Reddit just feels dirty to me now, not in a good dirty way... Just dirty, I want nothing to do with it. I see no coming back from this even if the backlash leads to Reddit reversing the decisions. Kind of new the IPO would do something like this. Looking forward to seeing this place bloom.
I predict that as the blackout goes into full swing, Reddit is going to start taking over major subreddits from their mods to keep the site going. Things are going to become ugly very fast.
Iirc one of the mods said that the blackout was designed to prevent that. If it's 2 days, they likely won't bother taking them over. But an indefinite lock down they probably will. Even then though, that disruption in content will likely be too large to handle for most users
If it’s only temporary then I as an admin would just wait it out, then go about my comically evil business. Reddit staff can’t realistically moderate the entire site, so the best way to get the message across is to stop moderating and let things burn until the bean counters can’t take the heat. Just my opinion, not that I want that to happen.
I just say screw it and leave. But that's coming from more of a lurker on Reddit.
Oh I have, I only put off deleting my account so I could tell spez to 🖕himself at the AMA.
I've been wondering the same thing.
We've all said for years that we've seen a slow decline but never knew when it was time to leave. Now all of a sudden here we have the giant sign saying "We've gone full corporate and don't care about the users anymore"
yeah this isn't such a huge thing on it's own (tough it is shitty), it's this combined with the years of other steady decline in a thousand small ways. Most people on reddit have agreed for some time now that the site has gone to shit, but there haven't really been viable alternatives or enough of a reason to pick up stakes and leave. Now there is, and hopefully enough people leave for good to Lemmy, Kbin, or others so that the change can stick
Amen.
100% too gross for me
I kinda feel the same way. I've used the official Reddit app before, and I might've considered using a modded version of the official client, but I just feel gross even having a Reddit account after what they've done. Despite the fact that I use old.reddit as well, once Apollo is gone I reckon I'll delete my account.
A lot of mucky feeling about it has been partitioned by Apollo for me. I specifically didn’t want to interact with online politics so I set up tons of keyword filters and blocked honestly a few thousand subreddits. I turned off awards and things. I could actually browse r/all and see cool and unique content. It felt really close to classic Reddit and it insulated me from a lot of the passing drama.
Drama around the thing I used to make that space for myself was inescapable. The entire saga, from the evasiveness on details in the initial post, to the insane pricing, to the blackmail accusations make it impossible not to see how rotten the leadership is at the very top. Even if all the API stuff gets reset (it won’t) I can’t feel good about Reddit anymore.
At least the Internet Historian video about this will be absolutely lit.
I think this reply by spez has been badly overlooked:
“the LLM explosion put all Reddit data use at the forefront”.
What he means here is that earlier this year the board realised they were sitting on a massive gold mine, and their single focus right now is to exploit that as ruthlessly as possible. Jacking up the prices to access Reddit data to eye-watering levels is intended to fleece desperate AI bros, and this may well be the only revenue stream Reddit cares about in the future.
The fact that they have put no thought or care into managing the damage that this does to third party apps and to their own reputation with the Reddit user base tells me something else too. Why bother being a good custodian of a community website that has never made a profit, when you could live off selling access to one of the largest bodies of good quality human-generated text-based content out there?
Do they even care if Reddit goes to shit in the future? Maybe not, especially now we are beginning to realise how easy it is for careful bots to poison the conversations with AI-generated replies.
In my opinion, we're reaching a moment where people are realizing that having lots of users doesn't matter that much if you can't monetize them. We took a lot of services for granted that maybe don't make any financial sense, which probably only survived because both the company and investors hoped that as long you could attract users, you could monetize them later.
I think that "later" is now.
Today I noticed that youtube has a new feature that unlocks more bitrate, but only for premium users (there's two 1080p options, one normal and another with more bitrate). I'm expecting that these social medias and other tech companies will try to monetize us further
Yeah exactly. I think what we need is decentralization and a move back to smaller hobbyist message boards - the costs of running such communities is more sustainable for individual owners and they are not so big that their owners would look to sell them out.
That's certainly my hope for the federated model. Scope and scale have been issues since the advent of social media, which encouraged users to centralize all of their interactions in one spot. One hundred people shooting the shit on a specific interest will always be a better experience than orders of magnitude more people who know nothing of the context spouting off to feel good about themselves.
I found the quality of my Reddit interactions had gone so far downhill that I took a month off to start the year. I'd gotten sucked into the belief that upvotes == quality of what I was writing, which creates perverse motivations completely unrelated to being more informed about the world.
I mean upvotes are related to how a post is.
Anyways I don't expect places like Lemmy to fix the ills of social media - eventually running something like this will cost their owners too much money and something will have to give. Also moderation has always been an issue, even with the message boards of old.
Agreed on the last point. That's part of what I was alluding to in terms of scope and scale. The smaller communities from early internet days (my experience overlaps with the time of BBSs but never included them) were pretty light on moderation. If you were a dick on IRC, you got booted. If you spouted off about politics in places that weren't about politics on phpBB, you were ignored then booted. These days, that sort of dynamic has moved to Discord, with people expecting that they should be able to say whatever they want, wherever they want everywhere else.
But I feel you're begging the question on funding. The ownership and profit model is the problem. User subscriptions can solve that funding issue in a vacuum; reality tends to be a bit messier, but I'm hoping we'll find that it works.
Well on the Lemmy subreddit, some people are already complaining about moderation issues here, and how you can't block federated servers you don't want to see individually - that is up to the federated server itself. Honestly, while Lemmy seems cool, I can see issues arising as it scales, especially with regards to moderation.
Beehaw seems to be fine, but some users have explained that they take issue with Lemmy.ml's moderation - chiefly from the main developer who created this platform to begin with. And that's troubling too. For example, on Lemmy.ml, any talk about Russia or China (or anything similar) is banned. You can't safely talk about the war in Ukraine here without getting banned from the main federated server.
As Lemmy gets bigger there will be more and larger communities that aren't on Lemmy.ml, and if you're worried about the software itself, aside from being open source, there's also already a fediverse alternative called kbin. You can even used it to follow Lemmy communities if you want.
The whole point of the fediverse is that it can't reaaly get screwed up by a small number of people.
I'm versed in ActivityPub to the extent the Twitter imbroglio landed Mastodon on Ars and Techdirt, so ... not very well. But wouldn't someone who really wants control over which instances they see be able to spin up one of their own and then just not let people join?
I guess. I'm kind of new to whole idea of federation myself, never jumped on Mastodon, for example. But we will see as Lemmy and its federated instances scale up.
I didn't get on Mastodon either, as I never got the appeal of Twitter.
I misread the last sentence in your prior response the first time around. That's worrisome. What's the practical impact of being banned on the main server? "Decentralized" is not the term I'd use for a network where one node has absolute control.
Let's say you sign up on Beehaw. You post a comment that gets you banned from Lemmy.ml. That means your posts will no longer show up to users of Lemmy.ml. If all federated instances were equal, then that wouldn't be a huge problem; your comments will still receive enough interactions. But right now, since most of the activity is on Lemmy.ml, getting banned could reduce the quality of your experience on Lemmy as a whole, i.e., you receiving fewer interactions from your posts.
So, you'd only be able to interact with those on instances that believe the Ukraine war is a valid topic of discussion? Kinda seems like a feature. Reddit is the easy example of why quantity is not my goal in online interaction ...
Yeah I imagine as Lemmy scales you are going to see moderation issues. But that's message board culture in general.
Wait is that really how that works? Geez..that doesn't seem right.
@Powderhorn @rimlogger the cool thing about decentralization and activitypub is that I'm replying to you now from a Mastodon instance. The conversation isn't as nicely threaded but it works.
Yep, can always make your own instance and look at whatever instances you want
@rimlogger @tango_octogono there is good argument to be made that these "unified services" were created to monetize them in first place.
Said that, federation as a concept of new era of social networking is good foundation. Hope it sticks and we work out quirks and people learn how to use it.
That's what I've been thinking, as well -- if a message board (or any other service) doesn't reach that critical user mass where it's no longer sustainable, then there's less chances of it selling out
It's because of market conditions. Low interest -> Companies spend money and chase growth High interest -> Companies try to monetize users
No more low interest rates...
@tango_octogono @alyaza YouTube basically spams ads and begs to sign up for Premium.
Thanks to adblock i never see those on PC. Wouldn't dream of opening u-toob on mobile though..
I use YouTube almost exclusively on mobile and TV devices, but I also filter my DNS requests to block things that I don't like.
Something that seems to be missing: Someone is working on an API compatibility/translation layer to help in porting reddit apps to lemmy and have already got some basic features working in RedReader. The RedReader (opensource Android reddit client) dev has expressed some interest in this along with the user base.
https://v.redd.it/xzvh8kih8d4b1
I've been tangentially involved in this. I think if any of the bigger instance operators were to contact derivator to see what can be done to host a gateway, that would really help.
Since it's a proxy you'd want a reliable entity to host it, who you trust with your credentials. And the only entities who currently make sense would be the lemmy instance owners themselves. Eg. if I'm already connecting to beehaw.org or lemmy.world, I would be okay to point apollo or baconreader to redditapi.beehaw.org.
See here for a list of how people can help: https://github.com/derivator/tafkars/tree/main/tafkars-lemmy
That is awesome :) Thank you for chipping in. I wasn't aware it was this far along already!
I've been enjoying using RedReader so far, and I'd love to see it switch to Lemmy instances
Me too. The app has a classic feel to it that isn't replicated by other apps.
A lot more customizable too. I love the ability to hide scores, upvote/downvote buttons, reply button, etc.
Exactly! My favourite is swipe to vote up/down!
I'd really like to see this happen for RiF. Not likely, but one can dream...
Sharing this because it should be shared
I've been getting used to lemmy for the last couple days, going back and forth between here and reddit and following what's going on, and I think I just realized something that I hadn't been able to put into words.
The lemmy community feels responsive and fun to talk to, and I think that's because the people who are coming here from reddit are the people who are motivated to communicate, and are people who care about the topics in each community. That's pretty cool.
I keep sitting here waiting for Reddit to backtrack. But it keeps not happening.
Reddit isn't going back. Even if they did I'm sure they just convinced multiple users to not go back. I hope the blackout and tons of users moving will have a big enough impact to devalue Reddit even if somewhat.
I predict Reddit backing out, lowering the API price to something realistic, and then everyone forgets what happened, like every other time something like this has happened.
if there can be a coordinated migration to the fediverse during blackout, that'd be the dream.
wouldn't it be amazing when all of spez's attempts to make reddit look pretty for shareholders completely fail so they ruined their community for absolutely nothing
Yeah I think this is going to be the event that finally causes a critical mass exodus. I mean, digg tried to keep going after the migration to reddit, but it was never the same again. Reddit is dead, it's only a matter of time until it's a called.
Question:
How do you address the concerns of users who feel that Reddit has become increasingly profit-driven and less focused on community engagement?
We’ll continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive. Unlike some of the 3P apps, we are not profitable.
This is where I lost all hope.
There'd be all kinds of better ways to go about making profit / becoming financially sustainable. This is blatant ignorance and mismanagement, without hearing or seeing anything. Complete mismanagement.
I’m doubtful because I feel like the business goons did the math, found the expected profit of killing 3rd party apps and taking the backlash was higher than keeping the status quo, and have committed to the more profitable option.
I’m glad at least one site is taking off the kid gloves with the title.
There was a response on the AMA where u/spez said "Reddit would always be profit driven and currently does not make a profit. Unlike TP apps"
You can no longer see this on the Reddit app, it is obscured in someway. Perhaps because of the potential impact for the IPO?
He is essentially saying, "we are unable to make a profit, so our plan is to use someone else's profit to make money."
What I think he's going for is sympathy points, but he did not read that back lol
I think at point it’s the sole goal of Reddit to pump their ad revenue numbers until the IPO.
Hilarious I can still see it on Apollo. I did notice while refreshing on spez’s comments that on that particular comment his name changed from red (normal admin color) to black, and then a few minutes later red again. I don’t know what it means, but it smells.
I also noticed the time posted got fuckity on that comment. I’m looking at comments sorted newest on top but the time of that comment is out of order
The AMA doesn't even show up on spez's profile. Lmfao.
I would not be surprised if a lawyer jumped in and said that revealing even profitability vs not is something they should do through official channels.
He just admitted, just as they're trying to IPO, that they're still not profitable. If these third party apps that make up a fraction of their users -- their most engaged, active users, by the way -- are the difference between profit and loss, they need a better model.
If it is true than he literally shot himself in the foot.
Just like you said if it is true that the "1-3%" of the users that use 3rd party apps (by spez his word) can actually provide a profit for the 3rd party apps and the 90+% that uses official reddit channels still cannot... then they have a very big problem.
I wouldn't even be surprised though. His whole demeanor reeks of jealousy and contempt.
The fact that a 3rd party app was actually featured on the Apple event multiple times and name dropped multiple times as "the" way to use reddit, has to absolutely sting as hell.
Edit; experiencing some lag ;)
deleted by /u/spez
do you have a direct link to this one
While tangentially related, if this shouldnt be here, let me know.
Reddit also appears to be experimenting with disabling mobile web access to circumvent ads.
They really want to cram those hegetsus ads down people's throats. I hope everyone migrates away to different options. Leave them holding turds.
Reddit confirmed for being into gaping Jesus.
all of these changes reek of desperation. i'm deeply curious as to what's going on behind the scenes at reddit HQ
They're all trying on monocles and top hats
oh for fuck's sake.
Wow. Spez is doubling down on attacking the Apollo dev. You'd think spez was new to reddit with the way he's commenting.
I don't get what his angle is. Is it just dumb ego or am I missing something?
He's selling and he's going to point his investors to his AMA comments.
Not sure what his responses are going to do for investors' confidence, given that they mostly show a complete lack of understanding of his userbase, and the reaction to them implies that he's trying to sell them damaged goods.
I mean, I might have accepted a response along the lines of "We're very sorry that we slandered the dev of the most popular third party app for our service, tensions have been running high of late and we're all not at our best right now. Also, bottom line is that running Reddit is ruinously expensive and we desperately need to monetize users somehow, and this seemed like a viable option at the time."
Instead it's all doubling down on everything, not giving any ground. They want those Elon Twitter API dollars (to the extent that anybody is actually paying those!) and they're done with treating their users as anything other than content generation for LLM model training.
Again anything public facing is a lie. The rich investment firms know that it's designed just to try and placate an unruly userbase. Now if something comes of it? Then they'll care. If the blackout happens I wouldn't be shocked if there's wholesale usurpation of the mod teams to reopen the big ones.
e: typo
I fully expect that subs with major frontpage presences are going to get taken over by the mothership and reopened almost immediately. They may even be able to find some poor saps to mod them, at least for a couple weeks until they realize that's a full-time job. But the smaller subs are what long-time and power users end up diffusing to and what keeps them engaged with the site over time, and those are likely going to be dead or zombies shortly. Any investor putting money into Reddit for any reason other than short-term trading or hoping to be at the front of the line to pick over the corpse in a few years has failed to do their due diligence.
Now is the perfect time to short reddit stock :o
I think the way I see it is that the vast majority of Reddit users have no idea that any of this is going on, and wouldn’t care if they did.
So from Corporate’s perspective, all they have to do is deal with a few weeks of whining and teeth gnashing, before everything calms down again and they can get on with whoring Reddit out.
Ultimately they’ll end up back in the black again, and making enough money from the IPO to not give the tiniest rats ass about any of this. They’ll sail off into the sunset on a fleet of expensive yachts, and never give Reddit another thought.
The people who don't notice are probably not the people bringing the content or moderating the subs though.
It's all corpspeak. It means nothing except to lie and gaslight users into staying so he can cash out.
Pao was used by design to piss people off. They made her CEO and had her implement on the changes they knew would be unpopular with the community, then “fired” her, complete with her own golden parachute.
And kept all of “her” changes.
It's bizarre to read his comment on that. It's either psychopath behaviour, or... I just don't know. I'm not a psychologist. It is worrying though, to see a human in charge of a social company act like that. He should probably be removed by some legal means just for that comment alone.
I do not know much details about the internal power structures of a company like reddit, but it seems like this guy seems to be a real liability at the moment. I wonder why he is being allowed to go around doing this.
Maybe they are giving him enough rope to hang himself so he can be removed from his position in a few days. Firing a disliked manager is a common union busting tactic. If he can be made into the centre of gravity for all the ire, canning him and making some small backtrack could have a lot of people reconsidering leaving reddit.
Or maybe there truly is no plan....
He is one of the founders and likely holds a big amount of shares.
Wouldn't be the first time they've done that
classic bully behavior
Yeah I think it was too much to hope there would actually be good-faith engagement at this point. It was just more corporate messaging.
Lol. This sounds like a dig at spez.
I just don't get how a site based on freely produced content thst employs volunteer mods can actually monetise.
That part just gets me. The site has nothing without the users and the users have nothing without the mods.
The active mod team of r/videos (nearly 27M subscribers) has agreed that their shutdown will now be permanent. https://reddit.com/r/videos/comments/145vns0/the_future_of_rvideos/
In a tildes post (I’m riding a lot of horses right now) one of the mods said:
I know this is likely a symbolic gesture because I'm fairly confident reddit will just kick us out and bring the subreddit back up, but after being on the mod team for over a decade its going to be interesting to see how things even function if they decide to take that route.
[Edit: just seen that’s there’s a top level post on this too]
Well, the AMA was a shining success…
The way that guy gaslit the Appolo dev, and doubles down that the Appolo dev is the bad guy. Even though the recording is clear that the reddit ceo is straight up lying. Imaging working with, or having to interact with someone who so easily lies like that. Shameless
It’s hilarious really. Christian has the fucking receipts. Spez can say what he wants, but it’s meaningless drivel.
Also, I just looked into the AMA and....he only gave 14 answers 🙄
To their credit, there were other admins too!
Collectively, they answered responded to a whopping additional 5 comments!
I may miss the community, but I definitely won't miss reddit.
The answers were all copy & paste canned ones. No wonder
Oblig. fuck u/spez
Seconded fuck /u/spez
It is hilarious to see this happening. Option A, he could have just shut up, released a press statement and waited till this blew over, he didn't do that. Option B would have been to do an AMA, engage with people and say nice but meaningless things to placate people and do whatever he wants in private, he didn't do that either.
Instead he choses to host an AMA, copy pastes canned responses, edits his comment when someone caught it, ditches the canned response when a question is asked about the Apollo thing and doubles down, and finally leaves after answering 14 questions.
You really can't make this shit up 🤣
Did they ever publish the starting time, or did it just start? It seemed to have happened while I was asleep. Not that I'd have stayed up for it ha.
I love how the AMA has 0 points. You down vote it and it comes back to 0. No manipulation there reddit. Just that alone shows what a disgrace that company is.
I don't think posts on reddit ever actually show less than 0 points no matter how many downvotes they get. Comments do, but posts always bottom out at 0 as far as I know.
Ahhh. What about that ea post? Didn't it have some crazy negative number? Or was that just the comment? Probably the comment
That was a specific comment
On Reddit, comments can show negative scores, but posts will never show a score lower than zero. It used to be possible to determine how negative a post score really was, but that hasn't been possible for some time now.
Edit: I guess that doesn't really answer your question. I read too fast, whoops.
When the individual up and downvote counts on comments and threads went away, that was a bad sign. Back in the old days you might see a comment with a -100 total score, but you could also see it had 400 upvotes and 500 downvotes, which made it a lot more clear it was a controversial but perhaps not wholly worthless comment. Modern reddit design just shows the final number, which I think capitalizes on internet hivemind behavior.
One or more of the Reddit interfaces displays a dagger on comments that are "controversial", notably missing from the official phone app I think. I do miss the individual counts, though.
I have (or should say "had") the dagger on Apollo, but it's a downgrade from being able to see the straight numbers. And of course my point being that reddit has continued to obfuscate info, so even though it is on 3rd party they have no problem hiding it from the primary userbase. Just I don't know. Talking about all this kind of wears me out, ya know? I think everybody here is just tired of reddit the machine.
Oh, it's been such a long time since I've used the official Reddit app that I forgot about this, because you can see the downvotes in other apps.
That's been a thing for a long time. Threads can not go into negatives. You can only see the upvote percentage.
You aren't the first person I've seen confused about that, which I think indicates a big problem with reddit's modern design. Back in the old days on every thread and comment you could see both how many up and down votes it got, not just the total number. It was cleaner and more transparent. Over time, reddit has increasingly obfuscated how all the magic numbers work.
Before they changed what numbers they showed, there were karma farmers that specifically posted dumb stuff to rack up the most negative karma score they could. Over time Reddit has done a fair bit of tweaking of what numbers are shown and setting caps or floors in some places.
This isn't special behavior, all posts have a floor of 0. Only comments can have negative scores.
It doesn't even show up on spez's profile lmfao. Last post says 1 year ago. Definitely no manipulation there.
This whole situation feels like a short term revenue grab. I bet shareholders are trying to inflate the numbers in order to cash out in the IPO.
what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can't piece together a good and accessible experience for their users...
I'm hanging on to my account until June 30th—so I can say a bittersweet goodbye to Reddit is Fun—and then I'm deleting it; Reddit is only going to get worse from here, and I don't want to be around to see it. I'm grateful that this mess has driven so many of us to seek out kinder, more thoughtful communities, and I hope said communities can retain their exceptional cultures as the Reddit exodus continues to escalate.
This is my take. Reddit has been on a trajectory towards enshittification for a long while. The API thing has created a focal point where a lot of people are passed off at the same time.
Care to elaborate ?
Don't forget to yoink your content on the way out, or else they get to keep it.
Digital gentrification is an interesting term. But yeah, TPA users have to be a particular type of users. Like power users, or just generally more discerning people who don't want to use a crap interface. And they're just happy to be rid of us it seems.
Edit: Why does it say "bot account" next to my name?
Try going to settings and unchecking "Bot Account"
Guess I skimmed through the settings page too fast. Thanks.
That's exactly what a bot would say.
I’m not a bot, I’m an AI language model designed to assist you with your queries.
Sync for Reddit is also shutting down on June 30th.
ReddPlanet also announced closure on June 30th.
Reddit creates API exemption for noncommercial accessibility apps (Ehhhh, grain of salt on this one. I'm getting a lot of conflicting reports.)
Relay is also out.
EDITS: fixed Sync names, added ReddPlanet. Will keep adding as I see them.
"If you do a better job than us at something we don't care about, have fun*"
*as long as blind users will have reddit ads read to them (probably)
RedReader has been granted a non-commercial accessibility exemption and will not shut down. QuantumBadger is planning long term changes to support Lemmy, HackerNews, and Tild.es alongside Reddit in the same app.
https://www.reddit.com/r/RedReader/comments/145du4j/update_4_redreader_granted_noncommercial/
That is fantastic news.
I've already deleted my reddit account, but I use RedReader primarily as a "look, don't touch" way to view reddit anyways. RedReader allows you to customize so much that you can turn off all the voting buttons and the reply buttons, so you just get a nice minimalist reading experience, don't have the constant tiny mental overhead of voting, and don't risk getting tempted into impulsively wasting your time (and supporting reddit) writing comments/posts.
Edit: being able to use RedReader for Lemmy would be wonderful, but it looks like that might be a thing in the distant future, perhaps, but not the near future.
Interesting, I might do a similar approach in the coming weeks just to keep an eye on some niche subs
I have also deleted it, but I forgot to wipe the data.
I'm going to hold off on deleting mine so I can repost stuff to quieter leemy communities to keep them going until it happens more organically.
I'm using libreddit on PC, and Offline Reader for Reddit for my android, I'm not good at tech stuff, can anyone confirm if they are also exempted?
I believe that libreddit is looking for a workaround against the reddit api changes, if they cannot find one they will move to web scraping
Unless they find a workaround or switch to web scraping, I don't think so. RedReader was exempted specifically because it has a lot of accessibility features for blind users who use screen readers.
I'm out. Redact is busy just now deleting everything under my account.
It's simply disappointing to see the disaster for the AMA. Saddens me to see Reddit go down like this. At least we got the Lemmy-proxy being a community project. Would love to still use Infinity as my main "reddit" browsing app, after all.
I am wondering if, based on this horrible AMA, if subs are going to either blackout early, or decide that 48 hours won't really do anything so they opt to go indefinitely.
/r/traa's main mod said they and the subreddits gone for good after this since they're tools won't be there
r/ffxiv has already considered to extend their blackout period even before the AMA, so it's possible
They need to. This AMA is just telling people that reddit is following through with their changes and telling people to deal with it.
a few communities already have (/r/TropicalWeather) because they can't run under the new circumstances so it's very possible we see a much more chaotic wave of blackouts.
I've learned so much about weather through r/TropicalWeather over the years so I hope they set up shop out here somewhere.
Did a little searching and found their post on r/ModCoord, they are on Discord now for anyone else who is wondering. https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/144lox0/rtropicalweather_has_been_shut_down_indefinitely
Reddit admins will likely just boot the mods and takeover the subreddits. Especially the bigger ones. Heck they may even do that to ones that blackout at all, or past the 14th.
They have threatened and done similar to things like firearm subreddits.
I wonder how well they would keep up with spam
How hard would it be to nuke a sub in a way that's particularly difficult to recover from?
Couldn't really tell you. I haven't done any moderation in many years. And have no knowledge of how their DB system or backups are structured. But make no mistake, Reddit has admin rights and the ability to takeover any sub if they don't feel the mods are doing a good job, and there's been precedence for such action, either due to mod abusing and shuttering a sub, or just not engaging at all or even just going afk and abandoning a sub.
I dont think Mods can outright delete comments or submissions, only hide them. Only a user can overwrite and delete their comments. So....unless basically all users started scrubbing comments it would be hard i would guess. And i wouldnt be shocked if they had replicas or DB backups crawled at the page/submission level to roll back off of to protect such an act. Heck Pushshift was doing about that. I really detested that guy for how he handled privacy. Even had people sign up to exemptions and just straight ignored specific requests to have their user pages excluded from crawling.
I wonder how much backtracking will be done. Are they going to listen to the concerns of the community or are they going to double down on their decisions?
My guess - zero backtracking
From how the AMA went, it sure seems that way. Funny how they just agreed to fuck over Apollo, but are working with the other apps, especially after blatantly lying about the situation. What a mess.
Spez was likely pissy that Christian called him on his bullshit and had all the receipts to prove it.
I'll bet spez isn't too happy about Apollo featuring in the Apple WWDC rather than the official app, either
Thin skin and the inability to admit that you’re wrong aren’t great qualities to have in a CEO…
And yet most CEOs have precisely those narcissistic tendencies
Fair point.
They say they are working with other apps but there were other devs posting that they've been trying to reach out but not getting any answers. The ball is being dropped on so many aspects.
They will only work with apps that are "non-commercial", AKA free labour. There's no way an app survives without some kind of monetisation. It's just a money sink then. It's honestly incredible how shitty they're being.
Yeah, in their answers, they didn't show any will to compromise.
Wow, RedReader somehow managed to get spared due to its accessibility features. Was not on my bingo card at all. I guess somehow I can still manage to use Reddit completely ad free, but who knows for how long. Even better, the RedReader dev might have plans to integrate Lemmy into it.
The “non-commercial” requirement to exempt third party accessibility apps is extremely underhanded and not being talked about enough.
Aka, “We don’t care enough about accessibility to pay anyone to do it for us”
Coming from Joey for Reddit. They pulled a survey today for its users asking 2 questions: if we'd be willing to pay and how much and for some suggestion for the future of the app.
I said no and suggested them to think about developing an app for Lemmy.
Joey is great. Looks like it lacks tools for modding, but I couldn't care less. It has everything else, is beautiful and customizable.
Such a shame to see it sinking because of Reddit's bullshit.
I really hope we go forward with this migration.
Seeing the increased activity since I signed up has been cool to see. While places like this may never get as big as reddit the userbase is starting to grow enough where I would definitely love third party apps and Reddit Enhancement suite equivalents to pop up.
So this is where you fellow Joey users have been hiding in. I swear out of all the TPA and API subs/posts it always seemed like I was the only Joey user.
About the survey, I did say I was willing to go $4/mo max. I wanted to support the dev as it has been my go-to app for years.
I understand supporting devs, I bought RIF years ago, but personally I couldn't imagine paying a monthly fee just to use reddit, regardless of who gets the money.
Also coming from Joey. I miss the swipe gestures and many of the other features but hopefully that'll be coming soon. More voices should hopefully mean more interested parties and supporters.
I'm another Joey user, and I said I would be willing to pay around $3/month, and yes, I'd love to see a Joey for Lemmy. I spend hours every day on Joey (or I did,) so it seems only fair to support that.
Hacker News: Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin
KbinMigration Subreddit URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/KbinMigration
Hacker News Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268458
Man that whole situation really sucks. Reddit was by far my most visited site before they decided to light the house on fire. On mobile I always used Boost because the official app is terrible and (at least the last time I looked at it) would drain my battery like it was nothing even when the app was closed. RIP. At least we've got Lemmy. I just wish these 3rd party apps would take their users to the fediverse instead of shutting down entirely. As a developer it really sucks when you have to shut down a project you've put so much work into.
What a colossal shit show. They're hellbent on destroying third party competition before the IPO. Next on the chopping block are old.reddit and porn.
Wouldn't be surprised if $8 red check marks appear soon
r/iPhone mods 6 hours ago: In less than 24 hours, /r/iPhone will be going private indefinitely.
BBC coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-65855608
I wish they included Selig's follow up on disproving the app's supposed inefficiency.
The AMA with u/spez has started. Get your popcorn ready. It’s already been a good start
Looks like I'm dropping reddit after my final hardware swap sale gets confirmed. Such a sad disgrace. Glad to be here :D
Is the vote count disabled for this AMA?
I don’t think so…
Do you see a number as vote count?
on the post? says 0 for me
i think it's disabled for most of them
hmm, alright. I looked into r/reddit and saw no other post that looked the same, and got curious
Spamming /r/LemmyMigration on all his answers. Doing my part lol
Spamming and being annoying won't really help anything. If anything it could push people away. I'd suggest being a bit more tactful about where you try and help push more people here.
All my comments are upvoted lol. You're the one who assumed I was being annoying.
Hello. While what Reddit is doing isn't great, it's the reality of running a site that's now owned by venture capital to make some kind of economic return for its owners. Running a site like that isn't free, and advertising dollars alone are probably not enough to generate the sort of return that its owners are looking for (or even pay for the its costs).
The core issue is twofold: Big Tech has devalued online services to the point where users are inured to not paying for them, and because of this inurement, most users are unwilling to pay for most online services if they don't seem to be offering a value add. Gaming services like Steam have managed to get their users to pay but that's because they are offering a service that's generally superior to piracy, such as immediate downloads, achievements, and other online services. But no one is ever going to pay to use a message board, and I doubt gimmicks like Reddit Gold bring in much money.
Perhaps the future is found in the past - people migrating back to self-hosted message boards - there used to be thousands of these back in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of them were run as small businesses, others were run as hobbyist projects by their owners. But I doubt there's going to be a mass exodus, and unfortunately, centralization has increasingly become the norm for the Internet.
The thing about it is its not like people were against paying. these apps are willing to pay. I mean, read the Apollo Devs post if you havnt. He has audio recordings and transcripts
https://old.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/
They are just pricing out third-party apps because they dont want them around. The problem is noone is going to sign up for Reddit Gold. They will just use old.reddit.com with a pop up blocker on the desktop. They wont make ad income from them either.
I'm going to say that Big Tech hasn't devalued online services. They've always been devalued. In the days of BBSes, most had both paid and free options. The free users might get bumped when the board was busy but that was it. You were often still able to dial in at all times and do everything on the board.
Honestly, that concept just carried forward. Usenet access was simply part of your internet access payment to your ISP. Free to join. You just needed a free NTP app. Many web forums were the same - completely free to use and maybe there were some ads, donations, or whatnot to help fund the site. Some even used forums as loss leaders - Harmony Central had their main page along with forums. Ditto other sites like Something Awful and Bodybuilding.com.
Right now the short-term is a mix. The reality is that the major jumps have been to Discord, not other forums, or so it seems. Subreddits already have their own Discord servers in many cases and there's a load of them on top of that. Beyond that, it seems a mixed bag of people trying to find a new home. Talks have varied outside of the Lemmy / Tildes mentions; Fark, Hacker News, City-Data, and various smaller forums.
Seems we'll be split on to at least a few if not many disparate forums and sites to fill various needs.
Yeah. I imagine most people will continue to use Reddit. I know I plan to, but it's always good to explore alternatives.
As someone else said, Reddit will die a death of a thousand cuts. The big hits will be the 3rd party apps loss followed by the expected old.reddit.com loss. That said, the majority of users don't use either of those. I'm seeing some general large site / social media fatigue combined with a lot of mentions of Discord. Given they've even got forum channels now, it seems Discord may be one of a few new smaller web forum options like we had in the late early 2000s with the start of software like vBulletin and phpBB. It's not looking like the Digg to Reddit migration. It's more the Usenet to web forums migration. Reddit is the Usenet 2.0. We're now scattering and waiting for the Usenet 3.0 contenders before a new champion is crowned.
undefined> Perhaps the future is found in the past - people migrating back to self-hosted message boards - there used to be thousands of these back in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of them were run as small businesses, others were run as hobbyist projects by their owners. But I doubt there’s going to be a mass exodus, and unfortunately, centralization has increasingly become the norm for the Internet.
I've been looking out for message board forums for some time after realizing that they really felt different from modern Reddit. The appeal is definitely there, and will probably convince at least a small percentage of Reddit's current user base (which would still mean thousands of users) to move to those pastures.
Lucky that lemmy has that nostalgia covered - https://fedibb.ml/
That design brings back to many memories.
I hope it continues to be worked on.
I could see a resurgence of discussion and some real niche communities hiding behind that layout. Perhaps some themes to recreate other old forum styles too.
The issue is that a lot of them died when Reddit became mainstream. Go back to some of the ones still standing - the activity isn't what it used to be. You see a post every few days on some of them. Why would I post on such sites if no one is going to reply? Might as well post on Reddit lol, where I will get a response within an hour at least.
Very true. I still visit one daily, but that's really the exception. To complete what we previously said, I guess that instead of 2000s message boards, people will gradually move to Lemmy instances, or other alternatives such as kb.bin. The experience is closer to Reddit, and allows for more conversation potential (threads vs chronological order)
IDK. I think Reddit will survive this controversy. Most people have really short memories. Lemmy's growing but still doesn't offer the level of activity that most users are looking for - people don't want to want hours or days with no replies to their post.
undefined> people don’t want to want hours or days with no replies to their post.
True, but at the same time the people replying to them the most are probably the ones that are going to move away, leaving only an empty land lacking actual value. I wasn't there when Digg died, but I guess it was a similar process.
The thing with the digg death was that there was already a Reddit community there; it was smaller perhaps but there would almost always be someone to read your post.
Theres a line of popularity that matters, sure, but the % activity of a place is much more important than just sheer numbers
Perhaps the future is found in the past - people migrating back to self-hosted message boards - there used to be thousands of these back in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of them were run as small businesses, others were run as hobbyist projects by their owners.
I kind of feel like lemmy combines both of these worlds. It is different but allows for people to self host their small communities while choosing to be a part of the larger network (or not).
Joey is currently canvassing for whether people would be willing to pay a subscription. As an average Joey user, the answer is no.
I feel bad no supporting them (Joey) but I rather see Joey support the Lemmy/ActivityPub protocol
Agreed, assuming more than us 20 people take a principled stance and leave Reddit.
I wish people would do this with more platforms in general. However I did pay for the original paid Joey app and would support them if Reddit wasn't going down the typical enshittification path.
"First, thank you for all the years of dedication to Reddit. You’re amazing." - My favorite Mod post of the AMA
You can watch as subreddits go dark here https://reddark.untone.uk/
That website loads painfully slowly. Got impatient after a minute of loading and closed the tab.
loads fine now, probably got hugged to death for a while
How much were these apps making in revenue? Curious how bad the gap is with the API pricing.
If I read it correctly Christian(Apollo Dev) made ~$500.000 for this year by having 50.000 people get the $10 subscription. The problem is that now, since on the 6th month of the year he is forced to shut it down, he has to refund these people for the rest of the money(so ~$250.000).
From what I understand though, the problem is that Reddit doesn't want to lose revenue from 3rd party apps avoiding adds, so in this section, from Christian's own recording(which is legal in Canada) he mentions that Apollo is costing $20m/year and that's what Reddit is after.
Yep and Christian made a somewhat reasonable proposal: If Reddit truly believes Apollo users are costing Reddit $20M in activity a year, it can have my app for $10M which would only be a 6 months worth of liability.
Yeah. What an horrific threat that was, right?
/s
Fucking reddit and /u/spez, specifically, being spineless.
it was hte wurst /s
At least, I understood it in some other way.
With some "back of the envelope" calculations (using Reddit provided revenue and user number) Reddit's revenue (not earnings) / user month is $0.12 , around $1.4 user/year
In the case of Apollo, the "intended" revenue per Apollo user would be $2.5 per user month, around $30 user /year
From the body of the post, search for the following header: Why do you say Reddit's pricing is "too high"? By what metric?
The $20 Million is what would cost to continue using the API with the intended price point.
Also, $500.000 year would be revenue, not earnings. As I understood, he's not a "solo" developer working in his basement. There's people and infraestructure to pay from that number (I don't know neither how many people nor how much costs "keeping the lights on", but anyway, I don't think those numbers are relevant)
My own opinion: Let's say Reddit's break even point is around the Apollo's intended cost / user. That would mean that with a revenue of $0.12 per month * user, Reddit would be losing around $800 million / month. That's close to $10.000 million / year. Even as a ballpark figure, I find it suspicious to say the least.
BTW: I've never used Apollo. RIF user from long long before they had to change the App name
If it was truly about Reddit not wanting to lose money from not serving ads on third party apps, they would serve ads via the API.
I'd love to link it, but there's so much content around this that I'll never be able to find it.
I'm sure it was mentioned by some app developers that they were asking for access to the ad API that Reddit uses in order to serve their ads in the 3rd party apps so they don't have to shutdown.
Also, asking after the proper GraphQL API access (instead of the older and less featured/efficient REST API) now that it's becoming paid access... And I'm sure that the answer was "it's not ready".
Wouldn’t Apple have taken 30% of that though?
I believe that is correct; i.e., the $500k is gross, not net. It doesn't account for his other expenses, either.
So even if his other costs were half what Apple takes, it’s about 1/10 of what the api would cost him. Dang.
It's disappointing that Reddit has chosen to prioritize money after their success :(
Money is the measure of success to a business. It's what they exist for, at least under capitalism.
They'll hold the very idea of community ransom. They'll do it in virtual spaces, and they'll do it in meatspaces. And they won't stop unless it's proven to be deeply unprofitable.
AskHistorians and uncertainty surrounding the future of API access:
Putting into layman's terms what reddit is deleting. Also the number of false promises by Big Reddit, it's just crazy.
I read somewhere that the Infinity dev would just let us grab our own personal Reddit API keys and build the app from source.
If that is actually the case, we'd all individually be under the free limit. That is of course if Reddit gives out those API keys to everyone.
Obviously this solution would be challenging and the barrier to entry would be higher than just joining Lemmy or something. But it could be an option.
It's better to just improve Lemmy than keep going on Reddit. They keep doing more and more shitty anti-user things, for their IPO (initial public offering). This is probably just the beginning
I was just presenting it as an option that may or may not be available.
But yes, I'd prefer to stick with Lemmy improve it, especially the mobile experience
IMO the better thing to do would be to convert it into a Lemmy client. I heard someone is making a Lemmy API that works like reddit's, so maybe it could use that when it's ready?
Either way, I'm starting to work on my own Lemmy app written in React Native. If you have a name better than "ymmel" (reverse "lemmy"), please tell me.
How about Hymmel? Himmel stands for heaven in German, hinting at a safe space for the lost souls in these tiring times.
Nice, I actually like that. Danke!
I would love to have it converted or forked into a Lemmy client
Good luck on your app but ymmel seems like it is too close to yaml for my taste and I'd rather not mix up those two things
- Same
- Someone suggested a different name ("hymmel"), and this one doesn't sound like yaml
How about "Carl"?
That's the most random thing lol, but I like it. Someone already suggested a better name, though
Either spez or FlyingLaserTurtle said this will be against the API's TOS.
Yeah, the solution does seem to good to be true
Time to get my popcorn ready! (First post from my instance).
It’s sad to see Reddit go down this path, but the writing has been on the wall for awhile now. Losing Apollo is what had me make the jump to Lemmy.
Hopefully we build a strong community here.
Edit: typo
I hope this bullshit kills their site. Monetization is necessary in some ways, but this is just pure greed.
Hate to see reddit die like this, but Lemmy does feel like a suitable alternative, and I'm glad I switched over. Hopefully we see a lot more users move over as subreddits go dark.
Incredibly sad to see corporate greed takeover. It's only a matter of time until they remove the old interface. I will definitely stop using Reddit altogether on mobile. It'll be quite hard for me to stop using it on desktop, but I might just give it all up on June 30th.
They said that they're keeping old reddit.
But they also told Christian Selig that the API won't be changing anytime soon...
My concern is that communities on Lemmy are fractured by instance. You CAN read or subscribe to communities on any instance, but communities with the same topics (or even the same names!) on different instances are in no way connected. For example, there can be a community called "Books" on every instance, but if you subscribe to one you will NOT see posts in any of the other Books communities on other instances. You'd have to go out, specifically find each one of them, and subscribe to them separately.
Not to mention communities with different names, but that cover the same essential topic. For example, I'm subscribed to the "Literature" community here. It's nice. But it's entirely disconnected from any of the "Books" communities on other instances. I'm not sure how that sort of fracturing could be addressed. I understand that there's a plan to eventually allow "MultiReddit" style aggregating, allowing users to group a number of communities into a single reading group, but that would only apply to what that individual user would read. No one else would have the benefit of seeing all the posts from those communities in a single group unless they individually recreated that collection.
What might work would be to bake in a set of standard all-instance communities which would automatically merge the content from all instances for those topics for all users. But I'm not sure that would work, since not all instances have to federate with all other instances.
I don’t think of that as a negative. It’s a different structure than Reddit.
Each instance would be a community in the cultural sense. All of the Lemmy communities within that instance would be a place for primarily the same instance users to gather. Each instance having its own cultural identity. Decentralized.
I agree. On reddit, there are a bazillion different "gaming" subreddits that are only named different because that's the only way to have different communities around the same topic: r/gaming, r/games, r/truegaming, r/patientgamers, r/girlgamers, r/transgamers, r/gaymers, and so on.
Each of those communities has a different feel and different moderation and different priorities, and no way no how would I want r/gaming posts mixed in if I'm trying to browse r/transgamers, for example.
Similarly, I'm mostly sticking to Lemmy instances that disable the downvote button, because it makes for friendly places I think, and lowers the barrier to posting for socially anxious users.
I like the idea of there being a way for users, or for similar groups of instances that agree to it (like if beehaw and an instance with similar rules/community feel wanted to collaborate a bit), to set up a multi-lemmy 'all' community thing that shows posts across similar communities, but it should still be optional.
I figure that a multi-Lemmy could be something set up by a user in an app, which would give maximum flexibility to individual users and reduce headaches of mods trying to set up shared spaces.
patientgamers actually has another reason to have a different name, because it's not an attitude everyone will embrace and they wanna be up front about it.
Yeah, this.
And the beauty of this approach is that the community of users is necessarily smaller, so more likely to actually be a community.
There's pros and cons to both centralization and decentralization. I like the idea and the goal of decentralization and federation but you run into issues like this, that are counter-intuitive and will be a road block to broader acceptance. Especially with smaller communities.
I think having the option to aggregate those communities into one view could bridge that gap. Have it be optional. Heck, even allow users/servers to block specific communities if they want.
I like the idea of Lemmy but I don't like the idea of having to subscribe to 7,10,15 different versions of a topic of interest spread across 25 different servers. Let me sub to "Technology" and have a toggle to display "all Technology communities across federated servers".
I’m of no doubt that apps will eventually allow users to manually create multi-Lemmys.
I just think we should kind of chill on trying to 1-for-1 replicate Reddit, or ask for all the features straight off. Reddit has been around for over a decade and the apps and ecosystem have matured a lot. Some of that takes time to happen, since internet communities drive sites so I’d rather give it a bit before making changes.
I just think we should kind of chill on trying to 1-for-1 replicate Reddit
I don't think I want (or was asked for) a 1-to-1 replica of Reddit. Like I said, I get the pros of open source and federation. I'm just pointing out an immediately apparent pain point that I'd like to see be addressed at some point.
I like the idea of Lemmy but I don't like the idea of having to subscribe to 7,10,15 different versions of a topic of interest spread across 25 different servers. Let me sub to "Technology" and have a toggle to display "all Technology communities across federated servers".
Or maybe just have communities tag themselves, and make it so you can sub to tags? With the ability to add exceptions
Agreed. The same thing needed some getting used to when I moved to Mastodon earlier this year, but eventually, you start thinking in “instances” without realizing. I don’t know if the general public will go through the same transition of getting used to the fediverse, but if they will (and I think it’d be a good thing if they do), then this kind of instance-based UX won’t be an intriguing novelty anymore.
Somebody pointed out that it's not dissimilar from the way email works, where someone with a gmail account can easily email someone with a yahoo account, and that everyone understands that well enough. It's presented a lot differently, so that regular users don't even have to think about it - if anything, they can just think of the snail mail metaphor to understand it - but maybe there's a way to simplify Lemmy onboarding too.
Definitely the email metaphor helped me at the time too.
I hope other instances give themselves mascots as Beehaw has done, and foster an internal sense of being a member of an instance rather than a generic Lemmy member. That is a future that seems promising.
I suspect a multi-reddit type functionality will be developed at some point which could partially mitigate the concern.
But besides that, I think we’ll find sites develop around a common interest, and they will each be the “big player” for that topic. LemmyBooks.org for example (not a real instance AFAIK) could be the leading book themed instance; you could still grab their content even though your account is on LemmyMusic.com
I guess multi-reddit style aggregations "supercommunities" could also be curated and subscribed to and maybe even nested. This would allow users to find a "technology" or "book" "supercommunity" that aggregates all communities with the same topic across many instances.
Maybe I'll go back to Usenet.
We were given a sort of a survey in the Joey app asking what's the max we're willing to pay monthly for a subscription. I haven't seen any post from the dev yet. But I'm pessimistic it'll continue since it seems from reddit comments that Joey users are in the minority. I doubt even a subscription fee for its users can save it.
Megathread? Why not just use reddit@lemmy.ml ?
Just changed to lemmy and using the lemmy mobile app. If you set it to ‘subscribed’ its great.
By "Lemmy app" do you mean "Jerboa for Lemmy"? Because I don't see any other apps on the Samsung app store. Maybe the official one is only for iPhone?
No its in testflight for ios called Mlem. Unsure if there is an android version. Maybe?
The Android equivalent is Jerboa
Good to know. Tnx.
Just deleted 2 of my 3 (don't ask me wny I have 3 Reddit accounts, bc I don't know)
I mean I had my regular account, my porn account and my hookup account
Looks like the Chinese "investor" is the Communist Party. The actions Reddit is taking are pretty much how they take down all the companies and citizens they target.
Looks like the Chinese “investor” is the Communist Party.
can we get a citation on this--preferably before asserting it as fact, please? i'd like it if, on this site, we didn't just say things (especially if they sound in line with our priors) but actually substantiate them.
Not fact. It's my opinion based on the actions I see, and the fact things started to go down hill after the investors gave money. One of the big ones was Chinese.
We've seen how things go down when China is involved - loans to poor nations, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the disputed islands with Japan, Tibet, the Urghurs.
We've seen the various iterations of the "oops how did that key logger get in there?" discoveries (Lenovo, i'm looking at you), corporate espionage, Huawei telecommunications infrastructure being used to tap communicatons, etc..
Strict control of pretty much everything is the pattern, in which disinformation is easily dispensed and difficult to identify.
I swear tankies and liberals are basically the same. Tankies blame the CIA for every single bad thing that has ever happened while liberals blame the CCP and the Russian government. SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn't need to be a secret cabal behind everything
SOMETIMES BUSINESS PEOPLE ARE JUST GREEDY AND SOMETIMES AMERICANS ARE JUST SHITTY, there doesn’t need to be a secret cabal behind everything
while i'll wait for the source i asked for and gladly correct this if i'm presuming incorrectly, i'd bet the odds are high that "CCP" is just being used as a shorthand/stand-in for a company like TenCent, because that happens a lot in discussions about China and it's really goofy.
In the interest of fairness, isn't the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I've always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
In the interest of fairness, isn’t the difference between TenCent and the Chinese government basically just paperwork? I’ve always heard (anecdotally) that they work extremely close with the CCP.
i don't know if i'd go that far? with Tencent specifically it is inarguable they have worked with the Chinese government on some things and that's not nothing. but Tencent is still an independent company, and governments and corporations/their shareholders frequently don't have the same interests at heart, so it's hard to say where to draw the line here.
i think my position would be: i don't think it's useful to assert everything they do is intended to advance what China wants, especially in the absence of anything indicating that. i also don't know how useful it is to assume they're just a front for China--certainly i don't think that the people most vocal about this consistently apply that concern to other countries like Saudi Arabia who use companies to advance their state interests all the time.
conversely, i think it's ridiculous to confidently assert Tencent have never, or don't ever, get influenced by interests China has, or that Chinese state officials aren't capable at least theoretically of using the company to advance state interests. that stuff happens here, where ostensibly our system exists to prevent that kind of collaboration (this is basically what the "military-industrial complex" is, for example).
There's no need to hypothesize about a shadowy government conspiracy when the situation is adequately explained by simple desperation for money. Spez outright said that Reddit is losing money and has always been losing money, and that he needs to make it stop losing money, presumably because Reddit's investors are tired of giving him money and want to see some return on their investment.
press x to doubt
Are you saying the ccp attacks people by messing up their third party apps? Or by giving bad AMAs?
The end of an era, I used Apollo for years :(
Any recommendations for good tools to use to overwrite reddit comments and delete them in bulk?
I made a short comment on how to do it here
I used Redact for Android today. Worked fine.
Don't forget Relay is shutting down too
I know that there's https://reddark.untone.uk/for tracking which subreddits are dark or planning to go dark but is there a website that shows the amount of dark subreddits over time as a graph? I think that'd be quite interesting to see.
Thank you for this! It's good to remain updated on the state of the things without checking reddit
Reddit refugee here just doing my part to help with engagement!
Joey is looking to do subscriptions