As some subreddits continue blackouts to protest Reddit's plans to charge high prices for its API, Reddit has informed the moderators of those subreddits that it has plans to replace resistant moderation teams to keep spaces "open and accessible to users."
I like the concept, and so far I like the implementation, but it's still far too early to gain mass adoption based on what I'm seeing from bugs (account creation silently failed on multiple instances, and login can also silently fail) as well as how registering can feel like jumping through hoops. I wanted to register for beehaw but don't much care to go through an interview process. Then I wanted to make sure I could access beehaw content, but saw they recently defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, so I had to make sure not to register on either of those.
I don't know this will catch on. Currently each instance is so small, and the communities are even smaller. I worry that content won't update often enough to warrant checking more than once or twice a day. We'll have to wait and see how much this all grows and matures. I'd like this to be my Reddit replacement, but we'll see.
I'm tempted to say it's better, but, unfortunately, in many ways it's not.
What Reddit had, most of the time, was semi-canonical communities. There was /r/python, /r/linux, /r/privacy, etc. The diaspora of Lemmy is a shadow of all of that. Surely, there are a dozen or so (at least) /c/python communities on Lemmy, but is there a single one that's anywhere near as active as the Reddit one? No. Not so far, at least.
And unfortunately, I can say as an instance admin, the lemmy moderation tools are just flat bad. We had to turn off open registration and enable email verification, not because we would otherwise need it, but the Lemmy moderation tools are 100% reactive and only operate on a 1-by-1 basis. If a spambot signs up 100 fake accounts, I have to go and individually ban each and every one of them. There's no shift+select, ban.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to be here, and Lemmy's great, and there's far less toxicity (so far). All I'm saying is, (1) there's work to do, (2) don't gloat.
We're not there yet, imho, but Reddit definitely feels like damaged goods, and the atmosphere has gotten toxic and polarized. So I think we're going to see a slow decline, unless they somehow get their community management back in order, but the recent comments by the CEO seem to suggest he sees the community as cattle, basically.
Reddit was pretty unpolished when I joined 13? years ago. There is something awesome about being on a frontier where posts are getting 20 comments instead of 2,000. Everybody gets a chance to contribute and be heard.
I feel like normie fed-based socials need to start going live like bluesky so people can finally get off these shitty platforms. We need a leader in the federation space.
Would still be poetic justice. Remember when they threw Ellen Pao under the bus? They forgot to hire a scapegoat for this round of unpopular decisions.
Yeah, moderating a large sub isn’t as shake-and-bake as the admins seem to think. They might “hire” scabs, but the scabs are probably going to slack off pretty hard and might not even understand the tools and procedures that can make it effective but not stifling to content.
“If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said. “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
And remind us who's been maintaining that system for so long? I seem to remember spez saying something to the effect of "it's democratic because you can just start another community".
Funny. When my 10 year old account gets banned by some 6 month old power tripping mod account I'm told "moderators get to decide who can participate in their communities" and given zero recourse.
Now when mods go on strike, they're told it's undemocratic and that mods shouldn't get to decide who participates in their communities just because they moderate those communities.
Its probably going to end up like facebook.
A big lumbering thing, still heavily populated but ad choked and overrun by bots and bad actors, indoctrinating unsuspecting users. Even if it stays big, hopefully its reputation will suffer enough to keep most new users away.
I would argue that the default subs already suffer from a lot of those problems. What's kept me around in Reddit is definitely the more specialist subs.
Have you checked out the official app? Last I looked, it defaults to about 1 post visible at a time. You can adjust it to about 4 posts visible. Last I check, 1 of those posts was an ad and another was a recommended post.
I feel like Reddit already turned into a general social media underneath us already, with so many reposts from TikTok, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it had nowhere near the amount of original style content as it used to.
The comments became no longer worth reading, with the same lame jokes populating the top of the thread, the atmosphere became toxic and not like a community.
What Reddit are doing is intended to turn the existing known entity into a profitable social media app, they don't care about the quality decline. The existing owners will slowly sell as the valuation increases and they will get their winnings at the expense of the decade of free labour from the content creators, moderators & developers.
It feels a lot like Reddit wants to be Facebook, especially with the recent changes it made to the official app to remove control over what Redditors read.
However, I don't think Reddit can afford the moderation required to be Facebook.
Yes, I got the "message" from the Reddit CEO, and decided to pre-empt that, and I spent a few hours today manually deleting each and every post I made in my subreddit. The content is already anyway on my blog, on The Internet Archive, and on the Fediverse. So my subreddit now looks like this (he is welcome to let someone else take it now):
Well, you could stay private and continue to moderate as if it would always be a private sub, just have a few authorized users and a few posts a day to moderate...
Stop giving thus self righteous, money hungry dickwad a voice, The Verge. Jesus christ. The more he talks, the dumber and more like Elon Musk he looks.
LMAO their response to the VPN ads they rolled out to every Firefox user was hilarious. Any poster got the comment from a mod that the user should use the already existing posts about it, the thing is, each and every post was locked by the mods with the same comment, not one post was available to comment on the situation. Eventually some posts went through after a while, but these hours, man, that's when i went Chromium, if i get fucked either way, i might as well use the objectively superior browser.
Oh, and to fix the issue "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" needs to be disabled, sure dude, the next week there is the next sponsor you have to disable before it even appears.
Brave has been caught with their hands in the cookie jar too much for me to use it. I tried it for a bit, but then all the articles of them doing stuff they promised not to do kept piling up. There is a reason they used the data-hoovering Chrome base.
I also switched to Brave - Firefox's memory leaks had become untenable for me. Now if I have enough Brave tabs open, the whole browser just freezes. I'm sticking with it though.
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