Hey everyone. If you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy!
hey folks, new megathread is thataway since this one has like 500 comments already and news is quickly cycling out of date. we’ll lock this one down shortly. thanks!
Anyone else notice how friendly, calm, and civil the posts and discussions have been away from Reddit? This place reminds me a lot of the early days.
Frankly, I think it’s entirely because of the self-selected nature of the people migrating, and the fact that the whole federation thing is mildly confusing so only people who have made sense of it and worked out how it works are here. If/when it becomes more obvious and popular beyond early-adopters, it’ll be targeted by all the same bots and propagandists and chudiots as anywhere else.
It’s practically the same reason reddit and other online communities were so much better a decade ago - idiots simply couldn’t find their way to them / it was “icky nerd shit”.
I think you’re right. It seems like there’s a pattern for every new platform.
Early adopters make the the site fun, valuable, and worth while
People start to notice and the platform grows, becoming slightly worse, but still pretty cool.
Platform explodes in popularity and it goes to complete shit.
It’s happened with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit. I’m sure that day will come for this place as well. I guess we’ll just need to enjoy it while it lasts.
But I think a piece of this that’s important to remember is the messed up incentives that most platforms have had beginning around the time they took on serious funds from big investors.
From the moment you bring in serious investment dollars from Silicon Valley funds and SV wannabes, your incentive is no longer to build something that seriously delights users just for the sake of delighting users, everything is in service to shareholder value.
Reddit is perhaps the most classic example of our time of a truly wonderful platform being destroyed by shareholder value coming first.
It makes me giddy to think of how fast people are working on readers/apps for Lemmy that will make all of this way easier for more people to adopt.
Yeah, but i feel there’s a lot to be done in the base lemmy protocol too - such as migrating your account to another server - should the current one fall etc etc
Of course mastodon is the most mature in this regard, I hope lemmy does too
But since we can make our own instances easily, we can get rid of the rif raf more easily than on reddit
I really hope this doesn’t lead to people forming their own echo chambers and instances become tribes who hate on each other
Well, it’s bound to happen to some extent (e.g.: instances blocking lemmygrad), but you have a lot of power to mitigate this effect as an individual user. By default, nothing’s blocked, so it’s on you as a user if you choose to “live” somewhere that’s interested in proscribing undesirables.
It’s not a perfect solution. Perhaps leadership changes (or you change) and suddenly your interests are no longer aligned. Nobody wants to get stranded! Eventually maybe user migrations will be a thing, but for now we’ll just have to do our best to choose our home-bases wisely based on our own ideological and practical needs (SDF represent!)
If Lemmy grows to significant size the politics are going to be crazy, if just as ignorable as the Reddit mod politics. There’s many times more moving parts now, it’s like going from a single city-state to feudalism.
Also, SDF represent!
I already found my way, commented and subscribed to other instances from beehaw and I wasn’t even aware I did it at first, tbh. I don’t know if they all connverse seamlessly like that, but hopefully we will be able to keep it nice and civil.
Can you though? There have to be communities to join, and they are what get polluted. As I understand it, switching instances won’t help.
Someone then has to police a community if you want to “get rid of the riff-raff” and they will follow who-knows-what criteria for their policing. Just look at all the right-wing subreddits for an example of how policing doesn’t necessarily raise the quality of discussion.
I mean, you could have a tightly moderated subreddit over there too.
It really is a breath of fresh air, and has highlighted for me how dumb and angry so much of Reddit has become.
I think the major turning point was around 2016. That’s the first time I began to feel like my guard needed to be up with every single comment from there on.
Hmmm, I wonder what major event occurred in 2016… Lol
A few small pockets of civility survived here and there, but everything else has drowned in bots, ads, and trolls for so long that it’s shocking to come here and be able to click on a random post and see civil discussion as the default. That tone needs to be set and maintained. Basic decency and civility are really not that hard, even when people disagree. We lost that somewhere along the way.
It’s so nice to not see GPT-3 bots replying to literally everything, like they have been for like 2 years now on Reddit.
It felt like every other comment on popular subs (like r/AmITheAsshole) was a bot calling out another bot for having scraped and stolen a comment from someone farther down the comment chain. It makes me think that a significant portion of the traffic being seen still active on Reddit is just bots talking to each other. That, and porn subs, probably.
That was happening? Well it explains a lot of recent reddit then, it really felt people had really weird reading comprehension.
This is interesting. I had no idea this was a thing!
Yeah the problem with GPT is that is soo convincing that’s not easy to spot, unless you try to force it to say something unethical then it tells it can’t :D
It’s been so enjoyable!
I’ve been so happy with the tone and discussions here. I am hopeful that as we continue to grow we will see lots of people from Reddit, but that we will all check the reddit culture at the door. It feels really nice here.
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Great article thank you for the read.
I was having a little look through the Wikipedia article for Digg, to remind myself how their downfall went about. Found this absolute banger of a quote 😂
Well that kinda aged poorly.
To his credit, Ohanian hasn’t been involved with reddit for a while. He and u/spez sold the company years ago, then spez came back.
Fuck u/spez.
Fuck u/spez
Fuck u/spez.
Simultaneously looking like a 12 year old and crib death warmed over and we’re supposed to be impressed by this chud lol fuck him.
Everything does unfortunatelly… remember Google’s “do no harm” quote?
“Don’t be evil” was their actual quote. The fact that they removed it says a lot about their new direction.
Yeah, probably, forgot the exact quote 🤷.
Reddit has been going through some issues for many on Monday, with the outage happening the same day as thousands of subreddits going dark to protest the site’s new API pricing terms.
According to Reddit, the blackout is responsible for the problems. “A significant number of subreddits shifting to private caused some expected stability issues, and we’ve been working on resolving the anticipated issue,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.
Too much load? Reddit is down.
Not enough load? Believe it or not, also down.
I’d love to know what it is about subreddits going private that caused issues.
It’s entirely possible that they’ve made some assumptions about what a “normal” level of traffic looks like when writing code for their backend, which has caused some things to break when that has changed.
Not our fault if their code is shit.
Maybe some overload caused by a process having to dig deeper to find best/top posts?
I like this idea. I imagine that with the top subs being dark the automated top posts that get scrounged up may be too terrifying for the front page and they hit the panic button while they scramble to curate through the absolute worst filth they’ve ever seen.
apparently that’s exactly the case.
That is an interesting aspect no engineer could have foreseen!
You’d be surprised how much critical infrastructure was implemented through trial and error and has just been left like that for years…
Anything less than 99% of infrastructure working that way would be surprising. Everything is held together with scotch tape and scotch whisky.
I bet their shitty bots intended to inflate comments and content couldn’t be switched off in time for the blackouts, still sending requests and DDoS’ing their own site.
When Reddit forcibly opens everything back up:
knock knock
“Who’s there?”
”Mods. Hired mods.”
“Hired mods?”
“Wait, you all are getting paid?”
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Some might say that some Redditors have always been revolting!
It’s nice that you shared this info, but could you try and stay away from money locked websites? A (granted European) student doesn’t have money. Or not enough anyways xD
Generally 12ft.io or archive.ph will sort out a paywall, also there are a number of plugins which can unlock them
Or at least post the important text here
NoScript (a Firefox extension) seems to have disabled the paywall for me. Might have been origin too, but I doubt it.
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New myself, but you seem to be doing it right.
However, the link only shows the first paragraph unless you have an account, at least for Firefox on Android.I googled paywall blockers, and this one is working for me.
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2F2023%2F06%2F12%2Freddit-revolt-puts-ceo-steve-huffman-in-a-tough-position%2F
PSA: Reddit Power Delete Suite
The “edit comment” feature, whether paired with deletion or used by itself, does not work due to hitting rate limits. The developer is aware, but don’t have capacity to fix it atm.
Some forks fix it. I didn’t have the patience to figure out which ones did, which ones worked, or how do use their modified versions, so I made my own fork including a working “release” of sorts. It it rate limited to wait 5 seconds between each edit:
I tried to use PDS to do a backup and it is only downloading the last 36 comments. I don’t suppose you have any ideas why ?
I did not try, but it’s proooobably hitting a serverside rate limit. If you have the option to inspect the network responses, they may have some information.
How is it possible, that with 90% of subbreddits set to private, the number of posts and comments created on reddit do not decrease according to https://blackout.photon-reddit.com/? (EDIT: I might have based this percent on misinterpreted information, see EDIT at end of comment. But I leave the following paragraphs unchanged for history and food for thought.)
Activity only decreased by 20-30% if I’m being generous looking at the graph. How is this possible, is the graph accurate? How can 10% of subreddits be so active, like nothing happened? That would meanthe remaining 70-80% of activity is happening in 10% of the subreddits which are still open! Which is craaazy.
I have a theory - maybe we are underestimated the amount of bots on the site and they operating like nothing happened in the open subreddits? If this would be the case (and I’m gonna enter speculation and conspiracy territory here), but what if certain parties have quotas to fulfill for advertisers or propaganda machines, so they have to post (using bots or other means)?
I struggle to find the cause of this anomaly, of course you wouldn’t see 1:1 decrease in subbreddits going dark and activity, because people are subscibed to plethora of subbreddits. But I thought that it’ll be at least 50-60% decrease in post activity. Worst case scenario is that these are real users creating real posts and comments, because that would make this protest moot - It would just show reddit management that the community doesn’t matter, general public who come to the site will still interact with the remaining slop, advertisers rejoice.
EDIT: I based the 90% number on this site’s statistic: https://reddark.untone.uk/. My understanding was that these subreddits makes up for most of all subs on reddit. Turns out, as @brightside@compuverse.uk mentioned in this comment, these are only subreddits that participate in the blackout. Based on the README.md of this reddark fork, it pulls the list of participating subreddits from the threads on r/ModCoord.
However I still feel the impact of the blackout a little lackluster. If this is the case, this statistic could be explained by another phenomenon: that the distribution of reddit activity by subreddits have an incredibly long tail. Meaning, that a significant portion of comments and posts are created in a very large quantity of small subs, which does not participate in the protest.
But as @immolator@lemmy.world mentioned in this comment, it’s not only the long tail effect, but there are huge subreddits which does not participate as well, including the largest one /r/AskReddit. Really makes you think about how the blackout is going against the odds.
An interesting feature of Apollo is the ability to highlight accounts that are less than a month old. Between seeing that highlight, and a slew of randomly generated usernames, it’s amazing how many accounts on there that are almost certainly bots, just chatting away.
Reddit is the self proclaimed “front page of the internet” and some of the subreddits that are “firmly in control” by Reddit are the ones related to news and politics. Similar to how Youtube videos have mountains of comments for whatever reason, people tend to leave comments on news stories on various news sites and politics tends to encourage many people to add their voices to that vigorous discussion wherever it is being held.
People going to Reddit are likely people who want to comment on the latest news story or political tidbit and those people want other people in the comments to banter with and to read what they have to say. To that end, Reddit has not changed much since the blackout.
Reddit likely has an important core part of their site. I feel that core part is the news and political discussions. Reddit likely feels that it would be financially advantageous to advertise to that group and that they will “always come back” so long as those communities remain intact.
As far as i understand it’s not 90% of all Subs but 90% of all the Subs who announced to participate in the Blackdown. Many Subs, especially ones led by Reddit employees but also many NSFW subs are still public
You’re forgetting about porn/OF promotion subs. You have no idea how many posts/comments they have per day. The mumber is mindbogling. Trust me, they make up well over 80% of all post/comments on reddit.
I refuse to believe such smut could be responsible. It just doesn’t add up. Maybe if you could tell me what subreddits you’re talking about I could perform my own research into the subject.
True… Hornyposters are a whole different beast, seems to me like a separate “community” within reddit who doesn’t really care about other stuff. I’m not a saint, I browse NSFW subreddits as well, but I cannot comprehend why would anybody want to comment under some random nude. The amount of thirsty comments is mind-boggling
Not even the commenters, but the promotion bots. With as filtered as I had my settings of r/all, I’d often see them in new (a lot of OF small timers just don’t even bother labeling themselves as NSFW). What is notable is they often post the same post to multiple subreddits at the same time. I’m talking like 20 posts back to back by the same OF bot. That’s a huge amount of activity on a chart even if in reality it’s just white noise.
Yeah, this too. The same image/gif/vid get’s reposted on several different subs. Sometimes with the same title, sometimes with a different title, but it is the same content. They don’t wanna crosspost cuz it reveals that they post the same image to several subs, which decreases their chance of actually getting some subscribers.
There is something very cathartic about deleting 11 years worth of posts and comments…
Honestly I was genuinely so sick of reddit that I didn’t even bother deleting.
The thing that is killing reddit for me is its endless suggestion of communities that I may want to read. I use reddit to get away from having stuff shoved into my face. I want to explore and find things that are relevant to me or things that are unique and challenging, not have random nonsense shown to me as a way of increasing some silly engagement metric.
that right there is the biggest reason I never swapped to the new reddit redesign. Looks and aesthetics are one thing, but constantly having fake notifications about “you may like this post” or “you may like this community” shoved into my feed with the same notification icon as an actual reply to a post kept getting on my nerves.
Glad to see them saying as “thousands.” Yesterday I saw a headline (can’t remember where) that claimed “hundreds” which felt disingenuous, regardless of how you feel about the protest.
Childish smirk of the day…
https://reddark.untone.uk/ shows that r/SexInFrontOfOthers is public.
Seems like all the traffic had to go somewhere…
Lots of love for the Beehaw and other Lemmy admins this morning. It’s never fun suddenly having to 10x scale. Although it sounds like everybody else on the internet is getting a heavy traffic load today too.
I think the most fun, unintended consequence is that there were some assumptions baked into the Reddit codebase and the large number of Private subreddits has caused massive disruption and outages for them. While others have speculated it might be a tactic to hamper the affects of the protest, it sure seems real plausible to have not anticipated 6K subreddits going private overnight.
- Week 1
I like your optimism!
Trace it to the root of the problem, if the subreddits going dark took the servers down, then what made all the subreddits go dark 🤔
My guess is that it didn’t. I wonder if all of the subreddits going dark left the front page and r/all open to god knows what from more unsavory subs, and when Reddit realized that it was happening, pulled the plug until they were able to filter out anything less-than-corporate-allowable on the front page.
Just an ‘Oh crap investors can see r/sinkpissers shutitdownshutitdown’
I read somewhere on one of these federated sites (I’d have to dig through my history to find it) that it’s essentially the spaghetti code that is Reddit. This person, who claimed to have worked at Reddit years ago, said that the aggregation engine for things like r/all is very inefficient and when thousands of subreddits went dark it wouldn’t be able to parse (or something like that).
