this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

thread cycled! new thread is over here, folks

[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago (2 children)

AskHistorians is taking the approach of “blackout for two days, then read-only moving forward indefinitely.” I think that’s a good approach as it still removes the functionality of the subreddit while reminding people of what they’re missing out on due to the admins’ actions.

I know there are bigger subs, but AskHistorians is an absolute jewel in Reddit’s crown. For all the dumpster fire subs that raise controversy and drag Reddit’s image down, AskHistorians is the one sub that could always be pointed to as a sub with an inarguably positive impact. It’s also a sub in a unique position because its moderators are probably the hardest for Reddit to replace, because many of them are the historians that answer the questions, or have personal relationships with those that do. In addition most of the historians aren’t really Redditors, participating only on AskHistorians. Removing the current mod team and replacing them would absolutely 100% kill the sub forever.

Not that I have any faith in Reddit to do the right thing. I just think it’s interesting to realize just how different of a position AskHistorians in than the rest of the subreddits, being at the same time more impactful than their subscriber numbers show, while being fragile enough to be permanently broken if handled poorly. They are also one of the only mod teams I’ve see who have issued a list of actionable goals that Reddit can address.

Also it’s interesting to see that their participation in the blackout is almost entirely on Spez’s head. That’s some damn fine CEOing there, Lou.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The askhistorians subreddit and it's mod team are absolute gems, I was able to attend one of their talks at a conference and it was honestly one of the best presentations I've seen at these types of events. It is giant loss to the academic community to have them shut down tbh, and I hope they are able to migrate and keep their audience.

But then again knowing Reddit, if they migrate u/spez will probably allow Holocaust deniers to take up the space or something.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I hope one of the archive projects (archiveTeam or others) has backed up r/askhistorians past posts and comments, just in case.

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I don't care about fixing Reddit and I don't care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don't care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I've been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they're doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it's not a person. It's a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There's no mastermind, no one's at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There's only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.

The main reason I don't care is that I don't have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

No reason to go back and every reason not to. The Fediverse is my home now.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Right? This was always bound to happen. The only way it wouldn't be innevitable would require Reddit be a non-profit or co-op or equivalent. Which it certainly isn't.

I also agree, the sudden breath into the fediverse (I've been poking my head in since I ran a nextcloud instance and they had a plugin for the fediverse called nextcloud social.). This place isn't just a handful of OSS developers and enthusiasts anymore, but something starting to resemble a community of all types.

It reminds me of when Reddit was good, way back in like 2010 (for me) - but it feels more consequential now!

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (8 children)

The Verge: Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

That's an absolutely tone deaf response from spez. The talking points are exactly what I expected and I'm not surprised, but man, whoever's running PR at Reddit is really dropping the ball.

If they do IPO, anyone who buys into it wholeheartedly deserves the deep losses the company will incur long term - it seems no-one on Reddit's leadership team, or anyone egging the company to float, understands what makes their own product tick.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is he wrong though?

We all know that users are going to come flooding back as soon as the closed subs open again. Reddit has been through controversy after controversy and has only grown in size. The truth is that most people on Reddit don't really care about third party apps, a lot didn't even know they existed before the Apollo dev spilled the tea on his conversations with Reddit. Spez knows this and is counting on it.

For this protest to have any teeth at all, the protesting subs need to stay blacked out indefinitely until Reddit starts negotiating realistically, or they start hemorrhaging users to alternative platforms.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

so - as one of those people who really didn't know much about the 3rd party apps or even what the protest/blackout was, I was wishing for an alternative for quite some time now. Reddit has become an echo chamber where you're downvoted for having your own opinion, no matter how vanilla the "dissenting" opinion is. The trolliing and constant arguing gets old after awhile, and I don't think the current state of reddit is what the original intent of the platform ever was. This, for me, was why I gravitated toward Beehaw specifically. I'm not going back to Reddit. It reminds me of a playground full of bullies, itching for an argument. This platform is so much more my speed. And I feel like there are a pretty decent amount of people here who are in the same mind... for us, the alternative is welcome and Spez can wait til he retires for us to return because it's not happening.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yeah, don't hold your breath for a Lemmy/kbin port of Apollo:

The amount of work it would take to port all the API endpoints over to Lemmy or Kbin or something, that would be a gargantuan amount of work that I’m not sure I have the capacity for. And then just the complexity of making it work. Long term, it’s a big question mark for me that, at this stage, I’m not sure I’m totally interested in pursuing. But it’s also one of those things where I completely wish it the best. And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Great interview from Christian there, it really is so frustrating that Reddit is and has been so hostile towards him. :(

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you imagine the dumbasses at Reddit corporate thinking they could turn him into a villain? lol

The leadership is so incredibly dumb that it almost feels like sabotage.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Honestly, it was probably intentional. People shit on spez (rightfully) but he's doing his job perfectly. He's looking like an incompetent man child, and finger pointing at a third party using an obviously and probably intentionally weak narrative. He's put all the focus on himself and how stupid he looks. He's a punching bag, and in the mean time everyone at the corporate level that actually enacted these changes and is forcing this platform shift is remaining a) anonymous and b) out of the crosshairs.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (2 children)

/r/ModCoord thread working on extending the blackout beyond tomorrow, as a response to Steve's email: https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/148ks6u/indefinite_blackout_next_steps_polling_your/

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

That's great news 👏. I really hope most of the subs currently participating end up going indefinite. Especially with Spez shrugging off the whole thing in the media.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

People commenting on there calling them lame for trying to protect the communities that they care about. Yet these idiots use the platform (for free) and just gobble up promotions and ads from daddy corporate and say thank you

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (15 children)

I'm glad to see there's been more of a push for previously '48 hours only' subreddits to move to an indefinite blackout - but I wish that more of them had committed earlier. That leaked internal email shows exactly what I already expected; they just see the protesting Redditors as a bunch of whiny babies who they expect to give up after a couple days and forget the whole thing.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

I'm surprised how quickly I've adapted to fediverse, Mastodon just didn't fill-in for twitter in the way that the lemmy instances have, once I learned how they work together.

Now that I have gotten over the first hump, it feels new and exciting enough to make up for the lack of diverse content. I really think lemmy/kbin can be the platforms that push forward an interoperable, self-custodial social media.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Presumably it's only going to get better over time. I was afraid I'd lose this part of the internet when Reddit went full corpo, but to be honest the quality of discussion on Lemmy makes up for the diminished content.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It's not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.

However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.

To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it's either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that's only in name.

Just my 1/2 cents.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I wouldn't have ever signed up for lemmy if this api thing hadn't come about. This is my first fediverse experience. I was pissed at reddit, but now I don't care about reddit one way or another. Lemmy has gained enough users to sustain itself even if there is no more mass migration. There is an active community here that will help lemmy grow organically over time.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (6 children)
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

r/piracy with a message to us lemmy:

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a sub that could really benefit from just leaving reddit entirely anyways. Potentially being able to have more open discussions centered around piracy would make the content of that sub so much better.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This has been absolutely wild. Sadly, it's not that surprising and the corporate speak is strong. While Reddit likely won't change, the "type" of users that will leave over this is the kind of users that made Reddit the community it is today. These are all likely active members from Fark, Slashdot, Digg, and others.

Good news though, we've got a group of people that are experienced in making fantastic communities. I'll bet we'll do it again. We'll see how this goes with the Fedditverse/Threadverse via Lemmy/kbin. I'm sure we'll figure this community/magazine thing out soon enough.

Sometimes all we can control is how we react to the situation.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find it a bit disheartening that a lot of comments on Reddit (I know I'm mostly staying away) are labeling us, the people who take issue with not only the API pricing but the entire direction the site is going, snowflakes and whiny babies.

A lot of "I don't cares" and "I just want to use the site not see this useless protest" etc. I remember a time when reddit could come together and actually get results (for better and for worse).

Even the way people comment is different. Seems like a lot more low effort, mouth breather posts, or suspiciously bad faith arguments that I see in response to the increasingly rare thoughtful/informative dialogue in the form of posts or comments.

I'm not saying the site was ever an iconic standard to the peak intellectual, but there seemed to be more people hungry for that type of content.

Maybe I'm just looking back at everything through rose tinted glasses, but I miss the days of ending up going down a new rabbithole sparked by a random comment chain.

I wonder if it's just me and I'm just turning into that old bitter dude longing for the "good ole days."

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I posted this on Kbin too, but I thought people might find it interesting here as well. I feel like maybe younger/shorter term users, and other people really don't fully understand what's going on with Reddit, and how it's been building to a crescendo for a while.

tl;dr: This shift in Reddit has been coming for awhile, and was heralded years ago by fundamental changes they made to how users engage with their platform, most specifically by turning "/r/all" into "/r/onlywhatwewantyoutosee".

I was a Reddit user for 12 years and change. I pre-date the Digg migration, and honestly I thought the years after that were its peak. There were warning signs that it was going downhill at many points in time, but I think the moment that really signaled Reddit was never going to return to what made it popular and successful is when they removed NSFW subs from /r/all...even though they'd rolled out /r/popular a year or two prior, supposedly for that purpose.

It's not because of the restriction of NSFW subs in and of itself, it's the implications/precedents that were set for the service as a whole. At that point, it became crystal clear that Reddit wanted to make sure the vast majority of users would be stuck with reddit recommended content only, and from there out it's felt more like user manipulation for maximum advertising. Think about it - probably 50% of the most popular posts are either thinly veiled ads, or posts LOADED with ads that Reddit is surely getting clickshare revenue for linking to. Then there's the sponsored posts hidden in with the normal posts, and the banner ads inserted between those.

The point of /r/all was to show everything, in real time, as it was growing in popularity. That's how people discover things they like that they didn't know existed - but finding those things, means spending less time in the controlled environment engaging with the content they most want you to engage with, and making them less revenue as a result. When /r/all turns into "/r/onlywhatcorporatewantsyoutosee", there's really no going back or improving. This API bullshit is just the next iteration of that same long term strategy - control what users see and interact with by forcing them to stay in their tightly controlled environment

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NSFW posts weren't the primary reason why /r/all got limits. /r/all was littered with hate and bigotry and general garbage. If /r/all had been left alone, Reddit would have continued on the path to becoming Voat.

Not modifying, to some degree, what subreddits appear on /r/all would have made trying to remove the bigotry off the site that much harder. (It will never completely go away; the site is too huge at this point.) While they should have used the idea of quarantines long before they started out with flat-out removal of these subs, these weren't just "[racist slur] are dumb" type of stuff. These were subs that outright called for the violence and death of people who weren't them. These were places for racists and bigots who had no qualm about doxxing people with hopes that bad things would happen to them.

You can argue "Well, then, ban the people who do that kind of thing!" Sometimes when the pool gets full of scum, you have to recognize the point where spot cleaning isn't the cure and you have to drain the pool to stop the scum from gathering.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (15 children)

Spez has told Reddit staff that the Reddit blackout “will pass”.

He’s right, it will. And that’s the problem.

A two day blackout means nothing to Spez and Reddit. What it tells them is “we can treat the userbase and developers like shit and they’ll still use our platform for the other 363 days of the year”.

The only thing that will force Reddit to the negotiating table is blacking out indefinitely. Not a single protesting subreddit opens back up until they realise what made the company so attractive to investors in the first place.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I just used Power Delete Suite to remove all my comments and submissions

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

I am just a drop in the ocean, but I won't be going back to reddit now that's I've discovered the fediverse

this feels like the internet I fell in love with back in the mid 90s with smaller communities and no corporations trying to control what I interact with

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Considering doing what someone else suggested and editing all your comments to explain why you left, to mess with the data it has access to rather than outright removing it

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Thinking about sticking to Lemmy for most things and using my Reddit alt account just as a porn aggregator. Who's with me?!

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There's lemmynsfw.com as well now.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

ok guys I'm done with reddit

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Relay for android gave in to Reddit's demands ... thoughts?

I think this is a bad sign for everyone protesting the changes... a major app giving in makes the rest of the apps look bad for complaining imo https://www.androidpolice.com/popular-android-reddit-app-may-survive-absurd-api-pricing/

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The relay creator did the math and came to the conclusion that an subscription model might maybe work but it would be to tight. It reads as the person is saying that it is unfeasonable.

You say he gave in? As far as I can read that is stated nowhere.

Even if the apps would comply;

  • Reddit will jack the prices again when they see fit.
  • Reddit also wins with this pricing because they are gonna pocket the cash.

>Reddit will limit 'Recommend' and NFSW content to its official app. >

And ohw yeah you are gonna get less content for your subscription. It is all in bad faith.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think that a forced paid subscription will probably kill it anyway long term, who in their right mind would pay a subscription to access Reddit?

Also don't forget that thes app owners themselves are running a business and probably make a bunch of money from their apps that they don't want to see evaporate with the changes.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The Internet was supposed to be better, but it turned into another set of monthly bills. And caving in to Reddit's gouging sets a dangerous precedent, because it normalizes the smearing of devs that brought us here.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

I didn't know api changes means 3rd party apps no longer can show nsfw content. Nobody's going to pay a subscription and not be able to see stuff that they can see on the official app. Looks like reddit is giving all 3rd party app developers a shitty deal whichever way you cut it.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You Can Export Your RiF History. You Can Export Your RiF History

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Just have to say: Has anyone notice that Beehaw is just way faster then Reddit? Sorry new here, just my first impression. By the way. Thanks everyone for this site.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (35 children)

I've checked both Reddit and Lemmy since I created my Lemmy account yesterday. Reddit has lost a number of subreddits I used to read and the feed seems decidedly less interesting overall. Although the equivalents to all the subreddits I used don't necessarily exist here, there is some good information here (particularly IT-related) and I think the overall feel of the community here is better - people seem (so far at least) largely pretty reasonable and there aren't the armies of contrarians or downvoters just wanting to spread their anger at the world to everyone else. So, overall, win some, lose some, and if I end up just here instead of Reddit, I think any losses there will be offset by gains here. Which if you think about it makes Lemmy look pretty good, given that it is (a) relatively new; (b) volunteer-run and funded; (c) much, much smaller than Reddit.

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