pay a cost per month 5x what it’s worth to reddit to have those users on its app, your right reddit might be like fuck it this works for us. At the end of the day, whatever is most profitable to reddit. For the most part, that means using the official reddit app so reddit can track you. But if some dumb devs are willing to pay more than Reddit would get from direct data harvesting, let them go. No, I think your right.
I think a few apps is key though, they want the majority of their users locked in.
Reddit gets to hold these up as examples of reasonable developers who were willing to work with Reddit, unlike those crying babies that are closing their apps.
This deserves to be repeated. Like… I get why one would want to not let their project die, but we all know this is exactly what’s going to happen. These few who remain will funnel a ton of money into Reddit’s pocket for a worse experience all so that they can be used to further slander the devs of the 3PAs who were forced out from the API changes. In a couple months when the last few 3PAs inevitably go under, I don’t know if a single tear will be shed because the writing on the wall is so obvious.
I just feel bad for the devs of TPA. They created so much value for reddit when reddit didn't even HAVE an app. Then reddit shafts them so hard for all the work they put in. Fuck reddit.
I also use Relay, and I'm not sure how I feel about this move. I'm using reddit less and less since the blackout, and mostly just to check on the protest at this point. I love the Relay app, and DBrady is an incredible dev, but I refuse to give money to reddit after this whole debacle, especially for an app that will be stripped of it's full capability,
Dropped Reddit a month ago after 12 years of daily use and while it was tough in the initial days Lemmy/Kbin activity has really picked up and is beginning to absolutely fill the gap. Just need the apps and a bit more stability and think it's going to be a proper successor.
There are a few (very few) communities I am still waiting to become active and useful here but Reddit has been moved to page 4 or my social media folder and I rarely ever scroll to it.
Good riddance too. The move to Lemmy/Kbin also pushed me back onto Mastodon and I could not be happier.
Edit: just realized kbin isnt on there. Kbin is another Lemmy-affiliated site, but it also lets you see mastodon posts. You need a seperate kbin login to use it, but the site looks similar and behaves similarly to any Lemmy instance.
When the protest started I poked around the Fediverse and it was a ghost town and was a little concerned that Reddit might not have any competition. But since the end of June posts and content have been going way up, and the quality of the posts is way better than Reddit, even before spez fucked things up.
Yeah I think a lot of people were skeptical if Reddit would actually follow through initially… I know I was. I thought they would back pedal, but realized shortly after Spez’s disastrous AMA that wasn’t gonna happen. Someone else mentioned Lemmy in a different thread and that’s how I first heard of it. After some research to learn about the fediverse and ActivityPub, badda-bing, badda-boom, I’m here and haven’t looked back.
/r/heat was a big loss for me. But /c/nba is actually nice, since everyone has been respectful. I avoided /r/nba since everyone was so hostile to each other and it contributed so much to me hating most fanbases.
Same, a little bit of added qol to Memmy as well as some content on some of the more niche communities I used to frequent and Reddit will be solely used for searching obscure problems in the future if even that.
I think a big help will be creating a streamlined sign-up process in the apps themselves. Menus to pick a server and create an account. Maybe tell the user which servers are biggest/ask if they wanna browse servers by specific content leanings. That way it’s not intimidating. I’m a tech guy and even I was a bit perplexed in the beginning and that will keep anyone with a non-technical background away: we tech nerds forget that things not “just working” isn’t a feature in the eyes of a majority of people. (For better or for worse.)
I have been using Kbin exclusively while waiting for the Artemis app to be released but I decided to Memmy for Lemmy to see what the hype was all about. Well I’m loving Memmy, it does exactly what you discussed. The app makes it super easy choose an instance and create an account. Does the app need some work? Yes but it’s leaps and bounds better than browsing through a mobile web browser.
Yeah I spent 2 weeks on Jerboa unable to post, comment, subscribed etc because the instance I joined was not yet a login option on the app. Still have that issue with every other app.
You can tell the devs are working hard on these apps though. It’s a race to get a polished app released before people lose interest in leaving reddit.
Indeed. I’ve seen the rate of app updates pick up recently, and I feel it’s noticeably smoother than a couple weeks ago. Great effort is being done and I’m grateful towards the devs for that.
Just in case you don’t already know: On most apps you can type in your instance instead of selecting one from the drop down menu. Im on a small instance too and it took me a week or so to figure it out last month lol
I look forward to talking about my first few weeks on Lemmy in years to come: “Back then I had to use an app that was in alpha and wait ten minutes to load a page full of bean memes! And then we got hacked!”
Don’t forget, “We’re gonna pay some of our staff to go to cool cities to meet several of you! What an incredible opportunity for them to get frequent flier miles and for you to show up (again, unpaid) at a fake meeting in your free time. This will surely have some kind of impact on how we run things, in that nothing will change whatsoever.”
It just brings up RiF for me, which doesn’t work. I’ve only 99% left though, so I can’t pihole it. I copy over some content and use the pages that turn up on Google search results.
Pretend your the mod of a moderately sized subreddit. You have third party tools you rely on to help keep your community functioning. Reddit takes away your tools, then tells you “you can spend more of your free time in a pointless meeting with us”
It also is the statement “we’re here to listen to you” in response to a protest with a lot of clear demands. There was no concession or acknowledgement of the possibility of any. There was no apologies for the absolute assholery of the CEO. There wasn’t even an acknowledgement that they’re the ones in the wrong.
It’s like if you’ve been sleeping on the couch until your spouse stops cheating on you and they say “I know you’re mad, but let’s talk this out after work tomorrow” like no, you have to say sorry and that you’ll stop, then we need to talk about how to rebuild the shattered trust.
I can’t tell what that person’s intent is because the post is filled with “I’m sorry you’re upset” platitudes that accept no responsibility or even an understanding of why the mods are so upset in the first place; just more unpaid work they’re expected to do to keep it from happening again.
Unlucky, didn’t see this until after I clicked. The new default for posts about reddit here on Lemmy should be that any links are just screenshots or archived versions or something
On one hand Im happy to see that dumpster fire ignite even more. Then on the other hand Im happy to see all those mods end up not being listened to and frustrated by those who have the power.
I picture the employees playing rock, paper, scissors to determine who was going to have to make that post; I can’t imagine any of them didn’t know how this was going to play out.
…And the dude that won (lost?) didn’t even know how to link his own username. It looks like he did it via an actual hyperlink! Now that is fantastic example out of touch management.
Yes they problem is we haven’t given them enough feedback. Surely if we have them now feedback they would understand the problem. Shutting down the entire website for multiple days was not clear.
“We’re gonna have meaningful weekly meetings with all the hundreds or thousands of you, and we’re gonna take the opportunity to really listen. Now, this isn’t just some platitude to quiet you until we take the company public, but you know, we might suddenly get too busy for these once we’re diving into our piles of cash.”
“We’re gonna compile your input and file it away somewhere safe. Look! I already bought a basket to hold all of them and lined it with a plastic bag! And when my comment can gets reeeeeeaaaallllllly full, I’ll file your comments into a larger bin until the city files those comments with the other valuables!”
“We wanna show you how much we care. We care sooooooooo much that we’re gonna visit you on our “Fuck you, I Wanna be Rich” vacation! We’re gonna see the country and occasionally talk to people in a patronizing tone. For all the shit-holes we don’t feel like visiting, we’re gonna throw you a pizza party! It’s gonna be super revolutionary cuz it’ll be a virtual pizza party! Pay for your own food and watch us eat pizza while we explain to you that you’re not really upset with us, you’re just scared of change and passionate about things that don’t make us rich. Remember to dress up nice, we’d hate for you poors to make us look bad.”
Unfortunately that hasn’t been unique to Reddit. Outrage, hate, and conspiracies generate clicks and engagement on platforms. Recent events within the last decade gave rise to a lot of coordinated hate campaigns. User created subreddits were a double edge sword for this in both being able to filter out these groups but also giving them their own echo chambers to congregate and embolden one another. The transition from liberal freedom of speech to absolutionist right to hatred made social media companies millions simultaneously in accepting money to promote controversial topics and harvesting the resulting outrage on their platforms. Reddit and their staff effectively became one of many internet war profiteers giving all sides bases of operations.
To end on a semi-positive note, with the rise of federated services, instances may still give these extremists places to seethe but they can at least be ‘sanctioned’ or defederated from the rest of the larger fediverse very easily.
This was also part of the strategy of foreign influence in western politics. Britain, France, and The United States got hit by this, hard. Driving anxiety pushes people to the political extremes and prevents actual political process from happening. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a degree to which outrage is warranted. The economy has yet to fully recover from 2007 and looks to be taking another dip now, police violence, a broken binary political system in America, you name it. There are all sorts of stuff to be frustrated with. But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
You used to be able to tell who the bots were, but now we have political movements espousing the same thing the bots are because they are both feeding off the same source.
What really broke hope for me is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines or effective treatment, n95 masks were the best protection. This should not be a controversial statement, just one of fact. A former Republican candidate for Governor of Connecticut, helped to get free masks distributed to every community in the state. His economic policies were way too conservative for me to consider him as a candidate, but he stepped up to help when it counted, so points to him. Unfortunately, after the worst of the pandemic, he ran again and while he never officially endorsed the anti-maskers, but he didn't denounce them either, and went to rallies cosponsored by them. He knew what the right thing to do in 2020 was, but when he ran in 2022, the outrage machine was in full effect with countless "unmask our kids" groups and instead of doing what he knew was right, he did what was easy and convenient. He still lost, because the Democratic governor of the state who had led the state through the pandemic had done a good job. Propaganda turned something that was common sense into a political statement.
A simple and easy thing that would help prevent needless deaths became a political football kicked around by the right. Much of the anti-vaccine rhetoric (some now being spewed by a "Democratic" candidate 🤦♂) originated in Russia and was meant to keep the population there from seeking western vaccines when the Russian vaccine was shown to be inferior. But because everything gets pushed into political framing, public health and science became team red vs team blue instead of humans united against a virus that kills. When we get a really nasty virus (COVID isn't that deadly compared to an avian flue), the world is screwed because so much anti-science has been pushed in order to generate engagement in media and social media.
It was around the 2016 election that things started to change. Before that, there was still a mentality of open and genuine discourse in most subs. But after the election that started to die, people started realizing bots and alt-righters had no interest in open discourse, on the contrary they would see to abuse such channels as a platform for their hate, and would use such hate and anger in an attempt to shape and suppress discussions. This forced the community to become far more jaded and less open, realizing just how vulnerable the community was to radicalization and firehouse misinformation.
On the early internet, we all had this vision that free access to information would free everyone, that unlimited information could only do good. Most of those people now understand how nieve we were, unlimited information means unlimited disinformation, and that organizations would always see to weaponize information the way they weaponize everything else. We are in a different internet age, now.
As a non US person I was reading your post and thinking how right you are and how international politics also got into the same problem of increased anger. And than got to:
But Russia and China feed that. Reinforce it. Encourage us all to hate each other
As proof it is really working even on aware people. It is a big problem seeing thing just from one perspective, that “feeding” even if intentional actually started from west. Just look at the movies, Russians and Chinese are always bad guys, for decades. What do you think they will think about west if they grow up looking how west is seeing them? How will they react?
How will someone in Afghanistan support west when someone from west destroyed their country and killed family and friends, maybe with good reason and couldn’t be done differently, but I am talking about individuals here.
I don’t think there is ultimate truth, but we can try and see events from a bit wider perspective.
The longer you think about that scenario the more fucked up it gets. Google argues that it’s a problem of scale, which is outrageously BS when you consider Google of all companies let their own account system be easily botted, and don’t use any of the ludicrous number analytical tools purpose built for detecting spam trends (3rd parties use them all the time to spot political spam).
Their mention of signal:noise struck a chord for me.
Ever since this gelled for me a few years ago, I have been on a miserable (and obviously impossible) mission to find places to see and discuss useful, HUMAN information with other useful HUMAN people on the internet.
Blocking whole forums on topics I really enjoy is mechanically easier than curating the contributors to those conversations on an individual basis. It hurts my heart to do it, but it is impossible to keep the noise out without wholly ignoring signal that I enjoy.
Even people I used to really enjoy talking to have had to be ignored. They stopped caring about nuance, and got intellectually lazier. They switched from reading to skimming, and the well thought out comments got shorter, and more hostile.
This is undoubtedly the snake eating it's own tail.
They filter their inputs so heavily, and have done battle with bad faith for so long that their outputs resemble the very thing they were trying to avoid.
Unsure what my point is other than commiseration with OP. It's utterly disheartening to realize that the technology that was created to connect us all has been co-opted and subverted - transforming it into a hideous monster of hate, and misery that forces us all to internally disconnect from entire parts of it.
That's not to say that it couldn't have been expected.. but I have no fucking idea how it could've been prevented.
Glanced over it. Complete word salad. Corporate nonsense: baffle them with bullshit.
You get points from communities. These points are stored on the block chain, because why not? The points themselves come from reddit, but the communities distribute them. Since they’re on the block chain, reddit can’t take back your magic bean points or whatever once you get them. Nevermind that they’re worthless and that reddit controls the only platform that they’re even remotely useful on.
For now, Reddit will cover gas costs for distributing Points to users and allowing them to spend Points on features such as Special Memberships.
Emphasis mine. Someone has to pay for it, because that’s how the block chain works. For now it’s Reddit. In the future? Who knows!
How does this benefit the consumer? It doesn’t, really. Potentially it gives posters more control over a subreddit, but looks like mods will still hold essentially all the power when it comes to a subreddit, which is how it works now.
How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn’t, really. They’re handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can’t take them away from you once you get them. It costs them money to do this, because it’s on the block chain as opposed to some in-house database. This replaced coins, right? They killed an income stream and replaced it with an expense.
They get to tell investors that they’re into the block chain when they launch their IPO, I guess. All I can say is buyer beware. Chances are high the powers that be unload their stock options in the IPO hype and then get the hell out of dodge. They might have waited too long, though. The tech bubble deflated, and I don’t know if the books are impressive enough to draw in the big bucks from investors.
If you want genuine control over your community, start one on the Fediverse and self-host an instance. No admins will kick you off since you’re your own admin and head mod rolled into one.
They’re handing out magic beans with the selling point being that they can’t take them away from you once you get them.
And that’s not even true in any practical sense. If reddit decides that the token in your crypto wallet is invalid, then it’ll stop working on reddit. And since they’re the only issuer every possible use is going to be tied to reddit in some sense.
Thank you for making this more understandable. It really feels like a “the people who pay us more will have a louder voice” and I am grossed out, if that’s the case.
its main value to the owners is that it is a more direct means of controlling user behavior.. once they get people used to "real" rewards, they can better use the platform as a means of controlling discourse.. which is why the Mukser is doing it on the other thing, and where they got the idea..
they're trolls.. they want to use it to troll harder..
How does this benefit reddit as a business? It doesn’t, really
$5/month per community
You may have missed it, but they snuck in that Special Memberships (subreddit subscriptions, which unlock badges and emojis and stuff) cost $5 a month per subreddit, outside of Reddit Premium. You can also spend 1000 Community Points, but if you don’t have the balance and want the benefits, you’ll be giving reddit money.
It feels like reddit has come to understand how much closer redditors feel to their communities than reddit as a whole - reddit is hated, but users still cling to their communities. A sitewide Reddit Premium badge is irrelevant, even repugnant and a badge of shame, but special flairs and features in close knit communities are still desirable.
This is reddit exploiting their users’ relationships with their communities with a stackable 5 buck alternative to Reddit Premium.
I still don’t really get who gets the money from this special membership? I understand people subscribe to YouTube and twitch personalities because they want to support the creator and they get most of the money, but what incentive does anyone have to buy this community membership here? Is it really just the special avatars/badges/whatever?
Clout in a community they care about. I can’t relate to wanting it, but people buy clout all the time online and in games. This is basically a more personalized Twitter Blue.
They also said something about community points being usable for moderation/governance. Does that mean people can come in and save/buy enough Community Points to enact a coup?
Like, Atheists could get enough Christianity sub credits and ban all the Christians? Or bigots could seize an LGBTQ+ sub? It seems kinda like a nightmare waiting to happen if so.
The way I see it, all of us who migrated here won. Enshitification is eventually going to kill reddit, the only question is when. I’ll grab some popcorn when it happens, but for now won’t worry about it and just enjoy my time here on Lemmy.
It won't die. It will just hollow out. Same as Digg. Same as Facebook, Twitter, and every other shitty part of the internet. The power users are what make the internet the magical place it is. Without those people, the sites will still work... but they won't be as great as they were before their respective turning points. It's a cycle it seems.
The result is still basically the same IMHO. It’s like saying “it won’t die, it will just turn into a zombie” … sure it’ll still move, but it’s dead inside and rotting on the outside either way, devoid of the life and soul it once had.
Meanwhile here, I find most engagements thoughtful and written because people want to engage. Sure, a few assholes post stupid shit or try to be mean, but most are just trying to participate in good faith.
Lemmy is open-source software. If the project root starts doing something stupid or gets abandoned, it can just be forked by someone else and it will live on.
I agree with you. Actually, Lemmy woke me up to how much reddit had already been enshitified. I didn’t realize that I had stopped commenting altogether because the subs were so big that either no one saw your stuff, or there was always some one pissed off who felt the need to respond. Lemmy reminds me of reddit the way it was when I joined 12 years ago.
And forget about trying to post articles on any subreddit. Always buried with 0 votes, because some bot network is trying to promote the latest Barbie movie or whatever.
Or subs like gaming having posts with 4 comments and 7,000 up votes “I was recently diagnosed with stage 7 cancer and my dog died, but I created this game as my final contribution to humanity, here’s a trailer.”
2D Hollow Knight rip off video
Comments: “Wow amazing graphics!” “Is it on steam?!” “Looks amazing!” “I neeeeeed this!!”
Not sure if you only posted on the mainsubs or what but Reddit really did hit that “hyper specific topic conversation” for me. Like up to the protests I could make a meme about a topic or reply to a post and have good discussions. When I deleted all my posts I deleted some of the top of all time posts off some subs lol.
Lemmy still hasnt hit that for me, I’m another in a swarm of people saying Lemmy doesn’t fulfill my topic based sub needs. Like I’m currently obsessed with Marvel Snap and loved the subreddit. The lemmy version is dead af. And I try to converse and interact but none of the lemmy filters for posts seem to show the posts reliably to me and I have to remember to go check it. The Spider-Man PS4 sub was another favorite of mine to interact with and I ended up having to make it for Lemmy and it’s got like 80 subscribers and I make a point to comment on every post but it’s still not getting much conversation going 😞
do you really need a forum to talk about marvel snap? lol. just saying that card game is pretty fun but easy. what is there to talk about? (tongue in cheek)
It might not even kill it. Facebook is still kicking, after all, for all its enshittification. It's just... idk, some of us were freed to move on to a more satisfying experience. That's all. Life continues here, life continues there
facebook's on the decline, meta's betting on instagram since that's what the kids use. facebook is for boomers to looking at family vacation photos and nazi radicalising and is a legacy service at this point.
do you know what a ‘boomer’ is? it’s slang for ‘baby boomer’ and it’s a specific age range of people born at specific times. plenty of people younger than that are on FB every day. just saying, if you didn’t know what ‘boomer’ was, it doesn’t just mean ‘old person’.
Maybe Facebook got so big and their search is so good that people just stopped using Google search for it, but I have a hard time believing that can be responsible for a drop of this magnitude.
I would say you're probably right. Remember this old gem?
Facebook (the page) is dead in the sense that its parent company changed their name to not be the same as their (once powerhouse) product. Facebook trademark is so unbelievably cursed due to what it became that they’re pretending that it does not exist.
Meta is focusing on Instagram for now. They could’ve launched Threads within Facebook (I think it was at some point) but they choose not to. Instagram is how they reach out to the people.
This means that Facebook was enshittified successfully. It does not serve any purpose now.
I don’t think Reddit has the same choice as they don’t really have means to pivot to something else. It will just cease to be… Or not.
I understand why the didn’t do threads in Facebook incase they need to shut it down. Kinda like how they have Messenger then purchased WhatsApp but never integrated it if they want to shut one down.
Yeah, I agree with this suspiciously named man. Whether it happens sooner or later, Reddit’s death is on the horizon, as it will keep making the wrong choices and so steadily lose those communities and content that built it in the first place.
I agree. I don’t think we’re there yet, but next time the they give people another reason to leave the Lemmy/kbin ecosystem will be even more appealing. Simply the app and dev community here is really exploding.
Have you been to digg recently? It’s a buzzfeed clone. Just because the brand is still around doesn’t mean it’s the same product at all
It’s like if I bought Nike and then killed off all their product lines and only sold high viscosity lithium grease. Yeah Nike would be around, but it would be meaningless beyond that
There’s a big difference between “die” like Facebook where less people are joining and using it, but it still functions as a “keep in touch with your family” site, and “die” like Digg whose community doesn’t exist at all, almost as if it got bought out by another company for the brand name only.
So, “we’ll still do some work for free, but not as much”? I can’t see Reddit caring about this ho hum response, and if they do notice it has a negative impact on the sub they’ll just replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
replace them with who and how though? For loyalty and allegiance they'll have to wind up paying someone eventually. If they really think they're just going to be able to find some 15 year old on summer break willing to do it for free, it'll only last so long. That stuff takes work.
I think this take somewhat misses the point, but it's one that's seemed relatively prevalent among the Reddit refugees hitting fediverse.
There is a sentiment among many folks who left fairly immediately that wants Reddit to burn. That wants the mods and the users of the site to set the whole of Reddit on fire, add extra gas, and walk away. Nothing short of the most extreme, most dramatic, most explosive possible forms of protest are acceptable - otherwise the people you're talking about are some combination of willing patsies, idiots, and/or feckless cowards.
Which is kind of ... a big expectation. Most people who care enough about anything to protest about issues with that thing, are not going to turn around and maliciously destroy it if they don't get their way.
The AMA mods built something cool and something impressive. They aren't protesting because they're part of the group that simply hates Reddit and hates Reddit Inc and wants to do as much harm as possible to both on their way out. They're going to keep maintaining what they built, while allowing time and other users to demonstrate what Reddit was failing to value. That is, quite honestly, one of the most constructive forms of protest available.
AMA started off as an absolute dumpster-fire of drama, fakeposts, and weird self-promotion bullshit - they're going to let it return to it's natural state while making sure Admin has no legitimate reason to intervene and replace them.
Scorched earth is the only way that moderators can exercise any real power at this point. Anything else is just impotent.
In this case, what do you think "scorched earth" would be? A lot of these takes seem to kind of overestimate how much power mods have, relative to admin, in terms of effective protest methods. To me at least, simply hurling themselves on the proverbial sword to get removed as mods is probably going to a lot shorter in impact and a lot more of a hollow symbolic gesture than this. Deleting accounts and temporarily locking communities is both a self-silencing protest and not something that remains visible or has long-term impact on the site.
In some ways a degraded system is much harder to fix (or even identify as broken) than an outright destroyed one.
If the IAmA mods vandalized the sub, they would get booted and replaced. But if they just stop doing anything but the bare minimum... that sub was such a magnet for traffic, it might slowly degrade traffic to Reddit as a whole.
But just looking at the data, it might be very very hard to figure out that what is driving that is the IAmA moderators starting to restrict their activities only to moderation. It degrades the experience of the site as a whole.
I don’t think people are asking mods to burn the place down as much as they’re asking them to just stop. Stop working for free. Stop trying to negotiate. Don’t work for them and don’t work with them. Move your community elsewhere if you want to keep your moderator status and forget about Reddit.
That’s not radical nor is it a huge workload. It’s less work for most.
Noooo I gotta write “fellate fuck spez” so other ppl on reddit see that I am totally totally against reddit. Just gonna buy some reddit gold to really drive home the point!!!
That’s been their mission ever since they bought and killed alien blue and released a pile of shit in its place. They can’t make a good app so have been slowly tying more and more exclusive features to it, and to new Reddit, hoping that this new shiny useless thing that no one asked for or wanted will get people to use it. I think with interest rates rising, their investors are looking for profits higher than t bills and so this trend that has been going on for the past few years is now kicked into overdrive.
Like, they’re giving users monopoly money, and try to pass it off as control. Like, the fuck are they gonna do with the monopoly money?
Plus imagine if users actually believe the monopoly money is important. We’re back on the days of BB Forums where you can make a factual point but oops, you’re level 2 and the forum regular (4506 posts) just called you a cocksucker.
Edit: Oh god, the moderator wallet thing. They’re letting moderators moderate themselves. This is going to set off a massive amount of infighting as some admins will take the whole wallet and the other moderators will call them out and the seriousness of the whole thing (moderation teams not getting along) will get drowned out with all the people shitposting about fighting for monopoly money.
I think that’s their point, to sound like the Fediverse but is actually a different way for them to get money and control the narrative. They’re also possibly trying to take away shutting down shitty sites “by giving the communities control.”
They’ve updated their preview feature TOS as recently as last month to push forward with avatars and community points, I reckon they’re just biding time to sync it with the next bull run to maximise value and heighten chance of seeming like they have genius cutting edge foresight.
The bottom of that’s also funny because it makes it clear their smart contract is permissioned and if they don’t like what you do with your virtual goods they can remove them from you. Very immutable, wow, such ownership.
Thanks for this! I was having trouble finding anything with a recent date on it related to Community Points.
That makes me wonder if Reddit is trying to keep this under wraps until release date, so that their remaining userbase doesn’t have another protest. It’s kind of crazy that they have been working on this crypto garbage for three years, yet don’t have the foresight to see that this is going to backfire. Is there anyone, aside from crypto bros., that are even interested in crypto and NFTs anymore?
“Failure to follow and comply with the above rules may constitute a breach of the Previews Terms and result in a temporary or permanent ban from Reddit or certain subreddits or removal of your access to Reddit Econ Goods.”
So they can take your coins at any time if they don’t approve of something that you do.
“By using any Feature, you understand that the Feature may be canceled at any time for any or no reason, in our sole discretion, without advance notice or liability to Reddit. We reserve the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue any Feature (in whole or in part) at any time, with or without notice to you…There will be no refunds if any Feature is no longer usable on or through the Services.”
Also, they can get rid everyone’s coins at any time without reimbursing them. I hope Community Points will be the final nail in Reddit’s coffin. It would be really funny if Reddit was killed by crypto.
Oh there’s a ton of interest but just kept to shitcoiners for now - the subreddits are nothing like they were during the bear market around 2019, back then it was a ghost town even with a subscriber count of 800k but now they’re still very active due to an influx of millions of users (6m subs on the main shitcoin sub).
It’ll all likely swing back up in the next two years and become a media and scam frenzy again, then another crash, rinse, repeat.
Reddit shilling decentralisation and ownership knowing how they’ve acted the last few months is hilarious though, they’ve been prideful of saying “nope you don’t own shit,now fuck off somewhere else” and spez bootlickers have been parroting it endlessly too. Seems odd that they’re the people Reddit are going to have to advertise this… Fauxnership to.
I’m not sure if I agree that crypto is going to swing back up, or at least not like it did in 2021. The subreddit may have more than 6 million users, but it doesn’t have any posts in the past week with more than 1000 upvotes. In reality, the crypto subreddit has a smaller userbase than Lemmy. That’s probably not entirely representative of the entire crypto community, but I think that it does indicate that a lot of people have lost interest.
I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how it all goes down though. Makes me glad I’m on Lemmy now.
It was much worse in 2019, a post hitting over 100-200 was unusual and the comment sections were beyond dead. Most comment sections these days are still filled with hope, in 2019 suicide hotline threads were a weekly occurrence or more.
We’ll see anyway, the BTC halving has led to a run 3 times in a row so far, just like clockwork. Barring another recession I just see the same pattern forming.
I visit it for a couple of subs that are not active on here. For the most part it feels the same. I never really cared for the karma system, gold, etc. So switching to Lemmy for me was more about just trying to find a place not being bombarded by ads, bots, and corporate policies.
I think reddit will survive the Exodus of users simply because Twitter is so badly managed that reddit may actually supplant it for a while. However, the drive to monetize all aspects of our lives is actually getting some push back from users so Lemmy may continue to grow in the next few years.
The biggest issues facing Lemmy isn’t content though. It’s ease of adoption.
God yes the ads, I just hate how every corner of our existence is being filled with ads. And if it’s not an official ad or “sponsored post” it’s someone trying to sell stickers on their Etsy or a t shirt bot spamming all and every subreddit. I just really hope those sort of things don’t invade here.
If you have been using an adblocker for years and turn it off for a moment, you really see how fucking bad it has become. It's almost like a dystopian movie.
But if you use an adbwockew then I can’t suwvive…
👉👈 Pwewse disable youw adbwockew…
-Adblock off-
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-Adblock on-
Yeah this is what has amazed me since joining Lemmy is the non existence of ADS. It feels weird that I’m not seeing constant ads disguised as posts here.
I have been bouncing between here and the Reddit official app and holy hell the Reddit app is so shockingly bad with ads that I can only manage a few mins on it.
Lemmy as it is now is great. Sure it could have more users, but I wouldn’t want the “average user” here because then it will be Reddit BS all over again.
I’m not saying I want or support that. I actually found it very easy to adopt. I am saying it is a hurdle in regards to adoption in regards to platform growth which is often discussed when comparing it to other social platforms.
Yeah as bad as it may sound, I kind of like that it’s not as easy to get into as reddit’s official app or tiktok or whatever. A barrier to entry can help quality. It doesn’t stop all the toxic assholes but it helps slow down the onslaught of braindead echo chambers and circlejerks that reddit has turned.
Yes, it’s a huge problem. New users are confused when they first get introduced. Ive been here for weeks and I still don’t understand everything. The explanations and infographics that have been made are a mess. It’s why there’s a certain kind of user that makes up the bulk of the site right now.
Doesn’t help that the first attempts to explain it were basically denial that there was a problem and insulting people for not understanding.
As a non-tech-savvy person, the confusion is real, lol. I am okay with just not really knowing what’s going on, and with asking questions or RTFM when I can find it, but that still puts me in the category of “comfortable in a highly technical environment.” People who are genuinely uncomfortable with technology and tech people are going to get a lot of culture shock.
To be fair, I think it goes both ways. People who answer a question from the point of view of a software developer will, quite reasonably, feel hurt if they’re told their answer isn’t helpful. I think it might be good to have a dedicated “landing pad” community for helping new people get oriented, rather than leaving them to ask the nearest person, who might or might not be the best person to ask.
We have done absolutely everything we could to work with Reddit and have given them every opportunity. When they offered to host a demo of the update, we understood how little they understand about accessibility: they did not respond to a request to use the app with screen curtain on. The only fair conclusion is that they cannot use it without sight, but expect us to.
The update introduced various regressions and new bugs. This is entirely within the expectations of the mod team, given how rushed it was and how Reddit continues to demonstrate how underprepared they are to deal with accessibility.
But what about the “accessibility apps?”
They may not work. At this time, it is impossible to log into RedReader.
They shouldn’t have to work. Reddit made a business decision to effectively remove users’ access to third-party apps and must assure that access by its own means.
The subreddit will continue operating under the care and stewardship of its visually impaired and sighted moderators.
Let us be clear: r/Blind cannot be moderated by blind people.
Reddit has a single path forward
As u/rumster, founder of r/Blind and a CPWA Certified Professional of Web Accessibility, told Reddit admins in our first meeting, Reddit needs to hire a CPWA. It has been patently obvious that the company does not have the know-how to address these accessibility issues, as we explained on the update on the second meeting.
To build the required internal structure and processes, and create an accessible platform, they must:
Create and fill the position of “Chief Accessibility Officer.” This role must have oversight over development as well as the ability to set internal and public Reddit policy. This person should have the ability to halt any corporate strategy or initiative within Reddit as a company and/or any feature, update, etc. to the Reddit website and/or apps until they believe the impact on accessibility for disabled redditors by said strategy, initiative, feature, update, etc. has been fully addressed, implemented, ensured, and/or mitigated. The person filling this role should have both development and managerial experience and hold at least the Certified Professional of Web Accessibility (CPWA) certification as issued by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). This person should also be disabled and an active Redditor and must coordinate communication with disabled users and their communities.
Reddit must commit to ensuring training and certification of all developers responsible for accessible and inclusive design. Lead developers must be trained and certified at least to the level of Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) as issued by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), but ideally should hold the “Certified Professional of Web Accessibility (CPWA).”
Fully implement an alternative text (alt text) function for photos and videos in which posters can compose descriptions for blind and visually impaired users.
Implement a closed-captioning system for videos, thus allowing deaf and deafblind Redditors full access to the audio content of videos.
Implement a single dedicated point of contact for accessibility and disability issues in the form of an email address: accessibility@reddit.com.
Ultimately and crucially, commit to comply with theWCAG at level AA and ATAG standards.
Disability is a social issue and software must be tested
As u/MostlyBlindGamer explained to Reddit admins in modmail, “disability” is an interaction between a person’s physical or mental characteristics and society’s barriers. Your website’s barriers. You are making people disabled by breaking your website and apps. Your organization’s unwillingness and/or inability to hire actual experts is what’s making people disabled. We’re not disabled, because we can’t see like you can: we’re disabled, because crunching developers, who don’t have the necessary training and experience, for a week, predictably, caused regressions. If I don’t test my code, people die. When you don’t test your code, because you don’t know how to, you make people disabled.
If Reddit Inc wants to deny service to disabled people, they must make that statement
As u/DHamlinMusic said, this update made no functional changes beyond the add/remove favorites button in the community’s list being labeled and changing state properly, yet it added dozens of new issues, made moderating significantly harder and should never have been released to start. If Reddit’s intention is to just not have disabled users on reddit come out and say it instead of pulling this landlord trying to empty a rent controlled building bullshit.
Disabled redditors will not accept being quietly whisked away, nor will the broader Reddit community. People make Reddit and people can break Reddit.
He's right that Reddit's "aggressive posture" is what's annoyed a lot of users. When I first heard of them adding API costs, I didn't care, because I didn't use 3rd party apps. But their attitude since then is why I don't want to use Reddit now.
They could have apologised for the inconvenience caused by their changes. They could have said something like "we recognise there are users who are not happy with these changes, and we apologise for the inconvenience, but we are in a position where we have to cover our server costs, or else Reddit may not survive into the future". If they had put it like THAT then I bet most people would have understood where they're coming from.
But instead they say things like "oh it's only a small amount of users who are unhappy" and "this will blow over like all of these controversies do". Basically saying "we don't need to listen to you, fuck you, fuck your opinions, we assume you'll use Reddit anyway". AND didn't they say they would respect mods protesting by shutting their subreddits? And then they're like "no fuck you we'll just force them open".
So the impression they give off is not that they're doing these API changes out of a financial necessity to ensure Reddit can survive into the future - instead, like many users have said, it seems like they are literally just trying to milk as many profits as possible in the short-term, so they can cash in as much as possible on the IPO, and then they can quit Reddit and retire to the Caribbean.
3rd party apps didn't affect me either, but the mods of most of the communities I go on were affected, so I was pulled in by default. Then Spez started power tripping
Same here, 3rd party apps didn't really affect me; but their treatment and attitude towards developers, users, and moderators got me to delete my 13yo account and walk away.
One of the main reasons people come to Reddit is to be informed by discussions they’re interested in, creating an environment of active discovery ripe for brands to show up and add value. Contextual Keyword Targeting places advertisers at the center of this journey, and at the heart of active conversations taking place, giving them the option to select specific keywords to associate with their brand, or even align keywords with their creative ad copy for added relevance. With so much direct traffic to Reddit conversation threads originating from high intent organic searches or research sessions, Contextual Keyword Targeting unlocks value for advertisers during and after discussions unfold, since we know Reddit threads live on as valuable, searchable resources for our users.
I threw up in my mouth reading this. I don’t think any community would enjoy being described as “an environment of active discovery ripe for brands to show up and add value”.
If you’re like me and haven’t deleted old reddit comments because of the valuable information they can give other people, now may be the time to reconsider. Being able to advertise on discussions that have already happened is one of the sales pitches Reddit makes to prospective advertisers.
Reddit’s recent monetisation schemes can all be summed up as “demanding a cut from people profiting off the site” and this is just more of that. They’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent astro-turfing and manipulation, now they’re just going to offer it as a service.
I’m so glad people like you are choosing to bootstrap the community’s they want to see instead of just hoping mods invested in there existing community’s decided to come over and working to try and connect with the people already on lemmy instead of just begging the people on reddit until the mods ban them for spamming
Same, we’re all prostitutes for Reddit in the end.
TBH, they’re already doing it a little here, but at least we’re not being sold to the highest bidder by Reddit. Here, they get ignored and/or downvoted.
I did that when the API fees were first announced, and it took a couple of weeks for them to respond, but I got a full text file of my comments and posts.
Oh thanks, I’ve just done that. I wrote a LOT of stuff in my time. I always thought it’d be good to look back and see how my positions changed and how I felt about my old thoughts. It was pretty annoying not to have a way to go back and actually read my stuff, even though they’re still hosting them and profiting off of them.
I’ll be honest most of it is anarchist propaganda so I’m in two minds as to whether or not to remove it. I’ll definitely get rid of the fun games stuff I posted and find a place here for it.
Contextual Keyword Targeting unlocks value for advertisers during and after discussions unfold, since we know Reddit threads live on as valuable, searchable resources for our users.
The use of all the buzzwords actually works to show the advertisers in question that they understand what they’re doing and, in this case somewhat literally, that they “speak their language.”
They mentioned Ally Financial as one of the success cases so I did a quick search for recent posts about Ally and sure enough the very first result from outside their own sub has this user contributing to the conversation:
Somebody posts a question about Ally and this 11 minute old account comes along pitching all of Ally Bank’s features. Then a week later they’re making 3 posts in a row advertising some other brand.
There’s a ton of these accounts. They gather karma with scripts that randomly repost top 100 all time posts on big subs and then delete them so their account looks clean. Then they sell it to ad companies that post client sanctioned posts and comments and get paid based on user engagement with the brand.
Check out r/hailcorporate. A huge portion of Reddit is just guerrilla advertising.
They didn’t even do that though. It was an absolutely brand new 1 karma account that somehow mysteriously didn’t get automodded to hell. Account created 09:00:27 UTC, then Ally Bank comment at 09:11:37 UTC
They also do it by copying text from comments that are getting upvoted in the same thread and then reposting it higher in the thread so it gets random upvotes. Caught the copy-bots doing it a bunch of times, got tired of reporting them since the reddit admins obviously weren’t interested in combatting the problem even if local moderators were (and I suspect they were in fact helping it along because it aligns with their goals for Reddit).
This is why the weekend DDoS attacks and frontpage vandalism don’t really concern me. With spez and Musk burning their services to the ground, we’re (along with other competitors, we’re not the only one) going to get a steady influx pressure for the coming months or even years. Shutting us partly down for a few hours every weekend does nothing in the face of this much stronger phenomenon. Whoever is doing it is basically pissing into the wind.
spez and Musk burning their services to the ground
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.
New does not need to be exclusively technical, if that was necessary, very little would really be worth calling new tbf. The situation the technology finds itself in, at that moment, is imo a far bigger factor than any details of the tech itself. The social, economic, political and business environments, each matter more than actual technical nature of any tech, which is irrelevant to most people. What makes our situation particularly unique is the large influx of free users we get.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.
What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.
But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.
Kinda good since devs getting their systems stress tests while service is still young and alpha testers don't bitch about minor inconvience unlike Normie's stream...
Agreed. This is very uncomfortable for us, but we’re going to come out much stronger for it.
Imagine the alternative–the devs just skipping through imaginary meadows, adding pleasant little features and taking their time, while the userbase grew and grew, and then we experienced a very major breach of trust and security.
That could’ve theoretically killed us. Now it won’t happen. Everyone is staring at their code and thinking “yep, security is important, that’s true…”
This right here is a big deal. Even if an instance goes down or gets attacked, the easy choice is to just browse from another instance till it is back up.
Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.
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