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Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Week 1
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think Spez is gambling on the apathy of his website's core audience and on moderators being unwilling to indefinitely lock their subreddits. Relatively few communities have vowed to close their doors indefinitely (/r/videos and /r/iphone are the only two big ones I'm aware of) and I also think a lot of major ones are unwilling to escalate their protests beyond the original planned 48 hour blackout.
At this point I predict that Reddit will survive this, even if they're going to lose a sizeable chunk of their user base by eliminating third-party apps. There are a sizeable number of moderators that are still willing to work with Reddit and they can definitely replace those who shut off their subreddits.
Digg v4 happened because a better alternative already existed in the form of Reddit. At that point Digg had a serious power user and astroturfing problem, while many of its users joked that they were just a vessel for regurgitated content that was posted on Reddit the day before. The damage had already been done, to the point where users jumped ship in droves the moment Kevin Rose dropped the disastrous overhaul of Digg...
Rarely does internet slacktivism work, and there are still some scabs willing to jump the picket line and keep their subs operating as normal. Some of us remember the days of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 boycott when everyone vowed to boycott the game over having no dedicated servers, then went out, purchased it en masse and made Activision Blizzard break sales records.
Whether Reddit make drastic improvements to the official Reddit app remains to be seen. If I've learned anything it's that Reddit's admins are snakes and you cannot trust them.
The only good that's come from this is that Lemmy and Tildes finally have active user bases. Never have I felt a sense of community from a Reddit alternative since the early days of Voat (long before it was commandeered by white supremacists.)
I don't see Lemmy replacing Reddit, since the fediverse is complicated by nature and Lemmy has similar issues to Mastodon, where the discoverability of content outside of your main instance is practically fucking nonexistent.
To be fair Voat was commandeered almost immediately or at least within a few days. I remember bouncing back very fast when I found out specifically why so many going there wanted "free speech." I chose to eat corporate shit rather than that malignant anti-social shit at the time. I don't like eating any kind of shit, and it doesn't seem as likely here as it seems like social responsibility is generally being given precedence over allowing fascists to say whatever they want.
This is some terrific no context life advice.
IIRC it wasn't within days but rather months after Spez took over Reddit and started banning content that promoted racial/religious hatred. Voat nearly died from lack-of-users after Ellen Pao was ousted and everybody pretty much abandoned the site.
Another thing that I recall was Stormfront (a white supremacist/nazi forum) having their hosting provider pull the plug on their service, which may have sparked some of their users to seek refuge on Voat.
There was another Reddit clone that existed two years ago called Ruqqus. It was a decent community, until Voat shut down and all of their bigoted users flocked to it...
I see. I never made it that far because I immediately was seeing the kind of conversations planting the seeds for the inevitable conclusion you described. There was a sense of "this horrendous bigotry proves that we can say whatever we want here and that's great," which is what turned me off so fast. A very similar thing happened in r/politicalcompassmemes which initially was fairly balanced and interesting but soon became dominated by fascists which were foolishly tolerated. I was one of the fools and actually learned my lesson that time. No tolerance for fascism is the most it deserves.
If there's something I've learned about fascists, or the right-wing in general, it's that they can't be reasoned with. It's like a cult where people are brainwashed.
I've also learned this lesson the hard way through more experience than I should have contributed towards it. If someone values reason and evidence, they will probably not stay on the right. I was raised in a right-wing environment and had right-wing beliefs when I was a teenager, but I was always curious to know as much about things as I could find out. Losing my faith in right-wing ideas was inevitable in my opinion since most of it depends entirely on its adherents not investigating its claims whatsoever. I will absolutely talk to a young conservative that knows me face to face and I have had productive conversations like this, but there's no helping the adult true believer until such a time as they seek to be helped (and even then it's most likely a bad-faith ploy but I'll still take the gamble even though I've never won). It just has to be exposed and opposed.
I agree. This feels more like the AACS encryption key fiasco to me than it does Digg v4. Brief context for the unaware, in 2007 Digg started taking down posts and accounts that referenced a hex code that could be used to decrypt HD-DVDs and Blu-rays. The userbase was very unhappy about it and spammed the front page with the code, rendering Digg basically useless. Digg relented pretty quickly, and while the site continued to chug along for another couple of years or so, the bad taste left in users' mouths surely triggered a lot of them to start jumping over to Reddit.
I was active on both sites for a good while. I loved TechTV when it was a thing, and had followed many of those personalities to their respective podcast networks and to Digg when that channel imploded; over time I definitely started leaning more towards Reddit though, as one could definitely see the corporate pressure that Digg was starting to cave to. The "darkening" of Reddit today feels a lot closer to that moment than to the big Digg v4 switchover -- the beginning of the end rather than the final nail. Feels very surreal looking back and having been there for all of it.
I do not disagree with anything you said, and I agree that Reddit (as they want it to be) will come out of this just fine. That being said, Reddit does have a lot of the same major problems Digg had at the time, especially astroturfing and spam content, and I don't expect that to go away. Over the past couple years most of the posts on the front pages are often bot generated and/or posted karma farms, and it's becoming more and more common to see bot brigades in the comments of everything, manipulating the dialogue.
I've commented loads on here that I haven't felt a sense of community on Reddit in years, and it's getting more and more cookie cutter and instagrammy by the day. It's become something I just mindlessly scroll through instead of ever really engaging with, and tons of the posts are really just socially engineered ads. I'm really liking Lemmy, it feels like a fresh start. I miss a lot of the content, but I love that it's more engaging. IDC if it doesn't become the most popular thing, if I can come here and actually engage with people/content rather than just amble through it apathetically, I'm 100% down.
Agreed, feels like a fresh start without some of the noise. Reddit will be bleeding users for a long while. A large number of power users have jumped ship and many of them technically apt. Lemmy will improve very quickly now. New UIs and features.
I'm excited.
Yeah I was super surprised to see just how many improvements hit the Jerboa Android app in just a couple days since I installed it. So many PRs lol
Same man. I'm also trying to get out of my shell and contribute as well. I have thousands of reddit comments, but only a few posts in 12 years, mainly because I didn't see the point. But here, where there are 1-2 orders of magnitude fewer users, what I have to say or post may genuinely interest somebody AND be seen by said person. If people don't like it, that's fine, at least it was there for them to see and not like!
Well your username certainly wins my everything for the day!
Thanks! My reddit name got shit on frequently, so I'm not sad to see people appreciating the new one!!
This just makes me really curious what it was - Mine was never a point of contention because it was just some letters and numbers
If they lose the 3rd party app users to us Reddit will still be there, but we'll be a more viable alternative, and I bet mods and content creators are much more likely to make the switch. Long term that might still mean a transition.
Otherwise, excellent analysis, good work. I wasn't around for the Digg exodus so I wouldn't know this stuff.
By the way, what do you think makes discoverability hard? I've heard that before but I obviously had no problems.
Honestly, if people though spam was getting bad on Reddit before...
It was getting really bad.
Imagine having nearly 80 followers on Reddit and nearly all of them being OnlyFans spam bots.
I have no idea how many followers I have because I use the old interface exclusively.
onlyfans ruined the nsfw side of reddit
Fully agree. As much as I see good in the adult entertainment industry, I utterly loathe OnlyFans as a platform and find it increasingly repugnant the more I see it in use.
Why?
It directly falls afoul of Reddit's rules on self-promotion, and it feels like e-girls are just being given a free pass by the admins to spam and astroturf the fuck out of every NSFW sub.
There's an element of findom (financial domination) and emotional exploitation to OnlyFans. It exploits vulnerable men by design and has pretty much been synonymous with the untrue notion that if you shower a lady with money and other lucrative gifts, she just might maybe notice you.
In the early days, OnlyFans had allegedy turned a blind eye towards CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and it feels hypocritical that Mindgeek faced far greater backlash from stakeholders for similar transgressions. To my knowledge Visa and MasterCard for instance are still working with them...
It's ruined the NSFW side of Reddit because none of the interactions with exhibitionists you'd otherwise have feel genuine, that's if they even interact with anybody on a site other than on their OnlyFans.
More of an issue with Reddit. Some asshole moderator didn't agree with what I wrote in a past comment and so added an Automoderator filter so I'm effectively shadowbanned from using words like "OnlyFans" on a lot of subreddits. It's awful when you have to get creative with words to get past draconian censors.
undefined> I predict that Reddit will survive this
Sure it will survive. And it's certainly not assured that this will be the crack that breaks the dam, but it is one of them. As you described above, Digg didn't fall all at once. Reddit may stay dominant until they disable Old, or until they disable mobile browsers, or this protest may end up doing it. We won't know until long after the fact.
Even as a reddit addict I didn't know anything about spez and all he past creepiness until the discussions about the mobile apps shutting down. It was the impetus to send me to the Fediverse. My reddit addiction is broken (yeah!) and I wasn't even a mobile app user.