A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- 0 users online
- 17 users / day
- 240 users / week
- 638 users / month
- 1.28K users / 6 months
- 1 subscriber
- 1.67K Posts
- 28.2K Comments
- Modlog
The Verge has been in our corner since day one and I hope the community never forgets that.
Don’t understand why other tech sites didn’t follow this story as closely as The Verge did. They are witnessing the downturn of one of the largest websites in the world.
Some in the verge are 3rd party app users. They get the betrayal reddit users feel from the way the API change was handled.
Step 1: open the sub.
Step 2: make every member a moderator.
Step 3: watch the world burn.
I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.
It’s reddit that’s changing the terms, not mods acting up.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it’s flight or drive.
Man Reddit is really trying to push a narrative of big bad mean mods, never mentioning they’re unpaid and being ignored while doing a shitload of labor
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!! Work when WE tell you too!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
“Landed gentry”… Because that’s what I think about when I think about unpaid employees.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA “Delete My Data” demands, on each account.
It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
For those wondering… TamperMonkey browser add-on with RedditHistorySanitizer userscript (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code). It’s kinda slow, but much faster than doing it manually!
Or they’re just, you know… children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I’m willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don’t see the need to be involved in this because they weren’t on the site when there wasn’t an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don’t think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don’t understand the effects here because to them “third party” isn’t something that they knew existed. “API changes” isn’t something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn’t care, because in their minds, they don’t need to. It’s “not their fight”. Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We’re in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit’s users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It’s not a simple “with us or against us” situation as some like to believe.
Yes. Mods form a very important minority.
I’ve seen statistics showing that most of the traffic returned. I wonder, how long will that last without good mods?
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”
Looks like they’re holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform’s big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I’m being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don’t think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it’s pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won’t sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn’t done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn’t what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going “Meh” when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
The sheer of panic in Snoo Platform, Inc. means that protest and blackout work.
IPO blackout looks even more good now.
What’s an IPO blackout?
I assume they mean go blackout again during Reddit’s IPO/Initial Public Offering of Reddit stock in an attempt to tank the stock price.