Why wouldn’t people expect differently? Is people trashing them on something so front facing undesirable for them or something?

900 comments and it’s still up, looks like they gave up ^^

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that’s a compelling point but I don’t think it’s as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of “don’t go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that’s just helping Reddit” has some “But you live in a society, curious” vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you’re protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn’t go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it’s not that impactful if it’s a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community’s coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there’s a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that’s pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place’s first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they’re doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities’ size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking “why fuck u/spez ?” and “the only reason I’m still on Reddit is that there aren’t any alternatives”

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren’t aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the “fuck u/spez” movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren’t aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got “Lemmy” as a recommendation in replies and said “interesting I’ll check it out” - they legit hadn’t heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don’t know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that’s fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is “which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places”, I’ve come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was “but the admins will just erase it”, and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there’s stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that’s visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

After giving it some thought, I think you should indeed do that. For Lemmy AND Kbin and more.
tl;dr: Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms

The major objection is that going to r/place gives Reddit the engagement and numbers they want for the IPO, and I think that’s a compelling point but I don’t think it’s as obvious as the people making that point seem to think. The idea of “don’t go on Reddit to protest Reddit, that’s just helping Reddit” has some “But you live in a society, curious” vibes to it; I think the question of whether to protest vs abstain and how to best protest is always going to depend on the details of what you’re protesting or abstaining from.

In this case I think Kbin and Lemmy users should put their names on the r/place board according to the following reasoning:

• The argument that you shouldn’t go on r/places is essentially saying that the best protest against Reddit is people leaving Reddit, which I agree with

• Like all protests however it’s not that impactful if it’s a few isolated people doing it, you need to find a way to have users do it en masse. Coordination is key.

• Same thing for going on Kbin and Lemmy and others - these platforms become good if they have enough users to sustain vibrant communities, they rely on network effects.

• r/place as an event is a showcase of a community’s coordination. It both requires a community to be large and well-communicated and it gives a very practical, visible way of advertising that coordination to both rivals and random observers (there’s a paper out there proposing that this is why music evolved btw, hmmm that’s pretty cool)

• what ultimately made me decide to post this is going on the thread for r/place’s first day. Look at the conversations, this is exactly what they’re doing: discussing the communities participating, commenting on what they draw and explicitly talking about what it means for those communities’ size and coordination

• These comments also included people asking “why fuck u/spez ?” and “the only reason I’m still on Reddit is that there aren’t any alternatives”

• This means there is a pool of normie users who aren’t aware of the protest, but are following r/places, and the “fuck u/spez” movement is effective in bringing their attention to it

• By the same token there are tons of users who aren’t aware of existing potential Reddit alternatives (one of those comments got “Lemmy” as a recommendation in replies and said “interesting I’ll check it out” - they legit hadn’t heard about it).

In conclusion:
Advertising the existence of kbin and lemmy to random Reddit users is exactly what you want to do if you want to go against Reddit, and r/place is an excellent way of 1) telling people who don’t know about it that these platforms exist, and 2) showcasing the vitality and size of the communities on these platforms.

Now in practice I don’t know that these platforms actually have the size and coordination to showcase that on r/places and that’s fine, clearly a huge percentage of people here believe that boycotting Reddit entirely is more effective or more convenient. But if the question is “which hurts Reddit more, promoting Lemmy/Kbin on r/places or avoiding r/places”, I’ve come to believe the answer is the first.

EDIT: oh right another objection I saw was “but the admins will just erase it”, and there again look at the comments on r/place. Clear streisand effect on the guillotine, if there’s stuff for lemmy/kbin/squabble that’s visible enough and admins erase it it still works fine from a comms perspective.

Maybe that’s the answer to OP’s “is [bribes] actually a thing here”

Yeah, I got into it from the TalkOrigin.org website, and 1) I’d never have gotten into it otherwise, no question, and 2) I think it took years and many, many attempts to go from “huh they refer to a talk.origins ‘newsgroup’ where all this fun discussion comes from, oh the link does something weird nvm” to “OH HEY I MANAGED TO SIGN UP THIS THING IS REAL WHODATHUNK”.

I said that in another comment but I think discoverability is huge. The way people find things out on the internet is by going to their usual internet places or asking questions of a search engine. I don’t know how people got onto Usenet in the before times but definitely at the time I got onto it everyone was on the WWW and there were very few ways to even hear about Usenet there, let alone hear something enticing enough to want to check it out. And when you combine that with the technical barrier to entry that’s pretty fatal.

There is https://www.eternal-september.org. For me the biggest hurdle tbh was finding an email provider that was 1) anonymous (including not requiring my credit card obvi) so that I could have a specific identity for Usenet 2) had IMAP/POP3 support so I could use it with Thunderbird and 3) wasn’t gmail, yahoo or outlook/hotmail because I already have accounts with those and don’t want to keep switching. I actually failed, I ended up having to pay the email provider I’d picked for IMAP support.

I’ve only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands “minecraft” to be an adjective meaning “that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic”, it’s adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.

Maybe it’s time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age

The more I’m remembering and re-experiencing Usenet the more it reminds me of the huge differences between it and web interfaces that contribute to it being difficult to adapt but also having its own strengths.

A huge under-appreciated difference I think is that because all the messages are essentially email and you’re meant to read them in an email client, and the threading isn’t inherent it’s the email client trying to figure out what’s a reply to what, and the message titles are displayed in a thread with a separate window for message content, you get:

• infinitely long threads

• the custom of copying the post that’s being replied to & replying at the bottom or inline, with further customs around trimming etiquette

• because the message is displayed in a separate window from the thread with its own scrollbar there is very little limit on post size other than custom (and I assume some client or server-related limit I’ve never run into, and I’m amazing at running into comment length limits on forums. Like, once I saw some apparently longtime Reddit user go “TIL there’s a 10000 character limit on comments” and I just went “how did you not know that I run into it twice a week”)

I think those things are what I truly love about Usenet as a forum interface. And I think they’re very very hard to replicate on a webpage where everything is on the same page. Most other forums are linear instead of threaded; that’s why I like Reddit so much I think! But even then there is obviously a cost in terms of page real estate to having excessively long threads, which Reddit manages in various ways. And either way, when the messages are on the same page as the tree structure then that’s an extra limit on the size of both. I think that was a big part of the issue with Google Groups, although it did perform those tasks well enough that the newsgroup was useable you always got the sense they didn’t want to. Like, there’s a tree view but it isn’t default I think? And it wasn’t great at displaying really long threads? IIRC it struggled with the quotation formats too, maybe top-posted by default. I’d have to go back to remember. I wasn’t around for DejaNews so I don’t know how they did it, other than that everybody seemed to like it.

Did you feel it was a hot mess in terms of the interface, or in terms of the culture?

Any gaming alt you remember fondly and/or that might still be active?

They framed him on a murder charge!

Hi ! I only realized that you’d posted a link after u/btaf45 (@btaf45?) highlighted it. That’s a really interesting usenet reader, do you know if there exists a website that highlights groups by activity, or can display the most recent messages from all groups like the main page of a social media aggregator? It seems to me that if reader.usenet.monster can do what it does it should be able to do that too but I don’t see that kind of page on that site.

That’s a cute grumpy old man take but I don’t think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It’s true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won’t hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it’s not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.

Offhand I’d guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other “portals” to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don’t mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they’ll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?

Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people’s recommendations because I don’t have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I’m working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don’t know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.

I heard that the comp.lang ones were still active ! And while I’m not wildly into computer languages as a subject of conversation I’m not totally not into it either. Are they all mostly about helping each other with coding questions or are there some with conversations that would be interesting to something with a more generic interest in computing?

Then there are also binaries groups which are NOT dead and still living ;)

Yes I gathered that :) I don’t know if those tend to have lot of conversation though?

I see rec.arts.sf.written and talk.origins are active, which tracks honestly but is still a nice surprise. sci.bio.evolution seems deceased, I don’t know if any other science group survived.