Ultimately, what went wrong is that most Reddit users were screeching at individual leaves littering their garden, without noticing the tree creating those leaves on first place. They failed to connect the dots between: arbitrary bans, subreddit suspensions, user-on-user harassment, the idiotic way that rules are enforced, the presence of powermods, then Reddit trying to get rid of the powermods, the 3PA being killed… while focusing too much on a braindead clown called Steve Huffman.
It’s all about profits. You can’t enforce any demand if you don’t make Reddit lose money. Blackouts and John Oliver posting only go so far, you need to migrate out of the platform. And if you’re staying in the platform you need to transform it into an advertiser-hostile shithole. But for that you need more coordination than just “HURR DURR WE WRITE FUCK SPEZ IN PLACE LOL LMAO”.
Honest question: how is Lemmy safer against power tripping mods, user-on-user harassment and everything else? Sure it’s a super nice place now but eventually the powertippers etc. will pop up. ?
The federation itself alleviates those problems.
In Reddit those problems backtrack to the Reddit admins giving no fucks about the users. Why would they? Even if the users are mistreated, network effect still keeps them in Reddit, as they don’t want to lose the content.
Here in Lemmy however, if the admins of an instance are arseholes, negligent, stupid etc., their users will simply migrate to another instance. The users won’t lose access to their content, and they know it.
And in some cases, admins of other instances might even defederate the instance with problematic admins, to protect their own users. (Specially useful when it comes to harassment, as harassers tend to gravitate towards the same places.)
So for example. In Reddit you got the powermods going rogue, being abusive towards the users, and the admins went like, “NOOOOO THEY’RE A PRECIOUS PART OF OUR COMMUNITY”. Until the powermods turned against Reddit itself; then the admins took action. Here, the admins would need to act as soon as the powermods become an issue for the users, not just for themselves.
Additionally: it’s hard to power-trip when you got a public modlog telling people what you did.
It contains the fallout of site-wide issues to some extent. Mods and user-on-user will still be issues. If one federation owner goes on a power trip everyone can just leave that server while continuing to use other Lemmy instances.
Essentially you’d only lose access to some subreddits instead of all of reddit in that situation.
You also would have 3rd party apps that would continue to work. Unlike now where apps like Sync are just down for a few months until they finish development for Lemmy.
But don’t worry, reddit had a run of like 6-10 years there where mods weren’t an issue so we have some time before that all starts.
The John Oliver thing was so dumb. Like, so what? Doesn’t matter if you’re posting John Oliver as a protest, you’re still using the platform on a sub that allows advertisement.
The only thing that could actually go anywhere was making the subs NSFW, since those will actually hurt Reddit’s finances, but obviously they forced the subs to revert and most easily gave up.
I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could’ve also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a “haha John Oliver” but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
mods could’ve also promoted ad blocker usage
Except a huge number of people only ever use reddit on mobile. There are no ad blockers that can target specific advertisements inside of an app itself. You can do network wide advertisement blocking with things like pihole, but the people using reddit on mobile aren’t the people setting up a network wide domain filter. I only ever used reddit on the desktop through old.reddit.com, but I could see the writing on the wall that they’re going to get rid of that sooner rather than later.
what all is broken, tho?
I can still view without an account on Infinity.
Sometimes I hit rate limits but so do the official frontends.
Spez realized that he literally paid for other companies to harvest one of reddit’s two greatest assets and that he needed to do something to recover. So he’s been flailing around like a toddler, breaking everything in his desperation to stay on his feet, and in the meantime completely alienating reddit’s other greatest asset.
What was that comment he made? Something like “reddit will continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive”. Like the arrival of profits is inevitable and they don’t need to do anything for them to arrive.
Also, he claims that reddit has never been profitable. How much has he spent chasing phantoms - reddit cryptocurrency, customizable snoovatars, reddit NFTs, special programming for a single day each year, buying an app then paying to make it worse, deciding to self-host images and videos, thereby drastically increasing the need for both storage and bandwidth, when they’d been perfectly happy to let others do the heavy lifting for well over a decade, paying to implement a drastically flawed video player (remember when it first launched and it was incredibly slow and we found out it was because it was trying to download every available resolution).
In 2022, reddit had $670,000,000 in revenue. There’s a reason it’s never turned a profit, and for the past eight years, that reason has been Steve Huffman.
I miss it, kinda. I think it was uniquely poised to take advantage of lockdown, and there was some great stuff broadcast - I particularly remember watching a kalimba concert. But we all got tired of lockdown and online meetings and that’s where it floundered.
I also STR that at least some of the feeds weren’t viewable after the event ended (don’t know if it was all of them or not). Which meant that it wasn’t really a format for short videos (because people need time to find them), so they were more effort to set up and run, and for at least the ones that weren’t viewable afterward, there was nothing you could point to afterward and say “I made that!”
I think if they’d kept it around, it could’ve found it’s niche, but at the time I didn’t really miss it when it went.
There’s something wrong with people who are so out of their depth like that who don’t just find and hire someone more competent to do this stuff for them. Either just a complete lack of awareness that they are floundering or some weird stubbornness that it’s only worth succeeding if they are personally holding the tiller.
I’d say what went wrong was nobody did anything meaningfuk or cared. Nobody put their money where their mouth is and deleted their accounts, and staying off the site for 2 days was too much to ask of >80% of the users.
The Mods closed a few subs but didn’t themselves do anything meaningful. They should have let reddit replace them if they actually cared. They should have moved their community to lemmy or kbin. The ones who did sick it out I’m grateful for, the rest cared too much about their own pride to bother trying to keep the admins in check.
Overall the reddit userbase since the pandemic are mostly entitled whiners who don’t really give a shit as long as they get their twitter and TikTok reposts. There’s literally only one piece of OC on the frontpage of reddit right now. There’s not much value to going there anymore.
I’m done with Reddit, and honestly I haven’t missed it. My time is now more full of hobbies and actual reading, I’m better off for deleting it.
So… how do you know what’s on reddit front page again? I actually did leave and have no idea what’s going on over there…
I think this post, which is an attempt by mods to continue protesting, and its reception by users speaks for itself: https://np.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/158zf26/reminder_july_26_rworldbuilding_is_shut_down_no/
The hive mind went from “fuck spez we’re staging an internet revolution” to “let it go already, nobody gives a shit, stop inconveniencing us with your real issues” in an instant. Basically, everyone’s attention span has lapsed and if you keep talking about it people think you’re killing their buzz. It’s no longer a relevant problem for the vast majority of the userbase, if it ever even was.
The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- ‘hail corporate’ types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.
And this was the entire point. Reddit was tired of being the place for over-educated, angst tech bros with lots of free time to be subversive. They want to refocus on the lowest-common denominator Facebook/Instagram/TT crowd who gives themselves over to popular media mind and body.
And how many are that? Are the non bootlickers even a significant number?
This. The protesting subreddits should have been creating alternative communities at Lemmy and elsewhere while they were locked down or hidden for whatever, and then they’d have had real leverage when forced back open.
I’ve been using the Reddit app lately and it’s absolute dogshit. It mostly shows me content that I didn’t ask for. It trying hard to be tiktok or something. Very annoying. It functions differently from how most people use Reddit
Third party apps still seem to work still, just logging in is broken on some. Not sure if reddit just “forgot” to disable anyonymous access or if they realized doing so would probably result in DDOSing themselves like twitter did.
