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Cake day: Jun 13, 2023

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It doesn’t need to have a use case. Use cases are for users and our priorities don’t really rank near the top anymore. It’s mostly cargo cult follow-the-leader product management at this point, so it needs to have the latest buzzwords tagged on like blockchain or machine learning or something-as-a-service so investors will get hyped for it and maybe generate some buzz in the tech industry.


This shit just feels like more work.

What if they miss their standup? Are the admins going to assign moderators tasks in Jira next? What if they don’t agree on the story points, should the moderators still consider themselves committed to the work this sprint?

Also, how much will the feedback from these conversations weigh in on the moderators’ quarterly performance reviews?


I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:

  • Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
  • Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
  • Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
  • Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like

What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.


You can block communities and magazines that focus on it, which should get rid of the lion’s share of Reddit-related content. It’s been a bit disappointing to see so much low-effort, choir-preaching memes and content flood in. Hopefully the Fediverse can progress to a place where the primary activities extend beyond discussing the Fediverse & Reddit.


I’m starting to come around to the idea that kbin/Lemmy doesn’t need to experience massive amounts of user growth in order to succeed, and I’m not certain that we’d even want anything approaching the userbase that Reddit has. Similar to how not every city needs to be NYC, and some people prefer living in a smaller city.

I suppose there’s a happy medium between “wow this place is dead” and “the cacophony of voices makes posting here feel like shouting into the void” that we’re shooting for.


I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.


The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this behavior is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn’t work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:

Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.

For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you’d have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:

Deimos’s comments by new: 948, 238, 153
Deimos’s comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
Deimos’s comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the “new” list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.

One of the problems with this system (which is probably what’s causing @phedre’s issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets “pushed off the end”. The comment still exists, but you won’t be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it’s no longer in that listing.

Deleting comments also doesn’t cause previously “pushed off” ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.

And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.

All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.


Exactly. And manufacturing fake grievances only serves to discredit the legitimate ones.

It would be fair to say that he and Reddit leadership not only provided a platform for deplorable communities like r/jailbait to flourish, but benefitted from them financially, while claiming that they can’t do anything about it because freeze peach.

Here’s the direct quote from the General Manager of Reddit:

I don’t want to be the one making those decisions for anyone but myself, and it’s not the business reddit is in. We’re a free speech site with very few exceptions (mostly personal info) and having to stomach occasional troll reddit like picsofdeadkids or morally quesitonable reddits like jailbait are part of the price of free speech on a site like this.


My guess is that the admin who sent that just copied & pasted the same message they’re sending to other subreddits without editing it first. They have a limited amount of admins, and there are a lot of subreddits that went (and remain) private, so they’re definitely not writing bespoke messages to each and every subreddit.

I suspect they have some rough templates depending on the scenario each subreddit is operating under:

  • If sub is private > send message A
  • If sub is restricted > send message B
  • If sub is NSFW but not normally > send message C
  • If sub is proposing letting the community vote > send message D

Reddit Admins Deny Subreddit Users the Right to Vote for Further Blackouts
Like many other subreddits, r/Finland is allowing its users to vote for whether or not they should a) reopen as normal, b) remain closed, or c) remain in protest mode. However, the admins just sent them a nastygram essentially saying that's not allowed: > > > Your community sees well over 2 million unique visitors each month. Allowing a small segment of those users to make a decision for a community forever does not make sense. There are a huge number of people that use this space now and who will in the future > > > > Polling to close is not a viable option that will return a result that resolves this situation > > However, mods can *also* see traffic stats, which show them as closer to 20k uniques per month. My guess is that this is a copy/pasted message and a whole bunch of subreddits are getting this notice. I thought this was a particularly nasty new development, since up until now the excuse has been that we can't let these Landed Gentry dictate the state of our subreddits, but now they're explicitly saying that they also don't care about how *the users of a subreddit* vote either.
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The creator of tildes.net is a former Reddit backend developer, and believes this is likely due to how Reddit caching works (or doesn’t work), rather than an intentional subversion of user intent:

Yes, this is almost certainly a technical issue. The way reddit caches things probably isn’t the standard way you’re thinking of, like a short-term cache that expires and refreshes itself. There are multiple layers of “cached” listings and items for almost everything, and a lot of these caches are actually data that’s stored permanently and kept up to date individually.

For example, when you view your comments page, Reddit uses a cached (permanent) list of which comments are in that page. There is a separate list stored for each sorting method. For example, maybe you’d have something like this with some made-up comment IDs:

Deimos’s comments by new: 948, 238, 153
Deimos’s comments by hot: 238, 153, 948
Deimos’s comments by controversial: 153, 238, 948
If I post a new comment, it will go through each list and add the new ID in the right spot (for example, in the “new” list it always just goes at the start). If I delete a comment, it goes through every list, and removes the ID if it can find it in there.

One of the problems with this system (which is probably what’s causing @phedre’s issues, and affecting many other people trying to delete their whole history) is that all of these listings are capped at 1000 items. If you already have more than 1000 comments and you post a new one, the 1000th comment currently in the new list gets “pushed off the end”. The comment still exists, but you won’t be able to see it by looking through your comments page, because it’s no longer in that listing.

Deleting comments also doesn’t cause previously “pushed off” ones to get re-added. If you have 5000 comments, your listing will only include 1000 of them. If you delete 50 of the ones in the listing, your listing now has 950 comments in it. If you delete all 1000 from the listing, your comments page will appear empty, but you actually still have 4000 comments that will be visible in the comments pages they were posted in.

And this is only one aspect of it. There are also multiple other places and ways that comments are cached—comment trees are cached (order and nesting of comments on a comments page, for all the different sorting methods), rendered HTML versions of comments are cached, API data is probably cached, and so on.

All of these issues are probably just some combination of all of your posts being difficult to find and access due to the listing limits or certain cached representations of posts not being cleared or updated properly.


I’ve been a Relay devotee, but Sync is a great app too, and I’m really looking forward to 1-3 months from now when we’ll likely have a wide variety of apps to choose from.

It just prompts me to pause and consider how poorly Reddit managed to handle this situation. Rather than offer reasonable API terms, or even a normal timeline, which would have been a win-win-win scenario, they’ve:

  • Motivated a large chunk of their userbase to join competing sites
  • Driven their 3rd-party developers away, some of which will be creating apps for those competing sites, likely bringing their users with them
  • Alienated their free labor force of moderators
  • Abandoned their users who have accessibility issues
  • Whipped up the rabble into a mob. The internet loves to grab a pitchfork, for the lolz as much as anything
  • Spun up a monthlong parade of worst media coverage they’ve ever suffered across not just tech media, but all media. Which is really quite staggering accomplishment given their previous controversies.
  • …in the year that they are aiming to IPO.

I’m really curious what rank-and-file reddit employees think about Steve Huffman and this whole affair. The guy has singlehandedly taken a match to their equity and I can’t imagine that would prompt a positive response.


Steve Huffman, the Reddit CEO, told NBC News in an interview that a user protest on the site this week is led by a minority of moderators and doesn’t have wide support.

ok

r/pics: return to normal, -2,329 votes; “only allow images of John Oliver looking sexy,” 37,331 votes.
r/gifs: return to normal, -1,851 votes; only feature GIFs of John Oliver, 13,696 votes.

Having trouble reconciling why these polls are always overwhelmingly in favor of continuing protests when users are apparently opposed to them. Craziest thing.


Want to get Google results for Reddit without contributing to their engagement metrics? Here are a few redirector scripts/extensions suggestions.
As I suspect many of you have also found, avoiding Reddit is easier in theory than in practice due to the longstanding reciprocal nature of: * Google Search results being useless without Reddit * Searching Reddit being useless without Google It seems unfair that Reddit Inc. the Profit-Driven Company should be able to hold hostage the content created by Reddit the Community of Users. The good news is that there are scripts and extensions available to redirect those Google links to Reddit alternative front ends such as [teddit](https://teddit.net/) & [libreddit](https://github.com/libreddit/libreddit). Right now, these use the official API. After the API changes go live, I suspect the big brains of the internet will come up with an alternative, something along the lines of how Nitter has been able to pull Twitter data via unofficial APIs. Chrome: [Teddit Please](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/teddit-please/plgkifjefgnakpadlnkmlcfmkiegahfe) [Privacy Redirect](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb) Firefox: [Teddit redirect](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reddit-to-teddit-redirect/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search) [Libreddit](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libreddit/?utm_source=addons.mozilla.org&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=search) [Tampermonkey ](https://www.tampermonkey.net/) scripts: [Reddit-to-Teddit Redirector](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/450004-reddit-to-teddit-redirector) [Reddit-to-Libreddit](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441420-reddit-to-libreddit)
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