hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
Now aws too… this afternoon
I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.
The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.
I don’t care about fixing reddit either, I don’t care if it lives or dies, not anymore, tho it wouldn’t be bad IMO teaching the CEO a lesson in humility.
no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king.
Every decision is made by one person or a party of people specifically saying “Yes” to it. Whether they are “idiot[s]” is up for debate, but every single event involving anything artificial is decided by a person/people, not merely a faceless system.
Right? This was always bound to happen. The only way it wouldn’t be innevitable would require Reddit be a non-profit or co-op or equivalent. Which it certainly isn’t.
I also agree, the sudden breath into the fediverse (I’ve been poking my head in since I ran a nextcloud instance and they had a plugin for the fediverse called nextcloud social.). This place isn’t just a handful of OSS developers and enthusiasts anymore, but something starting to resemble a community of all types.
It reminds me of when Reddit was good, way back in like 2010 (for me) - but it feels more consequential now!
This is just my personal opinion. The 2 day blackout for me, never meant for people to pack their bags and leave Reddit entirely. It’s not a very easy task to do, and honestly, there is still lots of contents and friends back in reddit. Reddit can be sure that lots of people will simply come back, and spez will grinning while working his way to his beloved IPO.
However, the 2 day blackout has opened a new world of alternatives to Reddit. Now people know other places and other communities that can replace Reddit as a whole. Yes, Reddit will still be an influential website. Yes, Reddit will still be money driven. Yes, spez will not budge. But we can.
To me, Reddit will not crash, burn and crushed to ash. But rather, it’s either went the FB way, relying to lots of ads and older demographics to sustain, or simply becoming Myspace or Digg, a distant memory that’s only in name.
Just my 1/2 cents.
relying to lots of ads and
older demographicslow-literacy masses to sustain
FIFY
Among the “older demographics” there are the most “nerdy” people, those born when personal computers and the internet didn’t exist, those growing up together with technology, used to a world when corporations didn’t destroy the good of sharing knowledge.
Those are the people most likely to rebel to what reddit is doing and find their way out if it, because they know it’s possible, because they’ve seen it before.
Youngest people are used to how the world is nowadays because it’s all they’ve seen, but they can be shown the difference if they’ll willing to listen.
Low-literacy masses are those who don’t listen because they don’t care, people of that sort exist in every age “range” and are unfortunately the majority of content “consumers”, that’s why Facebook doesn’t die, and Reddit won’t either most probably.
Yep, I kind of forgot the exact word for it, I used “older demographic” because im my local FB community, quite a number of toxics (and teaching people to be toxic) are more often than not, poor role models. I also forgot that outside of my country, there are early internet nerdys that lived throughout basically the age of Internet. So my choice of words are quite incorrrect, but yep they are precisely what you said, low-literacy.
And yes, FB, Twitter and Reddit will most likely thrive and live, by catering to those people instead of the nerdy, hobbyist group of people that once graced Reddit.
I can’t help but shudder at the thought that Reddit will be yet another Twitter or Facebook.
I’m trying to figure out what kind of blackout you’re talking about. I open up (oh my God, I feel like a heretic) Reddit and guess what? Hardly anything has changed on Reddit. My feed is still there. Yes, a grand total of five ever-fronting subs stopped working, ten more subs took a formal vote, and… it’s still the same. Every social network goes the way of monetizing content. I first joined Reddit in 2015, at the time it was an incomprehensible pseudo-social network with an awkward interface. It took almost 18 years before Reddit became usable. But blackout is still a long way off. While kbin/lemmy is consolidated by the thought of blackout, but people can’t stay in suspense for long.
It’s still refreshing to see how many subreddits ended up joining the blackout. Over 8000 joined, including some big ones, and (as of posting) 6800 are still either private or restricted.
Yeah I wouldn’t have ever signed up for lemmy if this api thing hadn’t come about. This is my first fediverse experience. I was pissed at reddit, but now I don’t care about reddit one way or another. Lemmy has gained enough users to sustain itself even if there is no more mass migration. There is an active community here that will help lemmy grow organically over time.
Relay for android gave in to Reddit’s demands … thoughts?
I think this is a bad sign for everyone protesting the changes… a major app giving in makes the rest of the apps look bad for complaining imo https://www.androidpolice.com/popular-android-reddit-app-may-survive-absurd-api-pricing/
I can’t blame him if he wants his app to survive. I used the pro version for years and would happily payed the planed subscription. But because the vast majority, if not all of the money goes to Reddit I just can’t bring myself to do it. I hope his calculations are correct and if they are not, I hope he doesn’t falls into dept.
I can’t blame the 3P Devs for dealing with this situation as they see fit. It feels like shooting the messenger …
I didn’t know api changes means 3rd party apps no longer can show nsfw content. Nobody’s going to pay a subscription and not be able to see stuff that they can see on the official app. Looks like reddit is giving all 3rd party app developers a shitty deal whichever way you cut it.
The Internet was supposed to be better, but it turned into another set of monthly bills. And caving in to Reddit’s gouging sets a dangerous precedent, because it normalizes the smearing if devs that brought us here.
I don’t know how to feel about this, that’s the app I use and was mad about losing… I already bought the paid version a long time ago but now it’s moving to a subscription model so I guess that doesn’t count anymore…
The base subscription could cost $2 per month, with an extra $1 for message notifications to account for the additional API calls that such polling incurs.
I’m in the same boat. It was my go-to app, and at first, I was happy that it will stay open - but during the last few days, I realized more and more… I don’t care anymore. Not about relay, but about reddit itself.
I’ve uninstalled relay on sunday - and never missed it on my phone. I just stopped wasting time and did better things with my time. At this point in time, I can’t see myself putting out $2 a month just to get angry at ragebait again.
I just had a Rollercoaster of emotions. I was sad and angry to see relay go be sure it’s been with me for idk how long (more than 10 years? Has it been that long?). But then losing relay would severely cut my reddit time and lemmy being a lot smaller meant that I could potentially kick this habit. So was kind of excited.
Then I read your message that relay is not going and I’m like “fuck! My addiction will never be cured!” Then saw its a subscription model and now I’m really conflicted.
Smart idea.
Reddit will jack the prices again when they see fit.
Reddit also wins with this pricing because they are gonna pocket the cash.
I think that a forced paid subscription will probably kill it anyway long term, who in their right mind would pay a subscription to access Reddit?
Also don’t forget that these app owners themselves are running a business and probably make a bunch of money from their apps that they don’t want to see evaporate with the changes.
Another good point he made is about how he’s calculating this. He’s projecting current usage into the sub model.
But he’s probably very right that casuals will probably leave and power users will probably pay. So it’s the Spotify problem, your power users use you more costing you more but they don’t pay more so you start going in the red. Considering relay is not a VC backed app or anything like that. One miscalculation and one bad month and you could see thousands of dollars in surprise costs.
Did he just imply people will protest by assaulting someone wearing a reddit logo?!
To be fair, he isn’t wrong.
I cannot see another blackout happening. I think a sizeable chunk of Reddit’s moderators would go back if it otherwise meant losing power and influence on one of the largest social media sites.
Of course a lengthier or indefinite blackout of most of Reddit’s communities would cause major disruption.
After slandering the Apollo Dev, Steve now starts to slander the entire userbase.
