Hey! This post is not specifically related to the lemmy.world instance. From now on, posts such as these will be removed, in order for the community to stay on topic. However, as this is a highly upvoted post, I’ll just lock it for now.
The alt-right is having a great time right now on Reddit. Tons of their posts from r/conservative on the front page.
Yes I went there for a peek and it’s so angry. Compared to the positive vibe here, reddit felt oppressive. I’m not going back. Let it simmer and boil. I love this place. It’s so refreshing at lemmy. Such a positive vibe. Like the internet was before it all became centralised. Lemmy is the real Web 3.
Well, that demographic is always great for their advertiser acquisition goal
Right? Nothing like a festering pile of bigotry & ignorance to get the advertisers signing up.
You joke but it’s not exactly wrong.
People like that love to buy dumb shit. After a time Reddit will be nothing but my pillow, t shirt companies, colonial penn life insurance, and reverse mortgage ads.
True, but they’re not exactly swimming in disposable income, usually. Trump’s base is mostly non-college-educated whites. Not exactly a rich vein to mine.
True, but that’s the same base for the mega churches, and those fucks aren’t hurting for private jets.
Trump raises a few million bucks every time he tells his supporters to donate. A LOT of companies want in on that
True enough. As the saying goes, no one ever went broke underestimating the American consumer. Or something along those lines.
r/Canada was taken over by alt-right a long time ago. r/OnGuardForThee had to be made in response to that. I feel like Reddit in general is going that direction. The sheer volume of bot activity on most major subreddits is insane.
So its like Twitter?
Well Steve, it’s not profitable for me to be a moderator for free either. Feel free to let me know how profitable you think you’ll be after hiring enough staff to replace all the mods that’ll be leaving.
Yeap. I’m also not working for free anymore.
They’re too cheap. I’m sure they’ll just replace you guys with less effective and active mods while the site just slowly smolders into a shadow of its former self.
Besides being too cheap, it’s honestly not even practical. There are about 21,000 active mods on any given day. Replacing even half of that number would increase their current staffing of ~700 by 15 fold which doesn’t seem likely given they just laid off 90 of them. That doesn’t even touch on the fact that those moderators would know nothing about the subs they’re now supposed to be taking care of.
Nah, you’re totally right, this is the beginning of the end. The blackout might not do anything short term but they’re certainly going to shed enough mods that quality will slip. Once that happens people will be looking for alternatives and Reddit will end up on the scrap heap of “used to be great” like so many that came before.
I stopped modding seriously long ago the moment I realized the community was getting too big and that the it is basically unpaid labour.
This means nothing to that lost CEO I started my sub over here but didn’t come closer to the numbers on Reddit. I really don’t know what to do now
You’ll have to wait. Reddit took a long time to get to where it is now. Lemmy can get there too, but it won’t be overnight.
Yea. I’m getting some good engagement right now in my community but. Yea we gotta wait!
What’s your community, illegallysmoldogs? I have two criminals myself. Subbed.
Thanks 😁
I subbed, too. Too cute! My first sub on Lemmy, lol.
Thanks. I open my sub tomorrow on reddit. but I think its way cooler over here. Another mod over there is going to open it plus its automated now so I will hardly interace with it. but yea I’m loving lemmy and might close the reddit sub don’t know still thinking about everything
Thanks
I don’t need reddit. Reddit doesn’t generate content, nor does it prevent contributors from sharing the same content on other platforms.
What is reddit doing to win me back?
Since I don’t see a link to it in the discussion, here’s an internal email from yesterday that has made its way to the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759559/reddit-internal-memo-api-pricing-changes-steve-huffman
Glad to know we’re just ‘noise’, lol.
One minute our content (through the API) is “very valuable” and “needs to be monetized”. The next we’re just “noise”.
If you can’t be monetized, you’re just noise. They don’t see their community as people, they see them as data to be harvested and eyes to be advertised to.
This is the exact message that was sent, and it’s sickening
Huffman says the blackout hasn’t had “significant revenue impact”
lol it’s hard to do that when you aren’t making any money, Steve.
Dam this makes my blood boil. My sub went dark for no reason!!
That’s what Huffman was saying BEFORE the blackout. Now that 8476/8838 subreddits are currently dark, I wonder what he would say now? I don’t really see how Reddit recovers from this. It’s sad because I loved it and there’s nothing else like it (yet), but there would need to be some major changes taking place before a lot of people consider venturing back.
WE should blackout for longer, i own a very small subreddit, but 2 days is not enough!! im not backing down tomorrow, i ask over subs do the same. lets stick it to reddit
I’ve decided I’m done. A complete and utter about face doesn’t feel like it would be enough at this point. At some point a relationship/reputation becomes damaged beyond repair.
We should move. Even if we did a longer blackout, the admins can just replace the mods of the bigger subs and ignore the smaller ones. Even if the blackout is effective, they will pull something like this again.
I’ve lost trust in them. I’m not going back except maybe for information if I really need to.
I won’t go back, with all the changes in the last few years. Reddit isn’t moving in a direction I like.
It should have been indefinitely.
Cool beans. Thanks spez, for introducing me to lemmy.
And that’s why this is my first comment on lemmy! Just in case Reddit eats itself.
This kind of protest is meaningless, going back online after 48 hours? It’s just a way for communities to feel good about themselves. The best way to protest is to delete the account / subreddit going offline indefinitely (although I doubt the effectiveness of this)
Agreed, but it’s 48 hours later, and it seems like more and more subreddits have decided to continue protesting indefinitely, which I’m really happy to see. I too have no clue how effective it’ll be, but it’s showing a much clearer message.
From how I understood it (I could be wrong), the initial blackout was planned for june 30th when the API changes come into effect, and the current (previous?) protest was due to Spez’s AskReddit responses. Basically, this was the warning, the 30th is the big one.
The blackout is a way to engage in a way that makes things inconvenient for people not informed about the issue so that awareness is generated. Like picketting the mayor’s office or blocking a public intersection.
I think a blackout has a much higher impact than deleting accounts.
There are so many users nobody notices when a few disappear. But when a subreddit goes dark it’s most certainly noticeable.
It’s evident by now Reddit management doesn’t care. Two days raise awareness amongst users. Maybe the two days won’t be the last for many subreddits or people. And I’m sure more people became more aware, or thought more about the situation and alternatives than without a two day blackout.
There’s a stupid question I have (c/NoStupidQuestions?)
What do mods gain from reopening the subs after two days, even if demands are not met? Are they gaining money or something? Perhaps the bigger ones.
Valid question. Hate to say this, but if most subs reopen after 2 days, we’re essentially handing reddit bosses an easy win. It’s like protesting with no terms, and instead merely creating a brief storm that’ll pass and quickly be forgotten. Might as well throw eggs at a tank with that thinking.
The only way this protest works, is if subs stay dark with no deadline, and terms that must be met to end the standoff. That’s how these things work. That’s how it’s always worked.
Some subs have already decided to go indefinite. They are coordinating in r/ModCoord.
It’ll be interesting to see how it goes, I know one of the subs that I visit has opened it up to a vote on their community on whether to go indefinite or not (or just restrict). For effectiveness it needs the big subs and the bulk of subs to keep it up I reckon.
Its hard to abandon a community that you’ve spent years cultivating. No money involved at all, just emotional baggage really.
Always be willing to walk away, or you are working for free for somebody else’s profit. If it isn’t fun, quit.
Mostly I think it started as a show of how much reddit relies on the free labor while giving reddit an out, but as time goes on I’m inclined to believe it’s also because mods know that if they “abandon” the subreddit, the admins will just open the subreddit up to new moderators a la r/redditrequest
There are already subs that have had users request being put on as mod despite barely becoming inactive.
Power is addictive. At least for some people.
Hey Lemmy gang. Just signed up after seeing this.
The world is ready to fully transition away from that cancerous company.
It started out great at the times of Aaron Swartz, but just as with people, cancer sometimes hits. Anyway, it influenced projects like lemmy for which I’m thankful.
Yes I’m aware of the history. The only way to kill cancer is excise it. Lemmy realistically can’t take a full migration from Reddit but that needs to change. I too am super grateful. Part of me wonders if this platform could end the same way but given it’s decentralised nature, I highly doubt it. Reddit was open source once. I really want this to succeed. Seize the means of communication.
Open source and decentralized are two different things, as long as it’s just a bunch of independent server instances which are small enough each to handle the traffic load you can’t really buy that out.
The question is if it’ll take off, more or less.
The question is if it’ll take off, more or less.
It already has.
we’re here aren’t we (grin). Looking forward to seeing how this plays out for sure.
One thing that worries me is Lemmy’s dedication to non-advertisement funding. Lemmy will never be able to handle a ton of people without money for server space and bandwidth. I hate ads as much as anyone, but there are ways to do it that aren’t intrusive or toxic or damage your integrity.
As more and more people host their own federated instances it won’t be as big of a problem as it was for web 2.0 legacy sites like reddit. The Fediverse really is the future.
There are ways to do advertising that works and is not annoying (or at least less annoying). Context advertising are ads that are directly related to the subject matter of interest. For example, ads from companies that are in the business of meeting the needs of the boatbuilding community would be welcome or at least tolerated in a boatbuilding community. Those same ads shown to a programming community would be less welcome, even if there happens to be significant shared membership.
For example, the paper magazine “Small Craft Advisor” recently transitioned to online only via Substack. It didn’t take long for subscribers to actually complain about the loss of advertising and SCA had to respond with self-promotion articles from former advertisers.
Context advertising requires no user profiling, no user tracking, and no data collection. “Oh, you sell epoxy (or sails or plans)? Well here is a community (as distinct from a user profile) that is likely looking for what you sell and probably already discussing products in your line of business.”
There is a site I am familiar with that was determined to not have intrusive ads and actually created a side business of creating ads for its advertisers that it would find acceptable on the site, which consisted of a still image of given dimensions, and a link.
When you say no data collection, you mean no personalized data collection, right? Obviously they would want to know how many times the ad was clicked.
That sounds like the kind of thing I envision.
Yes, no personalized data collection. Both sides of the ad transaction would need to track something if the placement had some kind of impressions or click-through payment system. It’s been a while since I’ve managed a website, but I think most of that can be handled with pretty basic logging that has existed since before micro-targeted advertising was even conceived.
For a simple placement contract like we have with what few newspapers remain, the ad supplier could assess the value of the placement for themselves using standard referrer logs. Not paying its way? Don’t renew the placement.
The privacy movement can’t sell out to private entities or all bets are off again, I think no advertisements is wholly nessasary. I think taking out Reddit is much more achievable than many people think. Yes it will take some money and resources.
Yes, but where is that money going to come from?
The money is coming from the community, which is why progress is slow. People don’t have much money. It doesn’t mean we should sell the soul of the project for a quick buck. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Rome wasn’t built for free either, we need some sort of financial backup. Even if it isn’t advertising something needs to be in place.
yes, its origins were great, it’s finale is not so great. I suspect if Aaron were alive he’d be livid. I also think reddit’s demise might be the intended outcome, like BCG is at the helm or somesuch.
Unfortunately they aren’t since the ones who cared couldn’t be bothered for more than two days.
The death of Reddit will be a slow bleeding process. Expect waves. Not floods.
I think it will be more like the tide moving out slowly … no one will really notice and the CEO and owners will keep telling everyone everything will be fine even as their ship sits beached on a sandbar and the water will never return.
Here’s a thread where subreddit mods are announcing their subs going indefinitely dark: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/
I really can’t wait to see what’s the fallout of Reddit going dark. Does the community really wield the power? Or does Reddit have another ace up its sleeve?
Yeah it’s gonna be quite an interesting event. Most of reddit’s newer userbase doesn’t seem to care, but then again the mods of major subreddits do.
Mods can be replaced. Remember r/TheDonald? Not that I have -any- sympathy at all for those trogs, but the admin dealt with them by deleting all the mods and appointing new ones that would toe the line. There’s nothing to stop them from using that playbook again. A lot of people will leave, but a lot of people will shrug and go back to posting cat pictures.
Mods can be replaced. I saw a post today – mods are being replaced.
Yeah, called it. But I was hardly alone in calling it.
The real fallout will be seeing what the numbers look like after July 1st. When all the third party users are given the unavoidable choice to switch to the official app or not. If engagement goes down then and stay lower, it’s ogre for Reddit.
I’m going to try to ween myself off reddit. I added the Lemmy page to my Home Screen where Apollo used to be and deleted the reddit app. (Don’t feel like sideloading the Lemmy app). I’ll probably still be browsing with Apollo until I can’t any more. 🤷🏻♂️
Edit to add: the death of reddit will be slow. They’re going to stick to their guns, the people who actually make reddit good will move leaving only bots, scammers, and idiots. The idiots will realize they’re surrounded by idiots, while not realizing they’re idiots, and they won’t like that so they’ll try to move here. Depending on how easy it is to move to Lemmy by the time that happens will dictate how many idiots move here. I feel like the current level of difficulty sets a high enough bar to keep the idiots out… for now.
“Money rules everything around me” -The CEO of Reddit
