Haven’t seen anything of this sort yet on Lemmy as well. We didn’t even have a moderator tools as of now. We might see it develop if there’s bot problem.
The saddest part of all this is the countless hours of work unpaid people have poured into the site, moderating, developing, and content creating only to see it end the manner it has.
I'm okay leaving it behind. I didn't contribute much over the 12 years I was there. I mostly lurked. I'm just sorry for all the people that worked hard to make the community better.
True, but the communities are built around people not the platform. We are once again learning that no platform will be around forever, older people have seen it plenty of times already.
Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad's PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren't even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
I did interact with a BBS site or two, but then got caught up in the AOL wave. I used their platform, Geocities, and a few other chat sites. Once ditching AOL around 1999 I ended up on a local forum we used for electronic music, and then in 2003 made my way to a Star Wars fansite forum called BlueHarvest (I moderated there the last couple of years before the admin shut it down in 2008 or 2009). A couple friends and I then communicated via a forum we made for ourselves. Then Facebook, then Reddit...now here.
EDIT
I also had accounts with MySpace and Friendster too...Twitter for a few years around Arab Spring, but I didn't like it. Even back then The Bird was a toxic mess with rare moments of humanity. I think my avatar is still shaded green...if my account still exists.
Shit, I used to run a WWIV 4.23 BBS back in the day. First modem was 9600 baud. Then 14.4k, 28.8k, and lastly 56k - screaming fast! Nothing like watching boobie pics loading one line at a time…
Edit: I remember signing up with Prodigy and participating in my very first AMA, with Quark and Dax from DS9. Good times.
I remember how excited I was to download the trailer for The Phantom Menace in 1999. Took almost an hour on a 56k modem. Or how it took under 10 minutes to download a 8 megabyte song off Napster on DSL.
Lol, man I remember in ‘99 having a stack of 100Mb Zip disks, using the college’s computer lab to do all my downloading on their T1 then walking my goods back to my dorm room. I’d load up a queue in the morning, then swing back by in the afternoon after classes. Such simpler times.
i just shut down a worlgroup server a few years ago... mostly up for majormud.
i with those asshats at the majorbbs restoration project would just release all the source code. they clutch those pearls like theyre valuable in some way
Man, the nostalgia is real. It was Gopher and Usenet via CIX and Compuserve for me from around '88, and eventually "proper" dial-up via Demon Internet (in the UK) in '92. 9600 baud, 14k4, 28k8, 56k and eventually dual ISDN. I still have a 28k8 modem in a drawer in my PC parts graveyard.
Lol I remember trying to get my parents to get an ISDN line installed back in ‘95 or ‘96 - the price was ridiculous. I was stuck on 56k until 2001 when I went to work for an ISP and was able to get a 1.5M SDSL line and was fucking ecstatic. Used it to run a CS1.6 server from my closet.
Edit: actually I did have a 1.5/128 ADSL line somewhere in there for a little bit.
Does anyone remember Plastic.com? I believe it used the Slashdot engine but was more focused on news and interesting internet stuff. I never see it listed when someone waxes nostalgic but I lived on that site until one day it just died.
Yeah, I used to work at a university, so I've been around since the earliest days of the web. It's kind of ironic that from the very start one of the big misgivings from academics about the web as a research tool was the ephemeral nature of its content. One of the examples given back in the 1990s was that a lot of websites that people had begun to rely on were really just some grad student's pet project, and when they moved on someone else might or might not pick up where they left off.
The scale of things has certainly changed since then, but nothing seems to have become more permanent. Just the other day I went through my list of bookmarks on a topic, and easily half of them now lead nowhere, even URLs for major news outlets and blogging platforms that are still extant.
I've noticed that some Wikipedia references now link to a Wayback Machine archive instead of directly to the original page. That's probably the smart way to do it.
In my case none of the dead links I had bookmarked were all that important. I had actually decided to try to check them in the first place because I couldn't remember what a lot of them were.
Yeah, but people move on too. Do you expect every single person who ever contributed to repost their content when a migration happens? Of course not. It's just not realistic. But actual info gets lost. Old game faqs vanish. Answers to niche questions poof out of existence. Yes, the world isn't over and things will move on. But actual, tangible value was lost with the death of reddit. A large portion of the internets "How To" guide just went up in flames. And a lot of that won't ever get rebuilt. Many of us who have been around long enough have also seen that dark side to these things.
It's a shame, is all. But time keeps moving and so will we.
Honestly, spez and the Reddit C-suite and board are in the process of finding out that a lot of what made their platform so good and popular was run almost entirely by community power users, enthusiasts, and developers, in addition to all the obvious utility and value that mods provided.
From the post: TL;DR With the API changes now in place, we no longer believe we can effectively perform our mission so we are sunsetting BotDefense. We recommend keeping BotDefense on as a moderator through October 3rd so any unbans can be processed.
The link is fixed in the post body. I don't get this at all. I only copied the BotDefense link which is available through clicking the title, yet it pasted the next post from Reddit in the post body? Weird, but the link is fixed.
To some degree it's hard to be sympathetic, because the people complaining about this are seriously lacking in sympathy themselves. They just wanted to see the content that those users produced for them, they didn't care about the difficulties or preferences of the users themselves. So when those Spez-opposed users took their ball and went home the Spez-friendly people got angry at them for taking their comments away with them rather than at Spez for having driven them to that in the first place.
Exactly. My sympathies are with those creators & moderators who have received awful comments from reddit users that are too naive and impatient to understand the protest actions.
They seem to assume that new mommies & daddies mods & content creators will rise up to take their place. Like all that effort grows on trees or something.
Most of us on the fediverse can sympathize with the idea that "its really frustrating not being able to use Reddit as a reliable spurce for obscure knowledge."
The difference is that we feel "its really frustrating that I can't rely on Reddit, because even if the answer is there I can't in good conscience support spez." Instead of "all the answers are gone because of these stipid protests."
Yes exactly. What’s the root cause? The good info is gone. Why is the good info gone? The people making it were pushed beyond their limits. Why were they pushed to far? Spez wants to make reddit publicly profitable (sure that’s not crazy by itself). Now we split up the next level. Either he wants reddit to live on foreverish and be self sustained or he wants to go public and dip the hell out of there. Going public is clearly bad when it is entirely valuable based on voluntary work and user based content. Fuck over all of the value and it’s not about keeping reddit alive foreverish, it’s about going public and fucking off. Whoever gets stuck with the bag when corporate dips is screwed.
Very much the truth. I cautiously suggested that people leave their content up simply as an archive of useful knowledge, but fbfw was downvoted to oblivion. I understand people wanting to depart and take their ball home with them because fuck you spez, but I still have a hard time with the destruction of the knowledge base.
Same here. I've left all my posts and comments up on Reddit. I'm sure it's made it's way in some form to Bard or ChatGPT. Just never know when some information would be helpful in a pinch, especially if it's tech or programming related.
The loss of /r/homeautomation has set me back a week at least with respect to home maintenance. The loss of knowledge is crazy.
Funny you mention /r/homeautomation, I’m in the same boat. Pro tip, though: if you found the Reddit result using Google, you can always look at the cached content.
If you’re on mobile, first open the search results page as the “desktop” version (for some reason it’s not an option in the mobile view). If you’re or after you’ve done that, click the three dots next to the result. When the modal pops up, click the dropdown arrow under “More options” at the top. Then click “Cached”.
Voilà. Read post and comments despite it being private/in protest.
People love to blame the victim for defending themselves over the problematic person who is abusing them, because if they acknowledge that someone is being abusive that kind of morally obligates them to step in.
And they very much don't want to do that.
And obviously the exploitation of users for their knowledge and content so that the owners of Reddit Inc. can gain wealth for sitting on their thumbs is different from the kind of abuse one's mind might go to when the word is raised, but it's the same dynamic.
Someone is claiming mistreatment, those around them are annoyed by the claims, not by the mistreatment, because the person standing up for themselves is putting onlookers in the dangerous position of examining their relationship to that mistreatment.
Vicious, but true. I'm still struggling with whether or not I'm going to astroturf my comment history and delete my account. I see a lot of folks saying their comments were restored and then they had no way to log back in to delete them again. For now, I'm just going to leave my Reddit account dormant. I suppose it isn't super effective to leave my content there for Spez to benefit from, but I kinda feel like it does more harm to people just looking for answers than it ever will to Spez if I were to remove it. All around, this is just a ridiculously stupid situation we all find ourselves in over the whims of small minds chasing after big money. Again.
i do not like what reddit is doing one bit, but please stop. what reddit is doing is not anywhere near equivalent to real actual abuse, and implying it is is a little offensive. have some perspective
I totally hear you that comments like this can feel insensitive of people who have been abused. I'm an abuse survivor so I get where you're coming from and appreciate your intent.
What I disagree with is that we shouldn't make this comparison at all. The same relational dynamics and structures that give rise to mental, emotional, physical, sexual, etc. abuse and exploitation give rise to this behaviour too.
The same as any form of abuse, no matter how big or small, is underpinned by the same thought patterns, behaviours, power dynamics, culture, societal attitudes and practices, etc.
EDIT: removed preview of pyramid so no one gets smacked in the face with unpleasant descriptions scrolling down. Typos.
I posted a similar comment elsewhere but along the same line of thought: The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There's a real problem of Apathy in today's culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don't give a fuck about "ideals" or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever.
I actually consider this to be (mostly) a good thing. Within those that walk away from reddit, I expect the ratio of content creators vs. content consumers to be way above average. So if we get most of the people who used to make Reddit a great source of food for thought, and spez gets to keep the vast majority of cat video watchers, that's not a bad deal at all.
lol I have to imagine a lot of the people active in Apple are pretty used to eating corporate overlord’s assholes so that doesn’t really come as a surprise…
Things are about to get real messy. It makes you realise how much free work goes into reddit and the community only for the higher ups thinking they can treat everyone like shit and make decisions purely for greed, while thinking it won’t damage communities within the site.
People are only using the 3rd party app line because it's the most relatable argument. It's much more than that. A ton of moderation tools and useful bots are going dark tomorrow thanks to the API policy change. Even if we all go back to Reddit, there's no bringing back those tools. Reddit communities are going to slowly go to shit as spammers all realize that moderators aren't as effective as they used to be. This was going to happen regardless of how the protests turned out. There's no scenario where things get better for Reddit.
Imo, more emphasis should have been made on how spez treated Christian, the Apolla dev. It's honestly disgusting. And not even any kind of apology or direct reply. Spez just went on to smear Christian's name more with disinformation he fed to the press via interviews.
I've already felt the sting of the protests when googling solutions to various issues. I used to be able to include "reddit" in the search and would almost always find relevant information quickly, but now as OP mentioned many posts and whole communities have gone dark.
It's all been really eye opening about the potential negative consequences of having so many communities and information in the control of so few.
Yep, the whole thing had ordinary and third party app users pitted against each other, only because blaming the mods would've reopened the subs faster than going against reddit itself. And the fact that 90% of reddit don't use third party app makes it that much worse. Goddammit spez you cunning mf.
Among higher than average users it seemingly was. Given that reddit was saying the third party apps were using above average amounts of API calls per user. They said it's because of the 3PAs baing unoptimized but it was likely that more engaged users used 3PAs.
Wow so they've prioritised the casual users over the power users... You know, the ones who actually post the content... This should go well /s
Anecdotal, but I've been talking about this whole thing to my partner. She doesn't really care though because, in her own words: "I tried to use Reddit a little while ago, but I didn't like the app"
It is. I was just using it because I thought I would support Reddit with it. But the recent changes showed what you get for that. Now I'm not using Reddit anymore.
He’s had money thrown at him from VCs, thousands of people generating content, and administering content for free, sitting on a goldmine of data and goodwill and Community spirit, and he’s managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue and a bruised ego. All while others make millions and gain significant community support using the exact same data with business models he could have just copied or shared in.
He’s had every opportunity. He’s fucked it up at every step.
he's managed to lose money, burn bridges, and fuck up the whole deal all for thppe sake of chasing a few dollars of API revenue
Let's call this what it actually was though, there was no attempt at making money from the API. This was entirely to shut down 3rd party apps. Smart AI companies will just scrape reddit. The only people affected by this are 3rd party app developers and users.
This is even more amazingly incompetent. There are a near infinite other ways they could have handled 3rd party apps not showing ads, but they instead chose the brute force method that makes no one happy.
Fair point. And yes, there’s just so many ways he could have made money from third party apps and their users without trashing them. The AI explanation just didn’t make any sense to me at all.
A business brain would have followed the money. He’s just following half-witted ideas/ego. I don’t think he really realises or understands what he had.
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